Must Love Otters Read Online Free Page B

termination if the memo results in a finding of negligence on the part of the dispatcher.
    Why another memo today?
    I stare at the poor excuse for cappuccino sputtering from the spout of the coffee machine, combing through the memory bank for recent folks who died when Operator Hollie was on the job. Probably Batman Jerry. Maybe I wasn’t urgent enough with his wife to get his cowl off. Hey, when the Big Man pulls Batman out of circulation, all the chest compressions in the world ain’t gonna do shit.
    I start to tell Les about the doughnut jelly smeared into his sad excuse for a moustache. I’ll leave it. He probably will say it’s not from a doughnut but rather brain matter from the alien he ate for breakfast.
    Troll Lady slams into the room.
    “Who did it? Who did it ?” she yells. She marches up and thrusts one of her troll dolls into my face—Troll Elvis, his prior black plumed coif now abbreviated and patchy.
    I hold up my hands. “I didn’t work this weekend. Wasn’t me.” She squints at me, her mascara-caked eyes narrowing into two blue slits from her CloudlessSkies eyeshadow. Her name badge/keycard clipped to the pocket of her shirt inches closer as she leans her ample breasts into me. I look down, read it. No way.
    Her first name isn’t Candi—it’s Candida . I hold in a laugh.
    Isn’t Candida a yeast found in the … girlie parts?
    Candi—Troll Lady—is named after a vaginal infection. How did I not know this?
    This day just got a whole lot better.
    “Well, somebody here is guilty—his hair is all over my console! This is a recent crime! Do you know how much this one doll is worth?” She waggles a chubby finger capped with a pink press-on nail at the four of us in the room. “I should call upstairs. See if I can get an ID tech down here to dust for prints.”
    She turns on me. “Think if this was the stupid otter statue sitting on your console. How would you feel?”
    Les is up from his chair. Wraps an arm around her shoulder. Turns to me. “Put your hands out.”
    “What?”
    “Put your hands out in front of you.”
    Reluctantly, I do, not sure where this is going. Les angles closer, the neck of his button-up stained with too much aftershave, and lifts his glasses to survey my hands. “Turn them over.”
    This is ridiculous. “I didn’t touch Elvis. Go sniff someone else’s butt and leave me out of it.”
    I turn away to retrieve my coffee. He grunts at the back of my head. Troll Lady grabs a paper towel and wipes the schmutz off his moustache.
    “We’ll get to the bottom of this, Candi,” he promises.
    “Mommy just gets so attached to her widdle troll babies,” she baby-talks. I need to leave before this degrades further.
    Two other dispatchers file out of the lunchroom before Les accosts them too.
    This morning, I dug through Keith’s jump kit in search of the softest gauze he had to tuck in between my nipples and the fabric of my bra, but it’s already chafing. No time to whine. Lives must be saved. The Reaper waits for no man, blistered nipples or not.
    The morning’s calls are routine: someone locked out of their house, three pocket dials, a kitchen fire, one possible broken arm call from an elementary school, four break-and-enters, one with the suspect hog-tied with duct tape in the victim’s kitchen. I have to convince her to not use her black-belt training on him—he’s already crying from the kick she delivered to his testicles. The usual barking dog calls. One very intoxicated girl who should probably be at school but is instead ripped by noon and is pissed that I won’t send the police to her house because she thinks her stepbrother stole the money she had hidden under the mattress even though she was going to use it to take pole-dancing classes because it would piss off her dad and he’s a lawyer who makes a “shit ton” of money and how much I suck because I’m not taking her seriously and how her parents pay my salary through their taxes and that I’m a