Uncommon Grounds Read Online Free Page A

retired security guard turned small-town cop.”
    He was heading for the door. “Anyway, like it or not, Pavlik is at Uncommon Grounds now, and he’s in charge. And Maggy, tread carefully. I hear he can be a real prick.” He closed the door softly behind him.

Chapter Three
    I wasn’t all that anxious to get back to Uncommon Grounds, but I couldn’t stay holed up in the blue room all day either. Besides, I needed to know what was going on. I filled Frank’s food and water bowls, handed him a pig’s ear, gathered up the tax papers to drop off with Mary later and headed out to the van.
    Gary’s last words were still echoing in my head. Gary Donovan calling somebody a prick, of all things, was totally out of character. It would be like your mom saying it. Gary had been an Eagle Scout, for God’s sake. Or still was. I think that’s like being an alcoholic, you never completely recover. In the ten years I’d known him, I’d never heard Gary curse. Not once. Pavlik had really gotten to him.
    So Pavlik must have been the mysterious dark-haired man with the medical examiner. I hadn’t paid much attention to the election, but I knew he’d replaced our former sheriff, an obese man who had died of a heart attack at his desk.
    If memory served, the new sheriff in town had been some sort of hotshot in Chicago. His “Take Action” campaign slogan had struck a chord with an electorate who had watched their last sheriff do little but slowly eat himself to death. Pavlik pledged to take an active role in law enforcement in the community. I guessed this was it.
    Poor Gary, he didn’t need this. He had paid his dues, going from the Milwaukee PD to ATF, and then on to Secret Service. When he had retired from the government at fifty, Gary took over the security at First National, bringing the albatross of a financial organization into the modern world, security-wise. He irritated the execs by making sure they didn’t travel together and endeared himself to me by taking over the security and risk management aspects of two very large events First National sponsored and I managed.
    Gary was an enabler in the best sense of the word. For example, when there was a sexual assault in the bank’s parking structure, he not only provided security escorts, but also taught self-defense classes so women could feel confident about protecting themselves. Gary figured his job was teaching people not to need him.
    Which might explain why, four years ago, First National had downsized him. That and the fact that the bank had been robbed of nearly four million dollars a few months earlier.
    I’d always suspected that Gary had taken the robbery “on my watch,” as he put it, harder than he had the downsizing. But at the time, he’d sworn he was itching to get back into real police work anyway and didn’t mind having a nice severance package from First National to finance his search. Not that it had been much of a search. Gary was a Brookhills native and the town had jumped at the chance to bring him in as police chief.
    Speaking of the police, as I turned into our parking lot, I saw they had cordoned off the sidewalk in front of the store. At first glance, business around Uncommon Grounds seemed to go on as usual. Until you noticed no one was moving. At the corner, the patrons at Rudy’s barbershop looked like they had planted themselves there till the next haircut. Next door, dental patients appeared to be lining up for extractions.
    I walked up to the door of my own store and knocked on it.
    Inside, I could see a group of suits. One of them moved away from the group and peered through the window. It was Pavlik.
    He opened the door. “Yes?”
    I had started in, but stopped. I had to, he was blocking the door. “This is my store,” I said. “I’m—”
    His eyes—yep, dirty gray Chevy—narrowed. “This,” he said, “is a sheriff’s investigation of a potential crime scene.”
    Gary’s description of Pavlik was proving apt. “Fine.