It was celebration time. He’d just completed his last day on the current job and the next one didn’t start until the middle of the month. So he had a couple of weeks to enjoy the summer weather, maybe go down to Alki and watch the girls in their bikinis in-line-skate along the path fronting the beach. Life was good. It would be a helluva lot better, though, if the family of the man he’d accidentally shot would quit agitating for their brother’s case to be kept open. Unfortunately, it had been a slow couple of weeks, newswise, so the local stations kept running the damn story with updates on the family’s sense of outrage. One of the younger, more militant members had even insisted it was a hate crime based on the store clerk’s race. What a crock of shit. It was a fucking accident; if the clerk hadn’t made that dumb move that looked as if he were going for a gun, he never would’ve been hurt. His stupidity was what had gotten him killed—he could have been frigging purple and it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.
