Roxie smiled, something he’d noticed she did more and more these days. “That would be great. She needs tons of exercise. We had her with us last night and she was still hyper at midnight. She seems to have two speeds—dead asleep or a hundred miles an hour.”
“Well, she’s a Lab, so expect that to continue for at least the next year and a half,” Armie said. “She’s welcome here. You brought bags, right? If you didn’t, I have some for when I bring Peanut to the station. We enforce sanitation laws for everyone.”
“Yes, we will clean up after the dog. Can’t have the po-po getting mixed up with a poo-poo scandal,” Zep replied.
Roxie groaned. “He’s been waiting to use that one for a while, I bet. Stop with the bad puns, babe. You work here now. Armie’s the only one who’s allowed to make dad jokes.”
Armie gestured back to his office. “Major, can you watch the dog while I take these two back to visit with the mayor and my lovely wife? And I don’t make dad jokes. I make jokes. Funny jokes.”
This was why he’d come into the office with her today. Armie had called him in this morning. The mayor and Lila had requested a quick meeting with him and Roxie concerning some problems they were having around the parish.
With the damn rougarou.
That didn’t exist.
He followed Roxie into the small conference room, where Lila LaVigne sat talking to the mayor of Papillon. Sylvie Martine gave him a big smile as he walked in. The mayor’s mother was his mother’s most frequent coconspirator. They’d grown up together, and Sylvie was the most reasonable of his sister’s closest friends.
“Hey, Zep. It’s good to see you.” She was dressed in a stylish blouse, slacks, and heels he wasn’t sure how the woman walked in. Like his older brother, Sylvie had spent time in big cities before returning to the bayou to help out her hometown. She’d taken over the mayor’s office when the previous mayor had died suddenly.
“And Roxie,” Lila said pointedly, her eyes like laser beams on the deputy. “It’s good to see you. Especially since I was supposed to see you yesterday.”
He saw Roxie wince and decided to try to play the knight. “I kept her busy all day. You know how my shenanigans can go. It was entirely my fault, Lila.”
Lila shook her head. “Nope. It was hers.”
“See, I kept her out late with my partying and terrible social ways,” he tried.
“Still her fault.” Lila obviously wasn’t buying it.
“Her family is in town.” He wasn’t going to give up.
Roxie put a hand on his arm. “Stop. It was one hundred percent my fault. I got busy and I forgot to come see you. I’m sorry. I’ll do whatever tests you want this afternoon. I promise.”
Lila gave her a once-over with a frown. “You feeling okay? No headaches or dizzy spells?”
“I’m feeling great,” Roxie said. “No nausea. Well, until Zep made a dog-doo joke, but that had nothing to do with the concussion and everything to do with his terrible sense of humor.”
“I thought it was kind of funny. It was a word play. That’s not dad-joke territory.” He took a seat across from Sylvie and was beyond pleased when Roxie sat down beside him.
“It was kind of funny,” Armie agreed as he sat at the head of the table.
Lila’s eyes rolled. “You love a good dad joke.”
“I don’t do dad jokes,” the sheriff argued.
Lila turned to the other women at the table. “Noelle has a social media page devoted to the awful jokes her dad comes up with. It’s got ten thousand followers.” Armie started to say something but his wife held him off, obviously ready to get on to the point of the meeting. “Now, Armie has explained a bit of this to me, but I have been fielding questions about what to do if bitten by some sort of mythical creature.”
Zep should have seen that coming. “It’s called a rougarou. Or that’s what we would call it if it was actually real.”
Sylvie sighed. “It’s been years since we had a rougarou sighting.”
“I looked it up on the Internet.” Lila sat back, her frustration obvious. “Why? I have dealt with some crazy stuff in this town. I have a whole list of protocols on how to handle golf cart injuries because someone recently screened The Fast and the Furious at our senior center and then encouraged our elderly to treat their carts like racing cars.”
It was Zep’s turn to wince. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. They were having trouble setting up the new system and I went down there to help. They had terrible movies. All old people stuff.”
“They are old people,” Lila pointed out.
“Don’t have to act like it. They’re old, not dead.” He wasn’t about to mention that he’d helped a couple of the old guys juice their golf cart engines.