“Nope. Regular police.”
He reaches for his wallet on the dashboard and flashes me a badge. It looks official, but I barely have time to read it.
“How do I know if that’s real? Maybe you drive around bothering vulnerable, emotional females for shits and giggles.”
“Said you’re from Seattle, right? Yep,” he mutters, shaking his head slightly. “You’re definitely a city girl.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demand as I start walking again.
“Suspicious of everyone.” He shifts into drive and continues to crawl along beside me. “It might comfort you to know that the crime rate in Sitka is well below the national average and we’re the fourth safest city in Alaska.”
“Only fourth?”
“Numbers one and two—Cordova and Haines—are also located in the Inside Passage.”
“We’re missing someone. Where’s number three?”
“Unalaska. It’s south of here.”
“You live in Alaska. Everything’s south.”
“In the Aleutian Islands,” he clarifies.
“You lost third place to a town called UNAlaska?” I ask. “That’s rich.”
“We have the tenth largest population,” he informs me. “Twice as many folks as Unalaska, but directly behind them in safety.”
I can hear the pride in his voice, and for some reason it makes me want to be bitchy. “A hundred here to their fifty?”
He shrugs. “I guess Sitka looks small to a city girl, but we’ve got almost nine thousand people here.”
He’s still driving slowly beside me and I’ve still got my arms crossed over my chest, but at some point, I stopped crying, and I notice the rain’s letting up a little too. The day’s getting brighter.
“Come on,” he says. “Let me give you a lift home. I’m headed into town, and besides, it’s my civic duty.”
I frown at him for a long minute before checking out the words Public Safety Training Academy on the side of the car. I guess he’s telling the truth. I open the back door and plop down behind him.
“Where we goin’, Miss Daisy?” he asks, and it’s so absurd that I can’t help but crack a smile.
“Lookee there!” he exclaims, grinning at me in the rearview mirror. “Is that a smile?”
He wears a pretty full beard, but it can’t hide his dimples. They’re deep and playful, and make him look boyish despite the fact that he’s—if I had to guess—about thirty.
“No,” I say, pursing my lips and looking away from him.
“I do actually need to know where I’m taking you,” he says.
For all that he flashed a badge at me, I don’t know him. I’d rather he not know exactly where I’m staying. “The library, please.”
“You live in the library?”
“Nearby.”
“Okay,” he says. “The library it is.”
I know from my drive to the Fortress of the Bear, it’ll take about ten minutes to get back to town, and for the first five minutes, we drive in silence. Then it occurs to me that if he really is in law enforcement, perhaps he could tell me a little bit about the recent bear attacks around town. May as well use my time with him productively.
I clear my throat. “Um…are you with Fish and Wildlife by any chance?”