Page 21 of The Flame Game

“And who knows how many cases weren’t reported to the CDC,” my husband muttered, shaking his head. “Now I understand why the other chiefs told me I’d appreciate the shit I dodged before being dumped into my rank.”

“At least I had some training before being thrown at you.”

“Yeah. You’re definitely better trained than I was before I became a cop. Actually, I think you’re better trained than most of our cops. You just have unconventional training, and you’re missing some of the fundamentals. That’s something we’re going to have to address once we’re at the station. I want to revamp our training programs.”

“Do you have any say over training programs?”

“I have a lot of control over what supplementary training courses my cops go through after they’re out of the academy. I’m thinking I will see if we can hire one or two extra cops so we can have an hour of supplementary training as a part of every shift. I also have some concerns about our gun handling. I’d like to see Amanda run more cops through unarmed training. General gun usage has been down, so there are concerns of inappropriate use of force.”

“I’m going to regret having a salary, aren’t I?”

“Matching work shifts,” he reminded me. “That means more sleep for you, my beautiful.”

“You’re just making me walk the walk after talking about how good I am at budgeting.”

“You’re not just good at budgeting, Bailey. If someone told me you were a goddess of budgeting, I would believe them. I’ve seen what you’ve done with our household budget. And not only do you handle the budget to save us money, you do not shirk on the quality. That is very important—we can’t afford to shirk in terms of quality and services, so the budget is a very careful dance.”

“The budget doesn’t have enough in it for coffee,” I warned him.

“That’s easily solved. We will put a tip jar on the eighth floor and make a note that all tips go to buying coffee and low-grade pixie dust for the station. You’re going to keep your pixie-dust license, and we’ll make a system to help make sure the cops are level-headed during stressful shifts. I already encourage them to get a low-grade dose on the way to work. Our job can get pretty damned stressful, and the dust dulls the edge.”

“You’ve done work performance tests, haven’t you?” I accused, as my husband would do just that to make certain his cops were in the best health possible.

“Absolutely. Getting rid of ticket quotas helped almost as much as encouraging pixie dust.”

“What is the deal with ticket quotas anyway?”

“Revenue. I had ticket quotas removed from all Manhattan precincts, and general performance of the cops increased fairly significantly; they were able to worry about more important calls and catching dangerous drivers. Once upon a time, we were also responsible for issuing parking tickets, but we lobbed that over to the city level. Last I checked, they had community service workers handle issuing standard parking tickets and checking meters.”

“Efficient.”

“It saved us a fortune.” Quinn admitted. “Unfortunately, how we saved ourselves a fortune is going to make our search even more difficult. While the police will help augment animal control as needed, we don’t keep much in the way of records unless it’s a notable instance.”

“Like the Chief of Police’s wife being caught with her ass sticking out of a dumpster while being slobbered on by yet another rabid puppy?”

“Precisely. Don’t forget about the one with distemper.”

I sighed, as that poor dog had been too far gone to save, but I’d stayed with him the entire time before being carted off to be treated for rabies, distemper, and any other disease a dog might pick up on the streets. “They had to put that one down.”

“I know.”

“I guess I can’t turn into a unicorn and burn any assholes behind the rabies outbreak, can I?”

“However much I would enjoy helping you do just that, we can’t. It’s tempting, but we’re the good guys because we don’t do that unless required.”

“That ex-cadet deserved to be squished like a grape. He was going to hurt you.”

“That is an excellent example of when it’s acceptable to ram all six or seven hundred pounds of your unicorn self into somebody. However, next time, please try to avoid being poisoned with ambrosia.”

“I didn’t do that on purpose.”

“I can handle being poisoned with ambrosia almost as well as you can, so try to remember that next time.”

I wrinkled my nose and went to work properly labeling my spreadsheet, creating a pivot table, and getting statistics on rabies infections by year and state.

Vermont came in at the top with six thousand rabies cases, and with a frown, I filtered by year, discovering a surge in rabies cases in the state six years ago. When I filtered by species, I discovered most of the victims of the virus were raccoons with wolves nipping hot on their heels. “Hey, Quinn. How many wolves live in Vermont?”

While Quinn worked on a search to find out, I adjusted my filters to include the month, discovering a pack of a hundred and fifty wolves had been found to be rabid in a single month in the state.