Joyce > Recent Status Updates

(I’m actually a little farther along … but I’m waiting for the ebook to be available at our library so I don’t have to keep replaying the audiobook to capture quotes/lines. 😅)

How quickly I went from no horses to possibly multiple. Or maybe a goat or donkey would be fun. She'd read somewhere they made good horse companions.

"Your recovery status?"

Half of Max's face was still bright red, and he looked as if he'd been beaten.
"I'm fine. Just a little toasted."

inside of his SUV had been completely silent during the drive to and from the restaurant. Unless you counted the ruckus of thoughts still spinning on inside his brain.

Drove me crazy how he'd berry-pick what to keep & what to get rid of based on his personal decisions. It was like he didn't understand that different people had different needs. Then I'd ask, "If no one has to pay taxes anymore, who's going to pay the firemen when your house catches on fire?"

He leaned over and popped open the glove box. It'd been cleaned out. "No one has an empty glove box."

He opened the driver's door and took a picture of the frame's sticker w/the VIN ... If Chisholm had also covered that VIN w/paint, he would have simply popped the hood & checked the engine block or firewall. VINs were all over the place on newer vehicles.

...my sixteen-year-old sister was Jacob's girlfriend.

We're twelve years apart.

It's been more than a decade.

(So Max is 38 or so?)

What if someone dies because I waited? It was the catch-22 of the job. By waiting to fire, he'd preserved the suspect's life. But had preserving the suspect condemned someone else?

He wasn't a military sniper who had trained at a thousand yards or more, but Max was confident at two hundred yards and under.

How could someone who was so alive in a picture no longer exist? Simply snuffed from existence.

F#cking horses, man. All they do is eat and $h!t.

You don't do anything different.

Somehow the terms big igloo and big luau have evolved from the word boogaloo, and putting together an igloo and a palm tree represents the movement.

boo guh loo

Long "o" on that first syllable. I had previously thought of "Electric Boogaloo," which has a shorter first o sound, like in "book."

[I guess I wasn't reading carefully enough - when I would turn to the ebook. I thought the n had a tilde and so Michael's last name would be MOO nyohz.

The narrator pronounces it MYOO nohz. :) ]

This can't be an easy part of your job.

It's not. But it's nothing compared to a family's pain. They become victims, too. A death is like dropping a stone in a pond. The ripples spread out and impact the circle of people who loved him.

Mentally, I know I can tough it out, but my body betrays me. It has other plans.

"So he might be a girl," said Emma, knowing the cat wouldn't let her peek under his tail.

"With that wide face and thick cheeks? That says boy to me. He was probably fixed later in life."

Well, someone took care of him at some point.

How do you know?

His ear. It's tipped. The vet does that when they neuter or spay a stray.

She bounced down her road in Tommy's old truck, not caring that the ride was rough. She felt free. Something about driving a vehicle by herself and realizing she had the ability to go anywhere she wished was incredibly empowering.

Four handguns and eight long guns. That's an arsenal.

Not around here. I know lots of citizens who have upwards of twenty guns.

The wife put a dead body in her husband's car?

Great way to point suspicion at the husband. Maybe she had Gone Girl aspirations. What do we know about her?

She'd spent hours and hours volunteering and serving on charity boards during that time, but she'd never felt that she truly helped anyone until she joined the Sacramento police force. It'd given her a purpose in life.

she put herself in the victim's family member's shoes when she had to deliver crushing news, saying what she would want to hear if it'd been one of her sisters. It was one of the most difficult aspects of her job.

"Ready to go see Rachel's sister?"

"Yes, but no."

Noelle understood that answer; it perfectly summed up family notifications.

"You think Mr. Mumford is a sovereign citizen?"

"Yep. Although some of them are calling themselves something else ... American States Assembly or American States Nationals or something like that."

Many sovereign citizens believed they were not under the jurisdiction of many levels of government and therefore that they were exempt from the laws.

Central Oregon was separated from the west side of the state by the Cascade mountain range. The largest cities were on the west side, where it was often wet or gray from October to June, so Max preferred Bend's high desert climate.

"Like you, I got a soft spot for strays. Once you're in with me, you're in for life."

I'm her Cornbread.

(the name she gave to a stray orange cat she's been caring for)

Evan: People know they can come here for help, and it doesn't end up on the gossip train.

Noelle: Small towns.

Evan: I think you mean good people in small towns. Not all of them have someone like Truman.

Truman: I didn't start it. I just keep it going.

Essentially, boogaloo is rather new, starting back in the early 2010s. ... some have aligned themselves with the BLM movements, speaking out against police brutality, but some suspect this alignment was to have a cover for violence. The common thread seems to be an attraction to areas of high tension. They like chaos and taking advantage of any kind of chaos.