When I was young I did not have an Internal clock—that thing inside a person that tells them when to wake up. I cannot remember ever waking up on my own when I was young. Either I would have to set an alarm, or more often, my mother would come in my bedroom and yell, “Get up or you’ll be late for school.” I did not immediately pop out of bed, because there were days I figured I could learn as much laying there in bed as I would in class, and most days I was right.

I worked night shifts for about twenty of the twenty-six years I was in law enforcement and usually existed on about six hours of sleep a day. I would hit the bed at six am and be awake by noon. I still didn’t have an internal clock; I had a neighbor with two barking dogs outside my bedroom window.

Since my wife has retired, she no longer has an internal clock either. She sets an alarm every day. It goes off with pleasant music from some radio station. Trying to wake her from a sound sleep with soft music is like trying to stop an M1 Abrams tank with a pea shooter. Most days she doesn’t get up until her real alarm, me, comes in and asks her if she set the alarm for a specific reason, or if she just wanted to annoy me.

Now that I have retired, by six am, I am up, drinking coffee and writing something. I now have an internal clock. It’s called an aging bladder. It doesn’t have a snooze setting, and I’ll be darned if I can get the thing set to go off at the right time. Usually by six, I say to heck with it and get up.

I think the reason my internal clock is out of whack is due to all the years I spent working night shifts. I worked four days of ten hour shifts and had the next three days off. I didn’t want to stay up until six on my days off so I did not have a specific time I slept or woke up on a daily basis. Working nights in a small rural sheriff’s office is different from working in a big city department—I’ve tried detailing the difference in most of my novels. We had our busy times, but week nights in the middle of the winter were slow. Sometimes I would drive for hours without seeing car lights, and the only tire tracks on the frosted county blacktops were mine.

During these slow times, I started sitting on an agricultural farm service in our county that sat out in the middle of nowhere. For those of you who don’t know, an Ag service is a place where they sell fertilizer and pesticides to farmers. They also sell anhydrous ammonia which is used to grow corn … and make methamphetamine. When it was slow, I would take my thermos of coffee, turn on the radio and watch for a few hours to see if anyone came with bad intentions. Over the years I did catch a few people trying to steal anhydrous to make meth.

My new novel, A Death in a Snowstorm, opens with a young deputy doing surveillance on an Ag service. Where it ends is, fortunately, somewhere I never had to go. The novel is due out February 7th.

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