Turkey Ranch Road Rage

by Paula Boyd

  “Now why would you ask a dumb thing like that? I thought you took a class, Jolene. Didn’t they teach you anything at all? Oh, for Pete’s sake just take it off safety, chamber a round and shoot. Like in the movies.”

  Nothing was ever like in the movies. “This doesn’t feel right,” I said, trying to find a comfortable hold. The handgrip’s different. Rubbery and fatter.”

  “That’s the laser sight. Don’t you know anything?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Oh, that’s right. The laser’s new. It’s a new gun too, but you wouldn’t know the difference about that. This one is a Kimber Ultra-Elite. The name kind of bothered me at first, what with that little twerp Kimberlee always coming to mind over it. Then I decided to just call her Miss Ellie and that just works out fine.”

  “Oh, for godsakes.”

  Lucille wiggled her fingers on the steering wheel and glanced at the rear view mirror. “Well, I enjoy my guns. Now, get it pointed out the window and get on with it. This one works the same way as my Little Lady, except for the laser. The old sight had a switch, remember. Well, this is better. Just squeeze the handgrip. You’ll see a red dot. Or, you could just shoot the thing. You supposedly had a class.”

  Oh, if only we had time for me to supposedly and properly respond to that little comment. I squeezed the handle and a red dot of light danced across the dash of the car. Okay. I had the safety off and could work the sight. Now all I had to do was chamber a round and shoot. I did not want to do it.

  “Did you chamber the first round, Jolene, because I didn’t hear it. It’s a real distinctive sound and I didn’t hear it. I don’t have time to explain every little thing to you so why don’t you just hand it over here to me and I’ll take care of it.”

  Oh, how I’d like to unleash my scathing wit on Mother Control Freak about now. “Just chill, I’m getting it!”

  “Well, you better hurry up. They’re getting closer,” she said, eyeing the mirror. “I’d go for the radiator.”

  “Yes, Mother, I realize you have a thing for radiators.”

  “Don’t be getting smart with me, Missy, I hit what I shoot at,” she snapped.

  I took a deep breath and told myself I had no choice. The vehicle was maybe four car lengths behind us, and any Driver’s Ed student knows that’s not safe. Not safe at all when you’re going ninety-seven miles per hour. I took a deep breath and stared straight ahead to keep what little balance I’d found. My hands were shaking, but I held the gun in front of me with my left hand and pulled the slide back with the right. Snap. “Fine. Done.”

  “Well, it is about time. I knew I hadn’t heard you do that, I just knew it. Now lean out there and shoot ‘em!”

  I did not want to do this. Still shaking, I slid around in the seat and worked my knees up under me and leaned my left arm on the door. I snaked the gun out the window, using my left hand and leaned out so I could see. However, going backwards made the world spin in the wrong direction and the hurricane force winds whipped my hair around, stinging my eyes. This did not seem like a good plan on any level.

  “Hurry up! Shoot!”

  I held as steady as I could, keeping close to the car so they couldn’t see what I was doing or shoot at me easily if they were so inclined. Besides, I didn’t want to kill anybody, I only wanted to keep whoever it was from following us, warn them off. It had seemed the only choice we had a minute ago. “I don’t think we should do this.”

  “Shoot!”

  “They haven’t really done anything wrong.”

  “Shoot! Now!”

  I aimed the pistol toward the car and looked for the squiggly red dot. With the hair in my eyes I couldn’t see much of anything except headlights blinding me. They apparently could see the red laser beam, however, because they started backing off in a hurry.

  “Shoot!” Lucille screeched again. She let off the gas and hit the brakes, which was sort of not the point of a getaway, but adrenaline was screaming just as loud as she was. “Shoot it! Hurry!”

  So I did.

  Twice.

  And then I leaned the whole top half of my body out the window and shot again, this time with two hands on the grip. Rapid fire. “I’m empty,” I said, ducking back inside.

  She punched the accelerator and we were off again. “Looks like you at least got a headlight, she said, glancing in the rear view mirror. “But they’re still coming. Hurry up and reload.”

  “I’m doing the best I can here, Mother, now where’s the damn clip release?” She told me—in excruciating detail—adding further tedious instructions on how to release one clip and slide in a new one. “I’m not a monkey doing brain surgery. I know how to change a damn clip for godsake. You just get us to the police station.”

  “I know what to do, Jolene, now would you let me drive.”

  “Absolutely, Mother Dear. I wouldn’t dare presume you don’t know what you’re doing and that I needed to tell you how to do every little thing as if you’re a three-year-old.”

  “Yes, well, that’s why you ought not do it.” She leaned closer to the steering wheel. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Jolene, really I am, but would you kindly shut up so I can watch the road. You’re distracting me. And it’s dark.”

  Meaning, she couldn’t see for shit.

  I managed a glance in the side mirror. “Looks like they’ve stopped chasing us. You can slow down some now.” And significantly reduce our chances of a one-car fatality. “I’ll let you know if I see lights again.”

  “Well, maybe you did hit the radiator after all,” she said, begrudgingly. “Even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then.” She let off the accelerator. By the time we were down to 75 it seemed like we were crawling. “They could still be driving without their lights, so you pay attention. I’ll speed up again if I have to, don’t you worry about that.”

  Nope, that was not one of the blind hog’s worries. I had plenty of others, however.

  After a few minutes, I saw a cluster of lights and what looked like a tall tower sticking up out of the middle of it up ahead on the right. “Is that an oil well going in over there?”

  Lucille glanced over but did a good job of keeping her eyes and the car on the road. It seemed like she’d slowed down a little more too. “Yes, I believe it is.”

  “Is that what you saw behind your house?”

  “Sort of. I don’t think it was that big though. There was other equipment around, but I don’t know about those boxes and things, I really couldn’t see all of it.”

  As we went flying by the road that led out to the rig, I noticed a truck pulling away from the group and heading toward us. It had a row of yellow lights across the cab and a pole sticking up behind. “That’s Gilbert Moore coming out of there.”

  “Well, what’s he doing out here in the middle of the night?”

  “That’s a rig. Maybe it’s his or maybe he was just out there fixing something on it. Guess he works all hours.”

  “Well, I don’t trust him and now here he is again. I wish I’d cornered him at the Dairy Queen when I had the chance. If we weren’t running for our lives, I’d drive right over there right now and pin him in where he’d have to face me. He’d be giving me some straight answers, that’s what he’d be doing.”

  I watched the lights on the truck from the side mirror. He was almost out to the road.”

  “You keep an eye out and see where he goes. If he follows us, you just shoot him too.”

  “Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.” It really did. “I’ll go for the radiator.”

  She glanced over at me, unsure of whether she should expound on the fact that I’d learned something from her or chastise me for being a smartass. Yes, we know which it was, but thankfully she kept silent for once.

  I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I saw Gilbert Moore’s truck turn the other way and a gush of air burst from my lips. “He’s not following us.”

  “Hmmph. That’s too bad. I had plans for him.”<
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  Chapter

  Fifteen

  Lucille pulled up to the Redwater Falls Police Station in less than five minutes. We even arrived without anyone tailing us or a fatal high speed car crash. Mother parked near the door in a “no parking” area and we hurried inside.

  There were a couple of things that convinced the officer at the front desk that we needed help. One was, of course, the very obvious use of duct tape on my face. That in itself, he noted, wasn’t particularly unusual, or even indicative of a crime, but it did get his attention and was a good backup for the story we told.

  What got us the instant royal treatment, however, was the simple stating of our names. In fact, his rather dour face erupted in glee, or perhaps appreciation. The good sergeant, it seemed, had been the lucky winner of the station’s one-would-think-illegal betting pool on when Mother and I would be involved in another crime or something to that effect. While this certainly was not a pleasant discovery, the thousand dollars in prize money had definitely bought us some good will with Sergeant Jackpot.

  He promptly made us comfortable in an interrogation room with an assortment of drinks while he went about tending our car as well as locating Jerry and a Redwater detective to deal with us. He was very nice in a “come see my prize-winning catch” sort of way. To his credit, he didn’t laugh in front of us.

  Mother had explained to the sergeant about the awful stress she’d been through and insisted on an immediate trip to the ladies room to freshen up. While Lucille was gone primping, I guzzled two bottles of water to try to re-hydrate myself and flush out the toxins in my system. When she got back I was definitely ready for my turn at “freshening up.”

  Unfortunately, the second I walked in the restroom door, I saw myself in a mirror. I screamed, horrified then smacked my hand over my mouth to stop myself, which was a really dumb thing to do since my lips looked like two slices of over-ripe plums and felt like they’d been peeled. And that was the least of my problems.

  Now, I’m not one of those women who is obsessed with her looks. I do make an effort with my hair and I wear a basic amount of makeup, mostly mascara and a concealer for my perpetual dark circles. I am generally neat, clean, presentable, and sometimes even cute. The person in the mirror was none of those things. Not one. And on top of it all, she looked like somebody had smacked her in the face with a baseball bat. Twice. Of course it had to be a bat with tweezers because I was missing about half of each eyebrow. There was not much epi left in the dermis of my forehead or mouth area either, and my hair was both matted down and sticking up. I truly wanted to cry.

  Instead, I slunk into the stall and tended to business, then slunk back out and reassessed my options. I couldn’t re-grow skin or eyebrows in the next ten minutes but I could wash my face and maybe my hair. And the smell had to be dealt with, so there was also some laundry about to be done in the sink. What the slimy pink hand soap would do to my clothes was not nearly as worrisome as what it was going to do to my hair. The wall dryer would work just swell for my hair and shirt, however, so there was some hope.

  Feeling a little better—I always feel better when I have a plan—I grabbed a stack of paper towels, stripped off my shirt and started methodically soaping, rinsing and drying.

  It took a while, but I was able to scrub a lot of the adhesive off my face—or at least the skin that had adhesive stuck to it. Luckily I had more eyebrows left than I’d first thought. The sticky stuff had gooed them up in little clumps, and except for a big hole in the middle on the left brow; I was in pretty good shape. The extended scrubbing also made my whole face pretty red so the stripes weren’t so obvious anymore. I had “brushed” my teeth and mouth with a wet and soapy paper towel, which was just as horrible as it sounds, but after much rinsing, my mouth felt reasonably clean. I wet and fluffed my hair back into fair shape and was wringing out my shirt when Sergeant Jackpot burst through the bathroom door.

  “What are you doing!”

  Incredulous, furious and hysterical would all be words I’d use to describe the uniformed maniac who stood in the doorway of the ladies room, waving his arms and bellowing at me. Of course it could have just been my own hysteria creeping in since I was holding my shirt in my hands and had on nothing but a bra above my shorts.

  “What have you done!” he yelled, pointing at the wet shirt I was clutching. “You weren’t supposed to do that!”

  “What, wash my shirt?”

  “Yes! No! You can’t wash anything. You’re evidence. I can’t believe you did this! Do you have any idea how much trouble I’m in now because of you? I should have just locked you in a cell. You! I knew better. I knew! But nooooo, I had to be nice.” He said this last word with a sarcastic singsong effect. “You’ve really done it now.”

  “I’ve done it!” Yes, I yelled right back. “I’m the one who was kidnapped, drugged and chased across town by lunatics. If you wanted me to stay looking like something the cat dragged up, you should have said so instead of strutting around patting yourself on the back for the money you made off me. And maybe, if instead of running off to gossip about who was in the interrogation room, you had actually done your job, we wouldn’t have this problem.”

  “What!” It was more of a booming bellow than an actual word. “Why, you little…”

  Oh, I’d hit that nail on the head. “Hey! How was I supposed to know I couldn’t wash my face? Am I a mind reader too? You want to make bets on that? If you do, you might not like the odds. Because I’m betting you’re in bigger trouble than I am right now.”

  A crowd had gathered behind the apoplectic sergeant, who’d been holding the door open, and I felt a little naked, to say the least. At about this same time, Jackpot realized he wasn’t exactly presenting a professional image to the impromptu audience.

  As more uniforms appeared in my line of vision, I decided a graceful retreat might be the better course of action for both of us. “Look, Sergeant, I didn’t wash my shirt and hair to ruin your life. Frankly, all I cared about was trying to not stink.”

  No, it wasn’t a good suck-up, but it was as good as it was going to get. Chuckles rippled through the crowd packing the hallway at the edge of the door, breaking some of the tension, but Jackpot couldn’t let it go. He continued to paw and snort and repeat himself.

  “I cannot believe this,” he said again. “You should have known. There are sixteen different cop shows on every hour of every day. Everybody knows you have to collect evidence. You have to have evidence. Any idiot knows that. The criminals sure know it. I can’t believe you did this!”

  I’d given him a graceful out and he’d rejected it. Fine. We could do things his way. As I geared up for a “get out of here or” kind of threat, I noticed a familiar face working his way through the crowd. I relaxed a little, actually a lot. My knight in shining armor had arrived. I mouthed “I’m sorry,” but Sheriff Parker just shook his head. It didn’t bother me, this head shaking. I’ve gotten used to it. Find it kind of cute even. Now scowling with head shaking, that’s a different thing. But this was the slow, side-to-side disbelief thing. He was probably more worried than mad. I lifted the corners of my mouth in a fake little smile.

  Jerry put a hand on Sergeant Loser’s shoulder. “It’s done. Let me handle it.”

  “Handle what?” Jackpot said, still glaring directly at me. “There’s nothing left to handle. She has once again single handedly made the entire Redwater Falls Police Department look like a bunch of fools.”

  Wow, I was more powerful than I’d imagined. But he didn’t really mean the whole department, he meant himself, although that didn’t make much sense either. Basically, I’d embarrassed him by walking out of the interrogation room without permission, nothing more. Well, besides accusing him of being incompetent at his job. “My mother helped.”

  “Let me talk to her alone,” Jerry said, “and find out exactly what happened. This might not even be your problem.”

  “Huh?” Jackpot took another look at Jerry and belatedly figured
out whose hand was gripping his shoulder. Possibilities and hope began to spring forth and ease the wrinkles and red blotches from his face. “Thank God you’re here, Sheriff,” he said, it dawning on him that perhaps there were boundary issues that could be exploited. “You make it so she’s not my problem, and I’ll be the happiest man in this county. Make it so she never sets foot in the city limits of Redwater Falls again and I’ll have a statue carved in your honor. Why I’d—” He stopped himself, realizing he was groveling. Then very authoritatively and for the benefit of the crowd, he said, “You let me know when this is handled, Sheriff.” Cutting his eyes to me, he whispered to Jerry, “I don’t know how you do it. She can’t be that good in bed.”

  “I heard that!” He practically ran out of the restroom, but I stomped toward the door with not a single care that I wasn’t wearing a shirt. I was going to rip out his ugly little tongue and stuff it up his nose. “Did you hear that?” I said indignantly to Jerry, although I knew very well he had. A good portion of the crowd had heard it too, and many were eyeing me accordingly, trying to decide for themselves. Idiots. “Yes, I am, you want details, what?”

  Jerry pushed the crowd back and stepped inside, closing the door behind him. “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene…”

  “You can chew me out in just a minute, Jerry, I have some unfinished business down the hall.”

  He caught my arm as I tried to make good on my threat. “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene…”

  “Oh, save it.”

  Now, I have been scolded by Jerry before, and I do not like it, not one little bit. I liked it even less when there was a significant chance that I deserved it, which I did not. Still, I felt obligated to attempt a defense. “That man who just insulted me is an ass. Did you know he won a betting pool about me? Did you know this stupid department had a betting pool about me? Did you know that? And then I walk in the door and he hears my name and…” I stopped and looked at Jerry again and I did not like what I was seeing. “Oh, my God! If you—”