T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 02 - Southern Poison

by T. Lynn Ocean

  Frowning, Ashton shook his head.

  I twirled a strand of hair around my forefinger, arched out my chest, and produced a sexy bimbette look, complete with fluttering lashes. “Puhlleeeze?”

  Ashton held my raised eyebrow stare. He nearly smiled. “I taught you that look and it doesn’t work on me. You report for work on Monday. Your name is Jill Burns.”

  “Can’t it be something a little more exotic like Marilyn Tulika or Giana Brenneka?”

  He dropped some bills on the counter and stood to leave. “Good to see you again.”

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  TWO

  Peggy Lee Cooke leisurely opened her eyes and rolled over to face the rays of early morning sun that pressed through the miniblinds. Enjoying the flood of warmth that hit her cheeks, she smiled, and, catlike, stretched her entire body, starting with her toes. She couldn’t remember when she’d last awakened happy and now that she thought about it, maybe she’d never before had anything worth being happy about. But now that a meaningful project sizzled on the burner and she had the love of an amazing man, she couldn’t imagine not feeling cheerful.

  No longer did she feel like a childless outcast. She wasn’t even bothered by her three-year-long failed attempt to find a cure for her type of infertility, working with the wild leafy shiff bush found in South America. She used to think that a man would never marry her if she couldn’t give him a family. Men wanted heirs to immortalize their name and she planned to mother hordes of children. Two or three, anyway. But like a promising slot machine that pays off just enough to keep the gambler from moving on to the next flashing machine, her research project ultimately ended up a loser. It sucked up all her energy and left her barren and dry. Until he came along, that is. Her lover and life mate. Chuck was a surprise jackpot.

  A good chemist, he told her, didn’t accept failure. He’d held her face between his strong hands and explained how a fruitless research project could be redirected—and resurrected—as a winner. Which is exactly what he did with her wild leafy shiff bush research. She’d chosen the right slot machine, after all, and it promised to pay handsomely.

  Pushing herself upright on the edge of the bed, Peggy felt beautiful, despite her plainness. The genetic outcome of her mother and father’s union hadn’t bestowed her with alluring physical features, but it hadn’t been totally unkind. Her skin was blemish-free, her eyes were set apart by seven-point-four centimeters, pupil to pupil, and her thick hair grew fast. Using how-to tips from a magazine, she’d tried applying makeup before her dates with Chuck, but the result was always clownish so she no longer bothered. Even so, he had called her brainy and gorgeous, and she’d been pleasantly giddy since. She was the best of both worlds, he proclaimed, as they’d made love in his hotel room and watched a movie and made love again. He was a visionary with big dreams and now she was a part of something that might change the world. She was someone.

  Stripping off a T-shirt and shorts, Peggy stepped into the shower and thought back to her geeky high school years, when nobody—not even the other girls—wanted anything to do with her. Fueled by a craving to learn more about chemistry, the only subject that made perfect sense of the world that surrounded her, Peggy plodded steadily through years of higher education until she could put the word doctor in front of her name.

  She gloated in the proof that her stepmother had been wrong all those years ago to scold her for growing crystals in a brand-new Easy-Bake Oven. She didn’t even cry when she got spanked over the incident, because seven-year-old Peggy knew that Santa Claus would have put a chemistry set beneath their scraggly tree, had he only known. A career in chemistry was her destiny, as sure as beautiful crystals will grow from simple charcoal, ammonia, and salt.

  Now, twenty-five years later, Peggy Lee gleefully acknowledged that it was also her destiny to become a wife. There was a reason she remained lonely for so many years, because just as the best crystals use more advanced ingredients and take the longest to develop, the best relationships happen in due time. Chuck was elated to learn of her virginity and wasted no time in teaching her precisely how to please him. Since her first gynecological exam at age thirteen, she’d known of her sterility—one category in which the DNA crapshoot had been unreasonably cruel to her—but now she felt feminine for the first time in her life. Her defective eggs didn’t matter anymore, and in hindsight, they hadn’t mattered all along. Chuck didn’t want children. The world was already overpopulated, he’d said. It was fate that put the two of them in the same hotel for a weekend conference. Fate that seated them side by side at a keynote speaker luncheon. Fate that merged discussions of two entirely separate projects, hers and his, both of which flopped during field trials. One pharmaceutical dud and one commercial-glue fiasco that, merged together, had changed futility and frustration into promise and progress. Peggy wasn’t sure whether she believed in God or not, but a higher power of some distinction had to be at work. Everything happened for a reason, she learned, and her life was meant to be exactly the way it was turning out.

  Chuck had been so impressed with Peggy that he built a satellite laboratory in Wilmington and hired her to head up the first stage of Project Antisis. She’d been willing to move to Roanoke, Virginia, where ECH Chemical Engineering&Consulting resided. For privacy reasons, though, Chuck chose to run Project Antisis from a satellite location and found the perfect spot right in Wilmington. Peggy Lee manufactured the synthetic plant-based chemical, which she added to a nontoxic adhesive, and shipped the raw material to a production and packaging facility in Virginia.

  The pieces were rapidly and efficiently falling into place. Chuck traveled to Wilmington almost weekly, and she anticipated his visits like a military wife waiting for her soldier to come home. Even though they couldn’t truly be together until phase one of Project Antisis was fully implemented, she was happy. Blissfully happy, she realized, toweling dry, deciding what she would wear to the lab that day. As she pulled a pair of jeans and cotton top out of a drawer, Peggy Lee’s mind wandered to other clothing. A wedding dress, for starters. He was simply waiting for the right time to propose. She just knew it.

  THREE

  “When are they gonna haul away that damn hunk of junk, for crying out loud?” Spud complained, asking nobody in particular. People think he looks like a much older, shrunken version of Wolfgang Puck. Except my father’s demeanor is much different from the famous chef’s, and right now, agitation was the flavor of the moment. “That stupid car is still causing me headaches.”

  Spud and Bobby, one of my father’s poker buddies, had joined Ox and me for a midday snack at the Block. It was well past lunchtime and too early for the happy-hour crowd, and a smattering of low-maintenance customers sat around eating peanuts and drinking beers. Ruby tended to everyone and still had plenty of time to catch up on local gossip with the regulars.

  “The insurance adjuster was a young kid, and once he took a look at your Chrysler, he wasn’t sure how to write up the report. Said he had to send a senior adjuster out,” I explained to my father for the third or fourth time. “Should be sometime this week.”

  After deteriorating eyesight claimed Spud’s driver’s license, he’d embarked on a mission to get rid of his Chrysler LHS. Unfortunately, his valuation of the vehicle was much higher than anyone else’s and he couldn’t sell it. Mad at the state of North Carolina and obsessed with getting rid of the car, he’d schemed ways to lose it so he could collect the insurance money, right up until a local cop offered to buy it. When Spud finally snagged a buyer with cash in hand—a buyer willing to pay the full asking price—my father had an epiphany: he would keep the car so his friends could tote him around in it. Minutes later, somebody drove a garbage truck into the Block, ripping right through one of the giant metal garage doors. Spud’s car was parked outside said garage door and the huge truck’s front-end forks had pierced it like toothpicks going through a fat olive. After being forked and crushed, the Chrysler was peppered with incoming rounds fr
om no fewer than twenty handguns. When the firestorm ended, the tow-truck driver couldn’t figure out how to safely haul away the garbage truck with Spud’s car attached—and suspended a foot off the ground. A forward-thinking kind of guy, he called a welder to cut through the metal prongs, effectively amputating them from the truck. Victorious, he towed the garbage truck away, leaving the impaled, smashed, shot-up Chrysler sitting in a patch of grass outside my bar, two long forked rods protruding through its belly.

  Spud retrieved his walking cane so he could poke it into the concrete floor a few times. “Well, I’m tired of waiting! It’s been almost a month now. That car was fully insured and I want my money. Any idiot can see that it’s totaled, for crying out loud.” That was an understatement. Demolished would be more like it.

  I bit a hush puppy in half and let it melt on my tongue. “Calm down, Spud. They’re probably just reviewing the police report. Maybe they found out that the car had been sunk, burned, and almost stolen during your failed foray into insurance fraud.”

  “Yeah.” Bobby spurred it on. “Maybe they’ve launched an official investigation.”

  “Well the insurance company can launch this.” Spud shoved his cane in the air, in lieu of an arthritic middle finger.

  Before he could get into a full-blown tirade about the insurance industry, Hal and Trip showed up. My father and his three poker friends—after much old-age shuffling and grunting—headed upstairs to Spud’s kitchen table for a round of Texas hold ’em.

  I tried to focus on the information in front of me but couldn’t help but to look at Ox instead and wonder—if my budding retirement hadn’t been so rudely interrupted—whether we might have finished what we started. The night of the shootout at the Block, he had stayed with me and I distinctly remember the glorious sensation of being enveloped in his arms as I drifted into the deepest sleep I’d had in a long time. Physically and emotionally drained from the week’s events and relaxed by too much alcohol, my body wouldn’t cooperate with my mind’s desire to ravage Ox’s body. Awakening beside him the next morning, I quickly came to my senses. He was certainly willing, but sex with my best friend could change everything. There might be no turning back. Ox is tall and has traditional Native American features with some surprises tossed into his DNA, such as the dimple set into a square chin and a unique cinnamon eye color that changes with his mood. Just hearing him speak sometimes drives me crazy. A Lumbee can be anywhere in the country and immediately recognize another Lumbee, simply by hearing the other speak. Their unique dialect is sort of Southern, but influenced by several ancestral sources and Ox retained the distinctive manner of speaking even though he’d led a mobile military life. When he first appeared in Wilmington, I didn’t fall into bed with Ox because he needed time to heal after a nasty divorce. In the years to follow, he always had a gorgeous woman on his arm and I always had a somewhat steady male companion. The timing had never been right. Either that, or the spirits had different plans for us.

  “What’s on your mind?” he said.

  “Oh, uh, nothing really.” Just thinking how good it would feel to press our naked bodies together. “I’m still blown away by this assignment. I feel like a commodity, like they own me or something.”

  “You’re mad because you are accustomed to doing things your own way, on your own terms.” He had a knack for seeing through bullshit. Hopefully, though, he didn’t know what was really on my mind. Him. Naked.

  “I suppose.”

  “Let’s get you in place and get this thing figured out so we can be finished with it. Then you can go play on your boat and ponder life after retirement.”

  I smiled. “We?”

  “I’ve got a feeling you may need me on this one.” He looked outside, at the placid river. “Oddly, I’ve got a feeling that we may need each other more than usual in the coming weeks.”

  Ox’s predictions were always right on target. “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I don’t, either.” He opened the file and together, we scoured my notes and the computer printouts.

  In typical covert fashion, an envelope had been delivered earlier by a woman I thought was a tourist. She handed it to me personally, saying only, “Don’t leave this shit lying around.” Inside I found a dossier containing detailed information on all Sunny Point personnel, or in government lingo, “the population served.” There are soldiers and Army reserve units, as expected, but few in comparison to the more than two hundred civilians who work at the facility.

  The packet also contained general operating info on Sunny Point and a fairly detailed blueprint. Built along Highway 133, it is surrounded by a huge buffer zone of undeveloped land and large sand dunes, and at sixteen thousand acres and more than two hundred thousand square feet of buildings, it is the largest ammunition port in the nation. The facility receives ammunition, explosives, and various other hazardous cargo by both train and truck, and loads the stuff on outgoing ships.

  We went over the report detailing possible terrorist scenarios and potential weak spots in MOTSU security. Nothing jumped out and said, “Look at me! I’m an open invitation for a terrorist!” Other than familiarizing myself with the information, there wasn’t anything to do except park the roach coach as scheduled and cook some eggs.

  “I don’t even cook breakfast for myself and now I’m supposed to go cook for a bunch of strangers every morning?”

  “Least they didn’t make you a janitor,” Ox said.

  The Block had slowly filled up while we concentrated on the task at hand, and another server and bartender arrived for the evening shift. The noise level climbed accordingly and soon leveled off to steady hum of good-natured chatter. All heads suddenly swung in Ruby’s direction when her entire body erupted into a loud, jiggling belly laugh. Two confused tourists stood by her side, and like the rest of us, didn’t understand what was so funny.

  Ruby stopped laughing and pointed at me. “That there is the Block’s owner, Jersey, and the manager, Ox. I’m sure one of them can help you out.”

  I stood to greet the couple, reminding myself to let Ruby know that Ox was an owner, too. I’d finally gotten him to agree to accept 50 percent ownership in the Block, which I took as a good sign. It meant that he didn’t have plans to leave Wilmington anytime soon.

  “What can we do for you?”

  “We’d like to find out who the artist is,” the man said.

  “Artist?”

  He pointed outside, at the pathetic remains of Spud’s car. “It’s a really incredible piece. Makes a statement, you know?”

  Stupefied at their interpretation of art, I forced myself to nod.

  “I just love the way he patterned all the bullet holes,” the woman chimed in. “And the giant fork prongs must symbolize that humans are really insignificant in the overall scheme of things. Like maybe we’re really not at the top of the food chain.”

  “Right,” the man agreed. “Anyway, we couldn’t find a signature plate on the sculpture and my wife wants to know who created it. Does the artist have a gallery around here?”

  I looked at the twisted, impaled monstrosity that used to be Spud’s car. “It was a coordinated effort by a group of local artists.”

  “They’re actually law-enforcement officers who dabble in art,” Ox confided to the couple with a straight face.

  “Really? Wow. That would make a great story.” The woman pulled a camera phone out of her handbag. “I’ve got to tell my editor about this. I write for Eclectic Arts&Leisure magazine. We have a national subscriber base.”

  The man led his wife outside, where the couple started taking digital photographs of the Chrysler from various angles. Ox let loose with a deep throaty laugh.

  “Think they’ll notice that Cracker uses the sculpture as his personal fire hydrant?” I said.

  He laughed harder.

  FOUR

  John Mason prided himself on his appreciation for discipline. A complete lack of discipline had made Americans weak and dishonorable, in his
opinion. That, and all the greedy politicians who pretended to work for the public good, when all they really cared about was padding their pockets and jetting around the country, gorging themselves at Ruth’s Chris Steak Houses and shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue stores for their mistresses. In an obscene display of indulgence, the U.S. Congress had just voted themselves a pay raise and continued to up their already fat pensions while sending other people’s family members into combat zones without the proper equipment.

  He knew the exact moment his twin was killed, even though he lay in bed asleep, on the other side of the globe. He’d been awakened by an alarming blanket of dismay that slammed into him as though it were woven of lead and dropped from fifty feet. He died right then and there along with his brother, and only a pounding heart and sweaty body made him realize that he remained physically alive. There were plenty more like him—people who lost family members for no good reason. God-fearing, hard-working Americans who’d been screwed by their own government.

  Veins bulged in his temples as he grunted out a final military press and let the chrome weight bar drop to the carpeted floor in his den. He loved the old, utilitarian house because it was surrounded by trees and set on a large lot that offered plenty of privacy. He was especially pleased with the old hidden root cellar that was left from the original house built on the property. Inside, he’d converted the living room into a gym and stocked it with free weights, a pull-up bar, and a treadmill. Just like a real health club, mirrors covered one wall so he could study his contracting muscle groups and monitor his form. A stack of neatly folded and bleached towels were within easy reach on a table, along with a bottled-water dispenser. A by-product of discipline, self-sufficiency made one stronger and that was the basis of his spiritualism. Stay disciplined and self-sufficient. A reflection in the mirror grabbed his attention and the image staring back almost seemed a stranger. Weekly injections of steroids had produced thirty added pounds of sheer muscle, and shaving off the wavy hair gave him a commanding appearance.