Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  “I don’t know nu’thing about any sixty-five thousand. How come you know so much about that money?”

  I ignored his question and wondered, so, maybe Jubal had just been helping us out of the goodness of his misguided heart? Or he was lying about the money.

  Money that was now resting quietly in a picnic basket in a recently cleaned-out kitchen cabinet.

  But before I could take it any further, Jubal reminded me of why we were all standing around in a shed in a graveyard.

  “Well, damn it to hell then, let’s find those kids,” Jubal said.

  chapter 58

  There are cultures that believe a person has an animal guide in life, or an animal talisman.

  It’s a lovely idea, and, if I were asked to select my animal guide, I’d pick something totally graceful and cool, like, say, a Florida panther or a deer. Or something totally smart and mischievous, like a dolphin.

  But it seemed the animal-guide matchmakers had something else in mind for me.

  As in an albino ferret.

  Go figure.

  All of which is to say that as much as I’d like to tell the tale so that either Shalonda or I were the heroine, it turned out that Johnny the Ferret once more saved the day.

  We were thrashing around in the graveyard, not even sure if the kidnapped trio was there, and, if so, where among the tombs and the graves they might be hidden, when a white flash dashed up to me, oonking like the end of the world, and dancing about like the ground was on fire.

  Johnny.

  And it didn’t take my law degree to figure out that where Johnny was, Armando wasn’t too far behind.

  While Johnny spun and oonked around me, I took comfort in knowing we were close to finding those kids. “Where are they, Johnny? Take me to them,” I said.

  “Whoa, that thing ain’t Lassie,” Jubal said.

  “Go, Johnny, go,” Shalonda said.

  And Johnny did an especially big oonk, and spun in a half-circle and started scampering. We scampered right after him.

  To a mausoleum, with an inscription dating back to 1897, and an angel guarding it, and the green, lichen-coated door, cracked partly open.

  It took the three of us maybe as long as it takes to inhale to get the damn door all the way open, and for Jubal to stick his head in. “Becky,” he cried out. “Bobby, you all in here?”

  Thump, thump, thump was our answer, the sound of someone alive hitting the ground with their feet.

  The operative words were “someone alive.”

  I pushed Jubal aside, jumped in, and shuddered. When the smell of the half-underground mold and ooze hit my nose, and I saw pieces of skeletons, I thought Willette’s house really wasn’t so bad after all, and then I ran toward the prone, tied, and gagged forms of Bobby, Becky, and Armando. Johnny oonked and jumped up and down on Armando, and Jubal pushed me aside and pulled out a big pocketknife, and Shalonda stood at the door and shouted encouragement and questions.

  The kids were spiderwebby and dirty, but when we got them untied and outside, we could see they were still healthy. Not a one of them had been cut or shot or hit.

  Becky did a head-spinning version of a damsel-in-distress routine, while Bobby and Armando tried to out-cool and out-alpha-male each other in order to attend to her. But I didn’t think any of them were nearly as scared as they should have been. Armando was the first to announce he needed to “take a leak,” and did so, a little too close for privacy, and then Becky took my hand and insisted I go with her behind a bush, but “don’t look.”

  Becky was a spunky little thing, and, in no time at all she didn’t need me to hold her hand, and she started blabbing forth, somewhat incoherently, about their adventures.

  Simon had busted into her house, she told me in little breathless snippets, and he had a gun, and some rope and some tape, and, yes, they fought, and, oh, but Bobby hit and punched so heroically to protect her, while Armando tried to knock Simon down by butting him in the back, and they were so very brave. Bobby and Armando did their best to fight for her, Becky said, beaming with pride at her boys.

  Still, I understood why Simon maintained the upper hand. He was a man who worked out seriously in a gym, who had probably learned to fight tough against taunts on the schoolyards of his long-limbed childhood. And he had a gun.

  Guns usually trump teenage boys.

  So it was, Becky admitted, they were all afraid of the gun, and finally Simon marched them outside into a paneled van he had parked in the backyard.

  Where exactly were the neighbors, I wondered. “Nobody saw him? I mean, saw him taking you and the boys?”

  “It’s Sunday, everybody was at church or Mr. Chick’s,” she said, using a tone that suggested she thought I was pretty dumb.

  “He told us he’d shoot us, and go back and shoot Momma, if we didn’t do what he told us, and, even so, Bobby tried to duck out and run, so Simon tied him ’round the neck, and gave him a big shot of something that put him right out. While Simon was fighting with Armando, Johnny jumped into the van. I don’t think Simon saw him, what with Armando kicking and stuff.”

  Good for Johnny, I thought.

  “We woke up, all tied up and with nasty old gags in our mouths, right in here,” Becky said. “And I got a headache, I reckon from the drug Simon gave us. And I sure am thirsty, but I think I’m okay otherwise.”

  They needed water, and food, and to get the hell out of there. And, by the way, just where was all that official law enforcement backup?

  Simon the soulless man was around somewhere, and I didn’t like the fact we were acting like we were on a family Fourth of July campout, peeing in the woods and telling tales. While Bobby finally broke down and used the outdoor facilities, I dialed 911 from my cell phone, which I’d tucked into my pocket for just such an emergency. But we were too far out and couldn’t get service, which made me think I needed to write that can-you-hear-me-now guy a nasty letter.

  “Come on, we got to get,” Shalonda said.

  “It’s all my fault,” Becky said.

  “Tell us about it on the way back to town,” I said.

  “I’m so sorry,” Becky said, and then hugged both Bobby and Armando. I saw the way Bobby swelled with pride when she hugged him first.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said.

  “Let’s get,” Shalonda repeated, though no one seemed to be paying her any attention.

  “We were, that is Bobby and me, we were talking in Willette’s room, you know, at the hospital. I mean, she couldn’t hear us, and I didn’t think anybody else could, and so I was telling Armando all that had been going on, and then we were talking about what it meant that Mr. Lonnie went running out of Willette’s house. And if that had something to do with why Simon paid too much for that house of Mr. Lonnie’s.”

  “Damn it, we got to get,” Shalonda said, raising her voice.

  “Damn straight,” Jubal said. “You can walk and talk, can’t you?” With that, Jubal gave me a little shove. “My truck’s out front, on the road.”

  “Simon came into Willette’s room, and we didn’t think he’d heard us, you know, talking about him and Lonnie. I mean, he acted real nice,” Bobby said. “But I guess he heard us all right.”

  “Faster,” Jubal said, and pushed me again.

  I turned around and glared at him. “Watch that shoving.”

  Just then, Johnny, who’d been resting in Armando’s arms, saw a squirrel on a low limb, doing that little squirrel-tease dance they like to do with cats when they know full well they are out of the cat’s range, and Johnny shot down out of Armando’s grip, and hit the ground running. The squirrel hit the ground running too, and then, instead of dashing up a tree in a squirrel-sensible escape, went zipping into the undergrowth of the woods on the other side of the fence, at the edge of the graveyard, Johnny on his tail.

  In a blink, both squirrel and ferret had wholly disappeared, eaten up by shadows and scrubs of the dense Georgia piney woods.

  “Well, damnation, come
on,” Jubal said. “Leave the little guy, I’ll come back and get him later.”

  “I’m not leaving Johnny,” Armando said, and before anyone could grab him, he dashed away into the darkening woods, climbing and jumping over the fence in a split second, and compounding the ferret-squirrel disappearance act.

  “I’m not leaving without Armando,” I said, and started moving toward the spot where he’d disappeared.

  “Whoa, there, white girl,” Shalonda said, and grabbed my arm. “Hold on.”

  While I tried to pull out of Shalonda’s grip, Jubal showed us a calm head. “Boy, you drive a stick?” Jubal asked Bobby.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jubal rattled his hand around in his pocket, fished out the keys, and tossed them at Bobby, who caught them. “Stay right on this path till it hits the road, and my truck’s right there. Only pickup out there. Get you and that little gal out of here, go straight to town, and get the law. Tell ’em ever thing, you hear? We’ll get that boy of Lilly’s.”

  Bobby turned and looked at me.

  “Do it,” I said, “and don’t dare stop that truck for anything but a red light, and then only if something’s coming in the cross street.”

  I gave Becky my cell. “Keep trying your momma till you get her. Then have Bobby call Patti Lea.”

  Becky and Bobby might still be young enough to expect the happy ending as the norm and to believe they were immortal, but their mothers surely knew better by now. And I wanted Rebecca and Patti to know their children were found and safe.

  “I know these here woods better than y’all. I’ll go get that boy and that critter. You two get back to your car and get it out of Simon’s yard, come back here on the road, pick me and those two up.”

  “We should stick together,” I said, not liking one whit the fact that Jubal was suddenly giving me orders.

  But Jubal didn’t wait till I finished my objection, he had already started jogging toward the woods.

  And poof, just like another man down the bunny hole, he was gone too.

  “He’s right. Let’s get that car and get it out of that man’s blueberries ’fore he comes home and sees it.”

  “No, I’m going after Armando,” I said, and ran to the edge of the woods before I realized that in the absence of a trail, the barrier of the scrub and the undergrowth and the trees made one spot look pretty much like the other. “Where’d they go?”

  “He’ll find ’em, come on. Jubal been knowing these woods longer’n you and me been living,” Shalonda said.

  But I was studying the limbs and leaves, and the ground, looking for some trace of evidence to say that a ferret, a boy, and a man had dashed in there somewhere.

  And that’s exactly what I was still doing when the last person on earth I ever wanted to see showed up.

  chapter 59

  Never let your guard down, not even when poking in the bushes looking for some track or trace that a wayward teenage boy and his equally errant ferret have passed that way before.

  Which is to say, I had my head bent down about two feet off the ground, studying a bowed stem on a low-lying scrub, trying to discern if it grew that way or got bent by Armando’s mad dash after his pet, when Shalonda let out a yip and I jumped straight up so fast I got dizzy.

  There stood Simon the Soulless.

  And Simon was not alone.

  He had his spiffy, new-looking shotgun with him.

  A shotgun, no doubt, that was loaded, in sharp contrast with Shalonda’s strictly-for-show gun.

  “You left a trail through the woods any idiot could follow,” he said.

  Okay, so spank me, I’m not a Native American hunter trained to pass without a trace through the underbrush.

  “Oh, hello, Simon,” I said, first-date perky, on the extraordinarily remote chance I was a hundred percent wrong about everything and he was just out with his shotgun, taking the evening air and not intent upon wiping out three generations of Cleary folks in one week.

  Shalonda didn’t play that long shot. She jerked up her own shotgun in a hurry.

  Simon matched the bet and raised it, pointing his shotgun right at Shalonda’s gut, then swinging it back at my own stomach, which had taken that inopportune moment to squeeze and flip so hard I thought I might possibly throw up.

  “Where are those kids?” he said, in a tone as menacing as the gun then traveling a path between my stomach and Shalonda’s.

  Okay, so the good news was I hadn’t been wrong about him. And the bad news was I hadn’t been wrong about him. Time to punt.

  “They’re gone. Back to town. We’ve already called 911. You might as well give up.”

  Shalonda pointed her shotgun right back at his gut. “You surrender to us, and we’ll see you get back to town safe and sound.”

  “Get real,” Simon said, and laughed.

  “I know how to use this thing,” Shalonda said, not a girlish quiver anywhere in her voice. “And Lilly’s got her a .38.”

  I jerked my hand behind my back as if I could possibly be holding a gun in it out of sight, but I knew Simon would not be tricked.

  A man who tries to kill old ladies with ants and LSD and binds and gags children in a crypt is not a man afraid of two unarmed women with a mouthful of bluff.

  At least that would be my instant assessment.

  Nope, right then, I figured our best, maybe only, hope lay with Jubal, and I started my risk-benefit analysis on screaming out for Jubal’s help.

  “Shoot him, Lilly,” Shalonda said. I guess her plan was that Simon would turn to me and she’d knock him over the head with her empty shotgun.

  But it occurred to me his most likely response would be to spin and shoot me, so I threw myself on the ground as quick and hard as I could, and rolled into a tiny ball behind the nearest bush. I’ve been shot at before.

  While I was playing roly-poly, Simon was playing Action Man, and in one quick and vicious lunge, he knocked the unloaded gun out of Shalonda’s grip. Shalonda aimed her body low to tackle his legs, and I unrolled and launched myself at the empty shotgun on the ground, thinking maybe I could use it, baseball-bat-like, to bash Simon’s head in.

  Before I could get a good grip on the damn thing, Simon brought down his gun on top of Shalonda’s head with a heart-stabbing crack, and she splayed out like a drunk or a dead woman.

  I tried to swing the empty shotgun for a weapon, but I didn’t have a good grip on it, and the next thing I knew, Simon had kicked it out of my hands. I sure wished I had hold of that chain saw, but even that might not have done any good, because I saw something now I hadn’t fully appreciated before: Under those gaudy business clothes he’d worn, Simon was strong. Very, very strong. And he was angry. Very, very angry.

  In an embarrassingly short time, he wrestled me into at least temporary submission.

  Physically, Shalonda and I had simply been no match for him. But at least I was not knocked out, unlike poor Shalonda, and I made sure I kept my mind and my eyes open.

  “Your car’s still at my place, so those kids are here someplace,” he said.

  When he said that, I realized Simon didn’t know Jubal was around. Why would he, after all, since Jubal’s truck was already hightailing it back to town, and Jubal had disappeared into the forest before Simon pounced upon Shalonda and me.

  So, okay, Jubal, I thought, rescue us. Now would be good.

  And don’t get Armando or that damn ferret hurt.

  Pretty tall order for an ex-logger-turned-smuggler.

  Still, I had hope. I also realized it had been stupid times ten to have left my Honda parked at Simon’s, especially since there was no mistaking that busted-out window in Simon’s house. It wouldn’t have taken him long to add up my calling cards, and, as he’d mentioned, find our trail through the woods to the graveyard. So, if I ended up dead, which seemed to be a good bet at the moment, it would be my own stupid fault.

  That didn’t make me any more resigned to my fate.

  “And I don’t aim to be foolin
g with you two while I look. I get rid of them, and I get rid of you two, then nobody is going to connect me up with that idiot Lonnie, especially now that I’ve got that damn contract for deed out of your trunk, so nobody will know he didn’t buy that place from your mother.”

  Aha, so he was the one that had broken into my Honda and stolen Willette’s important papers. Not that this detail particularly mattered at the moment.

  “I sent that fool Lonnie,” Simon said, “to Willette’s to get her to sign that backdated deed, then he and Ray Glenn were supposed to kill her, make it look like an OD. That man couldn’t even do that right. He decides, all on his own, to take cash and pay her what he owed her. He planned on walking out of there, with her still alive, once he got her name on the deed.”

  Ah, not a bad man, just like Shalonda had been saying. “So, he couldn’t kill her, could he?” I said, on the theory that conversation with Satan’s sidekick was better than getting shot.

  “You know, if you had just minded your own business, we could have had a good time together. A very good time.”

  Minded my own business? Like keeping my mother alive wasn’t my business? But a tart response didn’t seem like the proper life-saving response, so I kept quiet and waited for a miracle or Jubal to save me.

  “Stupid hick country boy, Lonnie, way he tells me later, he figured seeing all that money in cash would turn her head, and she’d take it, keep quiet, and sign the deed. After selling me a piece of property he didn’t even own, that man didn’t understand why we had to make sure she never talked.”

  I didn’t either, really—I mean, not to the extent of killing Willette. Up to that point, it was just bribery. Assuming Willette had called in the Atlanta Constitution and documented the whole story, bribe and all, the most that probably would have happened was that she could have reclaimed the property in a suit to quiet title, and Lonnie would have had to pay back Simon’s money. And maybe Simon got tagged for bribery, and lost his job running the hospital, and Lonnie got booted off the commission. But even with the generally low value placed on human life these days, killing Willette to keep the bribery a secret seemed a bit of an overreaction.