He Was Her Man

by Sarah Shankman

  “Who the fuck are you calling old?”

  They were okay. Sam stood and leaned across her two lovers and pushed the front door wide. She watched Doc unlock the dark blue Mercury with his right hand. His left was hanging at his side, blood dripping down the fingers. There was a trail of red, bloody spatters from the front step all along the sidewalk. Then it disappeared as Doc had crossed the dark pavement of Central.

  He was in the car now. He’d slammed the door. In a second he’d start the engine, and he’d be gone. They had his money and his diamond, but still, Doc Miller would be on the road. On the loose. Free to kill again with no one to stop him. Sam whirled, stepped around Jack and Harry, and ran back through the restaurant and up the stairs.

  *

  “Oooooooowrunuhooooo,” said Pearl sniffing the blood on the sidewalk. Then she looked back up at Bobby, searching his eyes, waiting for him to tell her what to do.

  “Take this, too,” Sam pressed all the cash she had in her wallet into Bobby’s hand. They turned right when they hit the main sidewalk, about to head up toward the Palace Hotel and the parking lot and Sam’s car. Across the street was an empty parking spot where Doc’s Mercury had stood.

  Pearl stopped. “Hooh hooh hooh,” she cried, lurching toward the parking spot.

  “The son of a bitch is going to have a fifteen-minute lead by the time we get your car and I head out after him,” Bobby said. His face was white. His mouth was grim. Maybe they had conned the con man, thought Sam, but this was the man to kill the killer.

  She said, “What else can we do? Let’s go!” She took off jogging, with Bobby and Pearl right behind her.

  Then a car horn sounded, and they turned. It was Loydell peering at them over the steering wheel of her ice-blue Chevette. “Where are you two racing off to? I gave up on waiting for Jinx to call me and tell me how it all turned out, thought I’d come down here and find you all.…”

  “Miss Loydell,” Bobby breathed, leaning on the side of the Chevette. “I need you to give me your car right now. The man who killed Mamaw has just drove off that way”—he pointed south down Central—“and I hate to be rude, but Pearl and I don’t have time to stand around and chitchat.”

  Loydell didn’t even blink. She just slid over into the passenger seat and said, “Son, you drive. Pearl can sit on me.”

  Bobby climbed into the Chevette. “Miss Loydell, I don’t think you under—”

  “I am just old, Bobby. I am not stupid.” She reached over and opened the glove compartment and pulled out her little .22 Jaguar Baretta. “Now hit it, son. The murdering bastard may run, but he can’t hide from us. Can he, Pearl?”

  “Yo yo yo yo,” Pearl sang as if they’d already treed Doc and she was on chop, waiting for Bobby to blast his lights out.

  Then Bobby did a smoking U-turn in the middle of Central Avenue, and he and Pearl and Loydell headed south. Sam waved them off. “Good hunting,” she cried into the clear blue Arkansas afternoon.

  37

  “THIS CERTAINLY IS beautiful country,” said Mickey. The baby blue Mercedes she’d picked up at Hot Springs Classic Cars was cruising along Highway 270 past the western fingers of Lake Ouachita. They were about to enter the little town of Mount Ida.

  “Isn’t it pretty?” said Jinx. “You’ve never been here before? Well, just you wait until we turn up toward Fort Smith. That national forest up there is so beautiful. You know, we could keep going, on up toward Fayetteville, do a little turn back east and you could see Eureka Springs. It is so cute up in the Ozarks. They have all these darling bed and breakfasts in Eureka Springs.…”

  “Jinx,” Mickey interrupted. “Sweetie, I think we need to keep our eye on the prize here. Now, we’ve got the nest egg, we need to get a good running start on making you a crystal altar queen in L.A. We should get there and get started. You want to do sight-seeing, well, darlin’, we can do some sight-seeing. We’ll see London. We’ll see France.”

  “We’ll buy lots of lacy underpants.” Jinx giggled.

  Mickey turned and looked at her. Who’d ever thought that the main chance would come in the form of a dingbat ex-beauty queen with one of the greatest legal scams in the world, who didn’t know it? And who was also a natural talent?

  “I’m telling you, darlin’,” Mickey said, pushing the button that opened the sunroof. The wind rushed through their hair. Mickey’s red curls looked like little pennants, bouncing around. “We’re going to be rich. Rolling in filthy lucre. That crystal altar idea of yours, we take it to Hollywood, unh unh unh. You think those bored-to-death rich ladies in Texas are foolish, can spend some money, honey, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen yourself some Hollywooders. That place is absolutely crawling with people so insecure, so nervous, so unhappy about one-half a pound of fat, one-quarter of a wrinkle, and that’s just the actors. Then you take the agents and the producers and, my God, the writers everybody else treats like pond scum—those people need your help so bad. We’re going to be bigger than Marianne Williamson. We’re going to start small and exclusive, and then we’ll branch until we’re into television home shopping. With you up front and me behind the scenes, we’re going to be colossal! Mega-colossal! And, furthermore, we’re going to be legal!” Mickey reached over with her right arm and gave Jinx a hug. “You are one smart lady, Miss Jinx. God, I love you, you did such a beautiful job faking out that s.o.b., then faking out everybody else.”

  Smart. Mickey thought she was smart. Jinx sighed. God, she was happy. She couldn’t remember ever being so happy. Then she slid down in the leather seat, propped her knees on the dash, and screamed through the sunroof: “Brace yourself, Hollywood!”

  38

  EARLY THE NEXT afternoon, Sam and Kitty were sitting on Sam’s front porch. Snuggled between them on the wide slatted swing was Harpo, Sam’s little dog, whom Kitty had brought home to Sam from her grandmother’s.

  “So then what happened?” asked Kitty.

  “After I waved Bobby and Loydell off? I turned and walked weak-kneed back into Bubbles.” Sam took a long sip of her iced tea. “You want some more?”

  Kitty shook her head. “And?”

  “And the two of them were sitting in Jack’s booth having a beer and a chat like old friends.”

  “Man-talk?”

  “Yep. Swapping lies about who’d lost the most money at the track, football, that kind of stuff.”

  “They weren’t duking it out over you, in other words?”

  “I don’t even think they’d noticed I was gone. Though, Jack did say, when they finally looked up, that he’d seen Bobby take off with Loydell, and he figured Doc was about to get what was coming to him.”

  “How’d you feel about that?”

  “Well, Oprah”—Sam held an imaginary microphone out in front of her—“as you can imagine, I felt like dog doo-doo, pardon my French, Harpo, I mean what the heck was going on? Wasn’t Harry there because of me? Hadn’t Jack sworn undying affection? And they were talking baseball?”

  “So you turned on your heel, marched back to the Palace, threw your stuff in a bag, and headed for home?”

  “You got it, sport.”

  “You heard from either one of them?”

  “Both. Multitudinously. Phone calls. Faxes. Telegrams. I expect a helicopter with leaflets any second. Both of ’em pitiful as hell. Seems I overreacted. Misunderstood.”

  “And what’d you say?”

  “Didn’t say a word. Not answering the phone—or any other form of telecommunication. Don’t plan to answer my door, either.”

  “You going to hole up? Get real about writing your book? Become a big-time hermitess?”

  “Looks like.”

  “I’ve got a hundred dollar bill that says you’ll crack in less than a week. Furthermore, you’ll come crying to me, Which one should I choose?”

  “A real hundred?”

  “Genuine.”

  Sam stuck out her hand. “You’re on.”

  They swung silently for a few min
utes, listening to the birds, the frogs in the bayou that flowed behind Sam’s old house on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The cumulus clouds blowing in from the Gulf were like gigantic puffs of whipped cream—which reminded Sam of Jack and that night in her hotel room. On the other hand, she and Harry had done some world-class smooching in this very porch swing.

  Sam took another long drag on her iced tea. Then she said, “So, what do you think?”

  “It’s a tough choice. Very tough. You could make one of those lists. Line up all the pros and cons. Harry vs. Jack. Both have a lot to recommend them. Of course, you have a history with Harry. But then, he done you wrong. Jack, on the other hand…”

  “I could. I could do that. Or I could just flip.”

  Kitty pulled a quarter from her pocket. “Call it, girlfriend.”

  “Heads, Harry. Tails, Jack.”

  Kitty tossed the silver coin high into the warm afternoon air, where it caught the kiss of the sun before it landed on the sky blue floor of the old wooden porch and rolled and twirled and spun and whirled in slower and slower circles until it ran out of steam and came to a stop.