“Succinctly put, dear.”
“And to use my masculine wiles to see how far overboard she’s gone.”
“That, too.”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll leave early and drive out. A road trip’ll give me some time to mull this over.”
Ivy smiled. “Whatever you think, Cletus.”
Clete leaned back in his chair and shook his head.
“I think,” he said, “that I’m gittin’ ready to step in a pile of somethin’ I don’t wanna git all over my boots.”
Doctor Ruby LaCost leaned on her desk and sneaked a look at the clock as she tried to focus. It was nearly five. Only four more minutes. Across from her, relaxed in a recliner, a woman named Phyllis Benderger whined through collagen inflated lips that the reason Colbert and Allysa were having such difficulties as teenagers was because her husband, Paxton, didn’t listen to her when she had attempted to convince him of the importance of the correct introductory education prior to pre-school. Paxton never listened to her. He didn’t care about any of her clubs or organizations, he had no appreciation for her volunteer work with the Junior League, didn’t even notice that her golf handicap was down to nine, and hadn’t spent any intimate time with her since before the implants and liposuction. How could her life ever be meaningful to her if it had no meaning for him? As she paused to finger her tennis bracelet and take a breath, Ruby jumped in.
“Phyllis, we’re out of time. Before next week, I want you to think about why your accomplishments are of so little value to you.”
“Okay,” Phyllis said, swinging her feet to the floor and into her kangaroo pumps. “I have to get to a meeting at the country club. I’m chairwoman of the committee that is trying to get the board to redecorate the ladies locker room. God, it’s dreadful. Just hideous. ‘Bye!”
Ruby stared blankly at the top of her desk and listened to the door slam. Jesus. It was a wonder that Paxton hadn’t beaten the woman to death with a five iron years ago. What really amazed her was how many of her clients sought to blame someone else for their personal difficulties. What frightened her was how much she’d sounded like one of them during the last couple of sessions with her psychologist.
She shut things down and schlepped upstairs, as least fifty pounds heavier than when the day began. In the bedroom, off came the heels, hose, and such, and on went sweats and big fuzzy slippers. She went into the kitchen and put a can of Campbell’s tomato soup in a saucepan with half a can of milk. She dropped a large pat of butter in the small skillet, sliced some cheddar, spread a little mayo on two pieces of seven grain bread, dropped on the cheese, added a thin slice of mesquite ham, put it in the skillet, and covered it with the lid. Ten minutes later she put the sandwich and soup on the counter, grabbed a bag of chips off the top of the fridge, and poured a glass of iced tea. A minute after that she realized she wasn’t hungry. Three minutes later she was on the couch with a glass of merlot and the latest from Iris Johansen, trying to ignore the drape she’d hung over the newly installed archway to Crockett’s side of their duplex townhouse.
An hour later, as Ruby stood in the kitchen pouring the last glass of wine from the bottle, the phone rang. It was Pamela.
“Hi, sweetie,” she said. “Whacha doin’?”
“Oh hi, Pam,” Ruby said, her voice slightly slurred. “Nothing. Glass of wine and a book, you know.”
“Want some company?”
“Whatimeisit?”
“A little after eight.”
“Okay.”
“Great. I’ll bring stuff so I can fix waffles for breakfast in the morning. Be there in thirty.”
Ruby sighed, killed the glass of wine, and started up the stairs. Halfway up she stopped, returned to the kitchen, opened another bottle of Merlot, refilled her glass, and headed up to take a shower.
CHAPTER THREE
Dusk was still an hour or more away when they came for Crockett. Three of them, each one armed, trying to sneak up on him through the tree line that bordered his campsite. They weren’t very good at it. In the weeks since he’d left Ivy’s he’d been up to Maine, worked his way southeast along the Canadian border, turned south into Ohio, motored through Indiana and Illinois and, drifting rather aimlessly but possibly pulled by the call of Kansas City, found himself in the Watkins Country Campground, overlooking the Watkins Lakeside Marina, on the shore of Truman Lake in west-central Missouri. During the entire time he’d had no trouble of any kind. No traffic tickets, no difficulties with the coach, no problems with any other campers. A hint of autumn was in the air now, the campground thinning out a bit as people left summer behind and returned to their day-to-day lives. It was boring. It was exactly what he thought he needed. And now this. He picked up his cane from where it rested against the picnic table.
The biggest of the three was carrying a long gun, the other two had pistols. Crockett stirred his small fire and waited for them. They paused at the edge of the trees then charged into camp, as the one with the rifle yelled.
“Bang! Bang! Gotcha mister! Yer dead meat!”
Crockett felt his heart rate increase as the boy brandished his plastic copy of an M-16.
“Hi, boys. You guys want a burger or something? I’m getting ready to put some on the grill. Hungry?”
The two boys with pistols, obviously brothers, hung back and lowered their toy guns. “We already ate,” one of them said. “We gotta go back to the trailer now. See ya.”
The boy with the rifle kept it leveled at Crockett as the other two walked away. “Yer dead,” he said. “Dead guy can’t fix no hamburgers.”
“How ‘bout this?” Crockett said, keeping his cool. “How ‘bout you stop pointing that gun at me?”
The boy, slightly overweight with nearly no neck, red hair, freckles, and gray teeth, sneered at him. “Ain’t no real gun. Just a toy. You scared of a toy gun?”
Crockett sighed. “How old are you?”
“Ten.”
“Fine. Then you should have reached the age of reason by now. Let me try again. I don’t like guns pointed at me. Not even toy ones. Stop it.”
The boy raised the rifle to his shoulder and aimed.
The head of Crockett’s cane caught the weapon on the end of the barrel and knocked it from the boy’s grasp. The rifle hit the edge of the picnic table and bounced to the ground at Crockett’s feet. He picked it up and looked at the boy.
“That’s my gun!” the kid yelled, backing up a step. “Gimmie it!”
“Probably not,” Crockett said.
Near tears, the boy went on. “I’m gonna git my dad! He’s a cop. He’ll put you in jail, you sonofabitch!”
“Again, probably not,” Crockett said.
The kid scurried away toward a Coleman foldout camper across the drive and four spaces down, shouting for his father. Crockett laid the gun on the picnic table and waited as he watched the lad relate his tale of woe to his dad. He tossed a small log on the fire and turned back toward the drive in time to be confronted by the block from which the gun-toting son had been chipped. A larger version of his child, the man was red headed, thick through the body, and had even less neck than his boy. Gray teeth seemed to run in the gene pool. Crockett smiled at him.
“Evening,” he said. “You’d be Dad, I guess.”
Dad stuck out his chin. “You got my boy’s gun?”
“Over there on the table. You’re welcome to it. See that he keeps it away from me, please. I offered him a burger if he’d stop pointing it at me, but that didn’t work, so I took it away from him. Sorry about all the trouble. The offer of the burger still stands, but not if he’s armed. Makes me nervous.”
“Hell, it ain’t nothin’ but a toy!”
“Not my point,” Crockett said. “He’s too proud of it. Chances are that if a boy like that threatens total strangers with toy guns at his age, he might do it with real guns when he gets older. Besides, I don’t like any kind of gun pointed at me.”
“You some kinda shell-shocked Vietnam vet?”<
br />
“Once again, you’ve missed my point. Let me put it in a way you might understand. I am not the problem here. Your son is. This is my space. Armed ten-year-olds are not welcome. Your kid said that you’re a cop. You should be able to grasp what I’m saying.”
“You goddam right I’m a cop, bud! Lemme see some I.D.”
Crockett grinned. “You first,” he said.
“What?”
“You first. You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”
The man struggled in his hip pocket and produced a badge that he flashed at Crockett. “There!” he said. “Now lemme see your driver’s license!”
“We’re on private property. I don’t need a driver’s license. Besides, anybody can buy a badge. You should have a copy of your police commission. Show me.”
“I doan gotta show you shit!”
“That’s true, you don’t. The plates on your truck are from Alabama. You’re not a local cop, are you?”
The man was beginning to look a little hunted. “I’m a city constable down in Hueytown.”
“Good,” Crockett said. “It’s a tough job. I have respect for anybody that does it with the right attitude and approach, but this isn’t Hueytown. You have no authority here. I hope you’re not carrying a gun. That’d be against the law. I might have to effect a citizen’s arrest.”
“What?”
Crockett shook his head. “Just kidding,” he said. “I don’t want to arrest you. I just want your kid to leave me alone. You keep him away from me and there will be no more trouble. He comes over here and points that thing at me again, I’ll take it away from him and wrap it around a tree. Now shoo.”
“You’re about one smart-assed sonofabitch, ain’tcha?”
Crockett smiled. “That’s twice I’ve been called a sonofabitch in the last ten minutes. Your no-neck little monster did it the first time. Now you. I’m tired of it. I’m renting this space and I told you to leave. You didn’t. You’re on it against my wishes. That’s criminal trespass to land. Now we’re back to the whole citizen’s arrest thing. Go away.”
“I oughta kick yer ass!”
Crockett studied the man for a moment. “Listen carefully,” he said. “You’re twenty years younger than I am and you got me by thirty pounds. But there’s an if here. As far as you’re welfare is concerned, it is a very important if. You might kick my ass, if you could survive the first fifteen seconds of our encounter. How good do you think you’re chances are?”
The man stared at Crockett for a beat, then licked his lips and began to back up.
“Wise choice,” Crockett said. “Don’t forget the gun.”
He watched the constable pick up the toy and walk away, then sat at the table, appetite gone, his stomach in knots.
Shit.
The following morning was magnificent. Windless and with only wispy clouds, the air held the promise of summer warmth and the lake twinkled pristine blue in the distance. Crockett was over the funk that his encounter that Dad and Son had wrought and, with no desire to prepare breakfast, wandered the quarter mile through the motorized vehicle section of the campground. Near the last empty camp spaces he was approached by a Labrador retriever. She shuffled up to him, tail wagging over square and stilted hips, worn teeth grinning at him from a gray muzzle, cloudy eyes searching his face for approval. He crouched and stroked her back.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said as the dog leaned into him, nearly pushing him off balance. “What are you doin’ this morning?”
The dog raised her nose to his face, gently sniffing from no more than a quarter of an inch away, resisting the urge to lick. Crockett scratched her chest and looked at the nametag dangling from a collar so ancient the leather was nearly worn through.
“Well, Maggie,” he said, standing and turning away, “I’m going for a walk. If you’d care to join me, you’re more than welcome to come along.”
The dog stayed with him past the motel built on the slope above the boat docks and down the hill to the marina before going off on her own business. The walkway swayed slightly with his weight and the motion of the water.
Near the door to the bait-shop/snack bar, the floating dock was interrupted by a railed area open to the water below. The six foot square hole was totally jammed with immense carp, mouths uplifted, begging for whatever passersby might throw them to eat. When they noticed Crockett they became nearly frantic, rising out of the lake a quarter of their lengths, round mouths uplifted and sucking at nothing, jammed together so tightly that the water that suspended them was nearly invisible.
Almost mesmerized by the cacophony of slippery greed, Crockett stared down at the gaping mouths for a moment, nearly rapt at so foreign a sight. When he felt his stomach turn over, he tore himself away lurched inside the bait shop. An elderly gray haired man smiled at him from behind a counter by the door.
“Damn near make ya sick at yer stomach, don’t they?” he asked.
“God! I’ve never seen anything like it,” Crockett replied. “Awful.”
“Yessir. I can’t handle lookin’ at ‘em much. Folks’ll stand out there tossin’ ‘em bread and popcorn all afternoon. Jesus. I don’t know how they take it. Got some big carp though. Twenty, thirty pounds a lot of ‘em. Doan know how many. Hundred or more I guess. They fill that hole so tight I betcha a monkey could walk across the top of ‘em and not even get his feet wet.”
Crockett smiled. “You get a lotta monkeys around here?”
The old man’s eyes twinkled. “Shitload during high summer. The chamber of commerce calls ‘em tourists, but that’s crap. You can put a tuxedo on a monkey an’ he’s still gonna be a monkey. That your big rig up in the campground?”
“Yessir.”
“By yourself?”
“Yessir.”
“Noticed the old girl escortin’ ya to the dock.”
“Yessir. Your dog?”
“Me an’ my daughter-in-law. Folks like her. Whatcha runnin’ from?”
Crockett grinned. “You writing a book?”
“Yup. Damn near done with it, too. You’d be the last chapter, I speck. Name’s Zebulon Watkins,” the old man said, extending a hand over the counter.
Crockett took the hand and looked into clear gray eyes under the brim of a ratty old canvas fishing hat. “Call me Crockett,” he said.
“Okay, Crockett. What brings you to Watkins Station?”
“Watkins Station?”
“Yup. That’s where ya are. We’re actually a town. When the Corps of Engineers built this lake they covered up a lot of farms, houses, graveyards, and the like. This here is the edge of a little ol’ town named after my great grandaddy, Augustus Watkins. The city limits run around the motel, the marina, and the two campgrounds. The rest of the burg ran down the slope out there. You might notice that the slope is now under water.”
“No kidding?”
“So now, Watkins Station has a permanent population of two. Me an’ my daughter-in-law. Her name is Mazy. She was married to my boy, but he up an’ got killed three years ago. So now it’s just her an’ me.”
“And you’re writing a book.”
“Yup. Want me to change your name to protect the innocent?”
“Ha! What I really want, Zebulon, is breakfast. Any chance of that?”
“Kitchen and the restaurant are only open on the weekends this time of year, but I can sure whip ya up some bacon an’ eggs. Got no stove in that monster up on the hill?”
“Four burner. Just like downtown ‘cept they ain’t no pigeons.”
The old man grinned and pushed his hat to the back of his head. “Bacon an’ eggs on the house, Crockett, if ya tell me why yer on the run.”
“Woman, Zebulon,” Crockett said.
“That’s pretty much what I figgerd. Call me Zeb.”
Crockett hung out in the bait shop to watch for customers while Zeb went next door to the kitchen to fix breakfast. A pair of good ‘ol boys arrived with a bass boat that they put in the lake on the boat r
amp and came into the shop to buy a bag of ice. Crockett handled the two-dollar transaction and Maggie wagged them on their way. In fifteen minutes Zeb was back with three over easy, six thick slices of sugar cured bacon, a mound of hash browns, a double order of wheat toast, honey, and fresh coffee with real cream.
“Damn,” Crockett said. “This for both of us?”
“You’re a big fella. Eat up. Maggie’ll take care of what you can’t finish. That dog is a opportunist.”
“How much I owe you?”
“Told ya it was on the house.”
“Thanks,” Crockett replied around a mouthful of potatoes. “How ‘bout the camp rental?”
“Off season rates for a bus like yours is twenty dollars a day. How long ya stayin’?”
“How long ‘til you finish your book?”
“Could be quite a spell. Why doncha just settle up before ya leave?”
“Aren’t you afraid I might run out on the bill?”
“Naw. Not you. You some kinda cop or somethin’?”
Crockett smiled as he worked his way through a bite of toast and egg. “What makes you ask?”
“For one thing, you answer questions with questions. For another, you got somthin’ goin’ on behind yer eyes. More than just whatever that woman done to ya. You don’t just look, Crockett. You watch. You a cop?”
“Usta be. Done a little freelancing the past couple of years. Nothing now. I really am on vacation.”
“May as well squat a spell, then. Me an’ Mazy could be pretty good company for a while. Be nice to have ya around. Lake’s real pretty this time a year. We got bass boats, crappie boats, and pontoon boats. Fix ya up if ya wanna fish. Even got a couple a jet skis if yer a hot rodder. Speck we got a wetsuit that’ll fit ya, too. Maggie likes ya.”
Crockett drizzled honey on a piece of toast. “You’re working awfully hard to get me to stay around, Zebulon,” he said. “What are you afraid of?”
Zeb smiled. “You writin’ a book?”
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