2 Heroes & Hooligans in Goose Pimple Junction (47 page)

“Oh, thank you,” she said, moving out of the way. “Roscoe, tell the nice lady thank you for cleaning up your mess.”

“Thank you, ‘ady.”

The woman finished mopping, and Velveeta gathered up the wet napkins and took them to the trash bin. She filled Roscoe’s cup with more Hi-C and came back to the table. After she straightened the hamburger wrappers and set the French fry containers back in front of her children, she sat back with a tired sigh. As the kids began to eat again, she looked around the room and then outside. Her eyes settled on the Piggly Wiggly sign, and she suddenly remembered Estherlene. She quickly looked at the spot where the car had been parked. It was gone.

Her eyes searched the lot frantically. Estherlene couldn’t have come out and driven away that fast.
The car must be there somewhere.
She’d only been distracted for a minute. But she finally had to accept the truth. She’d looked away for longer than a minute, and she had messed up. Big time.

She scrambled through her purse for her cell phone.

Johnny flew across the lawn and into Estherlene’s house, calling dispatch for backup and an ambulance, half-disbelieving what Jack had told him. But when he entered the room at the top of the stairs, his heart sank.

A bearded, gaunt Hector Bumgarner sat at the edge of the bed wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a leg iron. He was tethered to the bed and sitting on grimy bedclothes that reeked of urine. His ribs were visible through his skin. The room’s window had been covered with plywood.

“Well, don’t that knock your shirt in the dirt.” Johnny gaped. “I guess he did have something wrong with his leg. Really wrong.”

“I got him some water but didn’t touch anything otherwise,” Jack said. “I knew you’d need to see everything as I found it. He says he’s not sure how long he’s been in here, but the last civilized day he remembers was sometime in September. I didn’t get to look around much. I’ll do that presently.” Jack walked off down the hall.

“What month is it?” Hector asked with a raspy throat.

“Holy crap,” Johnny muttered. “Why’d she do this to you?”

“‘Cause she’s batshit crazy, that’s why!” the man rasped just before Nosmo King and his partner, Cathy Lawson, swept in.

“Hold it, y’all,” Johnny said. “Back up one minute.” He took out his iPhone and opened the camera app. He took several pictures of the room and of Hector and then said, “Okay, go ahead and treat him, but disturb as little as you can in this room.”

Jack yelled for Johnny, who followed the sound of his voice to the master bedroom. Jack knelt in front of the closet and had laid out a towel on the ground. On top of the towel was a pair of pants smeared with bloodstains. “The pants were wrapped up in this towel. She’d stashed it in the back of her closet.”

“Well, I’ll be,” Johnny said, standing with his hands on his hips, not quite believing what he saw. He leaned down closer to the pants. “Looks like she wiped the knife across her pants, doesn’t it? I always thought she was neither left-brained nor right-brained, but come on.” He donned a pair of latex gloves.

“Looks like we got her,” Jack said. “Your gut was right, Johnny.”

“Sometimes I hate my guts,” Johnny said. “Leave everything just like that, Jack. I’ve got to get folks in here to examine the crime scene. What’s that?” Johnny pointed to a piece of paper sticking out of Estherlene’s pants pocket. He carefully reached in and removed it.

“It’s some kind of a letter.” Jack stood to look at the note Johnny held. “It’s addressed to Butterbean. What in the—”

“We’ll bag it and mark it as evidence.”

“But don’t you want to know what’s inside it?”

“All in good time, my friend.” Johnny turned toward the door and hollered, “Hank!”

Hank came around the corner into the room.

“Go cut your lights and move your cruiser around to Walnut Street. Tell Nosmo King to load Mr. Bumgarner as fast as possible and get him to the hospital. I don’t want to scare off Estherlene. Everything has to look normal when she comes home from the grocery.”

“Solid copy,” Hank said, running off to carry out his orders. Johnny’s phone rang. It was Velveeta.

She was talking a mile a minute before he could even say one word. “I’m sorry, Chief. I don’t know how it happened. I didn’t think I looked away that long. If stupidity were a crime, I’d be number one on the Most Wanted List. I am so sorry. Roscoe was bugging his sister, and then he spill—”

“Velveeta!” Johnny snapped. “Just tell me the time, don’t tell me how the dang watch works!”

“She’s gone. Somehow I missed her coming out. I was cleaning up a spilled drink, and the next thing I knew, her car was gone.”

Johnny ran down the stairs and out to the front lawn, scanning the area. And then he saw it—the nose of Estherlene’s old maroon Buick LeSabre, stopped at the corner. He could just make out the silhouette of Estherlene’s big hair. She was leaning forward, craning her neck, trying to see what was going on at her house. Johnny took off running.

Estherlene had thoughts of making pickles as she headed home from the Piggly Wiggly, drinking from a can of Mtn Dew and tapping a beat on the steering wheel. She got ready to turn onto Marigold Lane when the flashing lights caused her to stop. A police car and ambulance were in front of her house.
Great day in the morning! How in the world did they find out?

She’d been so careful. Everything had gone so smoothly. Nobody had missed Hector.

She saw the chief’s massive body fly out of her house and stop on the porch. She saw him scanning, searching. She saw him find her car, and their eyes locked for a few frozen moments. When he started running across the lawn, she stepped on the accelerator and peeled rubber.

A one-eyed mule can’t be handled on the blind side.

~Southern Proverb

J
ohnny reached the edge of the lawn, heard the squeal of tires on pavement, and saw Estherlene speed off. He wasted no time. In a flash, he jumped in his car, backed it out of Martha Maye’s driveway, and flipped on the lights and siren. Estherlene had a good fifteen-second start on him, but there were two ways to go: to town or to the countryside. He figured she’d head into the countryside where she could drive faster. In his rearview mirror, he saw Hank Beanblossom also in pursuit, as he turned left, then right, and left again, blowing through stop signs. Once he left city streets and turned onto a county road, he called Bernadette.

“I’m in pursuit of a 1974 maroon Buick LeSabre, going south on Route 42. Anyone in the vicinity, please respond. Subject is a suspect in a homicide.”

“Ten-four, Chief. You watch yourself now.” He heard the call go out over the radio and prayed someone was on Route 42 coming north.

Johnny remembered seeing the frightened look on Martha Maye’s face just before he pulled out of her driveway.
No worries, Bernadette, I got a mighty good reason to be careful.

Route 42 was a curvy, hilly road with a speed limit of forty-five on the straight patches and twenty-five on the curves. Johnny barreled down the road at sixty, taking the curves at thirty-five with Hank right on his bumper. He’d seen Estherlene up ahead, but now he lost sight of her taillights. He guessed she was maybe a quarter of a mile up ahead. He punched the accelerator and heard a warning in his head
: You can’t catch her if you wrap your car around a tree.

Speeding past farms, Johnny barely noticed cows behind barbed wire fencing, grazing amid hay bales. Purple asters and ironweed growing wild alongside the road blurred as he raced down the sun-dappled country road. He passed empty cornfields on his left, and to his right jimsonweed and chicory mingled with pumpkin patches still dotted with orange. The road was resplendent with greens, oranges, reds, yellows, maroon—his mind screeched to a stop.

Maroon. He’d just passed a flash of sunlight gleaming off of something maroon.

He’d lost sight of Estherlene’s car, which was hard to do, considering it was the size of a barge. When he saw the color maroon and the flash of light out of the corner of his eye, he knew she must’ve ducked into one of the farm driveways. Seconds after he came to this realization, he heard a crash. In his rearview mirror, he saw the LeSabre had T-boned Hank’s cruiser and was pushing it—and Hank—off the road.

Johnny made a split-second decision. He pulled the steering wheel to the left and slammed on the brakes, feeling his car skid. He veered sideways, coming to a stop diagonally across both lanes of the country road. Estherlene had succeeded in pushing Hank’s car off the road and into the ditch. Johnny could see the smoking car, nose down amid the ragweed and goldenrod.

Now she backed up, turned, and headed straight toward Johnny.

As Estherlene’s car barreled toward him, he flashed back to playing chicken as a kid. He could see his friend Peter coming at him on his ten-speed bike. Peter thought Johnny would dodge, and Johnny thought Peter would chicken out. Neither did, and they’d crashed head on.

As her car sped toward his and he realized she wasn’t going to stop or veer around him, his hand flew to the gearshift, but he was out of time. He felt the impact as her car slammed into the side of his cruiser. Big hair, blue sky, orange and yellow leaves, the white of the air bag, and the image of Martha Maye’s smiling face were the last things he saw before blacking out.