Dead Red Cadillac, A (2 page)

I leaned over the counter and around the amused spectators to encourage her. "Oh, come on, it'll be fun. You've got a whole week before the fair. It'll give you something to work on besides those smart-ass kids." And reason to think about something besides my fortieth birthday, which was going to happen in another couple of weeks whether I liked it or not.

Certain that I had the grand prize sewn up with my mother's recipes and some noodling I intended to do on my own, I was not a bit concerned when she fluttered her piano-playing fingertips in the air and giggled, "Oh well, if you insist."

Patience's enthusiasm made Roxanne smile, and because it pleased Roxanne, I was pleased. Teaching me a bit about tolerance, Roxanne had broken me of more than one bad habit. Not the least of which was mashing my wad of Nicotine chewing gum into the butter dishes she kept on the tables. At least I'd quit smoking. She was still hard at work on the rest of my bad habits.

"There, it's settled. I'll see you ingrates in a week with my blue ribbon." Since my boredom had taken a small dent, I got up to leave.

Roxanne just rolled her dark eyes, picked up another dish to be deposited onto the growing pile from the noisy breakfast crowd and went back to wiping the worn countertop with a clean, damp rag.

When I got up to leave, she waved her dishrag in benediction. "I'm sendin' up a prayer for you, sweet pea, 'cause nothing else is going to help you win that contest."

That was it, of course. No amount of blessing, short of a personal appearance by the Pope, was going to suddenly allow me to become a chef. And jam? What was I thinking? Lately, it was one bad idea after another with me, and this jam contest was just one more in a long list.

I was standing outside the front door under the bright, hot sunlight when a surge of strange karma ran under my skin like so much dark ink. It tightened in a band around my chest and I felt disaster looming somewhere just around the corner.

Chapter Three
:

The week went as it always did during the summer months; busy work, long hours, cranky pilots, frustrated ground crew, and annoyed farmers. Still, I managed to whip up a jam recipe for the county fair. I got to drive the blue ribbon home too. Only problem was it got out of the car with Patience McBride and into the repertoire for the jokesters at Roxanne's.

On the desk inside my office at the ranch were flowers in a vase, with a florist's card sticking out of the ribbon. The card said
Happy Birthday
and was signed
Robert
.

A few minutes later our pilots, Brad, Robert (aka Mad Dog), and Fitz, our resident Englishman, sauntered in. Brad made a beeline for the showers, Mad Dog on his heels. Only Fitz lingered to sniff and admire the bouquet.

"How lovely. Who died?"

I tapped the walking cast with my cane. "Well, barring the one foot I seem to have in the grave, I believe they're an unhappy reminder that I'm about to have another birthday soon."

He lifted a rose out of the bouquet, sniffed and intoned, "'The report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.' Samuel Clemens." He handed me the rose. "Happy Birthday and many more."

"No wonder you and Noah get along so well. If he isn't quoting Euripides, it's Mark Twain."

"Ah, yes. How is Noah? Are you two almost finished with that engine you broke?"

"I broke? Okay, yeah, you got me. We still have some strut work to do, but she'll be ready soon, and Noah's ticker is due for a checkup. I'll tell him you asked."

He gave me an appraising look. "Then I suppose you'll be back to flying soon?"

I gave the flowers a sniff and avoided his very direct gaze. "Soon as this cast comes off."

Fitz grunted amiably and sauntered for the showers. Fitz didn't mind the extra work or money it paid, and the longer I stayed in this cast, the better his paycheck. Mad Dog came back in, rubbing his crispy ginger curls with a towel, the motion hiking his shirt up to show a very white jelly roll. The rest of him was reddened and freckled skin cracked from sun and wind. I'm sure he thought of himself as ruggedly handsome, but all I saw was an overblown ego. I ducked my head back to writing work orders and ignored him.

Seeing I wasn't going to look up, he buttoned and tucked in the shirt.

I said, "It was very sweet of you, the flowers I mean. My leg's busted, Mad Dog, not my brain, and I haven't changed my mind."

"Nothing meant by it either. Just thought someone ought to give you flowers for your birthday."

There it was. His blatant and not very subtle dig at a woman's right to choose to remain single and the very reason why I could never admire, much less love, this man. That my own father had immediately recognized Mad Dog for what he was said volumes about my ability to size up a man in twenty seconds or less.

I think I fell into my second marriage as a way of dodging yet another unwanted proposal from Mad Dog. I limped home from New York and a philandering Puerto Rican baseball player right into the hands of yet another bad boy, Ricky Halverson, heir to a string of car dealerships. Ricky sealed the deal with a five-carat ring and a string of affairs that he managed to keep under wraps for a whole six months, until I found out in a very unexpected way.

Two years ago, I was stranded in the hot afternoon shade of Ricky's car lot, and my childhood friend Caleb, who was then Deputy Sheriff Stone, turned in and offered to give me a ride home. I was embarrassed and annoyed to be caught waiting for my no-show husband, but Caleb serenely refused to acknowledge that there might be a problem. In a serendipitous moment, he said, "Let's go out to the ranch and see your dad. If we're lucky, Juanita's serving taco pie tonight."

"Sure, why not?"

We were about to take the highway exit for my home when his radio squawked. "Deputy Stone? You there?" It was Dispatch asking him to check on a car parked along the levee next to a farmer's orchard on Sylvan.

"Okay. Probably a couple of kids, but if you don't mind, it's on the way," he said to me.

With night fast blotting out what was left of a long hot summer's day, we bounced along the bumpy levee to where Ricky's classic El Dorado was tucked like a dark shadow between almond trees.

"What the hell?"

"It might not be Ricky," he said, eyeing me for seismic reaction, remembering another Lalla, the one who used to have a backbone. "And if it is, we don't know why he's out here."

"I'm not that dumb," I growled, and lifting Caleb's flashlight out of its holder on the dash, I exploded out of the cruiser.

Shining the flashlight into the car, I saw Ricky come off his secretary's heaving breast like a cork from a bottle. I waggled the light around and onto Charlene's exposed, young, perky twenty-three-year-old breasts and was disgusted when she didn't have the decency to cover up.

Unable to see beyond the blaze of light, she probably thought I was just another admiring male deputy.

I said, "Nice tits, Charlene."

Ricky's mouth silently formed the words "Oh shit!" His Adam's apple started to slide. "Lalla?" he yodeled. "Honey? What're you doing here?"

I didn't bother to answer that one. "This is it, Ricky," I said. "One sweet-young-thing too many." Then I pulled my head back from the funky smells that were making me dizzy.

His head followed me out. "Now, Lalla," he called, "don't let's do anything foolish. We can talk about this like adults… Lalla?"

Ricky simply didn't understand. I'd reached my limit and somebody was going to pay.

Caleb put a hand on my arm. "Let's go, Lalla."

Ricky, thinking Caleb still in uniform would block my murderous intentions, struck with all the force of a cornered hound. "Well, if it ain't the freak show," he sneered. "It's the Bains twins, honey. Lalla and Caleb separated at birth. One's a girl and one's a boy, you just don't know which one's which." Then Ricky made a second mistake. "You been porkin' my wife, Sheriff? That why you're so anxious to snitch on me?"

I restrained Caleb's instinctive grab for his nightstick. "Let me," I said, taking the nightstick out of his hand. I didn't have a sheriff's oath of honor to keep me from damaging Ricky or his cowardly ego.

"Lalla, don't," Caleb warned, as I took careful aim.

Charlene's high-pitched squealing was beginning to annoy me. I yelled, "If you don't want to get hurt, stay in the car!"

I drew back and struck hard. The first glass headlight shattered. I crushed the second thick dual glass headlight and almost, but not quite, missed the fender. I went at the windshield like a tornado, taking a breath long enough to admire my handiwork and stopping only after the nightstick had chewed up every piece of glass on the car.

"That's enough," Caleb said, his hand on my wrist. "I'm serious now, that's enough."

I was breathing hard and wishing for a lot more reckless justice toward this soon-to-be ex-husband. "Okay, okay, I'm done," I said, relinquishing my weapon with regret. I wiped my forehead of the dust. "I'll just say good-bye and then we'll leave."

"Uh-huh," he said, but he must have been remembering the smirk on Ricky's face, because he shrugged and turned his back to the rest of it.

I smiled grimly, then pulled out my small, but very sharp, pocketknife and sunk it into all four white sidewall tires.

"I'm leaving now!" I yelled, and jogged back to join Caleb, who was trying hard not to smile. I hopped into his car and slammed the door.

Caleb jammed the car in reverse, and in a swirling cloud of dust, Ricky disappeared from my life.

"I still can't believe I let you commit battery with police equipment—on your husband's car no less."

"Oh, save it, will you? You were ready to punch him out."

He acknowledged my comment with a grunt. "And if he files a complaint?" He was just looking for affirmation that he'd done the right thing, bringing me out here, letting me lose my temper.

"Don't be ridiculous, Caleb. What's he going to say, 'I was making out with my secretary on a back road, when my wife caught us and single-handedly destroyed my vintage Caddy'? Nope. Not if I know Ricky."

"Yeah, you're right. I'd almost forgotten what you're like when you get your nose outta joint."

I shook my head as the adrenaline melted into heartache. "I can't believe it. I mean, did Ricky really think he could keep screwing his secretary and I wouldn't find out?"

He stopped the car on the side of the road. "I wasn't planning this."

If that were true, then why was he giving the squashed bugs on the windshield all his attention?

"You knew? You did! And you didn't tell me? I see you almost every day at Roxanne's. Hell, you're at our house once a week shoveling down food and swapping jokes with my old man, and not one word! You didn't think I deserved to know?"

He chewed on his lower lip and then stared at the dotted line in the road ahead like it was a homing beacon. "No one, and believe me I've become an expert on the subject, appreciates being the first to tell a friend they've got a cheating spouse."

I retrieved a tissue from my purse and blew my nose. "Can this get any worse? Oh God, does everyone know?"

He reached over and gave my shoulder a quick shake. "Lalla, when have you ever cared what other people thought? Besides, the ones that do, care enough not to rub it in your face. And the rest of them, well, they don't count."

I looked away. "I just want to go home."

"Then I'll take you home," he said, putting the car in drive and pulling out onto the road.

We drove the rest of the way in silence, and when he turned into the driveway at the ranch, I got out and called over my shoulder, "Don't come in, Caleb. As a matter of fact, I'd rather you stayed away from me for a while."

He rolled down the window and called after me, "That's right, shoot the messenger!" Then he spun the big cruiser around and, laying gravel and dust out the back of his tires, headed for the highway.

The memory of Ricky's duplicitous nature, and the embarrassment he caused that day chimed like an off-key tuning fork.

I stacked my paperwork on the desk, gave Mad Dog's birthday flowers a bit more water, and left for the house. I showered with the cast in a plastic garbage bag, toweled off, and peered in the mirror at ten years of neglect. From a hundred eight to a hundred thirty pounds in ten years isn't bad. Most people say I'm still a rail, but for a New York fashion model, I am fat, old, and forty is twenty years past my prime. My hairdresser says I look good for my age. Sure I do, as long as you don't take off my clothes.

While I practiced stuttering "Fo-fo-fo, forty," I glared at the little lines forming at the sides of my mouth. Poking at a drooping fold of skin above my eyes, I considered making an appointment to have something done about it. It could be my birthday present, I told myself cheerfully.
Oh, just forget it, Lalla. You're forty and falling apart
. How will I ever be able to make it through my birthday if I can't say forty in the same sentence with my own name?

Wrinkles on Caleb's bony face just made him look more rugged. Where's the justice in that?

I dismissed my disappointing image for something that would make me happier. Dressing in my standard uniform of jeans, boots, a white T-shirt, and, because it was Sunday, I added a heavy silver Concho belt, I headed for the barn.

People are surprised at my slavish devotion to this car, but the heavy steel frame, powerful muscle of the V-8 engine, and sleek lines are far sexier than most men I know. I love this car, and besides, with only a little oil and gas, it's still there in the morning.

On the way to the barn, I raised my face to the morning sky. It was going to be a hot one, but I didn't care. I wasn't even bothered that I still hadn't fixed the air-conditioning. It was still morning, the paperwork was finished, and I was going to take my "baby" out for a ride.

I slid back the doors of the barn and gawked at the empty space where I'd left my Caddy. The canvas car cover lay on the straw floor like a discarded magician's prop. There was nothing inside but a lone moth gently circling in a dusty sunbeam. I waited for the trick that would make my Caddy reappear. But no amount of magic was going to pull all that muscled steel out of an empty piece of cloth.

"Ricky! You thieving rat!" Though the car was mine by decree of our divorce two years ago, Ricky was obviously still having a hard time letting go.

I turned on my heel and stomped back to the house, cursing at his duplicitous, underhanded, sneaky… Finishing with an expletive, I pushed through the back door and passed my dad, BP cuff on his right arm and bulb dangling, dutifully entering the results of his morning routine into a journal.

"What's caught in your craw this morning?" he growled, as I attacked the kitchen phone.

"Ricky stole my Caddy!" I growled back, dialing numbers into the old yellow rotary. Dad thought number pads were part of the fast lane and should be avoided at all costs, never mind cell phones.