Turkey Ranch Road Rage (23 page)

What got us the instant royal treatment, however, was the simple stating of our names. In fact, his rather dour face erupted in glee, or perhaps appreciation. The good sergeant, it seemed, had been the lucky winner of the station’s one-would-think-illegal betting pool on when Mother and I would be involved in another crime or something to that effect. While this certainly was not a pleasant discovery, the thousand dollars in prize money had definitely bought us some good will with Sergeant Jackpot.

He promptly made us comfortable in an interrogation room with an assortment of drinks while he went about tending our car as well as locating Jerry and a Redwater detective to deal with us. He was very nice in a “come see my prize-winning catch” sort of way. To his credit, he didn’t laugh in front of us.

Mother had explained to the sergeant about the awful stress she’d been through and insisted on an immediate trip to the ladies room to freshen up. While Lucille was gone primping, I guzzled two bottles of water to try to re-hydrate myself and flush out the toxins in my system. When she got back I was definitely ready for my turn at “freshening up.”

Unfortunately, the second I walked in the restroom door, I saw myself in a mirror. I screamed, horrified then smacked my hand over my mouth to stop myself, which was a really dumb thing to do since my lips looked like two slices of over-ripe plums and felt like they’d been peeled. And that was the least of my problems.

Now, I’m not one of those women who is obsessed with her looks. I do make an effort with my hair and I wear a basic amount of makeup, mostly mascara and a concealer for my perpetual dark circles. I am generally neat, clean, presentable, and sometimes even cute. The person in the mirror was none of those things. Not one. And on top of it all, she looked like somebody had smacked her in the face with a baseball bat. Twice. Of course it had to be a bat with tweezers because I was missing about half of each eyebrow. There was not much epi left in the dermis of my forehead or mouth area either, and my hair was both matted down and sticking up. I truly wanted to cry.

Instead, I slunk into the stall and tended to business, then slunk back out and reassessed my options. I couldn’t re-grow skin or eyebrows in the next ten minutes but I could wash my face and maybe my hair. And the smell had to be dealt with, so there was also some laundry about to be done in the sink. What the slimy pink hand soap would do to my clothes was not nearly as worrisome as what it was going to do to my hair. The wall dryer would work just swell for my hair and shirt, however, so there was some hope.

Feeling a little better—I always feel better when I have a plan—I grabbed a stack of paper towels, stripped off my shirt and started methodically soaping, rinsing and drying.

It took a while, but I was able to scrub a lot of the adhesive off my face—or at least the skin that had adhesive stuck to it. Luckily I had more eyebrows left than I’d first thought. The sticky stuff had gooed them up in little clumps, and except for a big hole in the middle on the left brow; I was in pretty good shape. The extended scrubbing also made my whole face pretty red so the stripes weren’t so obvious anymore. I had “brushed” my teeth and mouth with a wet and soapy paper towel, which was just as horrible as it sounds, but after much rinsing, my mouth felt reasonably clean. I wet and fluffed my hair back into fair shape and was wringing out my shirt when Sergeant Jackpot burst through the bathroom door.

“What are you doing!”

Incredulous, furious and hysterical would all be words I’d use to describe the uniformed maniac who stood in the doorway of the ladies room, waving his arms and bellowing at me. Of course it could have just been my own hysteria creeping in since I was holding my shirt in my hands and had on nothing but a bra above my shorts.

“What have you done!” he yelled, pointing at the wet shirt I was clutching. “You weren’t supposed to do that!”

“What, wash my shirt?”

“Yes! No! You can’t wash anything. You’re evidence. I can’t believe you did this! Do you have any idea how much trouble I’m in now because of you? I should have just locked you in a cell. You! I knew better. I knew! But nooooo, I had to be nice.” He said this last word with a sarcastic singsong effect. “You’ve really done it now.”

“I’ve done it!” Yes, I yelled right back. “I’m the one who was kidnapped, drugged and chased across town by lunatics. If you wanted me to stay looking like something the cat dragged up, you should have said so instead of strutting around patting yourself on the back for the money you made off me. And maybe, if instead of running off to gossip about who was in the interrogation room, you had actually done your job, we wouldn’t have this problem.”

“What!” It was more of a booming bellow than an actual word. “Why, you little…”

Oh, I’d hit that nail on the head. “Hey! How was I supposed to know I couldn’t wash my face? Am I a mind reader too? You want to make bets on that? If you do, you might not like the odds. Because I’m betting you’re in bigger trouble than I am right now.”

A crowd had gathered behind the apoplectic sergeant, who’d been holding the door open, and I felt a little naked, to say the least. At about this same time, Jackpot realized he wasn’t exactly presenting a professional image to the impromptu audience.

As more uniforms appeared in my line of vision, I decided a graceful retreat might be the better course of action for both of us. “Look, Sergeant, I didn’t wash my shirt and hair to ruin your life. Frankly, all I cared about was trying to not stink.”

No, it wasn’t a good suck-up, but it was as good as it was going to get. Chuckles rippled through the crowd packing the hallway at the edge of the door, breaking some of the tension, but Jackpot couldn’t let it go. He continued to paw and snort and repeat himself.

“I cannot believe this,” he said again. “You should have known. There are sixteen different cop shows on every hour of every day. Everybody knows you have to collect evidence. You have to have evidence. Any idiot knows that. The criminals sure know it. I can’t believe you did this!”

I’d given him a graceful out and he’d rejected it. Fine. We could do things his way. As I geared up for a “get out of here or” kind of threat, I noticed a familiar face working his way through the crowd. I relaxed a little, actually a lot. My knight in shining armor had arrived. I mouthed “I’m sorry,” but Sheriff Parker just shook his head. It didn’t bother me, this head shaking. I’ve gotten used to it. Find it kind of cute even. Now scowling with head shaking, that’s a different thing. But this was the slow, side-to-side disbelief thing. He was probably more worried than mad. I lifted the corners of my mouth in a fake little smile.

Jerry put a hand on Sergeant Loser’s shoulder. “It’s done. Let me handle it.”

“Handle what?” Jackpot said, still glaring directly at me. “There’s nothing left to handle. She has once again single handedly made the entire Redwater Falls Police Department look like a bunch of fools.”

Wow, I was more powerful than I’d imagined. But he didn’t really mean the whole department, he meant himself, although that didn’t make much sense either. Basically, I’d embarrassed him by walking out of the interrogation room without permission, nothing more. Well, besides accusing him of being incompetent at his job. “My mother helped.”

“Let me talk to her alone,” Jerry said, “and find out exactly what happened. This might not even be your problem.”

“Huh?” Jackpot took another look at Jerry and belatedly figured out whose hand was gripping his shoulder. Possibilities and hope began to spring forth and ease the wrinkles and red blotches from his face. “Thank God you’re here, Sheriff,” he said, it dawning on him that perhaps there were boundary issues that could be exploited. “You make it so she’s not my problem, and I’ll be the happiest man in this county. Make it so she never sets foot in the city limits of Redwater Falls again and I’ll have a statue carved in your honor. Why I’d—” He stopped himself, realizing he was groveling. Then very authoritatively and for the benefit of the crowd, he said, “You let me know when this is handled, Sheriff.” Cutting his eyes to me, he whispered to Jerry, “I don’t know how you do it. She can’t be that good in bed.”

“I heard that!” He practically ran out of the restroom, but I stomped toward the door with not a single care that I wasn’t wearing a shirt. I was going to rip out his ugly little tongue and stuff it up his nose. “Did you hear that?” I said indignantly to Jerry, although I knew very well he had. A good portion of the crowd had heard it too, and many were eyeing me accordingly, trying to decide for themselves. Idiots. “Yes, I am, you want details, what?”

Jerry pushed the crowd back and stepped inside, closing the door behind him. “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene…”

“You can chew me out in just a minute, Jerry, I have some unfinished business down the hall.”

He caught my arm as I tried to make good on my threat. “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene…”

“Oh, save it.”

Now, I have been scolded by Jerry before, and I do not like it, not one little bit. I liked it even less when there was a significant chance that I deserved it, which I did not. Still, I felt obligated to attempt a defense. “That man who just insulted me is an ass. Did you know he won a betting pool about me? Did you know this stupid department had a betting pool about me? Did you know that? And then I walk in the door and he hears my name and…” I stopped and looked at Jerry again and I did not like what I was seeing. “Oh, my God! If you—”

“They wouldn’t let me actually place a bet.” His lips twitched up a little at the corners. “Said it would be like insider trading.”

My mouth fell open in absolute outrage, but before I could even sputter, he had wrapped his arms around me and sealed my lips with his own for a quick kiss. He leaned back and ran his thumb between my brows and along my cheek, trying to smooth away the frown. “I’d heard about the pool through the grapevine, but I didn’t feel the need to dignify it with any kind of comment. Enough said?”

“Yes.” I laid my face against his chest and held on to him. “It’s been a really long day, Jerry.”

He held me and rubbed my back for a few moments then said, “I’ve heard the condensed version of what happened to you tonight. Let’s get you dressed and we’ll go through it chapter and verse.”

I leaned back and looked up at him. “I didn’t know, Jerry, really I didn’t. It did not occur to me that somebody wanted to pick over me like they do a corpse. I just felt gross and dirty and I wanted to clean up. I didn’t know it was going to be a major crime to wash my shirt.” I’m not a fan of crime shows, but I’d seen enough bits and pieces to know that spending the night with the forensics people would have been pleasant. “Would you want somebody putting plastic bags on your hands and cleaning your fingernails like a corpse? That’s what they do, isn’t it?”

He stroked his hand through my damp hair and brushed his fingers across my cheek. “It’s okay. It will mean we won’t have physical evidence from you to connect you to where you were taken, but there are still things we can do. We should probably get blood work to see if they can determine what you were drugged with.”

“What’s the point? It was nitrous oxide.” I saw his raised eyebrow so I explained. “No, I’m not positive, but it seemed right. There was a bit of a high but I went out quick and I felt horrible afterward. But there were two cylinders clanging together, not just one, so I don’t know how that works.”

“If it was nox, that’s good.”

“Why?”

“They mixed it with oxygen. Knew what they were doing. Otherwise, you’d probably have frostbite or be paralyzed or dead.”

“Great. I was kidnapped by knowledgeable druggies. I’m so fortunate.” It could have been worse, that was for certain, but it had been damn bad enough and I was shaken. A traitorous tear leaked out of one eye. “I really didn’t mean to screw this up, Jerry, really I didn’t.”

“It’s okay.” He kissed me again. “Now, put your shirt back on.”

Yes, I’d forgotten I’d been standing in front of the world in my bra. “I have to dry it first.” My voice sounded kind of pitiful even to me. I pushed away, shuffled over to the wall-mounted hand dryer and punched the button. Hot air burst from the nozzle and I held my shirt beneath it, wiggling and jiggling it for maximum heat coverage. “You go on. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“That’s not going to dry anytime soon. My undershirt wouldn’t cover up much so I’ll go find you something.”

As he turned toward the door, it opened and a plastic-covered white shirt came flying in. Jerry bent down and picked up a hanger with a man’s dress shirt, fresh from the laundry. “Peace offering, I do believe.”

“They just didn’t want to see what I’d do if they handed me an orange jumpsuit, that’s all. Probably because somebody has a bet on when that will happen too.”

He shook his head. “It’s going to be okay, Jolene. And really, you’re doing better than I’d expected. After what I heard, I was prepared for you to be hysterical.”

“Hysterical? Me? Nah, I was just standing half-naked in the police station bathroom screaming at a cop while half the police station watched. I am calm, collected and in complete control.” I ripped the plastic off the shirt and started unbuttoning a heavily starched size 18 1/2 Big and Tall. Once I got it on and buttoned, I was not sure I’d improved the situation all that much. I looked more like a five-year-old playing dress-up. So, I rolled up the sleeves and unbuttoned the bottom four buttons, tying the ends in front, low across my hips. “Truth is, if I let myself think about what really happened, I’d be a wreck. Hysterical is just one mental replay away.”