Turkey Ranch Road Rage (7 page)

Resisting all my natural urges to sigh, rub my face and bang my head against the wall, I said, “Okay, so the main players are Tiger, the leader, and Bobcat the second in command, both old hippie types, and some forty-ish women. Two women?”

Lucille nodded. “The snooty dark-haired one is Iris. Always wears black like Cat Woman and acts like she’s the Queen of Sheba. I was trying to be friendly and make conversation with her, and she just looked down her nose at me like she’d just as soon shoot me as not, and then she walked right off without saying a single word. I’ve never seen somebody so rude in all my life. Hateful hussy. She marched herself right over to Tiger and started talking about me. I know she did because I saw her lips move just a little bit, like a ventriloquist. Merline and Agnes thought she was probably just talking dirty to him or making plans for later. They think she looks like one of those dominator women who carries around handcuffs and such in her purse. I never did see her with a purse myself so I couldn’t say, but it wouldn’t surprise me any.”

You’d think at this point I’d be somewhat accustomed to this sort of thing from my mother, but I am not. The best I can do is reel my brain past the deeply disturbing conjecture and cast about in a new pond for some glimmer of a pertinent fact. “What about the other woman? Tell me about her.”

“Lily. She’s younger than stuck-up Iris, probably in her thirties, although it’s hard to tell with how she carries on. Blabbers all the time about nothing, flitting around in her long hippie skirts and sandals, playing with her braids like she’s a schoolgirl. They’re all real strange, I’ll tell you that.”

Yes, well, strange was relative. And while there may have been some bits of relevant information in Mother Dearest’s ramblings, but I did not have the wherewithal to ferret them out at the moment. I pushed away from the edge of the door and said, “Okay, here’s where we are. I’m going to the current crime scene for a first person view of the festivities, and you are going to spend your time in solitary confinement, figuring out how to get yourself out of this mess.”

“There is no mess, Jolene. I haven’t done anything wrong. And even if I have, er, had, whatever, well, you’re not in charge of me. I’m telling you, I was not involved in any of it.”

“I believe this is where we started this conversation. And yes, you were, I just don’t know the details yet.”

Lucille snorted and lifted her chin. “Fine then, you just run along and see what dirt you can dig up on me. There isn’t any, of course, but you go on and have a good time trying. I have plenty of things to do right here.”

Oh, I just bet she did. Red flags and blue flashing lights accompanied the warning bells in my head this time, forcing me to face a reality I really wanted to ignore. I couldn’t leave her alone. Regardless of what orders I gave, she still had unfettered access to a phone, a Buick and a 9mm handgun. There were no good outcomes from that scenario. None. “Change of plans. Get in the car.”

“What! All this fuss about locking me away in my own house and now you just up and order me to get in the car? Why, I don’t even know if I want to go now,” she said, reaching for her purse on the table. “That little rental car of yours is awfully small.”

“Hold on there. You can take the purse, but the gun stays here.”

Lucille made a good effort at registering shock and outrage, but she moved on to snarling rather quickly. “I can take my gun anywhere I want. I have a permit.”

“I don’t care.”

She glared for a few seconds, weighing her options. Finally, she flung open the black bag, fumbled around inside, pulled out the gun case and set it on the table. “This really hurts me, Jolene.”

“We’re taking the Buick. Get in the car.”

Chapter
Four

I chose the paved road to Bowman City, and fourteen minutes after we’d passed the Kickapoo city limit sign we were there. To her credit, Lucille had kept her mouth shut most of the way, a whoop escaping only at the crest of a really big hill. And not from fear either. She was having a ball. My mother’s idea of fun has apparently changed significantly in the last few years. Months, even.

As I’d expected, the road into the crime scene was blocked. Also as expected, I knew the deputy directing traffic. I pulled up and rolled down my window. “Hey, Leroy, getting things finished up here?”

“Hey, Jolene, Miz Jackson,” Leroy said, bobbing his head at us and snickering. “I’m a packin’. That’s something.”

Huh? I looked at Leroy and then at my mother, who was not so surreptitiously shaking her head at Leroy.

“Best license plate in the county, maybe even the state,” he said. “I kick myself every day for not thinking about it first.”

Lucille waved a dismissive hand at me. “It’s just one of those ‘Keep Texas Wild’ license plates with a horny toad on it,” she said. “That’s all. I support protecting the horny toads, you know.”

“Yes, I know.” After a few seconds, I finally caught up with what they were talking about. “You have a vanity plate that says what?”

“I-M-A-P-A-K-N,” Leroy chortled. “I’m a packin’.”

“If you paid any attention at all you’d have already noticed it,” Lucille snapped. “Now stop all this nonsense and get down to business.”

Leroy took the hint. “Things are just getting started, Jolene,” he said, dropping back into his serious voice. “HazMat’s inside and the bomb dogs are on the way. This is a serious situation we’ve got here. Don’t know what all we’re dealing with.”

We’re not dealing with your first string criminals, that’s for sure. Then again, past experience told me they hadn’t sent the first string HazMat team either. I couldn’t bring myself to ask about the gung-ho guy who’d shown up at Mother’s house a few months back with unfettered enthusiasm, an instruction booklet, lit cigarette, gasoline and Tyvek suit. He’d managed not to blow himself up that day, but he was clearly in line for a Darwin Award at some point. “Think there’s another bomb?”

His eyes kind of popped open a little wider, signaling me that he hadn’t exactly thought of that possibility. “Can’t say about any of that, Jolene. Everything’s still under investigation. Can’t say a word to anybody about anything. We’re securing the area now. May even have to shut the whole town down. This is serious.”

“Yes, very serious, I got that part. Where’s Jerry?”

“He’s busy. You can’t be bothering him right now. He wouldn’t talk to you anyway. He’s the one that put out the gag order. We can’t say nothing to nobody. Even you.”

One would think that sort of specific directive would not be necessary, but one would be wrong. The don’t-tell-Jolene-anything order kind of hurt my feelings. “Okay then, where’s the press hanging out?”

He frowned for a second then the light bulb came on and he nodded. “Oh, yeah, I guess you could do that, say you’re with the press and all. They’re over at the Dairy Queen, just outside the roadblock. You really ought to put on your press badge though.”

You betcha.

The Bowman City DQ was packed. Clusters of locals outnumbered the reporter types by about twenty to one. There was one local news van with a live feed setup waiting for something interesting to happen, but the crew did not appear to be on pins and needles. In fact, if the wristwatch checking was any indication, they were ready to move on to a livelier locale. There is only so much of an adrenaline rush to be had from flying livestock pellets, although I couldn’t help but wonder how this would play out in CNN’s “situation room.”

These days, this sort of thing could be twisted up with all kinds of supposition and conjecture, and within seconds an entire segment of the US population would be on pins and needles. “Breaking News! A feed store in north central Texas has exploded. Response teams have been called and the area is being evacuated. We do not yet know the motive for the bombing or if there are other bombs in the area. There has been no official link to Muslim Terrorists at this time. The national threat level has not been changed. Repeat, the threat level remains at yellow. If a terror threat is determined, we will be the first to let you know. To repeat, the feed store bombing has not been linked to any known terrorist cells. We have a live feed now from local channel—”

“Jolene!” Lucille whacked me on the arm. “What are you daydreaming about?”

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. “Just grateful that the place isn’t crawling with reporters.”

“Well, I’m not. I need to talk to a decent writer who will say what needs said about this park business and give it the attention it deserves.”

Yes, I got the implication and it wasn’t going to get me to write a story for her. I pulled the Buick into the DQ lot and stared a little more. Now that I was in the midst of it all, I couldn’t exactly remember why it was imperative for me to rush right over. And how much trouble was there anyway? It didn’t look all that intense to me. Aside from the nosy gossip types, most of the crowd looked bored.

“There’s Tiger,” Lucille whispered, facing me and cocking her head toward the windshield obviously and repeatedly. “Bobcat’s next to him. That’s Lily on the left, twittering around, and Iris is behind them all, slunk over to the side like black alley cat. And I suppose you can see for yourself where Bony Butt is.”

I really couldn’t. What I saw were two old hippie-looking guys, each near sixty, with gray ponytails and goatees. Lily’s long reddish-blonde hair was woven into two neat braids that hung over her shoulders. She wore what used to be called a peasant blouse with a broomstick skirt and earthy sandals. Iris, however, was not exactly as I’d expected from Mother’s description, although I couldn’t really define what that might have been. She did look to be in her forties and she most assuredly had black hair—short and spiky like Halle Berry in that James Bond movie. She was tall, maybe five-foot-eight, thin and gorgeous, with light blue eyes that seemed to cut through the crowd even from here. She did not look brainwashed or on drugs. She wore a black tee-shirt with jeans, looking more commando than Cat Woman. Mother had gotten one thing right though, she did not look the least bit friendly.

A sharp jab in the side from my mother’s elbow broke my stare.

“There she is. That’s Bony Butt, if you can believe it.”

I followed Lucille’s head bobbing and finger pointing until I finally caught a glimpse of Ethel, standing just behind Bobcat. Her formerly gray hair was indeed dyed a color suspiciously close to Frivolous Fawn, not that I would say so aloud, that being one of Mother’s most recent choices. The compact helmet hairdo was a little more relaxed than I remembered, and it did look like she was wearing jeans and some kind of tailored jacket. I was kind of impressed. Ethel had taken herself from the 1950s to maybe the mid-eighties, and it was a definite improvement.

The Great Horned Toad Messiah, on the other hand, was an old hippie. Tiger stood ramrod straight, arms crossed, eyes closed. A standing meditation maybe? His sidekick Bobcat held a similar pose—sans the serenity part. Of course, it would be darned hard for anyone to be Zen if you had Bony Butt buzzing you like a wasp.

“Look over there,” Lucille said, craning her neck this way and that. “That’s Gilbert Moore. The one I was telling you about that was out behind the house when the pole truck was there.”

I followed her pointing painted nail to a very tall and big man leaning against the DQ’s brick wall not too far from the toad crowd. He wore dark sunglasses, a tan tee shirt tucked in to his jeans and work boots. With a toothpick twirling in his mouth and thick arms crossed over his chest, he gave off a cocky vibe. Arrogant asshole would be my bet. And while that was generally just a cover for insecurity, my patience in dealing with such types was severely lacking. His size was intimidating, no question about that, but there was something else about him that made me uneasy. Something I just couldn’t put my finger on. “Was the equipment out behind the house his then?”

“Well, I believe some of it was, yes, although he wouldn’t admit to anything that I could tell, just kept talking down to me like I didn’t know my head from a hole in the ground,” Lucille said, scowling. “I left him message, but he wouldn’t ever call me back. He even hung up on me once without saying a word, like I wouldn’t notice the phone clicking off in my ear. I ought to go over there and tell him what I think about him and his ways.”

That wasn’t necessarily a bad plan, but confronting an overgrown asshole at the Dairy Queen wasn’t necessarily a good one either. Then again, he didn’t scare me, and I had some questions of my own, such as what he was doing here. “I’ll go talk to him.”

Mother jabbed me again and pointed at Bobcat and Bony Butt, who now appeared to be clutching each other and/or holding hands. “Would you just look at that? It’s just sickening. I’m going over there right now and tell them to get themselves a room and stop their lustful groping out here in public. Nobody ought to have to bear witness to such things.”

From what I could tell, Bobcat’s part in the bodily contact was more related to self-defense and damage control than lust. But, these things amuse Lucille, so I let her focus on Ethel’s love life while I turned my attention back to the tough big guy and what he was doing here. Only I couldn’t find him. Iris stood a few feet from where he’d been, but Gilbert Moore was gone.

The rattle of a diesel engine and tires crunching on gravel caught my attention, and I looked out my window just in time to see a white crew cab pickup speed away from the Dairy Queen with the missing big man behind the wheel. For once, I would have no trouble identifying a getaway vehicle. Gilbert Moore’s truck was a flatbed dually with two big poles that started at the back and came together in an A-frame over the cab. Fitted in beneath and around the poles were all kinds of equipment, racks, reels and toolboxes. It was definitely a work truck, and from the gas bottles chained up behind the cab, I’d say he was a welder. He’d probably built the back part himself and never bothered finishing it out with paint because the bare metal was covered in rust. Other distinguishing features included a row of yellow running lights just above the windshield and a gash in the passenger door. I had no idea why it mattered, but I knew I could pick out Gilbert Moore’s truck from a mile away, coming or going.