Bad Moon On The Rise (17 page)

“
Like what?” I asked
reluctantly, wondering if I really wanted to know.

“
Like the most beautiful
homecoming queen this town has ever seen reduced to being a
toothless hag at age twenty-six, with three starving kids, trying
to sell blow jobs behind the Dew Drop Inn to score her next meth
fix. Like fourteen-year-old boys in borrowed trucks flying off of
bluffs and dying surrounded by hundreds of thousands of dollars
worth of illegal drugs, drugs that disappear between the time I
find their bodies and I can get someone to go pick up the pieces
for their parents. Or having three old people die in their sleep
within two months of each other, years before they should have,
because some relative had an eye on their possessions or home. I’ve
seen too many bruises, too many accidents, too many families ripped
apart. This county is at war with itself and you will find drugs
beating at the heart of that war. The worst part of it? It’s people
from here doing it. We’re destroying our own mountain. We’re
destroying ourselves.”

He was silent, staring up toward the
top of Silver Mountain. I thought maybe he was going to
cry.

“
You sound overworked,” I
said softly. “No one can keep going like that forever.”

He shook his head. “It’s not
that.”

“
What is it?”

“
When I bring them down,
and I will bring them down, I’m going to find out I went to school
with them, that their daddy cuts my hair, or that I’ve sat there at
the Dew Drop next to them for the past fifteen years, raising
glasses of whiskey to their health. They’re going to be my own
people.”

“
But they’re the ones
destroying your people,” I said.

“
Yes, they are.” He
glanced down at me and I could feel his pain; it filled him and
spilled out as vividly as the sunlight filtering through the
pines.

“
What do you want from
me?” I asked. It’s better to get right to the heart of it at times
like this. Sometimes, too many words can just get in the
way.

“
I need you to go inside
at Silver Top.”

I froze. Willingly go back behind
bars, where I would be at the mercy of the guards, where the noise
and the smells would remind me of the miserable life I had once
lived, the men I had once chosen, how little I had once thought of
myself? Go back in where I would be trapped in a world where I
found it hard to even breathe?

How could I tell Shep that? He didn’t
know about my record. With shame, I realized that I didn’t want him
to know, either. Shep was one of the good guys. He was a walking,
talking Wyatt Earp of a man, on the side of the angels, clean and
just and true, willing to fight for his people and his mountain. To
tell him I had a record? To tell him that I’d been married to a
drug dealer and had taken the fall for him, and done my time the
hard way, a part of me believing I’d die behind those
bars—believing that because there was a good chance I could have
died, that I probably would have if part of me hadn’t learned to
fight back, if part of me hadn’t shut down so I could
survive.

I didn’t want to go back there. I
didn’t want to lose part of myself again. But I couldn’t tell him
that.

It was unthinkable. I was on his side.
I was one of the good guys, too. I had been for fifteen years and I
needed him to see me that way. I had worked too hard putting my old
life behind me to return to it now. Now was not the time to stop
and look back. I had to leave the past behind sometime. I wanted
that time to be now.

“
What do I have to do?” I
asked.

He told me. I listened. And I
agreed.

I have been a fool for love more than
once in my lifetime. Who among us has not? But the older I get, the
more determined I am to never again be a fool for mere lust. Thus
it was that I decided at least one other person on this planet
needed to know what I was doing for Shep Gaines and why.

The fact that this person was lugging
a six-foot fiberglass hot dog up the hill as he huffed and puffed
toward me did not fill me with confidence. But we can only choose
our friends. We cannot control their passions.

“
I was just coming down to
get you,” I said.

“
I figured. I saw the
sheriff drive away.”

“
I must be the talk of the
town,” I said. “Or at least the bed-and-breakfast.”

“
I’d say that was pretty
accurate,” Bobby admitted. He was breathing so hard I feared he
might stroke out.

“
Let me help you.” I took
one end of the giant hot dog and joined him in trudging up the
hill. It was surprisingly light for its size. “Taking it out for a
test run?” I asked.

Bobby nodded. “I’ve got these until
we’re ready for the real ones.” He pulled a pack of three rubber
hot dogs out of his pocket—eliciting a yip of joy from the inn’s
resident dog. It had been tailing Bobby with an intensity that
suggested the little beast was convinced the giant hot dog was real
and might result in the biggest score of his furry little
life.

“
I think he’s seen these
before,” I said, dangling a rubber hot dog in front of the dog
while he danced enthusiastically on his hind paws. “Let’s throw the
big one and yell fetch.”

“
Let’s not,” Bobby
suggested.

“
What are you getting
ready to do?” I asked.

“
Funny,” he growled. “I
was just about to ask you the same thing.”

We reached the meadow and Bobby sat on
a fallen log gratefully, his immense weight causing it to tilt at
one end like a playground seesaw. He leaned the giant fiberglass
hot dog by his side. “I know you are up to something and I don’t
appreciate being left out of the loop,” he said. He sounded angry,
which was rare.

“
I’m not leaving you out,”
I protested. “I was going to tell you everything.”

“
Yeah?” Bobby sounded
unconvinced. “Why don’t you start with why the sheriff dropped by
to see you today? It wasn’t a social call. His uniform told me
that. If you don’t want me to watch your back, why did you bring me
up here in the first place?”

He was right. So I told Bobby
everything. He didn’t like it one bit.

“
This is a bad idea,” he
said. “If I recall, you don’t speak very highly of your time behind
bars. Can you even do three days in the joint? And you might be
inside for weeks.”

“
I know. That’s why I need
you to pretend to be my lawyer. Come by every day. If something
goes wrong, you’ll have to get me out of there.”

“
How?” he
asked.

“
If anything goes wrong,
call Bill Butler,” I told him. “He’ll know what to do.”

“
How do you know Butler
will believe me?”

“
Play him this.” I handed
him a micro-cassette recorder. “I’ve got the sheriff on tape
suggesting I go inside for him and why.”

“
You taped last night’s
tryst or this afternoon’s come to Jesus meeting?”

“
This afternoon’s. All of
it.”

 “
I guess trust is an
issue for you?”

“
I’m not stupid, Bobby.
Hell, I’m still sore from sleeping with the guy. My judgment might
be impaired and I know that.”

He struggled to his feet. “You know
what? That makes me feel better. Seems like a little blood is
getting through to your brain after all. I am going to let you walk
into the lion’s den. I‘ll even drive you there myself.”

“
It doesn’t work that
way,” I explained. “Shep is going to arrest me. Everyone knows we
slept together, so our story is that I told him something in the
throes of passion that made him check up on me and he found out
there’s a warrant for my arrest.”

“
I see. So he gets to look
like a law enforcement genius instead of a dumb ass for sleeping
with a woman on the run? I’m sensing this guy knows how to watch
his own ass a whole lot better than he knows how to watch
yours.”

I ignored his comment. “They use
Silver Top as the local jail on account of they don’t have their
own. He’ll process me in.”

“
For how long?”

I shrugged. “A week at the most. Long
enough for me to befriend some of the other prisoners and find out
what’s going on. I just need to get a lead and I can get
out.”

“
You sure this Shep guy
isn’t behind whatever’s going on there?” Bobby asked. He was
kneeling now, shoving one of the rubber hot dogs down the barrel of
the giant wiener.

“
No, I’m not sure. That’s
where you come in. You can pull the plug on this at any
time.”

He grunted like it was no big deal,
but I could tell he was pleased that my life was in his
hands.

“
Help me with this thing,”
he said.

“
How? Want me to see if
they have a giant jar of mustard in the kitchen?”

“
Just help me to my feet,”
Bobby grumbled.

I grabbed an upper arm as thick as a
ham and heaved. Bobby was surprisingly agile and soon the giant
fiberglass hot dog was perched on his shoulder, balanced just
enough that he could walk. “Now watch this carefully,” he said to
me. “And you might want to stand back.”

“
Why?” I asked. “It
doesn’t work on gunpowder, does it?”

 “
Of course not. It’s
hydraulic. How could you shoot hot dogs into a crowd with
gunpowder? They’d come out all charred.”

“
Like that would stop
anyone,” I said. It was true. The whole reason Bobby D. had been
carting a giant hot dog around was that he was determined to
single-handedly solve a problem that had plagued the Durham Bulls
Triple A baseball team for years. Once a mainstay game promotion,
their hydraulic hot dog-shaped wiener shooter—which had once
rocketed real hot dogs into the stands—had been retired in favor of
a less powerful gun that merely blasted rolled-up tee shirts into
the crowd. Bobby missed the thrill of seeing free meat whiz over
his head and, I suspect, the entertainment value of seeing a pack
of well-fed humans fighting over a free hot dog like starving dogs.
Personally, I thought the Durham Bulls had pulled the plug on using
real hot dogs for sanitation reasons. By the time the winner had
claimed the wiener, it was invariably a mangled, dusty nubbin of
meat capable of causing a dozen different diseases just by looking
at it. But Bobby insisted it had been a matter of safety, that the
gun was simply too powerful, and that management feared they might
put someone’s eye out with an errant hot dog.

“
How is your version going
to be any different?” I asked.

“
Haven’t you been paying
attention? I have discovered a massive breakthrough in promotional
hot dog technology. Watch this.” Bobby braced himself and pulled
back on the trigger beneath the fiberglass barrel. I heard a
zinging sound as the rubber wiener shot from the gun and sailed up
into the air. “Watch for it!” Bobby cried. “Watch for
it!”

As the rubber hot dog reached the
pinnacle of its flight and started back toward earth, a tiny
parachute bloomed above it, slowing its descent with a tidy jerk.
It swayed gently as it sailed downward on the wind.

“
Perfect,” Bobby shouted
triumphantly. “Look at that hang time! I knew it would
work!”

Visions of fans shoving and fighting
for a paratrooper hot dog danced in my head. All Bobby had really
done was buy people more time to assault one another. “Are you sure
you’ve thought this through?” I asked.

“
Of course. You’re just
jealous you didn’t think of it first.”

And with that, the tiny dog that
looked like nothing so much as a mop sans a handle launched itself
into the air like a champion Frisbee-playing canine. It hurled its
body through space, higher and higher, defying gravity with sheer
determination. The little beast snagged the rubber hot dog
perfectly, plucking it from the air neatly before hurtling back to
the ground. It landed on all fours and was off like a shot, heading
straight for the forest, Bobby’s test hot dog still clamped in its
mouth and the deflated parachute trailing in the dirt behind
it.

“
Holy shit!” I yelled.
“Did you see that? That little fucker just out-jumped Michael
Jordan!”

“
Oh, shut up.” Bobby poked
one end of the hot dog gun toward me. “Help me get this thing back
in the car. It’s almost Happy Hour.”

It was happy hour for some, but not
for me. As planned, Shep arrived, lights whirling, right after
five. I knocked back my glass of wine, hastily poured another, and
knocked that back while the other guests ran to the windows. A few
of the more savvy ones turned and stared at me.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It
tolls for thee.

He had two deputies with him, a rather
unnecessary touch, I felt, since they were clearly not in on the
plan—not if the way they threw me against the wall and handcuffed
my hands behind my back was any indication. That little maneuver
pretty much killed the fantasy aspect of my arrest right off the
bat.

The guests were scandalized and the
proprietor, Bunny, turned white, her little hot dog-snitching pooch
returning from the forest just in time to yap furiously as the
deputies led me through a gauntlet of gaping faces and out onto the
front porch toward the waiting squad cars. Shep had not even looked
at me when he read me my rights, informing me that I was under
arrest for suspicion of murder. It gave me a bad feeling from the
start. He was supposed to have gone into a whole cover story about
how my husband was missing and incriminating evidence had been
found, but he said nothing more than that I was under arrest for
suspicion of murder before he gave me the usual Miranda
warning.