The Bogus Biker (3 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

“What does Rosabel Deane need luck for?” Jake asked as he pulled himself up into the SUV, a harder job than sliding out of it earlier. “Got to be two dozen beer bottles in there, and twice as many fingerprints. She’ll need a miracle, not luck.”

Penelope turned the key in the ignition, shifted into reverse, and looked over her shoulder at an empty lot as she backed out. “I think she’s interested in Bradley.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Mary Lynn’s niece Frankie said she’d asked a few questions.”

“So of course, that means a mad, passionate affair is going on.”

“Daddy!
No such thing, and you know it. You shouldn’t be talking about that sort of thing anyway.”

“Nellie, I may be seventy-five, but I remember when I was nineteen and met your mother. There’s nothing new under the sun.”

“Hush, Daddy.”

Jake sighed. “
Rosabel Deane hasn’t been here long enough to get to know Brad well enough to be interested.

“Six months.” Penelope turned into the drive-through at the Burger Barn. “What do you want?”

“I’m full,” Jake said.

Penelope ordered a chocolate shake. “Six months is long enough when you work with somebody every day.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” When they turned back onto Main Street, Jake said, “Take a right on Cherry Blossom.”

“I know how to get to Pine Branch Creek, Daddy. I spent a lot of time there when I was in school.”
Too much time one night, and you probably know it.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to know what you spent a lot of time doing.”

“You know I was good.”
Except for once.

Jake sighed again.

“It was safe enough. Privacy, but not too much. Not anymore though. Not since the bikers took it over for their ramble.

“Rumble,” Jake corrected.

“I thought gangs rumbled.”

“They’re a gang of sorts.”

“They don’t really cause any trouble around here, do they? Just make a lot of noise.” She shifted gears and made a right turn. “So, you think Romeo wasn’t a real biker? He could’ve fooled me.”

“I didn’t say that, but he sure came out of his leather quick enough when things got hot.”

“He landed on me like a ton of bricks.”

Jake chuckled. “You looked pretty funny all spread-eagled out like that.”

“I didn’t feel funny. I felt like somebody set a blessed concrete block on top of my back. Maybe two of them.”

“Slow down.” Jake leaned forward and peered through the darkness.

“I’m not speeding.”

“Look over there. It’s a bike.”

Penelope braked a little and glanced right. “Ahhh-ha, and look who’s standing there by it. I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.” She flashed her bright lights, revealing the subject of their recent conversation.

He waved both arms, motioning them away, but she coasted to a stop on the narrow shoulder, cutting her lights but not the engine. When he thrust an angry face against the window, she grinned, feeling safe inside the locked vehicle. He scowled and made a circular motion she took to mean ‘put down the window’. She touched the button but took her finger off once there was a scant inch of space.

“Down,” came the clipped voice. “All the way.”

Against her better judgment, she complied.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” Jake said, leaning across the seat.

“Daddy.” Penelope took a closer look at the man’s face. Beneath the stubble of two days’ beard, it was a nice enough face but lined in places that meant it had a few years. A few curly strands of steely gray hair escaped from beneath a black-and-white bandana.
My age anyway. Maybe a little older. Definitely too old to be fooling around on a cycle.

“Your son is going to have a fit when he finds out you came here,” the man said.

“You know who I am? You know Bradley?”

The man pushed his face through the window, closer to hers. “Yes, and that’s all I’m going to tell you. Go home.”

“He had that fit you speak about when he found out you hit on me,” Penelope said, trying not to laugh.

“I didn’t hit on you. I staked you out and maybe saved
your pretty little a…backside from a bullet.”

“Maybe we better do what the man says, Nellie,” Jake said.

Penelope thought she agreed, but she couldn’t resist giving voice to the next question. “What’s your name?”

The man rolled his eyes, soft blue ones from what Penelope could see in the light from the dashboard. “Tiny will do.”

Jake’s laughter erupted like the sputter of an empty ice cream dispenser. “Tiny! That’s good!”

“Listen, old timer…”

“That’s Mr. Kelley to you…Tiny.” Jake heh-hehed again.

Tiny looked straight at Penelope. “Get out of here.
Now.”

Something in the set of his jaw spoke louder than his words. “I’m going,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

“I just did. And don’t come back. Not tonight or any other night.”

Penelope put the SUV in reverse just as the growl of more bikes emerged from the darkness. Tiny hit her door
with his hand. “Go!” Then he collapsed on the ground and began rolling around and moaning.

“Go,” Jake echoed, touching his daughter’s arm.

Penelope backed up, shifted again, and took off for town, but not before she saw the lights of the bikes and heard Tiny yell something that sounded like, “That crazy broad ran me off the road!”

She put the window up and pressed the gas pedal. “I was right,” she said. “Something’s going down.”

“Uh-huh.” Jake drummed his fingers on the gear box. “Have you cleaned the room those two guys stayed in last night?”

“Not yet. The family who came in this afternoon took the third floor loft.” Penelope considered a minute. “But maybe I better. I don’t want Bradley up there poking around.”

“Well, maybe he’s the one to do it.”

“And if he finds anything, he’ll give me what-for because I let them stay. I can’t run a background check on all my guests, Daddy. You know that.”

“I reckon not.”

“Maybe I’ll go up and see if they left anything behind.”

“Couldn’t hurt.”

“As soon as we get home.
Yep. As soon as we get home.”

CHAPTER FIVE

After Jake went to his room, Penelope glanced over the breakfast menu for the next morning.
Scrambled eggs, fruit, biscuits, coffee, and juice, with a side of dry cereal for the two children. Then she thought about telling Jake she’d check out the room used the night before. Was it really necessary? The family on the third floor would be there for two days, and no one else was booked until the coming week when the B&B would fill up for the annual Back Walnut Cake Festival and Competition.

The name of the upcoming event made her snicker. Amaryllis had annual festivals and competitions for something or other six times a year. Corny as the names sounded, they’d been the town’s bread and butter since the textile mill on the Black River had to close because of environmental violations and the subsequent crushing fines. When it looked like the owners had pulled out permanently, Mayor Harry Hargrove and the town council went into action.

Downtown stores, long-closed, reopened as antique malls and sidewalk cafes. Even though she didn’t need the personal income, Penelope turned the old Kelley home into a bed and breakfast. Amaryllis survived, barely at first, and now, three years later, things were going well as clever low-cost advertising and word-of-mouth promotion brought people flocking to the small town of fewer than six thousand souls.

At the top of the stairs, Penelope shook her head to clear it and paused in front of the room her last guests had vacated without waiting for breakfast. Below, in the main hall, the grandfather clock chimed ten. She’d been up since five that morning, and the incident at the Sit-n-Swill, while exciting in a strange sort of way, had sucked the day’s energy out of her. Tomorrow would be plenty of time to clean the room. Plenty of time unless Bradley got wind of the visitors and made a connection.

She turned on the overhead light as soon as she’d closed the door behind her. The room bore scant evidence of occupancy except for the tousled covers on the twin beds. But an odd odor, different from the Lavender Spice potpourri she kept around in glass bowls from the local variety store, made her sniff twice. In the bathroom, a few dark hairs decorated the sink, probably courtesy of the man who wore his hair pulled back and fastened with a rubber band just above the collar of the golf shirt with the pricey logo. It had seemed an odd combination to Penelope then, and it seemed more so now.

Peering down at the lined wastebasket, she noticed a sprinkling of green on a tissue at the bottom, and then she knew what she’d smelled. Pot. Weed.
Those two shiftless skunks were smoking up here, drat them, even though I told them clearly this was a tobacco-free establishment. I said they could go out on the terrace if they wanted to light up.
Then she considered that, in a way, they’d complied with the rule—they hadn’t been smoking tobacco.

After a quick trip to the kitchen for some sandwich bags, she collected all the ‘evidence’ and looked for more. Though she searched under the beds, behind the drapes, and in drawers, she found nothing. Well, this was enough. She’d give the bags to Bradley tomorrow, along with the registration cards the two men had filled out when they checked in.
I doubt they used their real names, and I never asked to see a driver’s license, but I will from now on
.

What kind of car had they been driving? She closed her eyes as if that would clear her mind, but of course it didn’t. All she could come up with was it had been a small car. Blue.
Probably a rental. They’d told her they were from northern Missouri on the way to Louisiana, got tired of driving, and just wanted a place to stay the night. She took their word for it, just like she did with any other guest. She’d never had a problem, not until now. Now she wondered why they’d bypassed a dozen motels along I-30 out of Little Rock in favor of a relatively unknown B&B in a town five miles off the beaten path. On second thought, reviewing the facts, she didn’t wonder at all.

After a quick shower, she set her alarm for 5 AM and slipped into bed.
Shipment.
I know they said the word ‘shipment’. Pot probably. But for Roger Sitton and the Sit-n-Swill? I’ve known that man all my life, and Mary Lynn was right—he probably does have lace on his drawers. He’s always reminded me of a sand crab scuttling around, begging not to be noticed.
How he ran a business was the mystery, but Mary Lynn had it from her brother, a CPA, that the Sit-n-Swill always turned a tidy profit. Until tonight, she’d never wondered how a sleazy little joint on the edge of town generated that much taxable income. But why, if the money came from something illegal, would he risk reporting it?

Penelope closed her eyes and let herself drift. The red numbers on her clock radio read 12:26 when she came wide awake. Hail? The spatter on her windows reminded her of the sound, but the Channel 7 forecaster she relied on said to expect clear, sunny days for the next week. Gravel then. The driveway below was full of it. She sat up.
Or buckshot.
Surely not…no, please…

Rolling out of bed, her knees protesting their sudden violent contact with the hardwood floor, she crawled to the window and inched her eyes just over the wide sill. A full moon lit up the sky like morning. She straightened enough to peek out. A man stood under the magnolia tree her mother planted the day after the doctor told her she had maybe another six months. “I want to leave something behind,” she told Penelope, who had taken over hand-raising the tree when her mother could no longer leave her bed. She’d babied it through ice and wind and occasional dry spells. It was part of her.

Scrambling to her feet, she rolled out the casement window. “Hey, you get away from there,” she yelled.

The man fled.

Not bothering to put a robe over the knee-length night shirt with Garfield on the front, she scooted downstairs and out the kitchen door onto the terrace, rounding the house like a racehorse on a curve. Only when the gravel cut into her bare feet did she stop to think what she was doing. “I saw you!” she hollered, retreating toward the house. “I…” She clamped her mouth shut. Maybe telling the intruder she’d seen him wasn’t such a good idea.

Back on the terrace, she stopped to listen. No sound came from the house. Hopefully, her guests and her father—most especially her father—hadn’t heard the commotion. She had her hand on the doorknob when she heard the distant rumble of motorcycles. Her throat contracted. Where were they? Where were they going at this hour of the morning? And why were they so far from their usual territory out by Pine Branch Creek?

She hesitated a second too long. Tiny’s now-familiar fingers closed around her upper arm and squeezed.

CHAPTER SIX

“You.”

“Yeah, me. Open the door.”

“What are you going to do? Rob me? Ravage me?”

“Neither, but those dudes coming closer just might. Get inside.”

She heard him turn the deadbolt as soon as he closed the door behind them. The lock was purely for code compliance. No one ever locked their doors in Amaryllis, Arkansas, but maybe he didn’t know that—or maybe whatever was going on was more serious than she thought. In the light from the underside of the microwave, she caught sight of the raw, red scrapes on his left arm, but it was the cut above his right eyebrow, dripping blood that ran down his cheek like tears, that spurred her to action. “You’re hurt.”

“You noticed.”

“I was an ER nurse for fifteen years.”

“Well, well, versatile, aren’t we?”

His eyes ranging over her reminded her she wasn’t wearing a robe. She brought her arms up in front of her and said, “I’ll go upstairs and get something to take care of that cut.”

“Do I need to go with you?”

“I won’t call the police.”

“Good.” He dropped into a chair like a punctured balloon and leaned his head in his hands.

Upstairs, Penelope put on a terrycloth robe before gathering first-aid supplies from the bathroom. Tiny hadn’t moved when she got back to the kitchen.

“I could use a drink,” he murmured from behind his hands.

“Sorry, I don’t keep anything stronger than soda.”

“Figures.”

She wet some cotton at the sink. “Take off the bandana and let me have a look at that cut.” Once she had
the blood stanched, she cleaned the wound with peroxide and said, “It needs stitches. I’m guessing three at least.”

“Too bad.
Just patch it up.”

“I can put some butterfly strips on it, but it’ll leave a scar.”

“Just another one for the collection.”

He howled and let out a few expletives when she used antiseptic spray before applying the bandage. “I’ve taken care of toddlers who didn’t complain that much.”

He glared at her, but before he could reply, Jake’s voice came out of the darkness in the hall outside his room. “Everything all right in there, Nellie?”

“Just patching up a skinned knee, Daddy.”

Tiny gave her a look between disgust and loathing.

“Need any help?”

“We’re fine.” She waited until Jake’s footsteps died away before cleaning the abrasions on Tiny’s arm. “When did you last have a tetanus shot?”

“Couple of years ago, I think.”

“Okay. Depending on what you cut your head on, you might want to check and get a booster if necessary. What’s your real name?”

“
Tiny’s all you need to know.”

She shrugged. “How’d you get hurt?
Your so-called friends out there?”

“No.”

“You’re not really one of them, are you?”

“You’re too nosy for your own good.”

“So my son Bradley says.”

“He’s a good cop.”

“How do you know?”

“I know stuff.”

She took a canned soda from the refrigerator and poured it over ice. “Here. Want something to eat?”

He shook his head, then touched the bandage and winced. “That hurts.”

“Sorry. You need to keep it clean so it doesn’t get infected.”

“I guess you’d know.” He met her eyes. She had to look away before she melted.
             

“I told you—I was a nurse for twenty years. Worked for a couple of doctors and then in an ER over in Little Rock.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“I got tired of commuting. Then after a while I didn’t want to see another mangled body as long as I lived. Like yours will be if you keep riding that ‘cycle without a helmet.”

“Bikers don’t wear helmets. Not this bunch anyway.”

“But you’re not one of them.”

He concentrated on the glass in his hand. “Whatever.”

“What were you doing throwing gravel at my window at 12:26 in the blessed morning? And for that matter, how did you know which window was mine?”

“Your curtains were open.”

She gasped.

“You were decent.” He grinned. “Unfortunately.”

“That’s not something you say to a lady.”

He leered at her.

“What were you doing out there?”

“Staying out of sight.”

“Of what?
Or should I ask, of whom?”

“You shouldn’t ask at all.”

“What’s going on at the Sit-n-Swill?”

He ignored her question. “Got any place I can catch some sleep before the sun comes up?”

She nodded. “There’s an empty room.”

He got up from the table. “Thanks for the first aid.”

“Don’t mention it. And if you shower, which I hope you will before you get between the clean sheets, don’t sing and wake up the other guests.”

He almost smiled. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

She showed him the front guestroom. “And no smoking. Tobacco or weed.”

His eyebrows went up. “What do you know about weed?”

“I never smoked it, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She hesitated. “I found some in the wastebasket in the room next to yours. Those two men who stayed here last night…”

He grabbed her arm. “Here? Last night?”

She jerked away from him. “Two of them. They talked a lot like you do when you’re not trying to sound like a biker. The accent, I mean.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Put it in a baggie to give to Bradley tomorrow.”

“Be sure you do it then.” He leaned against the door facing. “What time will your guests be out of the way?”

“They’re going to a family reunion in the park about nine.”

“Then I’ll wait until they’re gone before I leave.”

“That’s not a bad idea. They might wonder what kind of place I keep if you show up at the breakfast table smelling like you do.”

He glared.

“Where’s your bike?”

“Behind your garage.
Out of sight.”

“Well, go to bed. In a few hours I’ve got to dress and go downstairs to start breakfast.”

“Sorry I got you up.”

Penelope thought he didn’t sound sorry at all. And she knew she wasn’t.