Diary of a Mad Fat Girl (9 page)

“
Well, Dax Dorsett from the Delta,
have you had supper?” Lilly asks and I shoot her a hard look that
she doesn’t see because she is all about Deputy Dax Dorsett right
now.

“
Why, no ma’am, I haven’t,” Dax says,
and relaxes his stance. “I always ride by the school here, then
take a break for supper.”

How convenient.

“
Well, why don’t you come join us over
at Pier 57? You like pizza?” Lilly says and I’m shaking my head no,
but have apparently ceased to exist.

“
Yeah, I love pizza. ’Specially
theirs.” He’s grinning and looking at her tits again.

“
We’ll follow you there,” she pauses,
“unless you were going to arrest me for being a bad girl.” She bats
her eyelashes like a 14-year-old girl feeling the first sting of
Cupid’s arrow.

“
Oh, no ma’am,” he says and his cheeks
turn red. “No, ma’am, I wouldn’t do that.”

“
Oh, you big sweetie!” Lilly says.
“See you at the pizza place.”

She blows him an air kiss and Deputy Dax
Dorsett hustles back to his patrol car like he’s been called to the
scene of a triple homicide.

“
Lilly,” I say when she gets in, “what
the hell was that about?”

“
Making friends, Ace,” she smiles at
me. “You should try it sometime.”

18

After a remarkably pleasant dinner at Pier
57 Pizza with the surprisingly funny Deputy Dax Dorsett, Lilly and
I set out to stalk that rat bastard Richard Stacks.

“
Ol’ Deputy Dax is a real a sweetie,”
Lilly muses after we get in the car and buckle up.

“
Yeah, and who knew he served in Iraq
and Afghanistan?” I say. “You know I have this image in my head of
veterans being sweet little old men with mesh back caps or long
haired fellows on motorcycles, but now there’s like this new wave
of veterans and it’s all these hot young fellows that don’t look
old enough to drive, let alone walk around a war zone in a Kevlar
vest with an M-16.”

“
I knew you thought he was hot,” Lilly
teases as she reaches in the backseat for the camera. “I saw you
checking him out.”

“
Me? You were the one looking at the
poor guy like you wanted to tie him to your bedpost and make him
your private sex slave.”

“
I thought about,” she says and laughs
and I decide not to comment on her gay love triangle or Drake
Driskall.

“
He really is pretty hot,” I say, “and
funny as hell.”

“
And
so
charismatic,” she looks at me, “and all this
time you’ve been running around here calling him Deputy Dumbass.
You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“
I am very ashamed of myself and from
here on out, I’ll be calling him Deputy
Hot
ass!” I exclaim and we both crack
up.

“
I really do like him and he seems so
lonely up here without any friends or family- Hey!” she exclaims,
“I’m going to invite him to the next get-together we have at your
place.”

“
Sounds good to me. Now let’s get down
to business,” I say and start digging around in my console for the
list of addresses that we put together at Chloe’s. “Fire up that
GPS and let’s get a plan together because I wanna bust Richard
Stacks’ balls and make him eat ’em with a spoon.”

“
Whoa now, sister. Keep in mind that
we promised to do this on her terms, not ours,” Lilly says as she
punches the addresses into the GPS.

“
I just wanna beat his face in,” I say
and fantasize for a minute about torturing him to death.

“
You already beat his face in and
you’re lucky he didn’t press charges,” Lilly says, still looking
down at the GPS. “Alrighty, the closest one is on Elmhurst Street,
so take a left at the light.”

“
Yes, ma’am.”

The first address is a bust, along with the
next three, but the fifth house turns out to be a peach. As soon as
we turn into the subdivision, I see that glistening white Lexus
shining like a polished diamond in the moonlight. I slow down as
Lilly fiddles with the high-dollar camera and I ask her if she
knows what she’s doing and she says she does but I’m pretty sure
she doesn’t. At any rate, she leans over and snaps a picture and
the flash is so bright that it blinds us both and I almost run up
into a landscaping ensemble that looks like it cost more than my
car.

“
Good word, Lilly!” I say. “We’re
gonna look like Tiger Woods out here running over fire hydrants and
shrubbery! Turn that flash off!”

“
I don’t know how.”

“
Is that even his car?”

“
Well, it has ‘Stacks 1’ on the tag so
I think it’s safe to say that it is.”

“
Who lives there?’

“
I don’t know,” she replies. “Go check
the mailbox.”

“
That’s a federal crime!” I pause for
a second. “You go check the mailbox.”

“
Pull the car back around there and I
will.”

“
Seriously?” I ask.

“
Hell yeah!” she exclaims and gives me
a serious look. “Think about Chloe. How pitiful she was today.
Think about what she’s lost.”

“
I don’t want to vomit right now,” I
say and bust a u-turn on the quiet street.

“
Stop right here!”

I turn off my headlights and Lilly hops out,
hijacks the contents of the mailbox, and is back in the car before
I can say shit.

“
Catalog, junk mail, graduation
invitation, oh yeah! Credit card statement!” she looks over at me.
“Bingo!”

“
Who still gets their credit card
bills in the mail? Don’t these folks know that there are small time
criminals like us out and about in their ’hoods? Raiding
mailboxes,” I say and crack up at my own joke.

Lilly examines the billing statement and
doesn’t even give me a courtesy laugh so I decide to follow the GPS
directions to last two houses just to see what they look like.

“
So it’s broken down into
his
and
hers
charges and it appears that Mr. Tate Dannan
does a lot of international travel and Mrs. Dana Dannan has an
affinity for spas and liquor stores.”

“
Nice,” I say, “so what
now?”

“
Well, it appears he was dropping
loads of cash in Europe during the first two weeks of this billing
cycle and then the last two weeks, he must’ve been around here
because it looks like local charges,” she flips the paper over,
“regular stuff like the Dodge Store and the Tobacco Shop,” she
pauses. “Oh hold on a second! Here it is!” She waves the billing
statement in the air. “Last purchase on this statement is a plane
ticket!” She squints at the paper, “Twenty-eight hundred dollars.
Damn!”

“
So I’m gonna venture a guess and say
that-”

“
He could very well be back in Europe
or some other faraway place,” Lilly finishes my sentence. “It’s a
long shot, Ace, but it’s all we’ve got right now. Turn
around.”

“
We going back to the house?” I ask,
feeling a rush of adrenaline worthy of a hunter eyeballing a
sixteen point deer.

“
Hell yeah, but let’s park somewhere
else.”

“
Oh my goodness, this reminds me of
when you thought that beaver-toothed boy was cheating on you, but
the poor bastard was really just playing cards with his friends at
that awful hunting cabin that we almost died trying to
find.”

“
Why you gotta bring that
up?”

“
Well, it’s the last time we did some
down-and-dirty-out-in-the-bushes kind of stalking,” I say, turning
into an upscale apartment complex two blocks from our
target.

“
Hey, we should go get Buster Loo and
pretend we’re out walking the dog.”

“
If we had a dog,” I say,
sarcastically, “why would we
pretend
to be walking a dog?”

“
You know what I mean,
smartass!”

“
Now, you wanna talk about getting our
cover blown?” I say. “We’d get arrested for disturbing the peace!
You know he barks his fool head off every time the wind
blows!”

“
Right, okay. No Buster Loo. Let’s go
then.” She crams the camera down in her bag.

“
Wait! Let’s get that flash turned
off.”

“
I did that already.”

“
Are you sure?” I ask and she nods her
head and doesn’t look sure at all.

“
C’mon let’s go!” she says and hops
out of the car like a rabbit on Red Bull.

We maneuver though the landscaping at the
edge of the parking lot, climb into and out of a deep gully, then
walk along the short concrete fencing that outlines the more
affluent neighborhoods on the west side of town.

Something moves in the darkness ahead of us
and I don’t know if it’s a possum or the devil coming to get us and
I get scared. I yelp like a dog and grab a tree trunk to hold on to
while I scan the area for a varmint or a pitch fork. Lilly laughs
so hard I’m afraid she’s going to piss her pants. Then a bat swoops
down, she screams like a banshee and we both hit the grass and let
the chiggers have their way with us for a few minutes.

“
We are going to jail!” Lilly
whispers.

“
No,” I assure her, “we are not going
to jail because we are way too slick for that.”

“
Yeah, we look slick.” she whispers,
“slick as the working side of duct tape.”

“
I was talking about the dew,” I
whisper back.

We get up, shake off like wet dogs, and make
our way down to the house where Richard Stacks’ Lexus is still
parked in the drive. The backyard of the four story estate is
completely dark. I hop the short stone fence and land in some
prickly holly bushes and Lilly sniggers as I whisper-cuss like a
sailor.

She hops the fence a few feet down and we
tip toe across the pristine lawn onto a sprawling concrete patio. I
ease up to the French doors while she creeps up to a large
window.

“
There’s a man and a woman on the
sofa, but all I can see is the back of their heads,” I
whisper.

“
I can see the woman’s profile,” she
whispers back, “but I just barely see the dude.”

“
You think it’s him?” I
ask.

“
Don’t know,” she answers, shaking her
head, “but it’d just about have to be wouldn’t it?”

I decide to change positions and step back
into a large wrought iron pottery shelf with about six hundred
flower pots on it. I turn around to grab it and think I’ve got it
steadied when I see one little pot teetering on the top shelf. I
watch in terrified silence as the pot falls, flowers first,
straight down onto Lilly’s head. She squeals like a pig and
stumbles back into a patio chair and I watch in horror as the pot
bounces off her head, onto the table, and down to the concrete
patio where it shatters into sixty million pieces. Lilly jumps up,
looks inside the house and, in a rush of movement, pulls out the
camera, steps up to the window, and flash!

Yet again, I am blind, but that doesn’t stop
me from trying to get the hell out of there. In my sightless haste,
I stumble over a yard gnome and fall face first into a bed of
monkey grass.

“
Get your ass up and let’s go!” Lilly
scream-whispers. “Here they come!”

I jump up and run through the yard like a
rat on acid, hurl myself over the fence, and roll like Rambo down
into the ditch.

I look around and Lilly is nowhere to be
seen.

I hear a woman screaming for someone to call
the police because there are burglars everywhere and in fifteen
seconds flat, every back yard on the block is saturated with light
and people are buzzing around like bees trying to figure out what
all the fuss is about.

A spotlight sweeps the air a few feet above
my head and I hear sirens and dogs barking and I know I have to get
back to my car. Fast. I strain my eyes against the darkness in the
ditch and don’t see Lilly anywhere, so I hunker down and scurry
away like a lizard on crack.

I stay low to the ground as I crawl out of
the gully and make my way back to the apartment complex. I am
peeking around the brick dumpster box trying to make sure the coast
is clear when my cell phone buzzes in the back pocket of my shorts.
I scream like a toddler at the dentist and take off in a dead
sprint toward my car. I drop my keys three times and my cell phone
once before I finally get in, and when I do, I spin out of there
like Ricky Bobby when he had that cougar in his car.

19

I don’t recognize the number of the missed
call, so I dial it back and, lo and behold, it’s Sheriff J.J.
Jackson.

“
Ace,” he barks, “where are
you?”

“
Uh, in my car,” I answer in a small
voice.

“
Would you happen to be close to the
west side Wal-Mart?”

“
Why, yes, as a matter of
fact-”

“
Get over here and get Lilly before I
change my mind and take both of y’all to jail!” he
yells.

“
Lilly,” I say, trying to be coy,
“where’d you find her?”

“
In the damned field between Wal-Mart
and Mrs. Dana Dannan’s house where some
burglars
made a mess of the porch and since Tate
is out of the country, Dana was quite alarmed by the intrusion. Now
get over here right now!”