Snake Dreams (26 page)

“Or whether or not he has a wife?”

“That’s right, Peachy Pie.”
She’s buying it!

“So you got bopped on the noggin—and forgot who you was—and who I was?”

He nodded. “That’s pretty much the long and short of it.”

“Then you must not remember that teeny-bopper waitress you run off with.”

“No, I don’t remember a single thing about her.” He shook his head at the wonder of what a bad bout of magnesia could do to a man. “But a couple of days ago, my name just come to me,
bang!
Jake Parker.”

As wives are wont to do, she corrected him.

“Oh, right.” Sheepish expression. “Harper.”

Oh, Jake was
good
! And he was just warming up. “And soon as I knowed who I was, it wasn’t long before I figured out that I had me a sweet, lovin’ wife by the name of Lulabelle and I hoped she was still living in our fine home down by Kerrville, and waiting for me. And you was!” He raised his arms in a triumphant gesture. “So here I am.” There was a slight crack in his manly voice, the hint of a salty tear in his eye. “Home again.”

She touched a flame to another Lucky Strike. “I’m glad you’re back, Jake.”

“Me too, Peachy Pie.”

Well. All’s well that ends nicely. Now, let us leave Mr. and Mrs. Harper to themselves. Lovers so long separated require privacy. Even if they are married. To each other. And so we bid a fond farewell to Jake and Lulabelle—Wait a minute.

What was that?

Was there a slight movement, barely discernible in Lulabelle’s dimly illuminated living room?

And did someone (in a muffled tone) utter the sort of remark that can fairly be described as “of a caustic nature”?

It wasn’t Jake. His store of conversation was quite spent.

Neither was it Lulabelle. No part of her, including her lips, moved by as much as a millimeter.

Moreover, the person who moved was
not
the one who had made the remark.

Well. This is beginning to get interesting.

There Really Is No Rest for the Wicked

That descriptor may be a bit over the top; as members of his hormone-driven gender go, Jake Harper was not particularly
wicked.
But neither was he to be counted among the righteous, nor in the company of that great centrist multitude who are “neither hot nor cold.” But in spite of his shortcomings, we may be allowed just a smidgen of sympathy for the aggravated felon who has recently been shot at by the Queen of His Heart, chased by Her Majesty across a parking lot, in and out of Hamlet’s Cowboy Saloon, shot at again, and pursued with extreme malice and ill intent until he finally eluded the vengeful girlfriend. Exhausted from these trials, Jake retreated to the Texas family homestead in Waco in search of the kind of love only a mother can give—only to find dear old Momma absent without leave. You might think this last disappointment would be the icing on the nasty-cake. But no.

Now, in his legally wedded wife’s living room, Lulabelle switched on a floor lamp and—

Jake could hardly believe his eyes.
I must be seeing things.
What Jake beheld in the living room were two additional characters.

His mother, Mrs. Petunia Harper. The hook-nosed old lady, whose hard visage glinted with congenital bitterness, was leaning on a walker that someone with a perverse sense of humor
had painted
purple.
She did not look at all pleased to see the bearded, dripping-wet offspring.

The second character?

The
other
Peachy Pie. The young lady was just as Jake Harper remembered her from the prior encounter—the shapely form concealed under a bulky raincoat, the .44-caliber revolver gripped in both hands. Nancy Yazzi’s trigger finger was white-knuckle taut.

The terrifying apparition spoke. “Hello, Jake.”

She’s real!
Which raised a couple of perplexing questions:
How did Nance find out about my wife? And how did she find Lulabelle’s house?

Women, bless them all, have mysterious powers of which the hairy-legged gender know nothing. His teenage girlfriend appeared to be a mind-reader. “After you told me your mother lived in Waco, I got on a bus headed for Texas, and found her.” Nancy nodded to indicate the grimacing crone. “When I told Petunia why I was looking for you, she agreed to introduce me to Lulabelle.”

The intensely curious lobe of his brain was tempted to inquire,
So now that you’ve found me, what are you going to do?
The much smaller, sensible section of the gray matter was fairly shouting,
Don’t ask!
And so he did not.

Didn’t matter. In her disarmingly direct manner, the mind-reader announced, “I’m going to shoot you, Jake.”

“Uh—listen, Nance—”

“Shut your mouth!” She pointed the stolen revolver at his belly button, which was showing under his dirty T-shirt. “First one goes in the gut. That’ll hurt
real
bad.” A sugary-sweet smile. “And while you’re writhing on the floor and hollering for mercy, I’ll put another one in your kneecap. Then I’ll shoot you right in the [expletive deleted].”

Harper tried to swallow past a crab-apple-size lump in his throat.

“Now hold on a minute!” Lulabelle’s voice was firm, her expression resolute. “Jake’s my husband.”

Yes!
Relief flooded over the threatened man. Picture Mr. Harper standing in a cool mountain pool, under a crystalline waterfall.

“And he’s my youngest son!” This, of course, was Petunia piping up.

As far as Jake knew, he was his mother’s
only
son, but what mattered in this crisis was Blood Will Tell, and in the Lone Star State a wife will Stand by Her Man. The exultant fellow wanted to shout, but because of the crab apple in his throat, he could not come up with a joyful “hallelujah!” or a lusty “wa-hoo!”

Without taking her eye off her boyfriend, Nancy Yazzi raised the pertinent issue: “So what do we do?”

As the women thought about it, the silence in the living room was thick enough to roll up and chink between logs.

The wife suggested a solution: “I say we cut cards.”

Jake was puzzled.
Cut cards for
what?

Nancy Yazzi was not the only woman present who had the gift of responding instantly to his innermost questions.

“I like it.” Petunia giggled. “High card gets to shoot the dirty rascal!”

The dirty rascal, who had swallowed the pesky crab apple, was opening his mouth to protest, when Lulabelle snapped, “You don’t get no vote, Jake!”

He watched his legal spouse produce a new deck from a voluminous purse, strip off the cellophane seal, remove the cards from the box, perform a dexterous shuffle, slap the stack of fifty-two plus a joker facedown onto the coffee table, and spread them into a perfect fan. “Who wants to go first?”

Nancy: “It’s your house and your cards.”

“Okay.” Lulabelle pursed her lips, pulled a card from the center of the array, turned it over. Five of diamonds. A shadow of distress settled over her finely chiseled features. Ever since she had tied the knot with Jake Harper, the lady’s life had been just one disappointment after another.

Jake watched the grim proceedings with the mesmerized fascination of a field mouse cornered by a trio of famished alley cats. A plump field mouse. Smeared with catnip jelly.

Both hands filled with Charlie Moon’s six-shooter, Nancy Y asked her host to select a pasteboard. Mrs. Lulabelle Harper complied, flipped the queen of spades onto the coffee table for all to see. Nancy’s brilliant smile could have adorned a Madison Avenue toothpaste advertisement. She cocked the hammer. Took careful aim at the boyfriend’s navel—

“Hey!” Momma again. “I didn’t get to pick me a card.”

Miss Yazzi murmured an apology, urged the senior citizen to get on with it, and reminded all present that time was a-wasting. After the fun part was over, it would be necessary to dispose of the corpse.

The potential corpse watched in numb disbelief as his aged mother clumpity-clumped the purple walker over to the coffee table, grunted and wheezed as she leaned to take the nearest candidate, which was on the end of the fan. “Hah!” She held the ace of clubs over her head, gloating as she flicked the card at her son. “Gimme that big pistol!”

After a slight hesitation, and with some reluctance, Nancy yielded the revolver to the elderly lady.

Knowing Jake’s natural limitations, also the state of his physical and emotional exhaustion, one might not have expected much from him. But a man whose girlfriend, wife, and mother are drawing cards for the high privilege of executing him is obliged to come up with a plan, and quickly. All the while the ladies were fussing with the cards, the intended victim had been easing himself closer to the floor lamp. Just as Momma took aim with the .44, the offspring gave the lamp a healthy yank, pulling the cord from the wall, which put the room into near darkness. All three women let out outraged howls, and the revolver boomed. A shot drilled a big hole in the wall just behind where he had been standing, while another shattered the television screen—which made the darkness total. Jake had crawled across the floor toward the door, only to arrive there and find it latched. Amid all the confusion while Lulabelle was attempting to wrestle the pistol away from Petunia, the intended victim redirected his crawl to the nearest exit, where he kicked off like a bullfrog to launch his bulky self through the window
as Lulabelle fired three .44 slugs. Two missed his behind by inches.

The third hit him where it hurt. No; in the wallet. And though his skin was not broken, the concussion impact on his butt might have been a ninth-inning whack by a Major League pinch hitter wielding a Louisville Slugger. This parting blow enhanced his ambition to become the first human being to break the sound barrier solely by muscle power. Mr. Harper was a blur on the landscape!

And do not underestimate the performance of American automotive products.

Before the pistol could be reloaded, the women heard the valiant little Escape go
vrrrooom!
as it lurched away like a jackrabbit with three she-wolves about three lopes behind. Mother, wife, and girlfriend—all responded with outraged shouts, rude curses, and, finally—streams of salty tears.

It was all for naught.

JAKE HARPER
was about sixty miles from Kerrville when he realized that his left buttock was beginning to ache like all get-out.

Bad news has a habit of arriving hand in hand with like companions.

Mr. Harper also noticed that the little SUV was running on fumes.
Damn. All I need now is to get stranded out here in the middle of nowhere.
But not a quarter mile down the road from nowhere was an all-night gas station. He pulled in, put his hand on his hip pocket, and discovered that his wallet had been badly chewed up by the .44-caliber slug, as had most of the currency therein. Only three twenty-dollar bills remained unscathed. He limped inside and gave the sleepy-eyed young woman at the cash register forty dollars.

As he pumped eighty-eight-octane into the tank, Harper mulled over his desperate financial situation and what might be done to remedy it.
I could bop that cashier on the noggin
and take what’s in the till.
But this was Texas.
She probably has a pistol under the counter
. He had no desire to face another armed female. Another option was more to his liking.
That cash Hermann Wetzel stashed under his office heating vent sure would come in handy. If the cops don’t know I’m driving this rich guy’s car, I could drive back to his big home on Muleshoe Mountain without much chance of being spotted. And if things have cooled off some at Hermann’s house, I could slip in there at night and snatch his bag of money.

It would be easy enough to drop by a public library somewhere up the road and check out the Granite Creek newspaper on the Internet to find out whether the local cops were still looking for his Jeep, or had discovered the break-in and knew he’d stolen the Escape. Despite the ache under his hip pocket, Jake Harper smiled as the pump shut off at $40. No, make that $40.02. He saw this as a good omen. No doubt about it, Lady Luck was beginning to smile upon him.

Such a possibility cannot be discounted. She might have been laughing out loud.

Lost and Found

When he received the news at six minutes before midnight, Scott Parris was enjoying a bedtime snack of Oreo cookies and chocolate milk. He thanked the Pueblo chief of police and immediately placed a call to Charlie Moon, who picked up on the second ring. “What is it, pard?”

“You’d never guess in a month of Mondays.”

Maybe not. But Moon was willing to give it a shot. Perhaps it was because Sarah Frank had been deeply despondent since her friend swiped the cherished birthday present. Or because Aunt Daisy was nagging him every chance she got about when he was going to get off his butt and go find that truck and what had he been a tribal cop for all those years not to mention a big-shot tribal investigator nowadays if he couldn’t even find a shiny red pickup. No wonder Daisy’s nephew was grasping at straws. “Sarah’s pickup has turned up.”