The Tramp (The Bound Chronicles #1) (8 page)

Why not?

He squirted paint directly on his hands and did whatever he felt like with the drawing for a while. It felt good. Finally finished, the drawing—technically a painting then, he guessed—wasn’t bad.

“Thanks, Candy,” he said out loud and actually laughed. He saw page after page in his mind of all the expressionist artists she had schooled him with; in support of Sam “finding his voice.” He cocked his head sideways and regarded his recreation of the admiral. He shrugged and tossed the tubes and sticks back into the box, his hands stained with sooty charcoal and sticky with paint, then let out a long sigh, loosening his shoulders.

Sam decided Candy herself was what he needed. It was late but she was a night owl and might still be up. Fishing his cell phone out of his pocket—belatedly wishing he had washed his hands first—he pushed her speed dial key. She picked up on the second ring. He could hear her father gabbing in the background, “always rambling on about something,” as Candy put it.

What does her dad get so jacked up about this late at night?
He knew the man would often record old Masterpiece Theater re-runs or History Channel specials, and then make Candy watch them with him, talking over the television instead of watching it.
Sounds like you’re ready for bed, Mr. Vale. I need your daughter to myself for a few hours.

“I thought you’d never call, what took you so long?” Candy whispered into the receiver.

“Hi. Meet me?”

“Half an hour.” She hung up without waiting for Sam’s confirmation.

“Perfect,” Sam agreed to the dead phone line.

He’d worked up a sweat drawing and he felt suffocated in his crowded little house on wheels in the musty, windless cove. He couldn’t get to Candy fast enough. Not even glancing at his mother, who was still passed out and snoring on the couch, he strode through the trailer and out the front door. He let the spring snap the door shut behind him with a sharp, metallic slap.

chapter nine

Charlotte Finley massaged her temples, careful not to smear the long tails of black eyeliner, and tossed aside her dog-eared copy of Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

Where is that little Hershey squirt?

It had to be past nine by then; he must have had a rough night at After Dark, the little hidey hole in the hollows that passed for a night club. She spun her chair around and kicked her high-heels up to rest on a copper beer keg adapter. She thought about kicking it in an inconspicuous location.

Uncle Rottenbrain Twatts would never know a leak from his tight little asshole. That moonshine probably smells just as fresh.

Instead, she got up off her perch and pulled her long pencil skirt down tight over her round fanny, then appraised that endowment in the copper mirror of a nearby distilling tank. She stuck her cheeks out further to swell into the convex reflection, gave one a slap, then licked her finger and mimed a sizzle on her hip. Leaning down to correct a lipstick smear at the corner of her mouth, she saw her uncle stumble through the front door. She leaned down lower and squeezed her cleavage together for his viewing displeasure.

“Girl,” he sighed. He shuffled past her, exasperated and already sweating in the muggy morning. “I can see clear down to your navel. Why you dress like that?”

“It’s funny you should think of something shaped like a navel, when gazing into peaches, Uncle Boobie—I mean, Bobby.” She followed him back into the man-cave they called an office, stepping around a collection of empty beer bottles. She kicked a stray cigarette butt.
Nasty monkeys.
“Where were you poking that gaze of yours last night, anyway?”

Robert Watts pinched the bridge of his nose and whined, “I don’t have the head for that crap this morning, Charlotte; what are you doing here?” He was no match for Charlotte, whatever she had planned. He plopped some Alka-Seltzer into his Irish coffee and lumbered onto the closest Barcalounger, his eyes closed in a wince as the recliner careened backwards against his weight.

“I know; I should be at church,” she vowed hollowly, in a cherry-red pout. Her uncle nodded in dazed, self-righteous agreement until she added, under her breath, “I have so many…sins to confess. Maybe I will, next time I see Father Ringold.”

Robert’s blood-shot eyes ratcheted open, his pudgy knuckles turning white on the armrests—she had his full attention.

Charlotte smirked.
Nothing wrong with a little threat and a diddle sweat.

She rifled through desk drawers and paperclip holders that held random trash, wrappers, lost pen caps, and flicked a cockroach off the table lamp, wondering exactly how far she could push it. She was so tired of being a Finley Minion to the Squattin’ Twatts. Looking over at the shivery mass of quaking blubber that was her uncle, she wondered how it had happened, not for the first time.

They were all equals in the beginning, both families moonshiners and both selling it fair and square; but somehow, in the salad days things got nasty, and—Charlotte still didn’t really know how—the Wattses ended up cranking the gears while the Finleys ended up being the grease.
We kept making the product and they kept running the show; a case of hard work not paying off.
She thought of her honest, hardworking father, who, for all of his ethical convictions and moral codes, was now employed as a menial house servant. His hands were clean but his wife had died cleaning toilets. His brother Virgil hadn’t minded slaving away for pennies on the dollar either, and now that the Wattses could smuggle in the fancy stuff, moonshine sold cheaper than ever. Virgil had built the very distillery that the Wattses now charged him to use, their own “bourbon” label produced and bottled in New York.

But that was the problem with hard work and ethics: they just didn’t pay. Ideas did, and Charlotte had an idea. She had looked into the Di Brigo kid and, sure enough, he had connections to a winery back in Italy. Imagine if she, Charlotte Finley, could be the sole wine connection for a hundred miles in every direction. Those valley whores she saw at that joke of a Rotary Club meeting sucked up the Chardonnay by the bucket, and they had to drive across two counties to buy it. But they bought it by the case. Not only that, but now Joe Robinson was planning to open a “private” dining area that sold beer and wine to rich tourists. They’d all pay top dollar, and she knew how to bring it in cheap.

Thanks to connections of my own…

“You’re a spunky little gal, Char,” Joe had told her. All trussed up and swollen with need, he would’ve told her anything. “You find me the best buy, if you think you can, and I’ll get it out the back door.”

“Really? You trust me?”

He had accepted the handcuffs with a Cheshire cat grin, but that didn’t necessarily indicate trust. With the pervs, they usually liked to get scared about what they
didn’t
trust. It made powerful people feel controlled, and that got them off.
Whatever works, ain’t no nevermind to me…

“Let’s see what you come up with, honey.”

She made him pay for calling her “honey” and he thanked her more than usual afterwards.

“We’ll work something out,” is what he had said about her business proposal. Charlotte didn’t really trust Joe either, but she could probably get him to do anything, especially with the promise of a whip or a riding crop. She smiled, thinking of the fun she had in store, then glanced at her poor, terrified uncle. He was no fun at all. She wished she was up against a little more testosterone; she had purposely come on a day that she knew he would be alone, unaided by his muscle crew.
This is boring, though. Poor little lamb.

“Alright, I’ll get straight to…” she swept one leg over his rotund midsection, her spiked heel narrowly missing his nose, “…the meat of it.” Her ponytail swung around to whip him in the face, and she sat down with her crotch firmly placed over his own.
Never anything firm down there.

“Oh, come on, now,” he complained in a wretched strangle, and pulled his hands away from his lap like it was wildfire, raising his hands to shield his eyes. The split in her skirt ran the length of one thigh, reaching nearly to her waist. “My god, I can see straight through those lacey underwears. Jeezus, Charlotte—what do you want?”

If there was one thing that sent Uncle Robert into a panic, it was pussy. Charlotte rucked up her skirt a little further to make sure he had a good view, then she leaned forward for emphasis, pressing her pelvis into his limp groin and rolling it around in a smutty little dance. She almost laughed at his stifled whimper, and had to calm herself for a few seconds. She reached a hand up to cradle his ear and whispered, “I need a project.”

“Whoo, girl. I figured there was something going on, for all the time off you been getting.”

“Tyler Finley, you git.” Robert bolted upright in a panic, tumbling the little vixen from his lap.

“Hey, Ty,” she greeted her pimple-faced cousin, holding onto the arm of the chair to keep herself from falling to the sticky floor and ruining her favorite skirt.
What luck, a witness. You’re in the palm of my hand now, fat boy.
Charlotte wiped her palm off on her skirt with that thought. Sometimes you just had to get your hands dirty to get ahead.

Robert fumbled with his clothes: straightening his pants and stuffing his shirt in his waistband. He blustered past the sneering boy, his voice echoing in the cavernous warehouse, “Set to work or go home. We’re talking business in here.”

Charlotte stood in the doorway, making a show of readjusting her clothes like a frightened schoolgirl, while Robert came back with a warning look, a broom and a dust pan. He shoved the cleaning equipment in Tyler’s hand, and slammed the door to the office in his face, the wooden blinds slapping against the window. A muffled curse came from the other side and a threat hissed underneath.

“You better fix that,” Robert said shaking a finger in Charlotte’s face, and walking an arm’s length away from her to sit behind his desk. “Fix that misunderstanding.”

“I’ll fix him, when you talk business with me.”

chapter ten

Big Joe slept peacefully, with cables attached to pressure points; IV’s pumping, catheters draining and monitors beeping rhythmically. An old cathode-ray television, mounted high enough to discourage civilian fiddling, was mutely transmitting a “Price Is Right” re-run.

“I guess that’s a re-run, do they still make that show?” Steph asked him. She tried to lounge back into the uncomfortable hospital chair and examine her nails. Nothing to pick, they were perfect. She smoothed her hair and sat quietly with her hands in her lap, looking at her shoes and thinking. Helen Collins had stopped by her house to talk about the new foreign exchange student.
Why is that my problem now?

Steph was president of Andrew Jackson High’s Parent Teacher Association, it was true. But she wasn’t sure she wanted the hassle of anything to do with the Rotary Club anymore. It all seemed like fun at first—and a good excuse to get together with the girls—but a
foreigner
at Jackson? Steph’s mouth puckered like she had just sucked on a lemon wedge.

She sighed and focused on Joe’s slack face. “If only you’d wake up, big man. Take this off my hands and clear this Mieke Walsh slapdash up.”

That woman thought she could just traipse into town, scoop up one of Shirley’s most eligible bachelors, and start running the show. Not if Steph could help it. She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head.
No siree bob.

Joe shifted in his sleep, his head rolling to just the right angle to produce a wet, guttural snore. Steph cocked her head to the side.
Just how well do Joe Robinson and Mieke Walsh know each other?

“Time for Mr. Robinson’s sponge bath.” Steph jumped and turned to see a nurse, built like a fire-hydrant, bustle in sweeping aside screeching curtains. The nurse stopped short and grunted. “Oh. Thought you was the one with the black hair.”

“Excuse me?”

“The one this man’s always going on about? The black hair and the black eyes, on and on.”

How often does Mieke visit?
Steph sat up a little straighter in her chair. “An Asian woman?”

The nurse’s eyes twinkled and she clamped her mouth shut—she’d said too much. She chortled and moved around the room checking monitor screens and rearranging cables. “I’ll have to change his catheter, too, and you might see more than you bargained for. If you stick around.”

Darn.
Steph knew she had lost her chance for a little gossip by seeming too eager. “No, I should go. How long will he sleep?”

“Oh, all day, this one.” The nurse belted out a humorless laugh. “And if he does come around, he’ll probably just push his little button and go right back to dreamland.”

Steph hadn’t spoken to Big Joe since the collapse, so she had to rely on hearsay. His wife Pearl constantly retold the “fainting spell” story but Pearl had gotten that secondhand. All the reliable information Steph had was scraped together from the hospital staff’s comments. Apparently, Big Joe suffered a couple of skull fractures when he fell and was in a lot of pain. His doctors had deemed it wise to keep him under observation for a couple days, especially on regular doses of morphine, with his unsurprising high blood pressure. That seemed pretty dramatic to Steph, and it had certainly been more than “just a couple days.”

“Are you sure you should be doing that when he’s unconscious? Seems a little unethical to me,” Steph said, with a distasteful grimace at the way the nurse was moving body parts.

“Hospital schedule don’t stop for nobody, honey. Monday morning sponge bath, first thing,” the nurse said, unperturbed. She grunted at the considerable effort her task entailed. “You gon’ let me do my job, or what, Ms…?”

The threat was clear: Steph wasn’t family and could be barred from the intesive care floor. She had a mind to tell Ms. High-and-Mighty that Pearl Robinson herself had asked that she look in on him. Well, sort of. When Steph offered to help, Pearl was happy to accept; Steph had a feeling she needed a break from hospital duty.

Oh well, no reason to be ugly.
She took her time rearranging the vase of roses she had brought that morning. They were just spectacular, and straight from her own garden. Glancing over, she got an unwelcome peek under the skimpy hospital gown, however. She made haste to the exit and didn’t look back.