Turkey Ranch Road Rage (10 page)

The sun had just dipped out of sight when we pulled up to Mother’s house. However, there was still plenty of light to see the Bowman County Sheriff’s white Expedition sitting in front of the house.

My eyes filled with tears yet again, only this time I wasn’t sad. I pulled the Buick into the garage then hurried out to meet Jerry, who was also coming toward me.

“I told you I’d come,” he said, pulling me to him. “I can’t stay, but I wanted to see you.”

He explained about the police chief who was there because of some top secret something and getting something or other arranged. He couldn’t tell me much about it, but said he would later and everything would be okay.

Truth is, I didn’t really care what he had to do, what mattered to me was that he’d driven all the way over from Bowman City because he wanted to see me. That mattered a lot. I mattered to him.

Jerry didn’t know how much longer it was going to take, but said he’d call later. “Jolene,” he said, kissing me deeply one more time. “Trust me.”

God help me, I did.

As Jerry drove away, I caught a glimpse of a curtain swaying. It was no great surprise that my mother had been watching the whole scene. Lucille is and always will be Lucille. However, there had been some odd—perhaps even borderline compassionate—behavior on her part at the cemetery. To begin with, she’d gone easy on me, giving me only a brief version of “how could you be that stupid” and really limiting her use of “I told you so.” In addition, I am pretty sure she also gave me some actual usable motherly advice, which is just plain weird.

As I turned and walked toward the house, I realized that I was feeling good about things with Jerry. I trusted him.

On the other hand, regardless of whatever bonding moment might have occurred with my mother, trusting her was still completely out of the question.

Chapter
Five

I awoke to the sound of gunfire.

It took a few seconds to figure that out, of course, but only a few, as gunfire tops the list of things likely to occur when I am in the general proximity of my mother.

It still startled me. Okay, it terrified me. I did not grow up with this sort of thing. Really. The woman has not been a geriatric road warrior all her life, only since she hit about seventy, which coincided rather closely with the sudden death of my father. Neither of us took it very well, but I’m pretty sure Lucille lost her freaking mind. The current situation—specifics unknown but definitely involving bullets—would tend to support that theory.

It is important to note that I assimilated this jumble of thoughts rather quickly— and while racing through the house to the front porch to see firsthand the full extent of the crisis. I stumbled into the living room and flattened myself against the wall by the front door, police-style, then stuck my nose around the doorframe and peeked out.

There, at the edge of the porch, in all her glory and bathrobe, was my mother and her Little Lady. No, her “Little Lady” is not a cocker spaniel. It is a laser-sighted 9 mm Glock, which at the moment was rapidly blowing holes into the side of a white four-door compact sedan.

Between shots, I heard a high-pitched shriek that sounded something like “stop” or “don’t shoot” or some other phrase that my mother was sure to ignore.

Since the shooting was decidedly a one-way affair, I stepped into the doorway to get a better view and tentatively grabbed the latch of the glass storm door. In an oversized tee shirt and not much else, I didn’t feel particularly motivated to wrestle her for the gun, and telling her to stop was a waste of good air. As I mulled over other impractical options such as buying a stun gun and simply going back to bed until she got bored, I noticed an odd sound. Silence. Reverberating Silence. The gunfire had stopped. My ears, however, were ringing like a church bell.

Mother turned toward me, dropped out an empty clip from the pistol and said, loudly, “I’ve got three full clips in my top left dresser drawer, the one with my underwear. You run get them, Jolene. And hurry up about it,” she yelled. “He might get away.”

I had serious doubts about that—not about what was in the underwear drawer—but the getting away part. Before I could ask any questions or voice my, um, concerns, a squeaky “don’t shoot” chirped from behind the bullet-riddled car.

“I’m unarmed,” the voice continued. “Please don’t shoot me. I’ll come out with my hands up.”

Yeah, that’d be great. With his hands up. “Mother, who’s behind that car and what have you done to him?”

“That’s Demon Seed,” Lucille said venomously. “And he hasn’t got a scratch on him. Yet.”

“Who?”

“He’s nothing but a lying little weasel. He’s the one trying to take my property and ruin my life. Now, go get me those clips or get out of my way.”

“Take your house?”

“Steal my house is more like it, the lying little twerp. The clips, Jolene, hurry up.”

“You know, you’ve pretty much destroyed his car,” which best I could tell was a Hyundai. “Let’s call that good for the day.”

“I’m making a statement here,” Lucille groused, “and I haven’t even shot out all the tires yet. The fool won’t be thinking he can walk all over me when he’s afoot!”

If you can come up with a reasonable response to that, well, you’re way ahead of me. The best I could do was to try to distract her. “You know, we haven’t been shopping together in ages. Why don’t we get dressed and run into town to the mall. Don’t you need a new purse?” Yes, it was truly a desperate moment.

“I have a new purse, thank you very much, and the mall is not open yet anyway, and you don’t give a hoot about shopping with or without me.” Lucille Jackson puffed out her chest and pointed a long acrylic nail to the front of the yard, where a sidewalk would traditionally be, if indeed Kickapoo had such things. “You look right there. I put up my signs just as plain as day. He chose to ignore them so he got just what he asked for. I have rights.”

She was right about one thing. A garden of yellow and white squares had apparently cropped up in the yard when I wasn’t looking. “Just because you put up ‘no trespassing’ signs, doesn’t mean—”

“Those signs mean just what they say ‘Trespassers will be shot’. Plain and simple.” She nodded her head for emphasis, the piled high hair not daring to wiggle. “Five of them. And I know he can read because he tried to get me to sign a contract to hand him over my life for little of nothing, the dirty rotten scumbag. He was just asking for it.”

Choosing to ignore her logic for as long as possible, I did a quick count of the signs and came up with six, not five. One was obviously handmade as it was larger and floppier than the others. Poster board was my guess. No, I did not ask what it said. “How about you give me the Little Lady and I’ll go out and talk to the man hiding behind the car?”

“That’d be a good idea,” came a squeaky voice. “My name is Damon Saide and I’m here on behalf of the Parks for Progress group. I just came by to explain some things to your mother about my offer. I meant no harm. Can we talk about this?”

He was awfully darned accommodating, considering he’d been pinned behind his car by flying bullets for ten minutes. Not to mention the fact that the car was probably totaled, Lucille having focused on the front half of the vehicle.

“Meant no harm my hind foot,” Lucille said, trying to push around me so she could go get more bullets. “Get out of my way, Jolene, that stupid boy’s trying to steal your inheritance.”

Ah, my inheritance. That was certainly going to get my attention. First of all, I have no doubts whatsoever that my mother will outlive me by at least twenty years. I’m absolutely certain of it, in fact. Secondly, a house such as my mother’s in the thriving metropolis of Kickapoo, Texas, is worth less than your average Suburban—without the full leather package. So, my inheritance wasn’t a real big issue. But, trying to take advantage of my mother was. “Who are you and who sent you? And don’t bother saying Parks for Progress again. I want names. Of people.”

A bit of reddish hair and then some squinty eyes peaked out from behind the front quarter panel. “I represent a confidential client. I’m not at liberty to divulge names at this time, but I assure you, this is a serious offer and the money is available.”

“Really? Well, it seems my mother has a nine-millimeter handgun representing her and she’s real serious about it too. How do you figure that’s going to work out for your confidential client? Or you, for that matter?”

“I told you I needed those clips,” Lucille said, pulling the slide back on the gun and letting it spring forward. “He needs shot. I bet if I shot off his toes one by one he’d start talking.”

“There’s no call for violence,” Demon Seed squeaked. “We were trying to be accommodating—”

The wail of a distant siren cut him off.

“You hear that, Jolene, that’s the sheriff. You’ve yammered so long I lost my chance to shoot the lying rat.” She sounded really disappointed. “I sure wish I’d thought about shooting off his toes earlier. We’d have been long done before now.”

“Well, there’s always next time,” I added helpfully.

The siren grew closer, and, knowing how these things went, I figured I ought to be wearing pants when the cavalry arrived. I smiled at my mother and said, “I’ll just go slip on some jeans.”

“A bra too, Jolene. It’ll probably be Leroy that shows up and God knows he doesn’t need a reason to stare at your chest.”

I feared she was right on both counts, not that I was going to praise her for it. One sane comment does not erase a dozen bullet holes in a Hyundai. Still, boobs swinging free and loose beneath a tee shirt would get me more of Leroy’s attention than I could stand, so off I scurried to correct the problem.

It took me less than a minute and a half to get myself properly attired in shorts, tee shirt and required undergarments. When I stepped out on the porch, however, I saw not Leroy, but his father, Deputy Fritz Harper—Mother’s boyfriend. Although, from the way she was shaking her finger at him and screeching at the top of her lungs, I didn’t think they were real sweet on each other at the moment.

Off to the side and slightly behind Fritz stood a skinny little man, not much taller than I am, with pale skin and reddish blond hair. He was nodding and trying to look very earnest. I’m not one to let others’ opinions influence me—especially not my mother’s—but there was something about him that just didn’t hit me right. Funny, too, he did remind me of a weasel.

I made my way toward the group. Fritz noticed me first and began waving me over, frantically. He, like many before him, assumed I have some influence with my mother. The man should know better. He does know better, which just meant he was really desperate. I could certainly relate to that.

“So,” I said, stepping toward Fritz, “what’s the charge?” Attempted murder was my first guess, but I went with door number two. “Assault with a deadly weapon?”

Fritz shook his head. “Nah, can’t really see that.”

“Discharging a firearm in the city limits?” This was my mother’s sweetheart, after all.

Again the negative. “If Miz Jennings across the street wants to press charges for disturbing the peace, I’d have to do that, but she don’t. She only called in because she was worried about Lucille. Said there was a suspicious looking character lurking around the house and it looked like he was trying to get inside.”

I suppose he had been attempting to knock on the door, but I hadn’t actually witnessed anything before the gunfire started.

“That’s exactly right. He was sneaking around my house, trying to break in,” Lucille said firmly and with a straight face. “The little weasel scared me half to death. I thought he was some ugly rapist on the loose.”

Said weasel shifted about from foot to foot, but didn’t act the least bit offended, or concerned about Lucille’s accusations, or more accurately, fabrications.

I glanced at Fritz. “So what are you going to do?”

“We’ll figure out what charges ought to be filed once we get back to the station.”

“Fine,” I said, with not a hint of cheer. I’d known it would come to this. It always comes to this. “Give me a minute to brush my teeth and grab my purse—”

“Oh, no, Jolene, you don’t have to go,” Fritz said. “I’ll take Mister Saide here on over by myself. Probably all we can really do is charge him with trespassing, but we’ll haul him in to sort things out. I’ll take your statements before we go.”

Huh? He’s the one going to jail? The guy who was dodging bullets behind his now-ruined car is the one in trouble? While I grappled with my rapidly deteriorating mental state, it somehow occurred to me that it was not time for me to be out of bed, much less dealing with law enforcement officers, or bullets, or my mother. “What time is it any way?”

“Seven thirty-five,” Damon Saide said helpfully. “I’ve tried to catch her at home later in the day and she’s rarely here. I thought this would be my best opportunity to talk with her.” He smiled amicably, with not a hint that he’d just been hiding behind his car in fear for his life and was now headed to jail. “I brought a new contract for her to look at. I am sure she’ll be pleased with the new terms.”

“Quit talking about me like I’m not standing right here, hearing every word you say, you little twerp,” Lucille snapped. “And I’ll be pleased when you get yourself off my property. Don’t you set foot out here again either or I can’t be responsible for what might happen to you.”