Except—as I was about to find out—Dodge had other plans.
7
Coming around the side of the building, I blinked against the strobe-light glow cast by the whirling visibar lights atop the Sheriff’s Department vehicle parked at an angle in front of the meat wagon. It appeared that I wasn’t going anywhere for the moment.
Plastering what I hoped was a genuinely innocent smile on my face, I started toward the nearest uniform and said, “Is there a prob—”
He held up his hand—Please be quiet—as he spoke into the radio microphone. “He just came out of the bathroom. Call Impound and let ‘em know.”
Impound? I looked around. What the hell did he think—
—You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into—
—the meat wagon now had a passenger, as well as some additional cargo.
Young Miss Memorial sat in the passenger seat. Behind her, crammed in none-too-carefully, were the contents of the Dead Pile; wreathes, crosses, and several hearts, all of them now sans photographs, all of them having scattered ribbons and plastic flowers around the interior as well as over Miss Driscoll’s oh-so expensive coffin.
I couldn’t have been in the restroom for more than three minutes, yet somehow in that time Young Miss Memorial had not only managed to cover a good two-and-half miles of road on foot, but did so while carrying all of her evening’s roadside pickings. I doubted that the things were all that heavy individually or cumulatively, but their collective bulk was enough to tell me no way could she have done this on her own.
So who’d helped her?
The sheriff finished talking to whomever he’d radioed, then signaled to his deputy, who promptly came up behind me and shoved the business end of a revolver into my back. Always priding myself on taking a subtle hint when one is offered, I slowly raised my hands. “We’re not going to have any problems, are we?” said the sheriff, looking down at his feet. Momentarily unable to summon a witty retort, I just shook my head. “You have some paperwork to show me?” When I neither spoke nor nodded, the deputy pressed his gun farther into my back. “My inside coat pocket,” I managed to get out. The sheriff reached in and removed the envelope, took out the FRTP, read it over, then said, “Okay, then. Let’s go.” “Go where?”
He nodded toward the meat wagon. “You’re under arrest for vandalism, theft of city property, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” Little Miss Memorial smiled at us, held up an open can of beer, then gave the gas station attendant a little wave. “This is bullshit,” I said. The sheriff took a step closer to me. “Oh?”
“I didn’t take those goddamn things and you know it. I’d tell you to ask him—” I nodded toward the attendant, “—but something tells me his memory might be a little fuzzy.”
The sheriff looked over at the attendant. For a moment I thought he was actually going to ask the guy, then just as quickly realized what I should have known all along: they were all in on it. No, Little Miss Memorial couldn’t have moved the Dead Pile so quickly on her own, but with a squad car and a couple of guys to help her—no sweat.
At least now I knew who the attendant had been calling when I first pulled in. What I didn’t know was why.
Summoning all the nerve I had under the circumstances, I said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
This got a huge laugh out of the sheriff as he pushed back his hat, giving me my first clear view of his face.
He was a kid. Nineteen, twenty years old, tops.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, tucking the FRTP back into my pocket. “It’s after two o’clock in the morning. You’re not where you expected to be—you’re where you’re supposed to be, sure, but my guess is you were figuring on—what?—at least a few more hours of road time. Doesn’t matter.” He got right up in my face then. “It’s the middle of the night. No one, and I mean no one, including you, knows where you are right now. We’ve got guns. You’re in possession of vandalized and stolen property. And there’s an underage girl in your front seat with an open container of alcohol. So you don’t get to say where you will or will not go or what you will or will not do.”
I wondered how many Raymond Chandler novels he’d had to read in order to teach himself to talk that way, but figured this wouldn’t be a good time to ask, so instead I opted for, “I want to talk to someone in authority whose age is higher than my shirt size, if that’s all right with you.” “Fair enough. If you’ll shut the hell up and get into the back seat of my vehicle, I’ll take you to that person.” I nodded toward the meat wagon. “What about—?” The sheriff held out his hand. “The keys.” I gave them to him. “Anything happens to that vehicle or the body, and I’m gonna be in a lot of trouble.”
He smiled. “Nothing’s going to happen. These streets are safe. Hell, a person couldn’t have an accident if they tried.” He walked over and handed the keys to Little Miss Memorial.
“Does Daddy Bliss know that Road Mama’s come home?” she asked him.
The sheriff nodded. “He knows. Everyone knows by now.” He patted the top of the wagon, and then smiled. “I like how that sounds, ‘Road Mama’s come home.’”
Little Miss Memorial smiled back at him. “Me, too.”
Road Mama and Daddy Bliss. Sounded like the name of some faux country & western ballad from 1970’s pop radio, a rip-snortin’, high-ballin’, pedal-to-the-metal toe-tapper you’d hear sandwiched between C.W. McCall’s “Convoy” and Jerry Reed’s theme from Smoky and the Bandit. If I hadn’t been so angry and scared (mostly scared), I might have laughed at the thought.
The sheriff leaned down to whisper something in Little Miss Memorial’s ear. The back of his jacket pulled tight, and for a moment I thought, he’s got five spines, because that’s how it looked. It was only as he stood back up and I heard a pronounced metallic scrape and the rustle of straining Velcro that I realized he was wearing some kind of complicated back brace. Without thinking, I asked, “Does that hurt?” “I beg your pardon?” I gestured toward him. “That brace you’re wearing. Does it hurt?” He stared at me for a few seconds, blinked, then replied, “Sometimes. What’s it to you?’ I shrugged. “I’m just wondering why you weren’t assigned desk duty until you healed up.”
“Because, Mother Theresa, I’m not going to heal up.”
“I meant no offense.”
“Nobody ever does.” He opened the back door of his cruiser. “Any more questions, or can we get on with this?”
I ducked down my head and climbed in behind the shotgun seat, surprised to see no wire-mesh divider separating the back seat from the front.
The deputy who’d been holding the gun in my back slid in on the other side of me, closed the door, and removed his hat. He looked, if anything, even younger than the sheriff. Round face, bright grey eyes, flushed cheeks…sixteen, at most. Plus he was smaller than the sheriff, so his uniform was pulled in and tucked tightly so it wouldn’t hang too loosely. He might as well have been a big-for-his age child playing Policeman. If it weren’t for the metal plate covering the right side of his skull, I might have even believed he was a little kid.