A big hand landed on her shoulder and she was turned around to face a good ole boy in overalls towering over her.
“No cuts, lady. I come here for the hot dogs, and you ain’t a’gonna get betwixt me and the last dog.”
When Serenity had volunteered at the concession stand during Joseph’s high school days she had spent many afternoons making a run to Walmart with other team moms. Buy as many of the cheapest hot dogs as she could, red sausages with so much gristle and so little quality control that she was horrified to carry the cooler. She always left a few in the fridge at home, but Joe refused to eat them there because they didn’t taste as good as the ones at the VM.
But anytime they went to see a game, two steps past the gate he always turned, zombie-like, to join his buddies in the packed crowd waiting for dogs. Somehow, on warm fall nights in a concrete stadium, a combination of boiled gristle, fat, rat excrement and less than 2 percent of something called “other” wrapped in a plastic casing that had probably been banned by the FDA for ten years would transubstantiate into a substance that was irresistible to American males. Catholics had their communion miracle, and worshipers of the southern football religion had theirs. Maybe Jesus did answer their prayers.
Serenity should have known better than to try to interfere.
“Sorry,” she said. She went around to the side door of the concession stand; it was propped open to let at least some of the steam escape. She wedged her way in.
The inside looked like any other sweatshop, which technically it was since the women and one poor man inside were packed cheek-to-jowl, sweating through their clothes, with customers screaming through the window and order runners trying to wedge past scrambling workers to put orders together.
“Serenity! Thank God you’re here. Get on the shake machine.”
“Dottie, I need to talk to you, just for a minute.”
“And I need someone on the shake machine.”
“I’m not here to volunteer.”
“And I’m not here to talk. Give me ten minutes on the shake machine and I’ll talk to you. At the counter.”
Serenity picked up an apron that was crumpled next to the shake machine and went to work. Chocolate shakes came out as fast as she could make them and were snatched out of her hand before she could set them down. After what seemed like a few hundred shakes, a skinny teenaged boy walked by the door with his head consciously turned away.
Didn’t work. “Harry!” Dottie yelled. “Get your ass in here and take over the shake machine from Ms. Hammer.”
Dottie glanced back and a runner nodded and started filling a sack. Dottie turned to Serenity while the sack was being filled.
“Okay, what you need?”
“You seen Joe tonight?”
“Twicet.” Dottie reached back without looking, took the bag, and handed it to a man at the counter. Money was passed, change was made. “He came in about fifteen minutes before kickoff, when it was just getting crowded. Got two dogs. Came back to the side door and got two more dogs about ten minutes before you showed up.”
Serenity nodded and said, “Last two would have been to go. He always gets a few for the road.”
Dottie said, “What’ll you have?” to the next woman in line, and Serenity slipped back out the side door.
So Joe had already left. She pulled out her phone and tried his cell again. No answer, again. If Joe were heading home, he’d answer his phone. She called Doom.
“Plan B. Joe’s already left. Meet me on the right side of the concession stand and we’ll figure something out.”
She hung up and tried to think. Maybe the drug lord was still here.
She looked around and realized the futility of looking for someone in a crowd of five thousand. It wasn’t like he’d wear a sign saying, buy drugs here.
Maybe not so futile. She saw a dark-skinned, white twenty-something boy slouched by himself against the fence behind the concession stand. He had a hipster hat pulled over his eyes, and baggy black jeans hanging halfway to his knees. She tried to approach him with as cool a walk as she could manage. Cool for a librarian, anyway.
“Hey, bro,” she said.
He didn’t look up. “Get lost, old lady.”
“I got a hankering. And I got money.”
The boy could have been a statue. “I don’t know you, and I don’t waste time on anybody who uses words like ‘hankering.’”
“Don’t you lecture me on words, young man. ‘Hanker’ is a perfectly legitimate word, dating back to seventeenth century Flemish.”
So much for Serenity’s cool drug addict act.
She heard a voice at her back. “Uh, Ms. Hammer.”
She ignored the voice and pushed into the kid’s face. “Okay. I don’t care about drugs. But I want to you to tell me where Don Juan is.”
The boy looked at her in horror.
Someone pulled her back and turned her around.
Doom said, “Ms. Hammer, that’s not a drug dealer. That’s Billy Zant. He’s in our young writers group at the library. He thinks he has to be a disaffected young writer, kind of a cross between Raymond Chandler and James Dean. Not a drug dealer. Ms. Hammer, I’m sorry, but you don’t know what drug dealers look like at Mad High.”
“Then you do it. But I want to know where Don Juan is. Hopefully Joe’s gone to him.”
“Done.”
Doom walked off through the crowd and Serenity followed her to the fifty-yard line on the home side. All the seats were packed except for a little knot of high school boys in preppy clothes who had a small ring of empty seats surrounding them. Doom crooked a finger at the boy in the middle and motioned him down.
“We need to talk to you about drugs,” she said.
He smiled a crocodile smile. “You’re cute, but I don’t know you, and I don’t sell drugs.”
“You’ll never see me again, and I don’t want drugs.”
He kept smiling a smug little smile.
“What I want is to know is where I can find Don Juan.”
He leered and Doom said, “Not a Don Juan, and certainly not you, for Christ’s sake. The real Don Juan.”
He tried to look tough. “Why should I tell you?”
Doom reached into the big bag she carried for a purse and pulled out a card.
“Abercrombie and Fitch discount card. Forty percent off.”
sixty
follow the bigfoot
“THIS HAS GOT TO BE A JOKE,” said Serenity as she backed her car out of its spot, the high school band still loud even here in the parking lot. “You got played, and now we’re on a wild goose chase.”
“Maybe.” Doom fiddled with the radio until she found something that sounded like a monkey banging on trash cans and a hound dog howling the same angry curse over and over. Serenity wanted to ask what the words were, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
Didn’t matter.
“Hard country rap,” Doom said without being asked. “The band is called Quarter Horse Cock; song is ‘Kill the Goddamned Game Wardens.’ You like it?”
“Uplifting. Didn’t Johnny Mathis do the original?”
“Don’t know who Johnny Mathis was. One of the old guys like the Beatles? But I do know that you’re the one who got us out here on a wild goose chase. We’re out here to protect your husband, who’s like eight feet tall and carries so many guns he clanks when he walks. Seriously? He needs our help?”
“He’s mad enough to do something crazy, and he’s alone, against an organization that has wanted him dead for so long that he never goes up against them alone. Until now, maybe. So, yes, he does. Whether he knows it or not.”
“And this helps the library how?”