He reminded himself of his predicament. The hotel was a good ten miles away. His ankle throbbed from landing on a splintery crate. His coat was in the cell, and his wallet was in Japonica's desk. This wasn't the kind of town where taxis cruised, especially the kind willing to accept welfare cases.
There were a few coins in his pocket. If he could find a pay phone, he could call Cherri Lucinda and have her pick him up. He couldn't go back to The Luck of the Draw, but there were plenty of cheap motels in the area and she'd surely brought some money to buy souvenirs. Come Monday morning he'd start looking for a lawyer to get him out of this damn mess. Mrs. Jim Bob could be dealt with later.
He must have walked for most of a mile before he spotted a brightly lit convenience store. There were no cop cars in the parking lot or uniforms bustling around inside. He tucked in his shirt and tried to look like a man on an evening stroll.
Inside, it was blessedly warm. He pulled out his change, hoping he'd have enough for a burrito once Cherri Lucinda was on her way. It didn't look promising, but he went on over to the pay phone. If there'd ever been a directory, it was long gone, so he continued to the counter, where a bored woman was thumbing through a magazine.
"Got a directory?" he asked.
"Yeah, somewhere."
"Can I see it?"
"I s'pose," she said, setting aside the magazine, "but only if you're buying something. The directory's for the use of customers."
Jim Bob fought off the urge to roll up the magazine and jam it down her throat. "I'll buy something after I make my call. I can't make my call until I look up the number, and I can't look up the number till you pass over the directory. You follow all that?"
"Ain't no need to get nasty," she said as she bent down and came back up with a thin directory. "This stays right where I can see it."
Jim Bob found the number of The Luck of the Draw, shoved the directory back at her, and was heading for the phone when a woman came into the store. Her hair was spiky and a bizarre shade of red, and she had safety pins stuck through her eyebrows and her cheeks. She was wearing a bulky jacket, but her legs were bare below very short shorts. Bare and shapely.
Despite the importance of calling Cherri Lucinda, Jim Bob stopped in his tracks and stared.
"Hey," she said, smiling, then went over to the case and took out a six-pack of beer. On her way to the counter she added a bag of potato chips and a handful of beef jerkies. "How much you want?" she asked the clerk.
Jim Bob forced himself to dial the number of the hotel and ask for Cherri Lucinda's room. When no one answered, he tried his own room in case she was sitting in there, feeling bad about what all had happened to him just because he'd done her a favor.
She wasn't there, either. He hung up the receiver and took his change back out to see what he had left. He figured he couldn't buy a bus ticket for seventy-seven cents, or a pack of gum, for that matter. The clerk wasn't gonna let him hang around for long, even if he had enough money to keep calling Cherri Lucinda till she got to her room.
The peculiar-looking woman came over to him. "You in trouble?"
Jim Bob did his best not to gawk at her choice of jewelry. "Yeah, somebody was hiding in the backseat of my car. He took my money and dumped me out on the road down a piece. All I want to do is get back to my hotel. Any chance you can give me a lift?"
"Sure," she said, going out the door.
He trotted after her, wondering if there was any way to get not only a ride, but also a beer and a beef jerky or two. "This is real kind of you to do a favor like this for somebody you don't know. What's your name?"
"Joy. Get in the car."
He was feeling downright giddy with his good fortune as he got into a big old Buick. The woman now known as Joy got into the driver's side, but before he could make a passing reference to the beer, a very bulky figure climbed in next to him and slammed the door.
"Who's he?" the man demanded, jabbing Jim Bob's shoulder. Unlike his companion, his hair was blond and pulled back in a frizzy ponytail. His eyes looked like pennies imbedded in a wad of dough. "Fer chrissake, Joy, I leave you for thirty seconds and you're already picking up some scrawny little asshole."
"Shut your mouth, Saddam," she said. "You're the only asshole in this car. I have just about had it with you. The only reason I came here was to play in the slots tournament. The minute I turned my back, you took all the money out of my purse and bought a goddamn chainsaw. Now all we can do is drink beer and watch television-if you haven't hocked your set. You're not only an asshole, you the biggest fuckin' asshole in the world!"
"You'd better watch it," he rumbled.
Jim Bob was about to suggest he leave them alone to work out their disagreement when the car squealed out of the parking lot and went flying down the highway. "If you could drop me off at The Luck of the Draw-"
Joy stomped down on the accelerator. "Do you realize how long I saved up for the tournament? The foreman was so mad when I called in sick this morning that I may not have a job on Monday. That wouldn't have mattered if I'd won some money, but that ain't gonna happen. You know what you can do when we get to your place, Saddam? You can fuck yourself, that's what?"
"You owed me three hundred dollars from when I bailed you out. I was just takin' what was mine."
"It was mine to enter the tournament," she retorted, swerving around a car and narrowly averting a head-on collision with a semi.
Jim Bob licked his lips. "I think my hotel's back the other way."
"Shut up," said Saddam. "Okay, maybe I should have said something before I took the money. I got all of twelve dollars in my pocket, and that's not gonna pay your entry fee. What do you want me to do?"
"Replace it," she said, then slammed on the brakes and spun into a U-turn so abruptly that Jim Bob sprawled across Saddam's substantial thighs.
When he sat back up, he saw they were approaching the convenience store. It looked a helluva lot cozier than it had a few minutes earlier, like an oasis in a desert of darkness. Joy pulled in and leaned across Jim Bob to open the glove compartment.
"You should be able to get a couple of hundred," she said as she pulled out a knitted cap.
Saddam pulled the cap over his head and down to his chin. Lopsided holes exposed his mouth and eyes. "Yeah, it's Saturday night. I'll be back in a minute."
Jim Bob watched in shock as Saddam got out of the car, took a gun from his coat pocket, and pushed open the door of the store. "Maybe I should get out here," he said, barely audible. "It was real generous of you, but I can see you're busy. I'll catch another ride."
Joy clenched his arm. "Can you imagine the nerve of that Saddam stealing money from me? If we were married, it'd be one thing, but this is fuckin' different. I worked overtime every chance I got to save up so I could play in the tournament. Then he goes and buys another chainsaw. I mean, how many goddamn chainsaws does he need?"
Jim Bob figured he was gonna have to leave his arm in the Buick if he got out. He was trying to squirm out of her amazingly tight grip when Saddam ran out of the store and dived into the backseat.
"Haul ass," he commanded.
As the car shot forward, Jim Bob saw the clerk standing at the window. She was staring at his face as if memorizing every last detail, from his beetlish forehead all the way down to his slack jaw.
It was possible that a certain amount of adolescent mischief was tolerated at The Luck of the Draw Casino & Hotel. Throwing chairs off balconies might be a time-honored Mississippi tradition, a unique display of gratitude for hospitality. The lawn maintenance crew might expect to pull some number of chairs out of the bushes each morning. I hadn't seen any other chairs fly by, but I was preoccupied with my plummeting body temperature. There'd been a heavy frost the preceding night.