Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [149]
The trooper ran to where she had vanished and stared helplessly as the poor woman—screaming the entire way—tumbled, bumped, and bounced her way down a surprisingly (to Mindie at least) steep hill to land on her back with a splash in a stream far below. The water, and friction from the fall, had dislodged her makeshift cover, and all her blistered skin was again exposed to the elements.
She was, however, mostly unharmed, and scrambled quickly back up onto her feet, turning her monstrous and blazing eyes several hundred feet back up the hill toward the trooper. Once she and the officer’s eyes connected, Mindie snarled like a beast and swatted at him as if his very gaze might be painful to her—like sunshine on a vampire. (Which is an apt metaphor in Mindie’s case.) Then she ran off into the dense foliage toward what only the great god Fockyoo knew for sure.
The trooper stared absently, frozen in stunned amazement, running his hand under his hat, scratching his head, and loosening a quarter pound of dandruff.
“What the hell?” he said.
I reached the end of the courtyard and its shops, emerged from the naked crowd and burst onto the street beyond. Morgan trailed just behind me, the chef and cops were nowhere to be seen. Had we managed to lose them somehow? Fockyoo could not be that kind.
There were no cars to speak of, so it was a clear path down the block to Nuckeby’s, where the Duesenberg was, just at that moment, being towed away at the owner’s expense. The naked gas station attendant was mounting up, and a naked River Nuckeby was waving him off happily.
“Hey!” I shrieked across the intervening distance. “That’s my car!”
“Is it really?” River said, the tone of his voice and the smile on his face telling me he knew damn well to whom the thing belonged. “Then why did you leave it in my parking lot? Go, Barney.”
‘Barney’ closed the door to the tow-truck, ground it into gear and hurried away. I was amazed the back end of the Duesy didn’t come loose in the process.
“Hey!” I repeated. “HEY!”
“Hay is for horses!” River told me.
Great. I was dealing with an overdeveloped three-year-old.
I had no response. I’d been running a good three or four hundred yards by now, and a series of ‘hey’s’ was pretty much all I could manage. Perhaps having a butler since birth wasn’t such a wonderful thing after all. Clearly getting up to make things for myself once in a while would have kept me in marginally better shape.
I hurried as best I could after the Duesenberg and tow-truck, fully intending to say rude things to—and make insulting gestures at— River as I passed. Instead I could only gurgle and flop my arms around like some inebriated squid.
River just laughed, which caused me to gesture more wildly, and in return he laughed even harder. Between us, we had generated a form of perpetual motion.
Morgan, still hot on my heels, called out to Wisper’s brother as he went by and managed a less wheezy insult.
“Ass…” Morgan gasped, taking in a few more deep breaths between syllables, “…hole!”
Which just made River laugh all the more.
There was no chance we were going to overtake the tow-truck, but I kept running nonetheless, all the way uphill to the gas station. Once Barney had pulled to a stop near a cyclone fence, and what I supposed were a host of other impounded cars, I leaped into the cab of the Duesy and began rifling under seats and inside door pockets, trying to remember where I’d stuffed Helena’s envelope.
I found an odd assortment of items: gum, hairpins, an earring, some unused condoms (Eww!), and Bare Britain, a book on nudist vacation spots in England (Ah HA!), but nothing that gave me a clue as to where I might have stuffed that damned envelope.
Finally, I pulled out my keys, opened the glove box, and found it, thick with bills, just as Barney came around the side of the car holding his baseball bat in both