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By Root 1082 0

man named Coonrod from an old shack where he was hiding out along the Paint Creek bottoms. Handcuffed in the backseat, he thought the sheriff was taking him to town for questioning until the cruiser stopped along the gravel road at the top of Reub Hill. Bodecker didn’t say a word, just yanked him out of the car by the metal bracelets and half dragged him into the woods a hundred yards or so. Just as Coonrod switched from yelling about his rights to pleading for mercy, Bodecker stepped behind him and shot him in the back of the head. Now Tater owed him five thousand dollars, a thousand more than the sheriff had charged him the first time. The sadist had beat up one of the better whores who worked upstairs in Tater’s strip club, tried to extract her womb with a toilet plunger. It had cost the gangster another three hundred at the hospital to have everything pushed back inside her. The only one who ended up making out on the deal was Bodecker.

Sandy sighed and said, “Okay, Lee, what the fuck are you talking about?”

Bodecker tipped his glass up, started chewing on some ice. “Well, according to this girl, your hubby’s name is Bill and he’s a big-shot photographer from California. Told her he’s good buddies with a bunch of movie stars.”

Sandy turned back to the sink, dipped a couple more dirty glasses in the lukewarm water. “He was probably just messing with her. Sometimes Carl likes to bullshit people for fun, just to see how they’ll react.”

“Well, from what I’ve seen, he’s getting a pretty good reaction. I gotta say, I never thought the fat bastard had it in him.”

Sandy threw down her drying rag and turned around. “What the hell you doing? Spying on him?”

“Hey, I wasn’t trying to tick you off,” Bodecker said. “I figured you’d want to know.”

“You never did like Carl,” she said.

“Jesus Christ, Sandy, he had you whorin’ for him.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like you don’t do nothing wrong.”

Bodecker put his sunglasses on and forced a smile, showed Sandy his big white teeth. “But I’m the law around here, girl. You gonna find out that makes all the difference.” He threw a five-dollar bill on the bar and walked out the door and got into his cruiser. He sat there for a few minutes, staring through the windshield at the run-down trailers in Paradise Acres, the mobile-home court that sat next to the bar. Then he laid his head back against the seat. It had been a week and so far nobody had reported the plunger bastard missing. He thought maybe he’d buy Charlotte a new car with part of the money. He wanted so much to close his eyes for a few minutes, but falling asleep out in the open wasn’t a good idea these days. The shit was starting to get deep. He wondered how long it would be before he had to kill Tater or, for that matter, before some sonofabitch decided to kill him.

29

ON A SUNDAY MORNING, Carl fixed some pancakes for Sandy, her favorite food. She’d come home drunk the night before in one of her sad-ass moods. Whenever she got tangled up in all those worthless feelings again, there was little he could say or do to make things better. She just had to work it out herself. A couple of nights of drinking and whining about it and she’d come back around. Carl knew Sandy better than she knew herself. Tomorrow night, or maybe the next, she would fuck one of her patrons after the bar closed, some crew-cut country boy with a wife and three or four snot-nosed kids at home. He’d tell Sandy that he wished he had met her before he ever married the old sow, that she was the sweetest piece he’d ever had, and then everything would be fine and dandy until the next time she got the blues.

Beside her plate he had laid a .22 pistol. He had bought it a few days ago for ten dollars from an elderly man he’d met at the White Cow. The poor sonofabitch was afraid that he would shoot himself if he kept the gun around. His wife had passed away last fall. He had treated her badly, he admitted, even when she was lying on her deathbed; but now he was so lonely, he couldn’t stand it. He told all this to Carl and the teenage waitress while icy snow