He Was Her Man (31 page)

And he would have done that very thing, if there weren’t a blonde, a stark-naked blonde, walking toward him, make that a
stacked
stark-naked blonde. In fact, a natural stacked stark-naked blonde, which was something you didn’t see very often anywhere.

“Hi,” she said, rotating her hands back and forth at the wrists like you would to show a dog that they were empty, you didn’t have anymore of whatever it was he wanted. “I thought this way you could see that I’m not armed.” When she was within three feet of him, she started turning slowly in a circle. “Hi, I’m Jinx Watson, not carrying a thing,” she said in this Betty Boop voice, “and I’m awfully sorry about the money, but like I said in the note, I just don’t have any, and I can’t get any, and I know this whole thing has been a terrible mess, my not ever really doing what I ought to, but what I came to tell you is that I really do want my sweetie back, and I’ll do anything, anything.…” She shrugged, which made her boobs, which still looked pretty good, bobble up and down.

Doc ripped his gaze away to check out the perimeters of the parking lot.

“Oh, I didn’t bring anyone with me, if that’s what you think.”

He really hoped she wasn’t lying, but so far he still felt safe. He looked back at her face, which wasn’t bad either. “So what’s the deal? You think you’re gonna screw Speed out of this?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head, and there went her boobs again. “Goodness gracious, no. What I hoped was that once I had your attention, you’d listen to me a minute. See, I really do have a plan. My mother, her name’s Mrs. Loydell Watson, and I know you must know something about her because you said you’d kill her along with me and Speed if I didn’t do this right, well, she used to work for the police department—”

“Great,” Doc growled. He started walking back toward the Mercury, then turned. “Listen, if you say a word about this to anybody, the deal’s the same. You’re both history. As it is now, you didn’t pony up the ransom, it’s only the Speedster’s dead meat.” Which was the truth, come to think of it.

“Noooooo!” Jinx screamed and threw herself down on the cracked pavement of the parking lot and started kicking her legs. It was quite a sight. “Nooooooo! You have to listen to me.”

“Jesus. Don’t do that.” He walked over and grabbed one of her flailing arms and pulled her up.

Now she was standing flush against him. She smelled sweet—and expensive. Like Mickey used to smell. He was going to miss old Mick. But, what the hell? A bird in the hand.…Doc grinned.

Jinx grinned back just a little, enough for him to see she had a real mouthful of beauty queen teeth. Capped, probably. She was still snuffling.
“
Please
don’t kill Speed. Please.”

“You love him that much?”

“Oh, I do. I do.”

“Then how come you told us to take a hike when we talked yesterday?”

“I wasn’t thinking straight. And I didn’t have the money, but now…” She flailed her hands up and down again and did a little dance, but this time she was so close that she bounced right on his chest. “Listen, you have to listen to me. My mother, Mrs. Loydell Watson I was telling you about, I don’t know why I said that about her working for the police, she’s been retired a long time, and that doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”

Doc wondered how this broad and Speed had ever spent two minutes together, they both had such serious diarrhea of the mouth. If he had to be with the both of them in a room, he’d blow his brains out, or theirs. Of course, maybe they spent all their time doing other things.

“You want to get to the point?”

Well, she did and she didn’t. Jinx wanted to get to the part Sam and Mickey had coached her on, the part where she told Doc about her mother having this big old diamond that she wouldn’t give to Jinx, and did he have any ideas about how they might get it away from her? Like steal it, or something?

However, the other part of her assignment was to keep Doc busy as long as she could right now. And they hadn’t explained how any of this was going to work, what the big picture was. That really burned her up.

Sam was treating her like she was stupid, just like she always had. Back in school, that’s why she stole Sam’s boyfriend, and she’d tell her that if Sam ever came down off her high horse long enough to ask. She’d say, Because you acted like I was some kind of Arkie hillbilly, lame-brained as a turkey, didn’t have enough sense to close my mouth in the rain.

She’d gotten into Stanford, hadn’t she, and she hadn’t done that with her tits, either. Though, today, this doing-it-in-the-buff business was her own idea.

“The point?” Doc said again.

“Well, have you ever heard of Murfreesboro?” And then she was off and running into this long story about Crater of Diamonds State Park over by Murfreesboro, about 35 miles away, where you could go and pay a fee and hunt for diamonds. Real diamonds.

She watched Doc’s eyes light up, which was nice, because otherwise he had this scary kind of face with that hawklike nose and those long grooves from his nose down to the corners of his mouth that she didn’t think came from smiling.

Then she looped around and got into the geology of this part of Arkansas, and how the hot water that came out of the ground at 143°F, and the quartz deposits, and the diamonds, well, they all came from the same place. Folks said it was seabed that had been squashed down and then pushed up to make the mountains that had worn down, and that gave you your hot water and your quartz and your diamonds. Then she was off on Thomas Jefferson, who had thought hot water was such a great thing, so great that he’d sent an expedition to check out Hot Springs, though it wasn’t called that then when the U.S. bought themselves all this hot water as part of the Louisiana Purchase. As a result, Hot Springs was set aside in 1932 as a reservation for use by all the people, or our first “national park,” though that was before national parks. That was interesting if you think about Bill Clinton being so drawn to Jefferson,
named
Jefferson, in fact, and he’d grown up here, went to Hot Springs High School.… It was when she got to the high school part that Doc grabbed her by the neck.

“Shut up!” he yelled. That was when she got scared. Very scared. After all, this man was a desperate kidnapper, and what had she been thinking about, letting Sam and Mickey talk her into this in the first place, not to mention her being with him in the altogether. He was so mad he was sputtering: “Why are you…what is this…
diamonds
?”

Oh. So she told him, with his hands still on her neck, told him the hooey about Loydell having found the biggest triple-A quality diamond ever in the history of Murfreesboro, and that was saying some, because they’d found some big ones.

At that, Doc let her drop. He stood back and grinned that wolfy grin. And then he said, lowering his eyes, “Bigger than those?”

Which was a stupid question, but she knew what he meant. So she let him take her hand and lead her over to the Mercury and into the back seat, all the while thinking: Sam wasn’t so smart, and she was going to figure out what Sam and Mickey were up to. For one thing, Jinx didn’t believe for a minute Mickey was a private investigator, but Mickey was nice to her and furthermore the prettiest woman Jinx had ever seen, aside from herself, of course. But Jinx was sick and tired of being treated like she was some kind of blond joke.

*

“Anybody coming, Lateesha?” Sam was sweating all over her cellular phone. She and Mickey were taking a break from searching the big stone house. They were standing in the kitchen taking turns drinking cold water out of the faucet, being super careful to leave no traces.

“Nope. Not a peep,” said Lateesha. “Y’all find it yet?”

“We’ve about given up. Doc must have it on him. I’ll check back with you in a few.” Then Sam dialed Early. He answered on the first ring. She said, “How’s it going?”

“Well, it’s interesting.”

“Is Jinx still with him?”

“She’s with him, all right.”

“You sound strange. What are they doing?” Sam waved Mickey over to listen, too.

“It’s kind of hard to describe.”

“She’s banging him, isn’t she, Early?” said Mickey.

“Uh-huh.” Early sounded like he wasn’t really paying attention to them, which he wasn’t.

Mickey hung up, then turned to Sam, “See? I told you she was a natural.”

“That’s just great. But we still don’t have the diamond.”

The two women plopped down on stools facing one another. Mickey said, “Patience, my friend. Patience.”

“It’s never been one of my long suits.”

“I’d never have guessed. Okay, if it’s not here.…”

“Maybe it’s in the car.”

“Could be. But I doubt it. Doesn’t feel right. It’s not going to be in something that somebody else could just get in and drive away.”

“So you think he carries it on him? Wouldn’t you know that? Wouldn’t Jinx see that?”

“No, I already told you. It’s not a piece of jewelry. It’s unset.”

“I know. I was just reaching. If it’s not here, at least we think it’s not here, and it’s not in his car, and it’s not on his body, then what does that leave?” They sat and stared at one another. Then Sam said, “You must have thought about this a million times. Now, it can’t be in his clothing, unless he wears the same clothes every—”

Mickey jumped straight up off her chair. “Jesus, I’ve been so stupid! What have I been thinking?”

32

“IT WAS ROBBERY is what it was,” Archie said to Tate, who was standing behind his bar, and Cynthia who was carrying a tray full of Buds. “Robbery gone sour, plain and simple.”

Cynthia turned on her heel and marched away.

“Now, darlin’,” said Archie, following right in behind her. “I think you ought to face it. That Bobby Adair’s just as rotten as I always said he was. Killed his own grandma over the money in her cashbox, well, I’d say that’s pretty low. Even for white trash.”

At that, Cynthia stopped. She pivoted like she was doing some routine she’d learned in step aerobics class and stared straight into her daddy’s piggy little eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Yep. Wuddn’t even but about three hundred dollars. That’s what Olive kept in that box. About three hundred dollars. Idn’t that a shame, boy’d kill his own grandma for that?”

“Did you say white trash?”

Archie shifted his weight and settled back into himself, hitching up his pants. “You know, sister, now that we’ve done gone and proved that that boy is the homo-cidal maniac that I always said he was, I’d think you’d be studying on using a more respectful tone with your daddy. Yep. Maybe even apologizing. Saying you’re sorry and begging to be let to move back home.”

Cynthia’s big brown eyes became fiery little slits.

“What do you think
you
are? What do you think
I
am? Have you rewritten our family history so that suddenly we are no longer the descendants of generations of sharecroppers from the Delta?” Cynthia jerked her thumb in a generally easterly direction toward the Mississippi and the part of Arkansas where cotton was still grown. “And if sharecroppers aren’t white trash, then I don’t know what is, except we had the honor to also have some Cherokee blood, have you forgotten that, Daddy Dearest? A fact that I am proud as heck of, though you always thought it was the same as being black, which is what everybody else around here thinks.”

“I don’t,” said Tate, polishing his bar. “Never did once confuse myself with any Native Americans.”

Archie turned and was about to give Tate a piece of his mingy little mind, when he took note of the fact that Tate held a wet rag in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, and
maybe
he could shoot him first, but then again maybe he couldn’t.

“Excuse me, Tate. No offense intended, but you know what I mean,” Cynthia said.

“Yes, I do.” He nodded.

“Tate,” said Archie. “I’d appreciate it if you’d just keep out of this.”

Tate was very tempted to tell Archie that
he’d
appreciate it if Archie would get his fat butt out of his bar and never come back because, frankly, in addition to his own paternal fondness for Cynthia, he thought Archie stunk up the place.

But then Archie made the mistake of saying what was really on
his
mind. He started, “Anyway, well, I was thinking, and…” Then he shifted his weight again and did this funny little motion like maybe he had ants in his pants. Or maybe he was embarrassed, which would be a signpost of his humanity, the first that Cynthia had ever seen.

“What do you want, Archie?” she asked, still holding the beers. Cynthia had developed considerable upper body strength working in Tate’s, and she was giving serious consideration to using some of it on her father right now. Jesus, she wished there were some way she could prove he wasn’t really related to her, that there had been some kind of terrible mix-up at the hospital, when he said, “Well, what I wondered, I’ve been looking all over town, and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her, is, well, do either of you know where I could find that cute Bobbie Sue? You know, that frisky blonde I met in here yesterday? Tate, you were talking with Early Trulove when she came in.…”