Hotter than Helen (The Bobby's Diner Series)

by Wingate, Susan

  ***

  They had not yet pulled out when Georgette’s car inched on to the front parking lot of the hotel. She moved the car forward slowly, noticing that several cars, she counted five, put up a barrier between hers and Biggs’ Impala.

  Georgette depressed the brake with such slow, consistent pressure, she could barely feel the car come to a stop. She slid lower into her seat hoping they hadn’t seen her. She couldn’t imagine they had. Their car was tucked into the parking space. But she couldn’t be sure.

  A clap of thunder resounded in the east and the dark clouds appeared like a huge charcoal jellyfish in the sky with one million tentacles trailing underneath it.

  God had spoken and the heavens had opened up. Sunnydale would get hit within the half hour, maybe less.

  The storm was an angry ram headed antlers down into a frontal assault with her town.

  The rear lights of their car fluttered on but the car remained parked. When she saw the driver’s window open, Georgette sunk down even lower in her seat, to the point where she had to peek through the steering wheel to see. And, through the prism of car windows between them, she could see some movement of Biggs’ head but not much more.

  Her heart beat thick in her chest and when she licked her lips she suddenly became aware of how stiff and dry her tongue was. She swallowed hard and could feel a glimmer of pasty moisture returning to her gums. She swallowed again, washing more saliva into her mouth.

  Taking a deep breath in, she exhaled slowly. Her heart pounded. The palms of her hands felt sweaty and she noticed her fingers shaking so she clutched the steering wheel hard in an attempt to stop them.

  With her eyes locked onto the car, she hadn’t noticed the old woman step onto the pavement.

  A single drop of rain splattered the windshield in front of Georgette’s eyes, skewing her vision around the splash. Then, as if a harbinger of what was to come, hundreds dribbled from somewhere above in a light sprinkle onto the glass, then, suddenly, thousands, tens of thousands of drops fell.

  She adjusted the wiper mechanism to intermittent. It wasn’t but a second or two until she had to crank up the speed on the wiper again. Rain was sluicing down the windshield, completely distorting her view of Biggs’ car.

  But when she saw his reverse beams light up and the car nudge back out of the parking space, she knew she would lose them if she didn’t do something right now.

  It was her only chance to stop them.

  Georgette pressed hard onto the gas pedal, making the tires spin without traction. Then, after finally grabbing hold, the tires made the car lurch forward, like a bobcat after a rabbit.

  They squirreled and lost traction again sending the car hydro-planing over the wet dark pavement, making the rear of her car swing out and back in again, fishtailing, and jostling Georgette around inside. She grabbed hard onto the steering wheel, trying to control her wild car and with her eyes still locked onto Biggs.

  She didn’t see the old woman step in front of her.

  ***

  An umbrella popped open. It reminded Georgette of a parachute opening behind one of those formula racecars.

  She yanked the steering wheel hard to the left. Skidding over a glassy layer of water and losing control, she felt her car shift and slide toward the row of parked cars on her left, trying to avoid the old woman walking behind the large black parasol.

  Just inches from hitting her. Georgette’s car was in a spin.

  Tires screamed out a warning for anyone nearby to listen to them. Definitely to the woman who had now pulled her umbrella down stiff in front of her, as she reacted to the shrill noise.

  But then, the eeriest thing happened. Time slowed down to a nauseating pace.

  The umbrella dropped out of the woman’s hands, a fluttering pendulum, wafting in slow motion to the wet black ground, filling up with rainwater.

  Georgette noticed the woman’s face first, an ancient face. They each stared at the other open-eyed, fear pasted to their skin. Each woman not feeling like they were reacting but each only able to react—instinct had taken over.

  The woman looked like an antique actress, on a movie set, just out for a stroll on a gray dismal day. Georgette imagined the set for a horror movie. Perhaps, a Hitchcock film.

  It was queer to Georgette, sensing everything vividly but not being able to do anything but spin.

  Teacups. She thought of the circus ride and wanted to vomit.

  The old woman stumbled backward. Did Georgette hit her?

  The woman spun toward the lobby’s cabana, catching herself with the cane and limping finally to a column where she clutched onto it, as if she were hiding next to it.

  No, Georgette didn’t think she hit her but she wasn’t sure.

  She noticed a bellhop from inside race out to her aid but as she passed, she lost track of them both.

  Georgette’s car felt like an E-ticket ride, like the whirling bowls she’d ridden on at the fair as a child. Teacups, shifting you one way and then the other, swinging her torso out of rhythm as the car skidded.

  The sudden crushing stop jarred Georgette’s head forward, thumping it once against the steering wheel. The white balloon from the air bag exploded, inhaling and exhaling, emptying then hanging off the steering column like a used rubber. It all happened in a matter of seconds. All of it.

  When she looked up, her car was on top of Biggs’. She’d collided into the rear driver side bumper of their vehicle, crushing the trunk, pleating its hatch ajar but pinching it tighter all in one motion.

  She unbuckled her seat belt.

  Tanner flung open his door.

  Georgette opened hers.

  Stepping up for action, Tanner left his passenger door fully open and in one swift act he pulled out his gun and fired into the old car’s steel shell.

  Pumping one, two, three shots into it, crossways but near the rear. The tink, tink, tink resonated, each pellet resounding and muffled fast under the crashing rush of rain.

  Georgette’s legs buckled, leaving her behind her car door for cover. Her body began to shake wildly. Rain slid off her dry hair onto her face, making her blink, trying to see. Her hands felt for her waistband. She grabbed the flare gun double-fisted, trying to control it. A crack of thunder blasted, making her dip down further behind her door.

  “Martin!” She spoke, not believing it that she would’ve called attention to herself, but somehow understanding why. Someone was in the trunk who Tanner wanted dead. Someone. And she knew that someone must be Roberta.

  He popped off two more shots. Tink, tink.

  She waved one hand out past the cover of her car door. Then poked her head out. He held a gun, a .38, her .38, sideways, like a rookie gangbanger.

  “Martin! Stop shooting.”

  “Screw you, bitch!” He stopped for a second then laughed at his own comment.

  She stood up enough to see out through the window at him but ducked down again.

  “Martin. Now hold up here just a sec, will you?” She shoved her flare gun into her pants again and stood up again, very slowly.

  His smile worried her but he dropped the arm he was wielding and the gun to his side. “What!”

  A distant siren whined, screaming its arrival.

  “Hear that, Martin?” She held her hands up in surrender, showing him she had no weapon.

  He nodded. “Yeah, I hear it.”

  The Impala’s driver side door opened and Biggs rolled out onto the ground. Georgette’s eyes flitted between Tanner and Biggs, who was now crawling along the ground in front of the row of parked vehicles.

  Tanner, still nodding, continued. “You know what it means?”

  Georgette, shifting between the cover of the door, then fully open, to Tanner, then back behind the door again, then trying to see where Biggs went, felt a cold sweat rush over her, like the cosmos was sending a message.

  She shifted behind the door again and, looking behind her, seeing Biggs running toward the rear of the hotel, Georgette pul
led out the flare gun without Tanner noticing.

  Bringing her attention back to Tanner, she answered, “No, Martin. What does it mean?”

  “It means,” he smiled again, chuckling like someone had made a joke. Then he dropped his arm, egging her on, “Now, why are you hiding. Come on out, Georgette. Where I can see you.”

  She moved slowly, inching tight against the door, holding her left arm up and her right down, with the flare gun behind the door. “I’m here. Now, Martin, what can I do for you.” Her voice sounded freakishly calm, unnerving Tanner.

  But he jerked and lifted his gun in a blink.

  Instantly, she sprung sideways toward the parked cars. Closing her eyes, she fired.

  He fired.

  The bullet whizzed past her right ear.

  The flare’s comet waggled out directly at him.

  She rolled onto and off of the car next to the Impala, banging her shoulder in the process.

  Tanner’s face froze.

  The burning torch arched and dipped on its trail over the crumpled trunk and landed directly into the front of his pants, sticking there like a smoldering cigarette, burning a hole into his jeans at the crotch. He buckled backward.

  He’d shot his last bullet.

  Georgette had three more flares in her pockets. She loaded another one.

  Rain drenched the scene but the flare burned bright, scorching his pants as he tried to knock it off but not wanting to touch it all at the same time. He roared out in pain, batting at the fire stick as it melted into him. He ran in a circle trying to douse it. But the explosive material of the flare had a burn time of no less than fifteen minutes. And Tanner’s penis would never last that long. He had to get it off somehow. He fell to the ground, writhing in pain.

  That’s when Georgette lost interest in him.

  Pounding her fists onto the trunk, she screamed, “Roberta!” Hearing nothing, her breathing took on panic. She wedged her fingers under the rim of the trunk and tried to lift but the crumpled metal had bent and locked the lid into place. She pounded again. “Roberta!” Her voice splintering into shards and she sobbed. “Help! Someone help!”

  At first she heard movement, shuffling inside. Then she heard Roberta’s weak voice. “I’m okay.”

  “Roberta? Are you hit?”

  The muffled voice folded into the thick wall of the trunk, muffling through a slice in-between the car’s bumper and the hood.

  “I can’t hear you!” Georgette shrieked.

  “I don’t think so.” The voice came through louder this time with instructions. “Go get that son of a bitch, George.”

  “What about you?”

  “Go!”

  Georgette looked over where Tanner lay moaning in anguish. He could die there.

  Then she looked to her left in the direction Hawthorne had run. She patted at her pockets for something to write with. Nothing.

  She ran back to her car and found a marker in the console.

  Back at the trunk she scrawled on top of the hood “Willy! Roberta is in here!!!”

  “The police are coming, Rob!”

  “George, go!”

  Georgette patted the top of the hood but didn’t wait around.

  She leaped into a sprint.

  She needed to confront Hawthorne.

  ***

  He’d shimmied down the twenty-foot sloping wall into the gully a few yards behind his truck. A trail of fresh mud trailed down toward his descent. It oozed like lava.

  He brushed the back of his denims off from sliding on his ass on the way down. A layer of mud caked his hands.

  Georgette caught a glimpse of Hawthorne’s large figure dive and disappear in between the hedge’s planting of oleanders and some tall evergreens that grew along the edge of the canal, about a hundred yards ahead of her.

  She held her flare gun up to her chest and shuffled over to the hedge with her back against it, hiding among the green speared leaves. Each movement washed rainwater off the hedge’s leaves and onto her. Rain had completely soaked her clothing and matted her hair in a snarl of peach-stained curls, ripe peaches. Her blouse clung to her and showed every tight muscle, every curve as she slinked along the same path to the point where Biggs ducked into.

  Sirens howled close now, probably on hotel property, from what she could determine by their noise. Mud lay thick and deep along the riverside, its gritty smell reminding her of a more innocent time, when she made mudpies as a kid.

  Rolling thunder skipped behind her, nearly tapping her shoulder. The electrical show had grown that close. Lightning tracers arced and flashed behind her, setting off the landscape like an enormous spotlight, bringing every living thing into view.

  Peering through the hedge, the gully’s basin was muddy and wet, but a flashflood had not yet made its way that far west.

  She heard a quick blip-blip of his truck’s remote unlock the doors.

  “Hawthorne!” she screamed through the pouring rain as she appeared on the river side of the hedge. He stood below her at his truck down in the riverbed. He hadn’t opened the door yet. He was just standing there, looking at her. She could see his steely eyes even from the distance that separated them.

  “What in hell do you want, Georgette?”

  “A few answers might be nice.”

  “Answers? What answers?”

  “Like why, Hawthorne. Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, holding the flare gun in her right hand and shaking her head, then dropping her arms in a pathetic gesture.

  “Cash. Why else. Money. Cash, Georgette.”

  Not seeing a weapon on him, she walked closer along the edge of the river.

  A huge rush of thunder slammed closer and another sheet of rain cut across the sky like a rudder, ever closer and skipping off the hardened earth skimming the ground, etching a path much the way the earth had been formed millions of years ago, like the Grand Canyon.

  She looked down and noticed trickling water flow into the mud veins of the dark wet gully, cresting, overflowing and building.

  “Hawthorne. You need to come up here.”

  “Georgette, there’s nothing you can do.”

  They were yelling, but the wind and rain and thunder consumed their voices. She wasn’t sure if he could hear her. She yelled louder. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she remembered she was holding what looked like a gun.

  “No, Hawthorne. Come up here with me!”

  “Georgette. It’s over with us!”

  She couldn’t believe his words and dropped her hands back down. He must have thought she wanted him back. She cocked her head and then shook it. “No,” she tried to scream her words, “that’s not what I mean…” Something was crashing in the distance making it impossible to be heard.

  “You were just a means to an end.”

  But she heard that.

  Her hand gripped the flare gun tight. Her face pinched in anger and the water began running like a shallow creek.

  “No, you idiot. Come up here where it’s safe!”

  But, at that second, a snapping tree fell behind her, it screamed like a whelping hound first, making Georgettte duck. Then the sound electrified, sounding like sheets of glass crashing against concrete.

  She dropped to her knees, covering her head with her arms. When nothing landed on her, she figured she was safe. She was in no immediated danger of being hit by the falling tree.

  But Hawthorne…

  She turned and looked back.

  A wall of water filling the river bed halfway up its berm, a good ten feet high or so, had snaked its way into view and was tumbling straight for his truck. She screamed. “Get out! Get out!” And pointed in the direction of the tsunami headed for him.

  Seeing the water raging toward him, he turned, scrambled to the side of the gully and tried to crawl back up to higher ground.

  But the rain had muddied only a thin layer of earth, leaving looser dirt beneath it, making him slide back down t
o the bottom of the berm again.

  “Hawthorne, get out!” she screamed again, seeing the panic in his eyes.

  She reached out to him and he moved forward as if to grab her hand but when he looked at the water barreling toward him, he turned and ran to the truck. He flung the door open and closed again just before the wall of water hit.

  It was acrobatic, the way it lifted the truck like a toy, tumbling it up, flipping it end over end, then rolling it onto its side over and over and washing it down the river, bobbing it up, dropping it under and continuing that way, the water’s assault on the truck until it pushed Hawthorne around a bend and out of sight.

  “No!” Georgette crumpled to her knees, screaming until the air in her lungs wouldn’t let her scream any longer, until her tears bleached the word No into shadows, into two ghosts of letters, until her crying took on no sound at all, until she lost her breath.

  And when she breathed, she began the process all over again, slumped over her knees in the mud by the river as the water rushed by below her, stealing everything living within the crevice into its current.

  38

  The flare rose high. Like a lone shooting star it pierced the cloudy day as it rose higher, higher than the hotel’s roof line, higher than the old Ponderosa pine trees that surrounded the waterway.

  Sounds of rushing water continued tumbling around her. Straggled, wet strands of hair covered her face. Tears intermixed with rain washed off her nose into the soggy earth next to the torrent crashing, racing, boiling past. Its reverberation, its din masked Willy’s car racing up behind her, next to her, skidding to a stop on the asphalt.

  She only heard him approach, the welcome sound of a human being. He ran to her. Cupping his body over hers, Willy held Georgette tight. The warmth of his body let her know how cold the rain had made her and she shivered, finally remembering she was alive.