“You can et those eggs in the big jar?” Bubba grimaced but he kept his eye on Willodean. Guess John ain’t in on it. “I thought they was just for show. Beg pardon, John but I got to see a lady about a horse. Precious, heel.”
Sheriff John glanced over his shoulder and at Willodean, then simply shrugged.
Bubba waded through a last rush of folks. He had to sidestep Mary Jean Holmgreen, who seemed to think he liked her flirting with him for some reason, but she was eighty if she was a day, and he didn’t know how to tell her politely he wasn’t really her type. She did manage to pinch his gluteus maximus in a way that made him jump a foot into the air. “Miz Holmgreen!” he protested as he sidled away.
Mary Jean winked salaciously.
By the time Bubba reached where Willodean and his mother had been, they were gone and Alfonzo was tucking one of his daughters into a car seat. Pilar took care of the other one.
“Say, Alfonzo,” Bubba said, “did you happen to see which way the sheriff’s deputy went?”
“Qué?”
“Little lady about yea high, has a gun, big green eyes,” Bubba explained.
“La policía,” Pilar said to Alfonzo.
Alfonzo nodded at his wife. “She said something about a call on her radio.”
Bubba’s shoulders slumped and he put his head down, but not before he saw Alfonzo grin at his wife. Bubba made himself look away and studied the daughter that Alfonzo was buckling into place. Wow. It’s true what they say about children. They grow quick. Kid must have gained three inches since Friday.
“Ya’ll going to church or such?” Bubba asked politely. Whatever they were doing, it suddenly didn’t interest him. The weekend couldn’t get much worse.
Oh, that’s not true, said a little voice inside him. It could get much worse. There could be real zombies.
* * *
Bubba decided to take his check, his truck, his dog, and his self to his home where he could lick his wounds in private and pretend that it was a normal Sunday. If Willodean wanted to avoid him, then he would let her go for the moment. Furthermore, he couldn’t do anything about his mother’s machinations but ruminate, and the movie business had been a complete but short bust.
Instead Bubba watched the Stars play the Blackhawks on his tiny, yardsale television. Occasionally he got up to eat something or to change the laundry. He folded his clothes as the game progressed. Later, out of the window, he saw the Dodge Caravan pull up to the Mansion, but didn’t bother to look to see what they were doing. He also heard his mother’s Cadillac pull into its regular parking place and focused on the game instead of wasting time and energy with what his mother was doing.
And that fella just lost some teeth, he thought as he folded a pair of boxers. Hockey wasn’t as good as football, but it was better than the cooking show on the other channel. Since he wasn’t hooked up to cable for the moment, hockey was the best choice he had and it wasn’t bad.
Precious asked to be let out by putting her paw on the front door and whining inquisitively. As Bubba let her outside, he saw Alfonzo was scraping around the back of the Mansion. Bubba went into one of the outbuildings to find another scraper. He didn’t really want to work but he couldn’t sit inside knowing someone else was working without assistance.
Alfonzo, regardless of his involvement with Miz Demetrice’s most recent master plan, was Bubba’s kind of guy. Communication was generally limited to grunts and sentences of less than three words.
“Missed a spot.”
“Yep.”
“Those Stars.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Drink?”
“Shore. RCs?”
“Bueno.”
They heard the babies before they came around the corner of the Mansion with their mother. Pilar carried one and the other one toddled behind. Bubba couldn’t tell them apart, but he thought that Carlotta was the one toddling.
Pilar smiled at her husband and said something rapidly in Spanish that Bubba couldn’t even begin to hope to follow, even if he remembered part of his high school Spanish.
Since it was a nice day, Bubba pulled the wading pool out of the barn and cleaned it with a scrub brush and a hose. Then he filled it a few inches so the two little ones could wade or splash. Pilar went to get towels while Carlotta stuck a tentative hand in the water. She jerked it back and said, “Frío!”
“It’ll warm up soon,” Bubba told the little girl. Liquid brown eyes stared up at him uncertainly.
Precious came to nose the wading pool and stuck a paw in the water. It was, after all, her wading pool, but most likely she didn’t mind sharing with smallish humans. Both children were enthralled with the Basset hound.
Bubba went back to scraping the section he’d been working on, while Alfonzo sat with his daughters waiting on Pilar’s return.
Pilar reappeared with towels. Later Miz Demetrice came around with lemonade and a few camp chairs. The conversation was limited to Pilar speaking quietly to the girls as they splashed in the water. Little diapers became engorged with water and Bubba wondered why they didn’t just take them off.
It wasn’t long before the two girls tired of the water and Precious decided it was her turn. She jumped in and splashed everyone within a certain radius. The two toddlers thought it was endlessly hilarious and Precious knew when she had a captive audience.
Bubba and Alfonzo kept scraping until they had worked their way around the other side of the house. Pilar took the girls inside to change their diapers and their clothing, probably in that exact order.
Then someone drove up. Several someones. Tires clunked to a halt. Brakes squealed protestingly. Doors slammed. People spoke to each other but not loudly enough for Bubba to hear what they were saying.
Bubba glanced at the heavens above. Now what, God? Several someones suspiciously sounded like the arrival of official law enforcement vehicles. He climbed down from the ladder and went around the side. It wasn’t the police come to arrest his mother for her latest transgression. It was worse.
The film company had returned.
Risley Risto waved at Bubba and gestured for his team to get busy. The crew fanned out. Van doors were pulled out. Boxes were extracted. They got to work.
They wouldn’t have brought the whole team to get the check back, Bubba reasoned. Therefore they got more filming to do here. Some kind of evening or night shot. Ah. This is the big rotten cherry on top of a big poopy sundae.
Bubba recommenced with the scraping. He didn’t want to talk to them. It was a long time later when he climbed down the ladder and Alfonzo was rubbing his wrists.
Risley ambled up to Bubba. “You know, Kristoph will calm down later and he’ll feel just awful about you and your dog. After all, it was just an accident.” Precious came up behind Bubba and abruptly shook herself. Cold, doggy smelling water flew everywhere. Bubba didn’t mind but Risley winced.
I care, Bubba thought. Not.
“You’ve still got one more line in the movie,” Risley enticed. “How many people get to be in the movies?”
One too many.
“I remember when I was in my prime,” Risley said, “twenty—” he looked Bubba over quickly “—oh, eight?” He waited for a response but Bubba didn’t bite. So Risley went on, “Ready to take on the world. Kissing the pretty girls. Climbing mountains and kicking butt. Life was a lot more fun then.” His voice became wistful. He glanced at Precious. “A man and his dog.” He knelt, holding his hand out to Precious. Precious sniffed the fingers offered to her and then tilted her head for a pet. Risley obliged.
“‘If it weren’t for that dagnammed sprocket,’” Bubba quoted. “Ain’t much of a line. Seems to me that you wouldn’t miss me ifin I dint say it. You could have some cute little zombie say it.”
“It’s an integral line,” Risley protested. “The second part of the middle of the film hinges on it.”
“Have someone else say it,” Bubba said, thinking of Willodean staring at him while the director yelled at
him and his dog. Normally Bubba wouldn’t be bothered with such things. It didn’t matter in the least what Kristoph thought of him, or what he thought of Precious, but he’d dinged Bubba’s pride at just the right time. Or just at the wrong time, depending on how one looked at it.
“Come on, think about it,” Risley said and with a last scratch behind Precious’s ear, he stood up and walked back to the vans. He began directing people to where they needed to be.
“You should think about it,” said someone and Bubba jumped. It was the redhead. He still didn’t know her name. She was the executive assistant of executive assistants. “The plot has a big hole in it without that line.”
“Seriously,” Bubba said doubtfully, looking at her face to see if she was joking.
The redhead shrugged. “Is there a swamp around here?”
Bubba pointed toward the back acreage. “Watch out for the koi pond. The koi are really big.”
It was the redhead’s turn to look at him doubtfully.
“Better bring a flashlight,” Bubba advised as she walked away, “it’ll be dark in an hour or two.”
The next person was Schuler, the head of the makeup department. He flipped the ends of his scarf over his shoulder and said, “Really, you should come back. It’s just that Kristoph hates dogs. Really hates dogs. That’s why I put your dog in the film. Just to mess with him. It’ll kill him.” Then he wandered off.
Bubba helped with the scraping for another hour, while keeping an eye on the film crew. He saw the redhead return and was only mildly grateful that the koi hadn’t eaten her alive, regardless of the fact that she hadn’t done anything to him.
“Dude,” someone said from the foot of the ladder.
Alfonzo was frozen still with the scraper pressed against the side of the Mansion. Then he muttered in a tone of awe, “It’s Tandy North, Bubba.”
Bubba shrugged and kept scraping. He glanced down at Tandy and saw Alfonzo staring at her with a gaping mouth.
“Just come say the damned line,” Tandy said. She puffed on a cigarette and blew a large circle. Then she blew a smaller circle that went through the larger one. “Kristoph is going to blow a cork and if he dies, we might lose funding.”
“Can I have your autograph, Miss North?” Alfonzo asked politely.
“Sure,” she said.
Alfonzo found a receipt in his pocket from Piggly Wiggly and a chewed up Bic pen. “One of my daughters is teething,” he said apologetically.
“It’s okay,” Tandy said, signing the receipt. She handed both items back to Alfonzo and he looked as if he had won the lottery.
“I’ve got to show my wife,” Alfonzo muttered. “She loved Bubble People.” He zipped around the corner of the house.
“So,” Tandy said. She puffed expectantly.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Kristoph won’t apologize,” she warned.
Bubba shrugged.
“Whatever,” she said and wandered off.
It cain’t be that dang important, Bubba thought.
When Marquita Thaddeus came to talk to Bubba a half hour later, Bubba gave up. No one was going to leave him alone and there were more people wandering around the Snoddy Estate than a bank on payday. He got his scraper, his RC cola, and his dog, and he trudged the hundred yards to his house. Maybe if he left the light out, no one would think he was home.
It was a wishful thought. However, when he went inside, he found that someone was waiting for him.
And someone was dead. Very dead. Not even close to zombie dead, but real life dead.
Chapter 8
Bubba and the Licentious Law
Sunday, March 10th
Bubba looked heavenward. Really, God? Really? Seriously? This was, of course, immediately followed by a gush of guilty remorse because he had been thinking only of himself.
With a blustery sigh, he put the RC cola down on a side table and looked at the body, because it was pretty much the entire focus of the room at the moment.
The corpse was face down in the middle of his meager living room. The person had obviously walked in, been accosted by person or persons unknown, and fell where they had stood.
Bubba didn’t even have to roll the person over to tell who it had been. The riding pants, short wool jacket, and riding boots gave it away. The beret had finally parted ways with the man’s silver-topped head and lay almost three feet away from him, an isolated testament to the aberration of the situation. Shockingly, there wasn’t a megaphone present.
Yes, it was Kristoph, the director of the movie. The same man who’d fired Bubba in such an open public event. Even Willodean had seen it happen. Everyone had seen it happen. And if any one person had missed it, then the word had likely already gotten around. Mike Holmgreen, who was the arson-committing grandson of Mary Jean Holmgreen, probably got it on his iPhone and immediately posted it online.
Bubba supposed he should check the man’s pulse to see if he was genuinely dead. After all, Bubba had been fooled before. But there was a problem with that. The knife in Kristoph’s back was the same bayonet that Bubba’s father, Elgin, had appropriated from the military during his time in Southeast Asia. Not inconveniently, Elgin had also appropriated a M1911 Colt .45 pistol from the same military and it had been used as the murder weapon in the attempt to frame Bubba for his ex-fiancée’s murder. In any case, the knife was forcefully inserted into the area of Kristoph’s back, dead center on the shoulder blades.
The last time Bubba had seen the bayonet it had been in his bedroom upstairs, in a box of items that his mother had brought over from the Mansion after the house had been finished. Although her memories of her late husband were less than stellar, she wished her only child to have some mementos of Elgin Snoddy. Remembering his father’s true persona, Bubba had been of a mind to toss them all into his garbage can but he’d restrained himself on his mother’s account. Elgin was long since dead and could no longer hurt anyone. Certainly his possessions should have been less than lethal. Ironically, the bayonet was not less than lethal.
The director, who had once won a Saturn award for a movie Bubba had never seen, was dead. He was very dead. He was so dead that Elvis Presley would have said, “Whoa.”
Furthermore, Kristoph was dead in Bubba’s living room with Bubba’s knife in his back. Bubba would have groaned, but he suspected he would have sounded like a zombie, which was one of the last things he wanted. (The very last thing he really wanted was to have a dead person in his living room, and it was about as welcome as hair in a biscuit, but it was done.)
And he didn’t know exactly what to do next. Coming up with a handy list seemed appropriate, so he cogitated.
A). Bubba could call the police. That was what he was supposed to do. The Pegram County Sheriff’s Department would come. Snoddy Mansion was located in Pegram County, outside of Pegramville proper, and the sheriff’s department had jurisdiction. Bubba thought he shouldn’t know that fact automatically, but he had learned some things over the past few years that regular folks don’t always know. (Willodean would probably show up and look beautifully pensive, but that wasn’t the best reason to call the police.)
B). Bubba could pretend the body wasn’t there. He could flip an area rug over it and say it was just a lot of dust bunnies under there. (Two hundred pounds of dust bunnies? Maybe.) Certainly there would be a big smelly lump in the middle of his living room, but who would really notice?
C). Bubba could call his mother. Miz Demetrice had considerable criminal experience, depending on her given circumstances. She would know what to do.
D). Bubba could dispose of the body himself. There was, after all, that swamp out back and they all talked about it. What else could one do with a swamp? Folks had been dumping bodies in swamps for millennia. (Bog bodies were an apt example.)
E). Bubba could call Lawyer Petrie. Lawyer Petrie was their family lawyer. Normally he only did family law but he’d gained significant knowledge with the onslaught of Bubba’s so-called felonio
us exploits. Lawyers would know what to do with a corpse. They probably took special classes on what to do with errant dead bodies. (Doing the Dead 101?)
F). Bubba could go to bed. It was a little early but his head was aching and a little shuteye would do him a world of good. The body would still be in his living room in the morning. (Probably would be, but one dead person Bubba had discovered had gone missing before)
Bubba thought about letter A). How many times had he actually called the police himself? The first time he’d encountered a body, Neal Ledbetter had called them. The second time the police had found him with the corpse. No calling had been necessary. The third time he had yelled across city hall’s lawn. After all, the sheriff’s department was right there. No phoning had been required. The fourth time was when his mother had found the body and she had called. The fifth time he had called. He had borrowed a cell phone to call. And voila, the body vanished. Of course, there had been boocoodle bodies around at that time, most of them significantly not dead. (Not zombies, but “victims” of the 1st Annual Pegramville Murder Mystery Festival.) And did Bubba need to remind himself that the other bodies had been long, long dead at that time and he hadn’t even come close to finding them? No, he did not.
So Bubba had actually called the actual police one actual time. There was a precedent. Precedents meant he could do it. Hooray. A decision had been made.
He was reaching for the phone when someone screamed. It was a long and loud scream as screams usually are. It was also the kind that would have shattered a wine glass if one had been close enough to shatter. It certainly filled the room and made the hair on the back of Bubba’s neck stand up.
Precious began to bark at the intruder and the screamer stopped screaming for a moment.
I guess I left the door open, Bubba thought and stared at McGeorge who was the screamer in question. The executive assistant, AKA Clipboard Girl, stood in the entrance to the living room and stared down at Kristoph’s body. Plainly, she also had immediately known who it was. Furthermore, she obviously had a good idea that he was definitively dead. She paused to draw breath and screeched again, clearly going for a record of some sort. Someone call Guinness.
Bubba and the Zigzaggery Zombies Page 8
