“She’s not driving my car.”
I sighed. “Of course not. In fact, I’m bringing your car back tonight anyway, with my sincere gratitude.”
“Is your car fixed, then?”
“Almost. Viv got hers back, so I won’t need mine for the next few days. You can have yours back.”
“I can’t go to the meeting, though. It’ll be over too late. I don’t have anybody here to watch the motel. I could miss out on the few customers I have left.
“Tony and I will take notes for you,” I promised.
I hung up, kind of relieved that she wasn’t going. Getting between her and Viv was tiresome.
I took the Lincoln back to the Executive Inn and brought her towels in. “I’m sorry I didn’t wash them,” I said. “I was going to, but my machine broke.”
G-Ma took the towels with one hand, staring out the window at Viv pulling up in her Cadillac. “Would you just look at her? Prancing around like she owns the durned world.”
“You’re an independent business owner, and you drive a fancy Lincoln with all its own bells and whistles,” I said. “It’s not like you’re doing so bad yourself.”
She frowned and let the shade drop. “I guess that’s true enough. I hope I don’t have to sell it all.”
“Why would you do that?”
“My business is going in the tank. I had steady income for a few months, but now it’s back at next to nothing.” She lifted the shade again and looked over at Mario’s tamale factory. “If it weren’t for Mario, I’d have no steady income at all.” She moved back to her recliner and dropped into it. “The best luck I’ve had the past few years is renting to other businesses.”
I started to say that the prostitutes could hardly be called business owners, then decided it would be better to just concede the point. “You know what you could do? In Amarillo, some of the old motels have been converted to little shopping centers. They don’t even do a major renovation, they just take all the furniture out and rent out the rooms as small shops. Hair salons, nail salons, candle stores. It’s really cute.”
G-Ma sneered. “Amarillo. Another one that thinks it’s hot stuff. With its Route 66. Like we don’t have highways in Lubbock.”
I leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Well, think about it. You’re resilient and have a head for business. You’ll end up on top.”
There was already a crowd at the community center. I looked around for Tony and spotted him getting out of his pickup. He wore a black v-neck sweater that looked quite yummy against his tan skin.
I waved to him, and he lifted his hand when he saw me.
I looked down and smoothed my own blouse over the stomach that was still bigger than I wanted it to be. It fit better than it had last year, but still…I couldn’t help but wonder if people would look at me and Tony together and wonder why he was with me.
I sucked in as I crossed the lot. Tony held the door open for us and I was so focused on trying to look skinnier that I didn’t notice until I was almost to him that he wasn’t alone.
“Hi, Salem,” Tony’s sister Margaret said, from behind and to the side of him.
“Oh! Hi,” I said. “Good to see you. Are you here with… with Tony? I mean, of course you are. You came together?”
“Yes, it looks like they have a good turnout tonight. That’s really good.”
I nodded too hard. “Great. Absolutely fantastic.”
As Tony led the way toward empty seats, I wondered for a moment if I’d even be able to sit beside him.
Tony and Margaret chatted and Margaret called out to people she knew here and there, with a wave and a friendly laugh, while I tried to keep from feeling like a middle-school drama queen because I hadn’t gotten to sit beside my boyfriend.
An older guy took the short stage and brought the meeting to order. He introduced himself as the recently retired principal of the local middle school. “Wow,” he said with a big smile. “We usually have a crowd about twenty-five percent this big at our quarterly meetings. We ought to get robbed all the time!”
The crowd laughed, some looking a little guilty, as they were no doubt intended to.
“Seriously, it is so great to see all of you out here, ready to do what needs to be done to keep our community safe. We’re all concerned about the rising crime and we all want to do something about it. Neighborhoods like ours are a treasure. We have families that have lived for generations in this neighborhood. My family is one of them. My great-grandmother moved here when Lubbock was about twenty-five thousand people. My father grew up here, went to college at Texas Tech, and met my mother there. I grew up here. I raised my own kids here. Not just in this town, but in this neighborhood. For people like us, this neighborhood is our home. We don’t want to leave. These crimes aren’t just happening to other people — they’re happening to us. And it’s good to see that we are doing what we need to, to take care of us.”
The crowd applauded.
“Now, the man who’s about to come up here needs to introduction, but I’m going to introduce him anyway.”
Laughter.
“I think everything I just said about my family could be said about Clete Pigg and his family. That man loves High Point more than — well, more than is probably healthy, if you ask me.”
More laughter.
“Seriously. He not only grew up here and married a local girl, he opened a business and had a son. Then he opened another business and had another son. Then he opened couple more businesses and had a couple more sons.”
“And they’re all hot,” Viv stage whispered.
The group around us laughed louder than the rest of the crowd.
I elbowed her, but of course she paid no heed.
“All together I think he’s got a couple dozen sons — ”
“Five, but it seems like a couple dozen,” Papa Pigg shouted from his seat.
“Five sons. Every single one of them devoted to this neighborhood. One of them is a fireman, one’s a businessman, ones the best football coach in the state — ”
The crowd erupted in cheers.
The principal held his hand out to quiet the crowd. “What I’m saying is, nobody is more invested in this neighborhood than Clete Pigg. You’ve all heard about the High Point Small Business Development Initiative he started here. He did that. He had the idea, he drummed up the funds, he put together a consortium of small business leaders in our community. And now anybody who lives in High Point and wants to open a business in High Point — they can go to this committee and apply for a grant to get started. If they qualify, they can get the start-up capital, they can be mentored by an experienced business owner, and they can get all kinds of support to make their businesses successful. Now, they’re not huge grants. It’s not for opening a factory or anything like that. But to start a small business, you could do that. Something like that — a few thousand dollars? Something like that could make the difference in a person being able to achieve their dreams. The business would stay here. The money would stay here. The success will be here, in High Point. Clete Pigg did that.
“He even — and a lot of you know this already — he even led an effort to get Lubbock’s first Krunchy Kreem franchise right here in High Point. Right here! Before those on the south side of town. We were going to be the first!”
This brought almost as much cheering as the football comment had.
“Now, that didn’t work out, because that’s the way it goes, sometimes, heartbreaking as it is.”
“South side still doesn’t have one,” Clete Pigg shouted from his chair. “We still have time!”
“That’s the spirit, Clete,” the principal said. “Stay in the fight. Fight for those donuts!”
After the laughter died down, the principal said, “What I’m trying to say is, what you’re looking at are the people who are walking the walk in this neighborhood. They’ve invested their very lives in this area and they’re not going to let a small-time-hood crime wave scare them away. We’ve been thro
ugh it. Maybe not exactly like this, but we’ve seen good times and bad times, and this is just one more bump in the road. Nothing more. Before Mr. Pigg comes up here and says his bit, I just want to put that out there. Your homes are here. Your kids are here, their friends are here, your churches are here, the people who clean your clothes and give you your immunizations and your cheeseburgers — we’re all in this together. Let’s watch out for each other. Let’s take care of each other. If we’re not careful, we could let everything that’s been happening lately convince us that this neighborhood is nothing but hard times and bad news. But we know that’s not the truth. I look around this room and I see nothing but good people. Let’s fight for those good people. Now, join me in welcoming Mr. Clete Pigg.”
He had on a different red shirt, but the same black belt and jeans, and he’d let his white hair blow a little looser than it had been when I bought my car.
He talked for a few minutes about the robberies and about what he felt was a “less-than-passionate effort on the part of the police to put an end to them.”
“Now, I’ve raised five boys. You don’t survive that without learning a few things. Like, making sure the seat is down before you sit, right?”
The crowd laughed.
“Seriously, though. I’ll tell you a story. Back when the boys were between the ages of, oh, seventeen and ten or so, I bought my first junk lot.” He took a deep breath and his chest expanded proudly. “Most of you know, I’ve made my living off junk. And I’d just bought my very first junk lot. Four acres of junk cars and parts. So I gave my boys a job. All that junk needed sorting and organizing. Some of it was good working parts that could be cleaned up and reused, but most of it was no good and needed to be scrapped. But there wasn’t a good way of telling without looking at each piece. Now, one thing about my boys — they all know their cars. They might not want to know their cars. In fact, I would hazard to say they’d prefer to just drive the things and leave the “knowing” up to somebody else. You’ll notice there’s no “and Sons” on my building. That’s not my choice. But that’s a different discussion, right? The point is, I knew every one of my boys was qualified to sift through that junk and help me with this chore. So I gave it to them. It was a big job. I figured it would take them a good week or two to get through it all. So I took them out there and we talked about how we would organize everything, where the junk would go, where the good parts would go and all that, see. And I told them it would probably take all week. I told them I’d pay them $150 each to sift the lot.
“Then I left to go tend to my other business. When I got back, it looked like not one thing had been done. A few pieces were piled on the scrap pile, but not many. And of those pieces, two were still good! I don’t mind telling you, I was hot. My boys — now that they’re grown and out of the house — they like to make fun of ol’ dad when he gets mad. They say my neck actually swells. Well, I’ll bet that afternoon I looked like an old granddaddy bullfrog. I mean, I was blazing mad. Here they had a job to do, and they’d wasted a whole day. I stomped around and I lectured and I sermonized.
“I got them up the next morning and took ‘em out there an hour earlier. I pulled up one of those scaffolds where I could get up nice and high and see everything. I took my lawn chair up there and my umbrella, and I just watched. And I told them I was only paying for five days’ worth of work. They’d already spent one. At the rate they’d gone that day, it would take them six months! But I figured it was a five-day job, and I was paying for five days. But no matter what, we were coming back every day until the job was done.
“And you know what happened? Well, all kinds of efficiency and initiative! Four boys who are properly motivated and supervised can get an impressive amount of work done. That whole place was cleaned out within the next two and a half days. And they did a good job of it, too. If I remember correctly, we made a couple hundred off the refurbished parts, which I let them keep, and I paid them the full five days worth of work, although truth be told, they only worked about half that time.
“Listen, my boys weren’t lazy, and they weren’t uncaring about the job. But listen. We all work better when expectations are clear and when we know someone is watching us. Most of us don’t like somebody standing over our shoulder, but when nobody’s watching at all…” He shrugged and pulled a face. “We can all get a bit lackadaisical. Even good workers. Even conscientious people. We don’t want to admit that about ourselves, but it’s true. Our work ethic kicks into a higher gear when we’re accountable to somebody.”
He paced slowly behind the podium, rubbing his hands together. “So you understand that I’m not saying the LPD doesn’t have some diligent officers. Now, I’ve known some of these officers all their lives. Some of them played t-ball with my sons when they were this big. I know their character. I know they’re good people.” He looked out at the audience. “I know they want to do right by you. But it doesn’t hurt to let them know that we’re watching them. We’re watching them do their job. Because it’s important. Their job is to protect us and we need them to be diligent — ”
Viv went suddenly stiff beside me. She clutched my arm.
“What?” I whispered.
Her eyes darted back and forth. She leaned toward me and whispered out of the side of her mouth.
“Do you remember if I left my gun on the backseat?”
“What?!”
“Shh!” She glared at me. “Keep it down, for crying out loud. Just think. In the backseat of my car. Did you see a gun?”
I searched my mind frantically, but the only thought my mind could form was “What the actual freak, Viv?” I wasn’t back there, you were, remember? We were both in the front seat.”
“I know that. I just thought maybe you happened to look.”
“What, just…laying there? Out in the open?”
“Yes. No, wait.” She put her fingers to her lips and thought. “I remember I was looking at it while you got your G-Ma, and I put it down so she wouldn’t have a hissy fit. I think I put my jacket over it. Maybe.”
“Maybe you tossed a jacket on top of an actual handgun. So it’s safe now?”
“Would you lower your voice!” She frowned and appeared to think for a minute. “It’ll probably be okay,” she said, leaning back toward me. “It’s dark and nobody’s going to be looking in the backseat of my car anyway.”
I nodded. “Yes. Unless they are. What were you doing with your gun out, anyway?”
“I was just checking it.”
Three people on the rows ahead of us turned and glared at us. We quietened down.
After a few moments, Viv leaned over and spoke low. “I was just checking to make sure it was loaded. In case anything went down tonight.”
“Give me your keys,” I said. “I’ll go check.” I could at least put it under the seat so if it went off, the worst we would have to deal with would be a shot ankle.
I bumped a few knees on the way out to the parking lot. My whispered, “Excuse me,” were perhaps a bit louder than necessary. But neither my departure nor my minor disruption attracted Tony’s attention.
I walked into the dark night and gathered my jacket around me. It had cooled off some since the meeting started. Once I got away from the glow of the building’s lights, the thought struck me that there were, after all, armed robbers in the area. And lots of armed and trigger-happy citizens. I made up my mind to check and make sure the gun wasn’t in plain sight, and get my butt back into the safety of the crowd.
I peered into the backseat of Viv’s Cadillac. There was a jacket there. But was there also…crud. Yes, there in the moonlight I could see the glow of a metal gun barrel just peeking out the edge of the jacket. It shone silver when I moved aside and the glow from the building touched it.
I clicked the button on the keyring. It chirped, and I thought I heard the door unlock. I reached for the handle, though, and it was still locked. I hit the button again. Another chirp. Another yank on the handle that yielded no results.
I frowned and decided to just use the key the old-fashioned way. There was no keyhole in the passenger door, though. I moved around to the driver’s side.
“Aha,” I said. I slid the key into the lock.
The horn honked and the lights flashed on. Then again. And again. HONK HONK FLASH FLASH.
“No,” I said, jiggling on the key. It went in, but didn’t turn. I fiddled with it, pulling it out a fraction in case that helped, then slid it all the way back in.
Then the horn stopped the intermittent alarm honking and went into one solid, incredibly loud blast that felt very much like the world coming to an end.
I danced around in a panic, then gave up and put my hands over my ears. “Stupid car!” I shouted.
“Hey, they’re trying to steal that car!” someone shouted from out on the street. “Come on!”
I couldn’t see anybody, but suddenly the memory of bullets flying and glass crashing flooded my mind, and I panicked. Leaving the key in the lock, I ran.
Upon reflection, it would have been smart to run back into the building. What I did, though, was sprint as fast as I could past the building and down a dark alley.
Dogs barked and I heard more shouts. I had no idea how close they were, but I was sure there was a bullet headed straight for my back. I wanted to scream but I was afraid of expending the energy.
I ran down the middle of the alley until something that passed for logic told me to move to the side, closer to the shadows so I wouldn’t make such an easy target.
It was as if I had to order my feet to turn slightly to the right, they were so focused on forward motion. But I did — I moved to the right side of the alley and kept trucking. I risked a glance behind me to see if they were gaining on me. That’s when I tripped over the water pipe.
I slammed into the ground so hard it knocked the breath out of me. I lay there, not even able to gasp, the pain in my ankle intense. Tears sprang to my eyes and I bent to grasp the ankle with both hands, sure it was broken.
I heard more voices, and looked around frantically. A green dumpster sat a few feet away. I slid toward it on my butt, desperate to get hidden. I crawled to the back of the dumpster and saw some space behind it, between the dumpster and the fence. I managed to crawl a little way in, then flipped back over to sit on my butt, wedged between the chain link fence and the dumpster.
Caught in the Crotchfire Page 21
