Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  The trip down was not pleasant, but finally, ten minutes later, he stood outside in the hospital parking lot right next to the butter head. Miracle of miracles, the key was still in the ignition. He wouldn’t even have to hot wire it.

  He grunted as he pulled the burlap back over the butter head and resecured the loose bungee cords that held it in place, then eased himself on to the seat, the body cast digging into his thighs as he sat down and turned over the engine. It purred to life. Turning the throttle and looking around to make certain no one was watching, he drove slowly out of the parking lot and onto the road, still covered with a half foot of snow.

  God must love him, he decided, smiling as he drove sedately down the road, the butter head jouncing companion-ably against his back. No one else was out trying to navigate through the glistening white snow blanketing every road and side street. So when Dunk heard the powerful drone of heavy equipment behind him, at first he didn’t think much of it. Until the drone revved up and the sound started to close, fast.

  He looked over his shoulder to see a two-ton snow plow barreling down on him and knew he was in trouble. He couldn’t see much of the guy’s face but he saw enough to realize the guy was pissed and coming for him, and something inside told him he was coming for the butter head, too. Panicked but purposeful, Dunk twisted the throttle hard. The snowmobile flew forward, and in answer, the sound of the engine behind him roared higher. Damn it! Couldn’t anything be simple?

  It was just not fair! He was going to some pretty fucking heroic lengths here, what with getting out of his hospital bed and all. Why couldn’t this guy just let him have the damn thing?

  Well, he would soon enough. He opened up the throttle and in a few minutes hit the edge of town and headed straight for the lake. He’d like to see that snowplow try to catch him there.

  As soon as he was in sight of the lake, Dunk saw just how he was going to lose the plow. A Ford Bronco was parked right in the center of the access road the city had plowed onto the lake. All Dunk had to do was whoosh by its left side, and so long, plow. He grinned, easing up on the throttle as he approached the lake. Some guy stood beside the SUV flapping his arms and yelling at him, even going so far as to step right out into the path Dunk had been planning to take. Asshole. Dunk veered more sharply to the left and onto the ice. Behind him he heard the snowplow’s brakes squeal. Good-bye, sucker. He was home free.

  And then the ice cracked open.

  The nose of the snowmobile plunged into the ice. All around Dunk the lake splintered apart in slow motion, the hole around the snowmobile’s front bubbling and widening as more and more of the machine was swallowed by it. He looked up, stunned. All around people were running toward him, screaming and shouting. The water was up over his ankles, freezing cold, boiling like it was hot. He tried to stand up, but only managed to thrust his legs deeper into the frigid water.

  He was going to die, he realized in bewilderment. There was no possible way he could survive. He was going to die. For a butter head.

  He didn’t want to die. It was a waste. His life had been a waste—he saw that now. He wanted to live, to be a good person. To date Karin Ekkelstahl. He didn’t give a fuck about an IRA!

  A second sharp crack announced the end. The hole yawned and the snowmobile dove toward the bottom of the lake, taking Dunk, encased in thirty pounds of Fiberglas and plaster, along with it.

  “Oh, no, you don’t, you stupid son of a bitch!” Ned flung himself out of the snowplow’s cab and raced toward the quickly sinking snowmobile. The asshole had driven straight over the spring, right where they’d set flags. Why even the jerk in the Bronco had tried to warn him off, but no, he’d had to go and break through.

  Well, he was not taking Ned’s butter head with him. Butter floats. All Ned had to do was make it to the butter head and undo the bungee cords holding it. But he had to get there fast. The lake was real deep in that spot. If the butter head sank along with the snowmobile, they’d never find it.

  Ned was almost there. Just a few more yards. A few more …

  With a giant crack, the lake swallowed the guy, the snowmobile, and the butter head.

  “NO!” Ned shrieked, ripping off his hat and coat and tossing them aside as he dove headfirst into the water. The shock of the icy blast drove the air from his lungs. He opened his eyes and saw a pale, waxy face staring up at him through the darkening water, slowly growing smaller and smaller. He kicked feverishly, frantically, reaching … reaching … Almost. Almost!

  A hand grabbed his arm. He spun around, gurgling, and saw a guy’s face a few feet from his, his eyes wide and staring. Beneath him the butter head was shrinking fast. This asshole was going to make him lose the butter head. Furiously, Ned tried unwrapping the guy’s hand but he had a death grip on him.

  “Gi ob me!” Ned screamed under water. The guy just kept right on staring at him and clinging to him.

  Ned looked down. The butter head had disappeared.

  With a few savage and highly graphic mental curses, Ned began kicking for the surface, towing his unwanted passenger along with him. He broke the surface to find the hole surrounded by people. Next to him, the asshole popped up, choking and sputtering.

  A cheer went up from those around them, confusing Ned. He looked around to see what they were cheering for. Some others flung them ropes; one guy found a lifebuoy. Other people ran to get blankets. The guy in the hole next to him still clung to him like a tick on a dog, leaning his forehead against his shoulder.

  “God bless you, mister. You saved my life!”

  Chapter Fifty

  6:40 a.m.

  Monday, December 11

  Blue Lake Casino

  “Can we call a break? I need to pee,” the math major from St. Cloud State, one of the five remaining contestants in the all-night poker tournament, asked. He’d been visiting his grandparents in Fawn Creek over the weekend and had been trapped by the snowstorm blocking the roads south. He’d entered the tournament more out of boredom than anything else, and no one could have been more surprised than himself at his still being in the running.

  “Come on,” he whined. “We haven’t had a break in a couple hours, and man, there’s a hundred thousand on the line here and I don’t want to be distracted by my bladder, ‘kay?”

  “Let the kid pee, fer chrissakes,” said one of the other five, an Asian guy who’d come up from the cities for the fishing tournament.

  “Let the boy go,” Jenn drawled, letting loose with the Southern accent she’d spent the last twenty years replacing with round Minnesota vowels.

  Next to her, the other female finalist, a barrel-shaped old lady who’d arrived early in the week driving an RV packed with grandchildren and covered with casino stickers from around the country, nodded. Ken Holmberg, rounding out the quintet of finalists, shrugged.

  The dealer shot a questioning glance at the casino manager, a big, good-looking Indian named Ed White, who nodded from his vantage on the edge of the roped off area.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be taking a fifteen-minute break,” the dealer announced as a pair of guards moved in to stand post beside the table. The kid shot up and ran for the bathroom, while Jenn got up slowly.

  As far as she was concerned, the break was just postponing the inevitable because there was no way the kid was going to win. Every time he picked up a pair, his forehead beaded up. You couldn’t win a poker tournament with a “tell” like that. Jenn, groomed by beauty pageants and accustomed to being under the hot glare of studio lights, had no “tells.” She just plastered on a pleasant pageant expression—okay, maybe it wasn’t so pleasant, but she’d had a lot to think about lately, so make that a neutral expression—and emulated a mannequin.

  The old lady and the Asian guy weren’t going to go home with that hundred thousand plus, either. The old lady was running out of luck and the Asian guy played too cautiously. If fate had its way, Jenn would end up going head-to-head in the final hands with Ken Holmberg. Which she had to admit, s
he was looking forward to. Ken represented Fawn Creek at its worst: puffed-up, boorish, and condescending.

  He was beginning to really piss her off.

  For one thing, he insisted on calling her sugar puss, and every time she took a pot, he rolled back in his chair, lacing his pudgy little fingers over the shirt straining over his little potbelly, grinned, and said, “Oh, wow, now. The little lady’s managed to take one. Good fer you, sugar puss.”

  When he won, he’d lean back, tuck his pudgy thumbs in the belt straining around his padded belly, and announce loudly, “Yup. I’m gonna win this thing. You guys might as well quit now. Can’t mess with Providence’s plan.” Like God had personally fingered him to be Saint Ken of the Green Baize Table. Well, Ken was about to have an unpleasant revelation, because he was not going to win. She was.

  She was going to win this tournament, tape the next six points on the “Winter Wonderland Weekend Checklist,” judge the Fawn Creek sesquicentennial lutefisk contest, ride at the head of their parade—sans butter head—and return to New York, where she would then embark on a career that would make her the Katie Couric of the Kitchen. Or whatever Bob Reynolds wanted to make her.

  And she was going to be happy. Very happy. And two years from now, she would have a dog. And name it something like Alfred. Or Neil. Or Prince.

  And Steve? The thought of him brought a wave of confusion and guilt. She probably shouldn’t have called him during the last break, but the feeling that she was going behind his back wouldn’t leave her alone, eating at her concentration until she’d had to call and confess, which was such a Minnesotan trait—stalwartly owning up to your actions—that under normal circumstances she might have laughed. These were not normal circumstances. The connection had been bad and she couldn’t tell his reaction from the choppy phrases that had been transmitted. She hoped, fervently, that he understood.

  She guessed their future—if you can even have a future on the basis of a few days, which she knew objectively was unlikely, but unobjectively completely bought into—all hung on how much he’d wanted to screw over his ex-wife. If he couldn’t see that a career was more important than revenge … Ah, hell. She didn’t know what she was thinking anymore. Why couldn’t Nat have come with her to the casino? She was Jenn’s Cold Voice of Reason, and things were getting murky again. Oh, yeah. Jenn was supposed to be incognito. Nothing must hint at any connection between “Ms. Uri” and Jenn Lind.

  Her stomach, never reliable under stress, was twisting up in knots. She started from the cordoned-off area, heading for the bar, where they kept a supply of Pepto-Bismol on hand. The spectators on the other side of the velvet ropes cheered and clapped her on the back like she was their champion as she edged her way through them. It tweaked the kernel of disquiet in her stomach further. She wasn’t their champion; she was her champion.

  Jenn could safely swear that she would never wear a polyester wig again for the rest of her life after today. The thing was hot and it itched like crazy and she suspected it smelled, too, but that might have been her old Buttercup pageant dress, dragged out of mothballs to be added to her visual arsenal of diversionary tactics. No one in the world would ever guess that the overpainted, undergirdled, middle-aged woman in the black wig and falling out of her dress was that model of homemaking virtue, Jenn Lind.

  Inside, the bar was crowded but she found a narrow place to shove in and waved to get the bartender’s attention. He gave her a quick smile and held up two fingers, mouthing, Just a couple minutes before hurrying off to fill another order.

  “—I don’t know why we needed some aging bucolic beauty anyway.”

  She froze. She knew that voice. It was Bob Reynolds. And he was sitting immediately to her right, his back to her as he spoke in a low, terse voice to—she glanced sideways—Dieter the Director.

  “It’s Davies,” Dieter said, stirring his drink. “He’s in love with all her virtue. He rhapsodizes about how she embodies American female decency.”

  “Crap,” Bob said tiredly. “Give me a week and I’ll find a half dozen younger, prettier women who’ve been certified by the Vatican as saints, are willing to work for half what Davies is paying Lind, and don’t take themselves so damn seriously. Man, this is a glorified cooking show, and she better wake up and realize it.”

  Her heart pounded.

  “Ja,” Dieter sympathized. “Diva.”

  “Okay, ma’am, what can I do ya?” The bartender’s voice startled Jenn, and she backed away, bumping into Dieter. He turned around and looked straight up into her face.

  Her breath jolted to a stop in her throat, as Jenn waited for the recognition to dawn in his eyes. Yeah, her disguise was good at a distance with strangers, but he was right here and he’d just spent an entire day staring at her face through a camera lens.

  “Hey!”

  Here it comes, she thought. She swallowed hard.

  “You’re the lady from the poker tournament, aren’t you?”

  Behind the dark glasses, she blinked in surprise. He didn’t recognize her. Not as Jenn Lind. There wasn’t a flicker of familiarity in his face.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me buy you a drink,” he said. “I’ve been cheering for you.”

  “Thanks, but I … I got to get back,” she said, thickening her Southern accent. Then she turned tail and raced from the room.

  She had just broken free of the door and was feeling the rush of relief when someone took hold of her arm and spun her around. She looked up into Steve’s face. She broke into a huge smile, surprised by the surge of pleasure the sight of him brought her until she realized he wasn’t returning her smile. His face was somber, his resemblance to a soulful bloodhound even more pronounced than usual.

  She’d known he would be upset with her for going over his bid to secure the butter head. She’d thought he would understand. But then, she hadn’t given him much of a chance to do that. She’d just … done what she needed to do.

  “We’ve got to talk,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Steve. But I can’t trash my future so you can thumb your nose at your ex-wife. Please don’t ask me. Please understand.”

  He shook his head. “We have to talk.”

  “I can’t. Steve, I can’t even be talking to you. Too many people know that you and Jenn Lind are both staying out at the Lodge. They see us together and they might put two and two together.”

  He didn’t argue, and for that, at least, she was grateful. “Okay. Come on.” He steered her through the casino toward the restrooms at the back. As soon as they reached the ladies’ room, he pushed the door open, took her arm and pulled her in after him. A trio of older women in polyester stood in front of the sinks comparing the weight of their bandit cups. Otherwise it was empty.

  “Ladies, could we have the room for a moment?” Steve asked politely. “That color pants, by the way, is wonderful on you,” he told the lady nearest him. “You should always wear tangerine.”

  The woman blushed and stammered, as pleased as she was affronted. “Oh fer—Well, I never. Come on, girls.”

  “Thank you,” he said to their departing backs. As soon as they’d left, he stuck the wedge the cleaning company used under the door.

  “What are you doing here, Steve?” Jenn asked.

  Steve leaned against the sink. “I have two important things to tell you.”

  “Yes?”

  “First, I have the key to the crypt. The thieves left their snowmobile in the grocery store parking lot while I was there. The butter head was strapped to the back. So I just dug the key out.”

  Jenn’s eyes widened. That meant … nothing. She might have guessed that Dunkovich wanted the butter head for that key but Steve claimed no one else knew about it and she had to assume that Dunkovich still wanted the butter head.

  “I called Fabulousa.”

  Jenn’s attention snapped back to Steve. “I’m sure it was a defining moment.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “That’s what I had to tell you.
It wasn’t a moment. It wasn’t anything. In fact, it was sort of anticlimactic. I called and I said, ‘Fabulousa, I am looking at the key to the vault that holds Muse in the House. What do you think about that?’ And she said, ‘Oh, you mean the sculpture that is sitting upon my living room table and upon which I am right now looking?”’

  He did a really good Boris Badenov impersonation.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Turns out my thief friend, Timmy, sold Fabulousa the whereabouts of the statue about three weeks after he stole it. He’s not even dead. He just got worried I’d find out and come after him, so he wrote a note saying he was dead and mailed it to me.”

  “Oh, Steve, I’m sorry,” she said, touching his arm. His face was all creased with unhappiness and filled with sweetness.

  “It’s all right,” he said, taking her hand and raising it to his lips. He kissed her knuckles. “I was actually sort of impressed she’d never sold it. I mean, she’s had it for years and she’s never sold it, so it must mean something to her and that means she must have some sort of a soul, right? I told her so, too, and she said she was never as much of a bitch as I thought she was, and I said I was never as big of a prick as she thought I was.”

  Steve’s brow furrowed pensively. “I thought having that statue would somehow make up for that part of my life, the divorce. I thought if I had it, I’d be done with Fabulousa. But, Jenny, I’ll never be done with her. She’s there. In the past. And she always will be. For all the shit she put me through, and it was a lot, it was shit that made me who I am and I like who I am. Most of the time.”

  “Great. But I don’t understand what this has to do with me.”

  “Because of the second thing I have to tell you: Ken Holmberg needs to win this tournament.”

  At this, Jenn snorted. “He can stand in line.”

  “No, Jenny. I heard him talking and he’s in trouble unless he can come up with ninety thousand dollars by tomorrow. He’s in real trouble, Jenn. Like legal trouble.”

  “Gee, I’m looking down the track but I don’t see the pity train coming.”