07-Peaches And Screams

by G. A. McKevett

  Then there were the bullies, the tough guys who used their badges, guns, and nightsticks to bolster their already overinflated egos at the expense of those unfortunate enough to cross their paths.

  Long ago, she had decided that Mahoney belonged in the second category. And she had no use for his type.

  But as she and Dirk slowly descended the stairs, waiting for the sheriff to glance their way, she reminded herself that they were on Mahoney’s turf, and he might very well hold the key to her brother’s future.

  It wouldn’t be a good idea to piss him off.

  Too late.

  The instant he saw them, his hand lowered to the butt of the enormous revolver strapped, Western-style, to his hip.

  For half a second, she thought he was going to shoot them both dead on the stairs without asking a single question.

  She felt Dirk tense beside her and knew that he, too, was mentally willing himself not to reach for his own weapon.

  “Whoa, and who the hell are you?” Mahoney shouted, taking a couple of quick steps in their direction.

  They froze. Savannah made her hands, open and empty, fully visible to him. Dirk did the same.

  “I’m Savannah Reid, Sheriff,” she said quickly. “I was born and raised here in McGill. You remember me, don’t you?”

  He studied her, his eyes dark and suspicious under the large, yellow uni-brow that stretched from one side of his face to the other.

  She noticed he had developed a bright-red boozer’s nose and a patchwork of red and purple veins across his cheeks since she had seen him last. In McGill, rumors had always abounded that Mahoney liked a bit of vodka with his morning orange juice . . . and his afternoon cola, and his supper coffee, and his evening beer.

  His once blond hair held more white than gold now, but it was still wavy and thick for a guy in his late fifties or early sixties. Like Tom, he had filled out considerably. But, unlike his deputy, the added bulk wasn’t muscle.

  He looked her up and down for a couple of moments, then a light of recognition shone in his eyes. “You Shirley Reid’s oldest kid?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Surprising, she thought, how she still hated to admit that. It was one thing to be Granny Reid’s granddaughter. But Shirley’s . . . That was a pedigree she could do without.

  “Then that means you been up there with your little brother, my murder suspect, doing God-knows-what!”

  He walked on over to them, practically bristling under his two-sizes-too-small uniform. The khaki didn’t flatter him half as much as it did Tom.

  They walked down the remainder of the steps and met him halfway in the middle of the room.

  “Talking to him,” Dirk said. “That’s all we were doing . . . talking.”

  “And who are you?”

  Savannah cringed as Mahoney shoved a forefinger in Dirk’s face. Dirk wasn’t the sort to rein in his temper under circumstances like these. He, too, had a weak spot for bully cops. He liked to have them for breakfast with bacon and eggs, sunny-side up.

  Dirk reached into his shirt pocket and produced his badge. He flipped it open. “I’m Detective Seargent Dirk Coulter.”

  He pushed it under Mahoney’s nose. “And that’s gold,” he added, looking smugly at the tin star on Mahoney’s chest.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s studded with diamonds and rubies,” Mahoney snapped. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, running around free as a jaybird in my jail?”

  He turned back to Jeter. “Get your lazy, no-good hind end up those stairs and check that prisoner. Search him good. And his cell too.”

  Jeter ran full-tilt for the staircase, flying past them.

  “Do you think you can handle that, Deputy?” he yelled after the little man as he pounded up the steps.

  “Yes, sir! I can . . . I mean . . . I will, sir.”

  “I oughta lock you both up right now,” Mahoney said, running his eyes up and down each of them in turn. The fact that they were both a head taller than him didn’t seem to impress him at all.

  Savannah could tell he was seriously considering it. The vision of herself and Dirk locked up with Macon, and Tammy running the investigation alone on the outside, gave her a chill that had nothing to do with the air-conditioning in the office.

  “On what charge?” Dirk said.

  “Breaking into my jail, for starters.”

  “We didn’t break in, Sheriff.” Savannah donned her sweetest, buttery voice. “We just walked in. We would have asked for permission to talk to Macon, but nobody was here, so we just figured it would be okay if we—”

  “Bullshit. I reckon you don’t know nothing about that blonde out there with the broken-down car . . . that probably ain’t broken-down no more.” He turned to Dirk. “And you weren’t the one who made the call that sent my deputy on a wild-goose chase out to Whiskey Joe’s.”

  Dirk shrugged and gave him a half smirk. “What blonde? Whiskey who?”

  “Get outta here, both of y’all, before I slap cuffs on you and throw you in the pokey.”

  Savannah didn’t exactly break into a run, like Jeter, but she didn’t allow any moss to grow on her before she headed for the door, with Dirk right behind her.

  “And don’t you two come back here, either, you hear?”

  Savannah opened the door, shoved Dirk outside, then said over her shoulder, “Well, if for some reason we have to, I’ll be sure to have Dirk call Deputy Stafford first.”

  She slammed the door behind them, and they hot-stepped to the rented car, which—as Mahoney had predicted—was now sitting at the curb, running just fine, with a grinning Tammy at the wheel.

  “What happened?” Tammy asked breathlessly as they piled in, Savannah in the front, Dirk in the back.

  “Drive!” Dirk said. “Now.”

  “Whee-e-e, howdy.” Savannah felt her knees go to jelly. She reached over and slapped Tammy on the back as Tammy put the car in gear and peeled out. “We just escaped the iron jaws o’ the law, my friend. And the seat of my britches is tattered and my arse is aflappin’ bare in the breeze.” She sighed deeply. “Yep, that there was a close one.”

  When Tammy pulled into the dirt parking lot of Whiskey Joe’s, Savannah felt a wave of nausea that was the strongest she’d felt since changing birth control pills last summer. Instantly, she recognized the faded orange Karman Ghia parked closest to the store. Her mom had bought that car, used, in 1975 and had been driving it ever since. The last time Savannah had taken a ride in it, about twelve years ago, she had watched the road whipping along beneath them through at least three sizable holes in the floorboard. Her mom had warned her to leave her shoes on or risk losing them.

  Driving over a mud puddle had been a particularly invigorating experience.

  Savannah was surprised to see the car still running. Not only because of the sheer mileage, but because Shirley Reid was infamous for driving under the influence. Way under the influence. Savannah considered it a miracle that neither she nor the car had suffered a permanent crackup. As Gran would say: They’re both running on borrowed time.

  “You don’t have to go in there, Van,” Dirk said. “You can just drop me and the kid here off for a while and drop around later to pick us up. We can ask any questions that need asking.”

  In a gesture that touched her heart, he leaned forward from the backseat and laid a big, warm hand on her shoulder. She laid her cheek against it for a second.

  “Thanks. But, like you, now that we’ve talked to Macon, I’m thinking maybe he didn’t do it after all. And if he didn’t, somebody’s setting him up by sticking those medals under his bed.”

  She flashed back on the moment she had decided to leave those incriminating bits of evidence where they lay. Yes, she definitely had to do everything she could for her little brother. “I’m not exactly hankering to see my mom, but it might as well be now as later. Get it over with, you know?”

  “I guess.” Dirk didn’t sound convinced. He held the firm conviction that
conflict—at least the personal kind—was to be avoided at all cost.

  Tammy shot her a sympathetic, but slightly confused look, and Savannah knew how difficult it was for the younger woman to comprehend what she was feeling. Although Tammy’s family lived three thousand miles away from her on the north shore of Long Island in New York, she called them several times a week and visited frequently.

  They were close.

  And members of close families might try to understand. But they couldn’t. Not really.

  “I can’t come home and not see my mom,” Savannah said. “I mean . . . I could. But I can’t. So, let’s do it.”

  The three of them got out of the car and strolled up to the bar’s front door.

  Whiskey Joe’s hadn’t always been a dive; it hadn’t always been Whiskey Joe’s. In McGill’s better days, the bar had been a restaurant, Julia’s Place, frequented by the county’s wealthy landowners. Stained-glass windows, etched mirrors, solid brass hardware on hardwood doors had set the scene for leisurely candlelit dinners. But few remnants of its former grandeur remained.

  The oak door bore numerous scars from careless boot kicks and a deep crack down the middle from the front tire of J.P. Murphy’s Harley-Davidson, when he had decided to crash the place one hot Fourth of July.

  The floor-to-ceiling stained-glass window to the right of the door was bowed outward, roughly in the shape of a human body, from the night J.P. had been evicted . . . and missed the doorway.

  Savannah could think of a lot of places on earth to pleasantly while away the hours of her life, but, unlike her mom, Whiskey Joe’s wasn’t one of them.

  Each to his own . . . or her own, she told herself as she walked through the door. Don’t judge. Nobody knows enough about anyone else to judge.

  But a man is judged by his actions. Or lack thereof. A woman, too, came the quick mental response.

  She sighed to herself. So much for not judging.

  The smell of booze and stale cigarette smoke hit her, along with the familiar pinging and bells of the pinball machine and the clicking of pool balls being knocked around three full-sized tables, and the whine of a country ballad from the jukebox in the corner.

  “Pretty busy for early afternoon,” Dirk said, glancing around the main room, at the bar, booths, and tables that were at least one-third full.

  “You oughta see it on a Saturday night,” Savannah replied, her own eyes searching the room. But she wasn’t counting the crowd.

  She felt Tammy’s hand close around her arm. “Isn’t that her, over there at the end of the bar?”

  Savannah wondered at Tammy’s powers of detection, until she recalled that in her spare time, Tammy had scanned and catalogued all of Savannah’s old family pictures into the office computer.

  Following Tammy’s line of vision, she saw her mother, sitting where she had been the last time Savannah saw her . . . on the second stool from the end, beneath a picture of Elvis.

  Now, as then, she was holding a beer in her right hand, while smoke curled upward from the tip of a cigarette in her left.

  But that was where the similarity between yesteryear and the present ended.

  “I wouldn’t have known her if I’d run into her on Main Street,” Savannah said under her breath. “I don’t think I would have recognized my own mother.”

  Shirley Reid had aged twenty years in eight. Once a pretty woman, who had spent an inordinate amount of time and care on her personal appearance, Shirley looked as if she hadn’t brushed her hair or changed her clothing in a week. She had always been slender, but now she was painfully gaunt, her cheeks sunken and deeply lined.

  Alone at the bar, with only her beer and cigarette for company, she looked frail, fragile, and terribly lost.

  Savannah had been afraid of the anger she would feel when she saw her mother again, the resentment, the disappointment. But the only emotion she felt, standing in the back of Whiskey Joe’s staring into her mother’s lonely world, was sadness.

  She turned to Dirk and Tammy, who were watching her with the depth of compassion and concern that only the dearest friends could demonstrate. “You two go on, mingle, shoot some pool, whatever, and ask your questions. Talk to you later.”

  They nodded and headed for the other side of the room, where a bald and burly bartender was giving a pile of glasses their requisite swish in the sink and loading them onto a draining tray.

  Savannah took a deep breath and strolled over to the bar stool . . . the one directly beneath the picture of “The King.”

  Shirley didn’t notice her, didn’t even move, until she was standing right behind her. Savannah reached out and lightly tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Hey, Shirl,” she said. “What’s shakin’?”

  Long ago, Shirley had established the cardinal rule: Don’t call me “Mom” in here. Not ever.

  Shirley wasn’t big on being called “Mom” anywhere. Especially a setting where members of the opposite sex might overhear.

  As though roused out of a thick mental fog, Shirley shook her head, turned, and stared blankly at Savannah.

  Slowly recognition dawned on her face. “Van? Oh, hi, baby.” She waved her cigarette vaguely at the nearest stool. “Sit down. Let me buy you a drink.”

  Somewhat relieved that the moment for the awkward, obligatory embrace had come and gone, Savannah sat down beside her mother and laid her purse on the bar in front of her.

  “It’s a bit early for me,” she said. “How’s the coffee in here?”

  “Fresh.” Shirley mashed the stub of her cigarette into the ashtray and, in one continuous motion, reached for the pack on the bar, shook out another, and lit up. “Fresh . . . every Saturday morning, that is.”

  “Well, since it’s Wednesday afternoon, I guess I’ll pass,” Savannah said. “How have you been?”

  Shirley shrugged and looked as though she were swimming inside her clothes. The denim shirt she wore was at least two sizes too large for her, and the front was stained with something that looked like spaghetti sauce.

  But she was wearing her jewelry. All of it. Shirley never left the house without her silver and turquoise rings, bracelets, necklaces, and earrings. The bigger, the heavier, the better.

  Savannah had once told her that she’d better never go swimming or she’d sink straight to the bottom with all that metal.

  Her mom hadn’t been amused. Her jewelry was no laughing matter. Shirley had never owned much in the material world. And what little she’d had, she’d lost. Except her jewelry. Those bits and pieces of turquoise and silver were about all Shirley Reid had to show for sixty-one years of living.

  “I heard you’d come home,” Shirley said. “I guess you’re here for Marietta’s wedding next Saturday.”

  Savannah flashed back on the giant peach-tulip dress and gulped. “Yeah. What are you going to wear? Do you know yet?”

  Shirley took a long drag on her cigarette and held it deep before releasing it through her nose. “Haven’t been invited. I thought my daughter might ask me to sing at her wedding . . . I used to sing in church all the time, you know . . . but no. She didn’t even invite me to come.”

  “Oh.” Savannah could practically taste the rubber sole of her shoe. “Sorry. Maybe the invitation got lost in the mail or—”

  “Or maybe Marietta decided not to invite her own mother because she’s ashamed of her.”

  “I don’t think that’s why.”

  “That’s why. I know. I called her and asked her point-blank.”

  “And Marietta said she was ashamed of you? She actually told you that?”

  Shirley’s hand shook as she knocked her ashes into the tray. “In so many words. She’s afraid I’ll show up drunk and embarrass her in front of her new in-laws.”

  Suddenly, Savannah felt as though she were treading on quicksand. It was a feeling she often had when she tried to have a conversation with her mother. “Would you be willing to . . . you know . . . not drink that day? To show up completely sober?” />
  “Yeah, I could probably show up sober,” Shirley replied, her voice tight, her tone sarcastic. “ ’Course, we all know I wouldn’t stay that way at the reception.”

  “So, get yourself a pretty suit and show up at the church. Skip the party.”

  “No, thank you. I don’t want to be anywhere I’m not welcome. And that witch, your grandmother, she hates me. She won’t want me around.”

  “Gran doesn’t hate you. She’s never said a bad thing about you, ever. She—”

  “Yeah, yeah, she’s a friggin’ saint. I know. I should get down on my knees and kiss her damned feet. That’s what the family court judge told me when he took you kids away from me and gave you to her.”

  Savannah felt the rage welling up again, the fury that she had to bury, over and over and over again, year after year. She choked it down and wondered briefly if it would turn into an ulcer or some sort of cancer someday.

  “I’m not going to discuss Gran with you, Shirl,” she said. “Actually, I came by to talk to you about Macon.”

  Shirley downed about half her glass of beer before answering. “Yeah, Macon. Goes to show you what a fine job the old witch did of raising you guys. He’s going to go away for murder! So much for the stable home life she—”

  “Stop! I told you, I’m not going to listen to that crap. I want you to tell me anything you know about Macon, or Kenny Jr., or Judge Patterson.”

  “Macon’s a pain in the ass, steals stuff around town with that no-good Kenny. And Judge Patterson . . . he had more enemies than you could shake a stick at. A zillion people in this county wanted to see him dead, and I don’t know anybody who’s crying about the fact that he’s passed on to his eternal reward. Most everybody I’ve talked to figures he’s roasting his hind quarters in hell right now. And in their opinions, he more than deserves it.”

  “Really?”

  Family politics instantly took a backseat in Savannah’s detective mind. This visit might be worth the heartache after all.

  She leaned closer to her mother and lowered her voice, “Do tell,” she said, “and don’t spare any of the juicy details.”