“Good evening, ma’am. We need to see Cornnut about fixing my windshield,” Ulyssa said, gesturing toward the leering car with the fractured glass.
“Him and his idiot friends are down by the lake, catching tourists. Just follow the road for a little ways, then turn left at the giant oak tree. Shouldn’t be too far ‘n you’ll see ‘em sitting next to the lake,” she said, slamming the door before we could thank her.
We decided to walk to the lake since the car windshield looked like it would collapse any minute. The walk seemed like a death march and we were about to turnaround when we saw the edge of the lake. We stepped off the road and followed a well worn trail around the side of the water. It didn’t take long for us to locate the loud, rowdy trio perched on their coolers.
“Hey Cornnut!” we yelled, from a distance.
“Howdy girls! How y’all doing?”
“Pretty good. We need your help. My windshield is all busted up and I was hoping you could have a quick look at it. Maybe tell me how much it’ll cost to fix it.”
“Sure, I can do that. But you’ll have to hang out for a little while. We just got word from Johnny that a couple tourists passed through town.” He leaned over and spit a stream of tobacco from the side of his mouth. “Me and the boys are bout to go tourist fishing.”
We didn’t get a chance to ask anymore questions because a Lexus SUV came speeding down the dirt road and drove straight into the lake. The truck was going so fast the water immediately covered the hood and stalled the engine.
“Here we go boys!” Cornnut hooted. They all jumped up and ran over to the truck to help the occupants.
Ulyssa and I stood on the grassy bank, unsure what was going on. The couple came sputtering to the surface as Cornnut and crew helped pull them out of the water and brought them over to sit down near us.
“Y’all ok?” he asked, the drenched couple.
“Yeah. There must be something wrong with that GPS system. It told us to keep straight for three more miles. Then outta nowhere we’re sinking in this lake. I’m sure glad you guys were here to help.” He pulled a soggy cell phone from his pocket and tried to make a call. “You don’t happen to have a cell phone, so I can call for a tow, do you?”
“I’ll do ya one better than that... I’ll head back to the house and grab my truck,” Cornnut said, jogging off down the road.
He was back a few minutes later driving his tow truck. I narrowed my eyes at him. There was no way he coulda made it home and back that quick. He caught me staring and gave me a wink like we were co-conspirators. Him and the boys chained up the truck and dragged it out of the water.
“I’ll work on it tonight, but I probably won’t be able to get it running til tomorrow. Do y’all want me to drop you off at the local motel? I can pick you up in the morning when your truck is all fixed up.”
The man shook Cornnut’s hand saying, “That sounds great. I guess it’s true what they say about you southerners. You really are good folks.”
“Ronnie, you mind giving the girls a ride back to the house while me and Beaver run these nice folks over to the motel?”
Cornnut’s sidekick stood there with a face splitting grin and I understood how he got his nickname. He looked like a cartoon beaver with protruding front teeth and fuzzy sideburns.
Ronnie, the final trio member, snapped a salute to the edge of his buzz cut. “Roger that, Cornnut.” Something seemed a little off about Ronnie, but it was getting dark and I didn’t want to walk back through the woods at night.
His truck stood over eight feet tall if you counted the giant tires and flood lights. We had to use the sidesteps to get into the cab. I gagged from the overwhelming smell of the pine tree air fresheners. He had two hanging from the rearview mirror, and one hanging off the driver and passenger door ‘oh shit’ bars.
What smells so bad in here that he needs four air fresheners?
The gun rack, camouflage seat covers and spittoon completed the redneck decor.
Ulyssa slid in the middle and I sat by the window where the fresh breeze kept me from getting sick off the stench of the sweetened cardboard. Ronnie fired up the monster truck and guided it onto the dirt road. We were the last ones to leave the lake so the woods were pitch black, except for the truck headlights.
We hadn’t travelled very far when Ronnie let out a banshee cry and flipped a silver switch on the truck dashboard activating every light on the truck flooding the road like football stadium.
A giant deer stood planted in the road shocked by the floodlights.
“Wooowhheeee, girls! Hold on tight! We’re a-gonna git us a deer!”
Instead of slowing down so the deer could move, Ronnie hit the gas and drove straight over it. Ulyssa and I screamed as the truck wheels thudded over the animal’s body.
Ronnie threw the truck in reverse, tilting the truck sideways as he backed over the deer and eliciting more screams from us.
“I didn’t bring my knifes with me, so I gotta make sure we killed him,” he said, hopping down from the truck to inspect the deer. He was obviously happy with the results and came back to enlist our help.
“I need y’all to help me get him up on the hood and tie him down.”
He looked so crazed from the kill, we decided it was safer to help. We fell out of the truck and trudged over to the deer carcass. I took one look at the corpse and puked in the ditch.
Ronnie laughed and patted me on the back asking, “First time hunting deer, huh? Y’all grab his back legs and I’ll take the front ones.”
We grabbed the legs and helped swing the deer up on the truck hood. Ronnie tied the deer down since Ulyssa wouldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t stop puking. We climbed back into the truck and screamed again. Ronnie had arranged the deer so it was facing us.
“I didn’t know it was deer season,” Ulyssa whispered, as the tears dried on her cheeks.
“It ain’t deer season. It’s just ‘don’t get caught’ season!” Ronnie laughed maniacally, pleased with his wit.
She looked at me for help, but I just sat there with my mouth closed watching the deer watching me.
The short drive back to Cornnut’s house seemed to last forever. We jumped down from the truck before it came to a complete stop.
“Thanks for the ride!” we yelled, as we ran toward the welcoming glow of Cornnut’s garage.
Ronnie waved as he drove off giving a short honk at Cornnut who was already working on the Lexus SUV.
“Cornnut! Ronnie’s crazy! He spotlighted a deer and made us help him strap it to the hood!” I announced.
He just nodded in agreement saying, “He ain’t been right since he got back from ‘Nam. I don’t know what happened, but he came back with a fascination with blades of all sorts. You girls are lucky he didn’t have his knifes with him. Otherwise, you mighta been stuck helping him gut the thing!”
My stomach rolled and face paled at the thought of cleaning and dressing the deer. Cornnut chuckled as he walked around the SUV, wiping his hands on a cloth.
“The good news is... I had a quick look at your windshield and I can replace it. Maybe even be able to finish it tomorrow after I’m done with the tourist’s car. It’ll run ya about $500.”
“Damn! $500!” she said, shaking her head at the bad luck. “I guess I don’t have much of a choice. Would you mind dropping us off at the house? Shasta can drive me back over here tomorrow to pick it up.”
“I reckon I could. Let’s get going, so I can git back here before supper.” Thankfully, the tow truck ride with Cornnut was devoid of air fresheners and deer.
“It was a good thing y’all were fishing at the lake when that truck crashed,” I said.
“Luck!” he snorted. “We was out there waiting on them to drive into the lake. There’s an issue with them fancy navigation systems cause they show a highway running through the lake on the way outta town. And most folks don’t have enough common sense or it’s too late to stop when they see the lake. The first time it happened it wa
s a complete accident, but it didn’t take me long to figure out what was going on. So, I set up a system where Johnny lets me know when any tourists pull into the gas station. Me and the boys will come down here with a couple beers and wait to watch them drive into the lake. Then charge ‘em a bunch of money for the tow and repairs. We started getting a kick back from Myrtle over at the motel too cause we wuz giving her so much business.”
“How many times have you done this before?” Ulyssa asked.
“Bout seventeen or eighteen, I reckon.”
“And nobody has caught on?”
“Nope. They’re so grateful to me for helping them out in a pinch, they usually give me a big tip.”
“How do Ronnie and Beaver make money on it?”
“Shheeettt!” he exclaimed, leaning over to spit out the window. “They do it just to have something to do. Nobody else knows about this side business and I’d appreciate it if you kept it to yourself.”
We both nodded.
He pulled into the driveway next to my rusty Sidekick.
“You can stop by to pick up the car tomorrow night about six. Y’all have a goodnight.”
We shut the tow truck door and made our way into the trailer.
Ulyssa went to check on the money and stash the newspaper article while I made us some dinner. It had been more than twenty-four hours since we’d met with Nicolo and we still didn’t know what to do.
This musta been bugging Ulyssa too because she suddenly said, “Let’s do it!”
I stopped mid-chew. “Whraat?”
“I don’t have enough money to pay for the windshield and we’ve got tons of overdue bills. We’re going to miss our mortgage payment too. Marcus is an awful person, so it’s not like we’ll be killing someone nice. All we have to do is run him over and we’ll have enough money to hold us over until we find work.”
“But we freaked out when crazy Ronnie hit that deer! There’s no way we can handle killing a human.”
“That was different. I’m sure we’d kill that deer if it was a matter of self-defense.”
If we don’t do this job, we’re going to die from starvation or mobster anger. “Ok,” I relented, “We’ll do it.”
I went to bed that night with a heavy heart, but I woke up the next morning with intent.
“Ulyssa. Ulyssa,” I said, shaking her snoring body. “Get up! We gotta figure out how we’re going to kill Marcus!”
“Whhaa? Can’t it wait? I need a few more hours.”
“No. It can’t wait. We need to get this over with. Get your butt up, I’m going to make us some mochas!” When I get my mind set on doing or getting something, I become really obsessed and hyper about it until it’s done.
A few minutes later she came grumbling into the kitchen. “Couldn’t your OCD wait until after 10AM to kick in?”
“Do you think we should run him over? Like crazy Ronnie did to that deer? He made it look pretty easy. We won’t have to touch the body or anything.”
“It might work, but we couldn’t do it in our cars cause they’d trace them back to us. We’d have to find a car that nobody would recognize.”
“Cornnut!” we said, looking at each other.
“I bet he’d have an old junker we could buy,” I added.
“Yeah. Maybe one from his backyard!”
“Good. Good. Now we’ll need to figure out where Marcus spends his time, so we can plan our hit and run.”
My OCD was in overdrive as we drove into town to run errands and plan our assassination attempt. The utility company was first.
“Good Morning! We’re here to pay our bill and late fee.”
We slid the billing statement under the window with two hundred dollar bills stacked on top. The lady behind the counter gave us a suspicious look.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, taking the bills out of the office.
“I didn’t even think about how suspicious we’d look rolling around town handing out $100 bills. Damn!”
“What if they’re counterfeit? Double damn!” I added.
We were about to run out of the building when she came back into the office.
“Sorry bout the wait. We don’t often get $100 bills in here, so I had to check the watermark to make sure it ain’t none of that funny money,” she explained, handing us a handful of dollar bills and coins. “Here’s your change. Y’all have a good one.”
The next stop - Nitro Bank. We decided to deposit two thousand into an account, so we could use debit cards for purchases around town without drawing suspicion. We walked up to the teller station as Emma came waltzing up to the counter. “Howdy. How can I help y’all?”
“We’d like to open a joint account and make a deposit.”
“Why sure. Here’s the forms. You can fill them out while I count the money.”
When we were done, I handed the forms back to Emma.
“Looks like y’all have $1900 here. Would you like to deposit it in your new joint account?”
“You may want to count that again. There was $2000 when I handed it to you,” Ulyssa said, staring at Emma like she wanted to pull her hair out by the roots.
Emma pretended to recount the money. “Well, it looks like you’re right. Two of the bills musta stuck together the first time I counted it.” She smiled at us with a false sweetness asking, “How did y’all come up with this kind of money? I thought you were unemployed.”
She directed her fake smile at Ulyssa when she added the last barb. I placed a warning hand on Ulyssa’s arm and responded to Emma. “It seems that you get a nice severance package when you get fired cause your boss is committing adultery with a bank teller.”
Her smile turned into a sneer. “Well, no wonder YOU got fired with a nasty attitude like that,” she said, restoring her fake smile. “Thank y’all for stopping by Nitro Bank today. I hope you have a blessed day! Next, please!”
The bank was the last errand we had for the day, so we drove over to the library to Google our target. The research achieved two things 1) it confirmed what the news article had told us Marcus’s criminal track record, and 2) He spent a lot of time at Bella’s Italian restaurant in Charleston. This last tidbit was the result of our keen detective skills. Since he’d been arrested twice outside the restaurant - it seemed like he was a regular. And that’s how we picked the scene of the crime. Now all we needed were disguises and the murder weapon. Drawing from our cinematic experience, we decided scarfs and sunglasses would probably be the most effective disguises. We went to Wal-Mart for the best and cheapest scarf/sunglass selection. I bolstered up my confidence for the visit, since I hadn’t stepped foot in the store since I collected my last check.
Eugene ignored us as we came in through the external sliding glass doors. He was staring at Ruth who was leaning over a buggy trying to look seductive.
“Oh my, it looks like somebody left a flier in this cart. Goodness me. I’ll just have to reach down here and get it,” she flirted, extending the upper half of her body into the cart while sticking her butt higher in the air. It looked like some animal mating ritual where she was attempting to lure nearby males to her. “We just cain’t have this... it makes Wal-Mart look dirty. And we don’t want to be dirty, do we?” she asked, looking back at Eugene with her hand on her right butt cheek.
Eugene was so entranced that he didn’t realize his mouth was wide open. His upper denture slid out of his mouth, smacking the ground and shattering into teeth shards. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw a tooth skitter across the floor near the mechanical pony ride. This town is so full of hustlers that I bet whichever kid found the yellow stained tooth would try to swindle money out of the tooth fairy. We strode past the geriatric “Girls Gone Wild” scene waving at Mitsy on our way to the accessories section.
We wrapped silk scarfs around our heads to hide our hair and donned obnoxiously large sunglasses to cover our eyes, eye brows, and upper cheek bones. We were standing there in our disguises, debating whether this looked less suspicious than
just wearing a ski mask when we heard a commotion in a nearby aisle.
“Gimme them bloomers! They’re mine. Y’all go find your own store. I run operations at this one!”
Bssssrrrttt. A mechanical whirring was followed by a yelp.
“You crazy old woman! Don’t think I won’t hit you cause you’re in a chair!” Bsssssrrrtt. Crunch. “You ran over my foot! I’m gonna knock you outta that chair!”
A loud smack was followed by more shouting.
“You hit my momma!” a younger female voice yelled into the confusion.
Instinctively drawn to drama, we peeped our heads around the corner to see what all the hubbabaloo was about.
Two young girls were acting like body guards for two old women.
I immediately recognized the woman in the hoverround. “That’s Roberta, the crazy old hoverround lady I was telling you about. That other old woman is Daisy... the cart runner. Those girls must be their daughters or something.”
We watched as they continued to fight over girdles and underwear. Roberta kept trying to stash the items between her legs under the hoverround seat. But Daisy’s daughter kept snatching the items from her and throwing them back in their trolley. Roberta’s daughter grabbed it out of the buggy and handed it back to her momma. This shoplifting cycle went on for about ten minutes with tempers continuing to escalate with each rotation of the items. It looked like it was about to break out in some form of gang violence and I was wondering why an associate hadn’t come by to break it up yet.
We were so busy watching the action unfold we didn’t notice the man standing behind us.
“Enjoying the show?”
Thinking the mobsters had come to finish us off, we turned shrieking and ran smack into each other trying to escape.
“Whoa, whoa. It’s just me.”
I sat stunned on the floor waiting for my fear to pass.
“I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t a-snuck up on you like that.”
Deputy Hodde extended his hand to help us up. My face flushed thinking about the last time he’d helped me off the ground. The twinkle in his eye was the only indication he was thinking of my birthday night.
Fat Assassins (The Fat Adventure Series) Page 9
