by Lois Greiman
My aim was shockingly accurate. The carton, warm from my body, exploded in my assailant’s face like an overripe egg. I spun away, leaping through the brush. Twigs scraped my legs. Branches tore at my hair. But I reached the Jeep. My fingers clutched spastically at the door handle. I clawed it open, leapt inside, and fired up the engine.
It wasn’t until then that I saw the old man sitting on the ground, legs bent at awkward angles like a broken doll’s. I scanned the area. No hulking criminals seemed to be ferreted away in the trees. No ninjas were leaping toward me like…well, like ninjas.
I remained immobile, heart thumping in my chest as the scrawny figure creaked to his feet. His hands were empty, entirely bereft of the cannon I was certain he carried. I scanned the area again. Nothing disturbed the stillness.
When he spoke, I couldn’t hear his words. Peach goop was splattered across his face and chest. His camouflage cargo pants hung low on practically imaginary hips and he wore two plaid shirts, both buttoned incorrectly. I was still breathing hard, still feeling shaky, but I was nothing if not stupidly curious.
Making certain my locks were engaged, I powered down the driver’s window, engine still running.
“Why’d you go and do that?” His voice was scratchy, his brows beetled over a pemmican face.
I darted my eyes this way and that. He seemed to be entirely alone. “Who are you?”
“Me! Who in blazes are you?”
I scanned the woods again. Still no WMDs. “I asked first.” It seemed that I had, at a moment’s notice, returned to my usual level of immaturity.
“I’m the owner of this here property.”
“Are you Asian?”
He swiped a hand across his face, then propped his fists on the baggy waistband of his camo pants. “What the devil are you talking about, girl?”
“You’re not…” A noise crackled off to the right. I jumped, but it was just another bird, trying to scare the liver out of me. “You’re not a Black Flame?”
He shook his head. “Could be you’re even crazier than the others,” he said.
“So you’re not trying to kill me?”
“Didn’t plan on it,” he said, and bent to retrieve the plastic bucket he’d dropped during the yogurt attack. “Gotta get back for the breakfast rush. But maybe tomorrow if I ain’t too busy.” He snorted at his own wit, then shambled away, muttering about kids and respect and people who should be horsewhipped.
But I was uninsulted. The word breakfast had stuck like a burr in my underfed brain. I was suddenly ravenous, and the only sustenance I had possessed was spattered across the old man’s face.
Surveying the area one more time, I stepped out of the Jeep. “Hey!” I raised my voice, feeling exposed and pee-in-my-pants scared. I kept my hand on the door handle in case the old man morphed into a gun-wielding gangbanger with a vengeance. “Did you say something about breakfast?”
He twisted toward me, grumpy as hell and looking ridiculous with peach slop plastered across his nose and cheeks. “You plannin’ to steal that too?”
“What?”
“There ain’t no reason to play dumb,” he said, and turned away with a disgruntled snort.
“I’m not playing. Listen…” I stumbled after him. “I need help.”
He swung back toward me. “Why would I help you when you was planning to steal my morels?”
“What would I do with your morels?” I shambled to a halt. “I hardly even use my own.”
He chuffed a heavy breath. “You as dumb as you act?”
“How dumb do I act?”
“Pretty damn. Come on,” he said, and changing course, headed for the still-running Jeep. “You can give me a ride. Serve ya right if they see ya.”
“Who?” I asked, but he just clambered into the passenger seat and stashed his bucket between him and the door
“Let’s get a wiggle on. I ain’t got all day,” he said.
“It’ll serve me right if who sees me?”
“The dense duo.”
“The dense…”
“My grandsons. We gonna get going or what?”
I climbed into the driver’s seat. “So you’re not…you’re not Asian, right?”
“Asian…Holy nuts, girl! Is your blood sugar low or somethin’?”
“My everything’s low. Just…” I stared across the seat at him. “Please. Answer my question.”
“Name’s Eli,” he said finally. “Eli Hughes.”
I scowled, trying to think, but I was running on ashy terror and two hours of sleep. “Is that Irish?”
He glared at me. “Like it ain’t bad enough you steal my mushrooms.”
“I wasn’t stealing anything,” I said, and shifted into drive. “How can there be mushrooms in the desert anyway?”
“Who says there was?” he asked, and hugged the bucket to his side.
“You sure you’re not Irish?” I asked, remembering my idiot brothers’ idiotic behavior.
He snorted and pointed a crooked finger toward the north. “Take a right up here.”
Nothing more was said until we turned onto a long, bumpy lane that wound up a short hill to a low wooden shed. It was surrounded by a barren, dusty lot as big as a football field.
Hughes was already scrambling out of the Jeep before I shifted into Park. The building toward which he shambled might have been called a shack, if one was feeling particularly generous…and somewhat intoxicated. I was just about to slam the door when Paul Bunyan appeared on the porch. He was tall and blond with a small head, a wide chest, and hips that seemed to have been whittled down to toothpick proportions. His legs were long, his smile lascivious. “Gamps, you shouldn’t have.”
“I didn’t,” the old man huffed, and ambled up the ramshackle stairs.
But the grin never left Bunyan’s face. “I got eyes,” he said, gaze roving over me like dirty hands. “And I can see ya brung me a gift.”
My eyebrows shot into my hairline as he trotted down the tilted wooden steps, but a thwack of sound from the right caught my attention. Not fifty feet away, a chicken danced across the hard-packed sand, jerked spasmodically, then fell, dead as a turkey baster, on the ground. A woman, or what might have passed for one, if they made them big as SUVs and scary as hell out here in the sticks, retrieved the headless corpse by its legs and hauled it unceremoniously into the shack. I felt the bile rise in my throat like a geyser.
“Wanna have some fun?”
“What?” I jerked my attention to Bunyan, but I was pretty sure that, unlike the Adonis at my athletic club, he really had spoken those exact words. “No.” My answer was unequivocal.
He grinned as he prowled toward me.
“Thank you anyway.” I crowded back against Jeep’s still-open door. “But I hate fun.”
“Come on, sweet thing,” he drawled. “There’s a party in my pants. And you’re invited.”
Chapter 10
If God only gives you as much as you can handle, I wish to hell he didn’t think I was such a badass.
—Peter McMullen, following a confrontation with a couple of angry husbands
I would like to say, in my defense, that I seriously considered springing back into the Jeep and roaring off down the road at that point, but I’m a practical woman. A practical woman with an all-but-empty fuel tank, no money, and not a clue where the hell I was.
Although I suspected hell was a pretty good bet.
But if I was hoping the old man would help me out, I was about to be sorely disappointed. He had already disappeared inside. What hadn’t disappeared was the seductive smell of frying bacon. Perhaps the fact that it kept me rooted to the ground despite Bunyan’s dumb-ass come-on was proof that the trauma of the last few hours had rendered me brain dead.
“What’s your name, sweet cakes?”
He was close now. Less than ten feet away and big as a yeti.
“I’m…” I paused, realizing with belated clarity that I couldn’t very well use my real name. Breath held, I notice
d a cardinal just flitting to a nearby branch. “Scarlet.”
He raised his brows and broadened his grin.
“Scarlet,” he said, and upped the wattage of his smile. “Sounds like a stripper name. You a stripper, darlin’?”
The first sip of indignation flowed through me. “As a matter of fact, I’m not,” I said, and raised my brows.
“A hooker?”
“No,” I said. “How about you? Might you be an ass?”
I don’t know why those particular words fell out of my mouth. I was, after all, at the mercy of strangers, but this guy immediately put my back up. Maybe that was because he reminded me of my brothers in some fundamentally disturbing way. Yes, he was taller, beefier, and blonder, but I instinctively knew they would share a boneheaded sense of humor.
His grin never faltered. “You got a last name, firecracker, or are you one of them one-name chickadees, like Cher or Madonna?”
My mind buzzed, trying to scare up a believable surname, but just then a second man stepped out of the shack. He was short one shirt. His chest was broad enough to dine on. “Maybe it’s Lolita,” he said, and snapping a dish towel over one brawny shoulder, descended the steps.
“That it?” Number One asked. “Have you only got the one name?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Then what is it?”
Don’t say O’Hara. Not O’Hara, I thought, but my mind was spinning. I pried my eyes from Number Two’s chest. “O’Tara,” I rasped.
“No shit?”
“None. Are you…twins?”
“Uh uh,” said One. “That there’s my clone. I was so dang pretty, folks decided the world needed more of me. Only he’s kinda a disappointment.”
I narrowed my eyes as he drew closer. My fight-or-flight instincts were ticking like a time bomb.
“Where you come from, Miss Scarlet? The wind blow you in?” he asked, stepping even closer.
According to Dr. Dirkx, the average person’s comfort zone for strangers ends at about twelve feet. Closer than that and the amygdala in the exterior extremity of the frontal lobe begins to fret. Thing One was closer than that, with Thing Two closing in; my amygdala was going bat-shit.
I retreated a pace, skirting the Jeep’s open door.
“She does look kinda windblown,” said Two.
“Fiddle dee dee,” said One, and reached for me.
My hand shot sideways without ever interfacing with my brain. One minute, I was being relatively civil, and the next, I had Rivera’s anti-theft club jacked up against Thing One’s nether parts.
He hiked up on his toes, mouth open in a wordless O, brows raised in surprise as he awaited my next move.
“Here’s the deal,” I said, and shifted my gaze from one cretin to the next, trying to figure out just what the deal might be as I tightened my grip on the impromptu weapon. “I had a bad day, followed by a worse night, and topped off by a hell of a morning. Do you know what I’m saying?”
Thing One nodded. Carefully.
“But I’m not looking for trouble.”
One shook his head. Cautiously.
“I just want to be left alone. Do you understand me?”
He nodded again. Slowly.
I shifted my gaze to the dunderhead that remained behind him. The world seemed to stand still, except for the smell of bacon. That wafted toward me like a siren’s irresistible song. “And breakfast,” I added.
“You like bacon?” One asked. His voice had risen by a few octaves.
I narrowed my eyes at him, wondering if he was joking…Everybody with half a brain cell and functioning taste buds likes bacon. But I had learned early on, even before my stint as a cocktail waitress, that if you hike a man up by his balls, things generally stay pretty serious.
“Yeah,” I said. “Bacon’s all right.”
One nodded, arms held stiffly away from his sides, as if he would spontaneously combust should they touch his hips. “We cut it extra thick,” he said. “And Gamps makes pretty decent flapjacks.” His brow looked a little moist, his lips dry. He licked them.
I skimmed my gaze to his brother and back. “I can’t pay you.”
He shook his head again. “Don’t matter,” he said. “Don’t matter at all. We wouldn’t take your money no how.”
“Pretty little thing like you,” said Two, slithering toward me. “I’m sure we can think of some way for you to work it off.”
I lifted the club a little, hitching One up on his toes another notch as I realized his sibling was unable to fully comprehend the situation, hidden as we were behind the driver’s door.
“Tell him not to be a numbnuts,” I warned.
“Re!” he snarled. “Back the hell off.”
“What?” He ambled closer. Finally realizing the state of affairs, he stopped short, widened his eyes, and laughed like a hyena.
One growled and twisted toward him but I tightened my grip on the club, effectively jacking him a little higher.
“You,” I said, jerking my head toward Two. “Get me some breakfast before your brother’s a eunuch.”
Confusion mixed with happy humor on his broad face. “We don’t have no sheep no more. So I—”
“Not a ewe’s neck, you fuckup. A— Just do it!” One croaked. Sweat had found its way onto his neck.
Two shrugged, grinned, and sauntered away.
Seconds ticked by as I watched the door of the shack, but no one reappeared to devour me.
“Scuse me,” said One, polite as a Girl Scout. “But my legs are cramping up some.”
I eased the club away from his balls and stepped back a quick pace.
“Geez,” he said, and rubbed the offended area. “PMS much?”
I raised the bar marginally and tried to feel guilty when he flinched. Nothing. “Do you get the L.A. Times?”
“What?”
“It’s a newspaper.” He still looked baffled. Either he was dumber than I thought, or his thinking apparatus was directly linked to his testicular area. “Large sheet of paper with words written on it?”
“I know what a newspaper is.”
I thought of a half-dozen nasty rejoinders. There was, apparently, something about idiot brothers that brought out my fairly substantial mean streak, but I fought it back. “Do you get it or not?”
“If you put that thing away I’ll take a look,” he said.
The smell of maple syrup juxtaposed against fried pork and nitrates was wafting out of the building and interfering with my concentration. I lowered the club distractedly and wandered, nose first, toward the porch. But at the last second I remembered that men whose nether parts have been threatened by a hard object sometimes hold a grudge; I motioned Thing One past me with my impromptu weapon.
He hurried ahead, shooting me nervous glances and muttering about poor manners and the unfortunate lack of a sense of humor.
Once inside, I scanned the area. The building was divided into three rooms, but there seemed to be no interior doors. Two of the chambers appeared to be filled with mismatched tables, some of which had been built out of makeshift objects: a sheet of plywood atop two low barrels, a car hood balanced on hay bales, two…ah, the missing doors…there they were, propped on tilting saw horses. Three men sat around the nearest door. They glanced up as I came in, faces smeared with grease. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was where novelist James Dickey had found his questionable inspiration for Deliverance.
“Sit down,” One said, motioning irritably toward what appeared to be a window propped on what might have been a discarded vanity.
I eased onto the piano bench that ran the length of it. The cushion felt a little sticky, but before I could react, Thing Two came through the doorway to my right. He was carrying a pair of plates. One was covered in ragged-looking pancakes the size of my head. The other was filled with bacon and what looked to be a variety of cheeses hacked into irregular chunks.
“A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou,” he said.
I swung
my gaze up from the dubious-looking meal and scowled.
“My apologies for Rom.” He grinned, slithering closer. “He’s been off his nut some for the past…” He wiggled his head. “Twenty-two years or so.”
I curled my fist around the nearest fork as he invaded my aforementioned body bubble.
“I’m the oldest,” he informed me. “By forty-three minutes and thirteen—”
“Set down the plates and no one’ll get hurt,” I said.
He grinned and slid the dishes onto the window/table, then sat down across from me on a seat that may or may not have once occupied a tractor. “I like a girl can play hard to get,” he said.
“Where am I?” I asked, and drowning the cakes with syrup from a nearby bottle, shoveled breakfast into my mouth with my erstwhile weapon.
“Well, you ain’t in heaven no more.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “How about hell? Am I there?” I asked, but the pancakes were surprisingly tasty, so I was pretty sure I had not yet descended past purgatory.
“Get it?” he asked as I sampled the bacon. “I says you’re not in heaven anymore cuz you must be an—”
“Who made this?” The bacon was flavored with apple…and a hint of ambrosia.
“Gamps. Not bad, huh? Ya oughta try his kitchen-sink scrambler.”
“Is there bacon in that too?”
“There’s everything in that.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“My devilish good looks?”
“The bacon.”
He shrugged. “Rom cured it, but I—”
“Wait a minute,” I said, continuing to chew. Being raised with the Troglodyte Trio had long ago made me a multitasker. “He’s Rom and you’re…” I took another bite of bacon and wondered how quickly one could become addicted to smoked pork. “Re?”
“At your service.” He grinned. “You can interpret that any way you want, love bucket.”
“As in Romulus and Remus?”
“Roman gods,” he said.
Demigods, if I remembered my mythology correctly, but I was a little too consumed consuming the fruits of their mutual labor to make mention. “And you two made this?”
