Double blast, p.20
Double Blast, page 20
It was Eddie.
Eddie the Idiot Crawford.
My ex-ex-husband.
“Well, lookie who it is.” He smirked.
“What are you doing here, Eddie?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Beg all you want.” He tipped back in Daddy’s chair. “I love it when women beg.”
“How’d you get here?” Truthfully, I couldn’t have cared less. I was stalling. Still standing in the open door. Hoping someone would walk by and see him—huge news—then word of his return would spread like wildfire. All the way to Florida. (The person.) (Not the Sunshine State.) “Did you swim here?”
“That’s none of your business either,” he said, “but I could’ve if I’d wanted to.”
“You couldn’t swim a hundred and twenty-five feet, Eddie. Much less a hundred and twenty-five miles.”
“That’s exactly how far out in the drink I was,” he said. “Glad to know you’re keeping up.”
“You wish.” Although I was momentarily irritated at myself for letting him know I knew exactly where he was in the Gulf, but it was more along the lines of knowing where the landmines were before crossing the field that had to be crossed than keeping up. Something I didn’t bother to explain to him because it just didn’t matter. What mattered was the news of his surprise visit reaching Florida. At some point, she had to deal with the paternity issue. It was only right to resolve it. But did it have to be today? And without warning? “Why are you here, Eddie? What do you want?”
He rubbed his bristly chin for a full minute before sing-song drawling, “Well, a few days ago when I was having a little trouble with some boys on the rig, I called my good buddy Roy Howdy to hit him up for a little voodoo.”
Roy Howdy could find his own ride home from Greenville.
“Got my voodoo business done with him, and I asked if everything here was the same as I left it. I was mostly talking about my truck I left at his place, but turned out things were nothing like I left it.” Eddie tipped his head back to study the ceiling. “I decided I’d better come home and see for myself. So I asked my boss for a few personal emotion days off.”
“A few what?” My eyes darted across the street where I saw Mrs. Mobly, who spent her daylight hours on her porch swing crocheting mile-long multi-colored blankets and keeping an eye on the police station like it was her job, drop her binoculars. Next, she dropped the blanket she’d been crocheting. Then she raced down her porch steps. “There’s no such thing as personal emotion days.”
“I can see where you might think that, Davis, because you never met a personal emotion. I, on the other foot,” he patted his chest, “do have personal emotions.”
“And?”
“And my old dragon lady boss said no. So I tricked her into firing me.”
“How’d you manage that?” Out of the corner of my eye, I watched gossipy old Mrs. Mobly poke her head in the door of Frank’s Barber Shop, and with that, I took my first full breath.
“I don’t kiss and tell, Davis. But it may and might not have had something to do with tuna melts that shut down production for two shifts.”
“Aren’t you clever.”
His head snapped up. “Thank you, Davis.” He landed his feet on Daddy’s desk. Then he crossed his ankles, clasped his hands behind his head, and looked me over from head to toe. “And since you said something nice to me, I’m going to say something nice back to you.”
I couldn’t wait to hear it. And spotted Mrs. Mobly again, who apparently couldn’t wait to get through the door of Pine Apple Pies & Cakes. Which meant she only had to spread the word of Eddie’s surprise return a block and a half more before she reached the chicken wing truck in front of the bank. Hopefully it would be before I strangled him, because just then he said, “I always thought you’d be one of those pudgy mamas with a big wide ass.” His hands came from behind his head to demonstrate the vast width of my rear end in his imagination. “Which is only one of the reasons I didn’t have kids with you.”
The nerve.
The absolute nerve.
“But you wear it pretty good,” he said. “I mean, you don’t look like you just popped one out of the oven. I bet your homo husband is happy about that.”
I had to either take a breath or shoot him.
I took a breath.
“Speaking of rugrats.” In a heartbeat, he landed his feet on the floor and leaned in. “Did you hear the news? I got a kid too.” He dusted the phantom lapels of his Fuel Solutions t-shirt. “I’m a proud papa.”
“Did you hear the news, Eddie? Your mother’s been arrested in Canada.”
His brows drew in on themselves.
His eyes darted right and left.
He hadn’t heard.
“And since you’ve heard there’s a young man in town who Roy Howdy thinks bears a slight resemblance to you, and why you’d consider Roy Howdy a reliable source is a total mystery to me, I guess you heard his mother’s here too.”
“Where else would she be?” He asked it while poking on his phone. And because his voice had lost most of the bravado attached to every previous word he’d spoken, I presumed he was either trying to make contact with his mother or looking for news about her arrest. “I’m about to go see her.” He looked up from his phone. “And we’re going to have a little talk about why she never told me she was knocked up.”
His bravado was back.
So was mine.
“Leave Florida alone, Eddie, or I’ll lock you up.”
“I got no beef with Florida. Other than she’s a stone-cold bitch too.”
Too? Did he mean in addition to me? I wasn’t quite following, but then again, it was Eddie. Who stood with, “Like mama, like daughter.” He crossed in front of Daddy’s desk and breezed by me. “And it’s the mama you’d better lock up. For her own good. Because I’m about to mop the floor with her old ass.”
He made his exit.
I don’t know how long I stood frozen in place before I slid down the door frame and let the floor hold me.
Fiona Simmons wasn’t the boy’s grandmother.
Fiona Simmons was his mother.
I didn’t have time for Mrs. Mobly to spread the word another block, and I didn’t have time to dig through Daddy’s desk and find Florida’s chicken wing cookoff paperwork with her phone number so I could warn her to run. And hide the brother she’d raised for her mother. But Pine Apple Bank & Trust’s number was on a laminated card under the phone. When I gathered enough equilibrium to stagger to the desk, I dialed with a shaky finger. Courtney Carr answered.
“It’s Davis. Let me speak to Fiona. Right now.”
“Do you seriously think she wants to talk to you, Davis?”
“I don’t want to talk to her either, but you’d better lock the front door because Eddie Crawford is about to blow through it.”
TWENTY-TWO
Friday showed up at twelve a.m. as regularly scheduled.
It found me wide awake in my mother’s swivel glider I’d dragged across the rug to the middle of the den, so I’d have a direct line of fire to both the front and back doors with just a pivot. I’d tossed the contents of her two armchair caddies—reading glasses, a movie theater box of Junior Mints, cuticle cream, and multiple Large-Print Word Search books—and replaced them with my old Beretta 92 service pistol, a taser gun, and a sledgehammer I found in the garage. The armchair caddy with the sledgehammer was drooping a little bit. Dragging the floor, in fact. In my lap, I had my cell phone and Daddy’s personal weapon, a Ruger LC9. I didn’t know who I was going to kill—almost anyone would do at that point—but I was ready.
Fiona Simmons was upstairs in Meredith’s room.
Florida Simmons and her brother—I still couldn’t believe it—were next door to her in my old room.
The house was quiet, so presumably, they were all asleep, if they could sleep after what we’d been through any more than I could. They could be staring at the dark ceilings in wide-eyed wonder unable to sleep. Like me. Except my eyes were darting back and forth from the street to the back porch. In wide-eyed alert.
The house was dark, the only light from the glow of a lit candle on the stove.
And the house was on edge, waiting for what might come next. I was on edge with the house, so when I heard the third step from the top of the staircase creak, I almost jumped out of my skin. Thirteen more steps and whoever it was would be in the kitchen. I barely moved a toe and had the glider aimed at the kitchen stairwell landing, halfway holding my breath because I wasn’t up for another visit with Fiona and had no idea what I’d even say to young Cole if it were him, when I was rewarded with Florida.
“Don’t shoot me.”
I almost laughed.
She spotted an empty champagne bottle on the kitchen table. “Courtney?”
“You guessed it.”
“Did she drink the whole bottle?”
“She did.”
By then, Florida was in the den doorway. “Can we turn on a light?”
“It’d be better if we didn’t.”
“Is there any Dr Pepper?”
“No.”
“Coffee it is,” she said. “Where are the filters?”
Ten minutes later, after she’d made coffee by candlelight and I’d dragged Daddy’s recliner next to Mother’s glider in the middle of the den for her, she settled in, and we clinked coffee mugs.
“Why do you have a sledgehammer?”
“Just in case.”
“What now?” she asked.
“We wait,” I answered.
We waited for our coffee to cool was what we waited for.
“Fiona and Eddie,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Sick.”
“I’ve heard all manner of sick tonight.”
“Worse than my mother and Eddie Crawford? What could Courtney have told you that was worse than that? What else did she tell you?”
“I’m hoping everything.”
“I’m sure she did. We had to tell her everything, Davis, and she’s not one to hold back.”
“But everything from her is secondhand. Not from your mother’s perspective. Or yours.”
Florida was quiet.
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
Florida was even quieter. If that was possible.
“Okay,” she said. “But first I have a question.”
“Shoot.”
“I already asked you not to shoot me.”
“What’s your question?”
“What are we going to do about Eddie?”
“For now, we leave well enough alone. Start talking.”
TWENTY-THREE
After busting through the bank doors ready to burn it to the ground the afternoon before, Fiona had wisely asked Eddie to step into the vault so that they might have a private conversation before the whole town learned their secret—the whole town learned their secret anyway—then slammed the vault door behind him. Which was where things stood when I rushed in like a wild woman. Courtney Carr was standing guard at the door with an umbrella. She barely missed me. Fiona, ghastly pale and shaking like a leaf, was frozen in place at the vault door. Angry dissent filtered through from the other side. It was Eddie the Neanderthal Crawford beating on the inside of the vault door and making muffled threats.
I patted my heart back into my chest with relief.
Short lived relief.
Maybe two seconds.
Fiona grabbed my arm and whispered, “The vault isn’t secure.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t use it. The vault hasn’t been operable in twenty years. All Edward has to do is roll the interior spindle and the door will open.”
“What?”
“Frank turned it into a safe room, Davis. Safe rooms have exits. The vault door only locks from this side. Not that side.”
“A safe room? Like bottled water, Army blankets, and doomsday food?”
“More or less,” she said, “emphasis on less,” she added, “and more,” she threw in, all the while trying to wring her own hands off her wrists. “Frank was in all kinds of trouble back in the day. He built a safe room. Since then, I’ve used it as a storage room.”
My eyes darted around the grim lobby outside of the surprise safe room. “Can you lock down the bank?”
Her eyes flew to the front door. “Of course.”
“And you have an operating alarm system, right?”
“Yes.”
“So if and when he finds his way out of the vault, which chances are he won’t, because it’s Eddie and he won’t think to try the door, he’ll be locked in the bank.”
“Which won’t stop him from hurling a chair through the front window or busting down the door.”
“Well, at least the alarm will let us know he’s escaped.”
“Then what? What do I do after that?”
“I don’t know what to tell you to do after that, Fiona. I’ve been a little blindsided by your—” I threw my hands in the air hoping to catch the right word “—your life, so I’m somewhat at a loss to advise you. Or solve your personal problems. Of which there seem to be many.”
“For what it’s worth, Davis, I’m sorry.” She looked straight into my heart when she clapped her hand over her mouth and muffled, “I’m so sorry.”
“Fiona,” my voice was gentle, “we don’t have time for you to be sorry.”
The front door chimed, Courtney let out a yelp, and then we were four. Five, counting Edward the Maniac, who was pitching a fit in the vault, but I never counted him. Florida, I counted.
She and Fiona locked eyes across the room, both seemed to deflate, then I witnessed mother and daughter silently acknowledging that the day they’d sacrificed so much to keep from coming had arrived. Florida slowly crossed the room and took Fiona’s hands. They tipped their heads together in a quiet moment of solidarity. When they’d had enough time—because we had a pressing issue in the vault—I cleared my throat, and none too gently, to get their attention. They parted quickly, slowly turning to me. Florida’s eyes sought mine and found ice. “I didn’t lie to you, Davis. I never said Cole was my son.”
“And you never said he was your brother either.”
We dispatched Courtney to Fiona’s house on Adams Street where she would retrieve Cole and quietly take him to my parents’. I told her to lock all the doors, stay in an interior room, don’t answer the door, her phone, or my parents’ phone if it were to ring, don’t breathe a word of anything to anyone on the way, and wait for me. Then I turned on mother and daughter.
“Davis—” Fiona started.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“You have to understand—” Florida tried.
“I don’t, Florida.” I cut her off. “I don’t have to understand. And I don’t care to understand. What I want to know is how fast you can get your brother out of town.” I spoke the next words slowly. “And never come back. Ever. Go somewhere far, far away, get a family attorney, and handle it from somewhere else. Anywhere else. What made you think you could come home with your brother in the first place? He’s just a child! And look what you’ve put him in the middle of! Did either of you think there was a snowball’s chance it wouldn’t end up right where it did?” I swept an arm in the direction of the vault door upon which Eddie the Deranged was beating and yelling threats at the top of his lungs.
Florida’s eyes narrowed as she spoke slowly. “Do you think we wanted this?”
“Then why?” I demanded. “Why?”
Fiona tried to speak but only stuttered. And staggered a little.
Florida shot left, grabbed a low chair from her mother’s office, dragged it back, then all but pushed her mother into it. “Sit down before you pass out, Mom.” She opened her mouth to say something to me but changed her mind, leapt back through her mother’s office door, grabbed the second little chair, and returned with it. She placed it beside Fiona’s. She pointed.
I barely raised an I-don’t-think-so eyebrow.
She said, “You’d better sit down.”
“Say what you’re going to say, Florida, and say it fast.”
She tried to, but she had to wait on the muted string of the profanity-laced threats issuing from the vault that distracted her and made me want to pour straight Clorox into my ears. It was when Eddie the Deranged paused to fill up his lung tanks she squeezed in, “Three prisoners escaped Talladega Federal.”
As far from what I expected to hear as could possibly be.
And it rang a distant bell.
I’d seen the notifications about the escaped prisoners on the National Crime Information Center’s log. But it wasn’t until just then that I made the connection that Talladega Federal was home to Frank Simmons. Her father. Fiona’s ex-husband. And Pine Apple’s favorite bank robber. At which point I gladly took the low chair beside Fiona, preparing to hear Florida say the words, “My father escaped prison, and he’ll be here any minute,” while seated. By then, Florida was pacing a small circle. She started to speak, stopping herself twice, as if I didn’t know full well what her next words would be. She took so long that it dawned on me I’d brushed by the escaped prisoners’ names and took good looks at all three intake photos, and I’d have definitely noticed had Frank Simmons been one of them. Maybe I didn’t know what her next words would be. But when Florida opened her mouth for the third time with no luck, Fiona did the honors and barely shocked me to my very bones when she said, “Davis, Frank told his cellmate about the silver.”
The question my brain wanted to ask was if one of the prison escapees was the cellmate, but the question that passed my lips was, “What silver?”
They both opened their mouths to answer, but before either could speak, Eddie the Village Idiot Trapped in the Village Vault let out another war cry just as something hit the door with a thud.
