Son of Fletch

9

By golly, Ms. Carrie,” Fletch said, bounding into the dining room where Professor The Reverend Doctor Kris Kriegel breakfasted in state. “We’ve never had house-guests so plumb worn out in the mornings before, I do declare!”

In a white shirt, purple necktie, dark trousers, Kriegel sat at the head of the long, highly polished dining table. On his place mat was a full china breakfast setting, silver cutlery. At almost full attention, Jack stood beside, a little behind him.

“More ham?” Carrie asked the rotund little man.

“Please.” His pale blue eyes gazed over the saddle-shaped birthmark over the bridge of his nose. “It is most delicious.”

Carrie heaped more of the ham on his plate.

“All three hundred and fifty pounds of white and naked flab you all call Leary is dead to the world out on the back lawn,” Fletch said. “I swear, if we drag him down to the roadside, the slaughter truck will pick him up for the glue factory without even stopping to ask which nature of beast he is.”

“Speaking of dead,” Kriegel began.

“By the way,” Fletch said to Carrie, ignoring him, “I forgot to tell you Aetna says Angie Kelly has that recipe for firecracker cake you want.”

Carrie’s lips twitched. She knew Fletch had made his arrangements with the sheriffs department.

Jack glanced from one to the other. Clearly he knew some message had just passed subtly between them.

He did not ask.

Kriegel cleared his throat. “Speaking of dead,” he began again.

“Yes?” Fletch asked.

Frowning as if at an underling, Kriegel said to Fletch, “You may have deprived me—you have deprived us—of a very important source of revenue.”

“Us?” Fletch asked. “You mean me, too?”

“The late Juan Moreno, or so he was known in this country—”

“Yes,” Fletch said. “John Brown. Go on.”

“—is lamented principally for the cash he was going to provide us.”

“Is a-moldering in the ditch,” said Fletch.

“He was indebted to us, you see, for our allowing him to escape with us the confines of the federal penitentiary. He was to pay us from his considerable funds deposited in various Florida banks. Now that he is dead, these funds may be harder for us, even impossible, to tap.”

“The snakes got him,” Fletch said simply.

Kriegel placed his cloth napkin on the table. “That,” he announced, “was the worst night of my entire life. Whose idea was it to conceal me in that raging river filled with barbed wire, old washtubs, and enormous snakes floating down on us in squadrons so thick they were actually entangled with each other?” His voice broke.

“Mine,” Fletch said.

Kriegel was trying to glare with his watery blue eyes. “I barely survived the experience. Only my call saved me.”

“Your cowl?”

“My calling!”

“Exactly,” Fletch said. “The cops didn’t cotch you. In fact, they did look everywhere else.”

“But only, I understand, Mister Fletcher, because you provided them with the use of your four-wheel-drive Jeep to search for us!”

“Certainly,” said Fletch. “I always cooperate with the coppers. They’re my friends. They do their best to keep murdering loonies like you locked up.”

“Mister Fletcher.” Despite his agitation, Fletch could see Kriegel was having difficulty keeping his eyes open. “I happen to be apolitical figure of international significance, and require that I be treated as such, with all due respect.”

Carrie cut her eyes at Fletch. Personages of genuine international political significance had sat at that table many times. None had required particular respect, even during one or two memorable bread fights.

“I am of such significance that your American authorities, in their wisdom, decided it their best course of action to imprison me on perfectly irrelevant criminal charges.”

“I know,” Fletch said in a sympathetic tone. “Both that whore who strangled herself on your bed and that chambermaid who walked in on you and saw what had happened were government agents. They’re everywhere, they are. You don’t need to tell me.”

“I said, ‘irrelevant.’”

“I understand,” Fletch said. “The strangled whore was irrelevant to your call.”

“Exactly.”

Carrie said, “The whore had a calling, too.”

“What difference did the life of a whore make considering the scope of my mission?”

“What’s your mission?” Fletch asked.

“At the moment, my mission is to get to my people who await me.” Tiredly, Kriegel stood up.

“More ham?” Carrie asked.

“Thank you, no.”

“We’ve got that all worked out.” Fletch pulled a torn road map from his back pocket. He spread it on the dining table. “We have to split you up. There are roadblocks everywhere looking for you three. Four. Pretending to drive my son, Jack, to the University of North Alabama, you, Jack, and I, in the station wagon, will take this road into Alabama, you see? and then turn east to Tolliver.”

Carrie was watching Fletch’s fingers on the map.

Bleary from exhaustion, Kriegel was not focusing successfully. “What of my bodyguard?” Kriegel asked. “What of Mister Leary?

“Ah,” Fletch said. “That’s the beauty of the plan. Mister Leary will be going in the pickup truck with Ms. Carrie. She is going to pretend to be delivering a little cow. Dressed as a farm worker, he will ride on the back of the truck with the little cow. She will take these back roads in an arc, you see? and meet us in Tolliver. That way we won’t all be traveling together.”

Kriegel looked at Carrie’s 123 pounds on a five-foot-five frame. “I see. But I do not wish to be separated from my bodyguard.”

“Come, come,” Fletch said. “Jack and I will be with you. What have you to fear? You know Jack is a karate expert. And I? Don’t even ask. Never have I met man or beast to make me tremble in nose or lip.”

“Will you be armed?” Kriegel asked in a high voice.

“Indeed not,” Fletch answered. “The worst thing we could do would be to carry arms.” He had already put the .32 he had given Jack (which Fletch found under the afghan on the study’s divan), properly loaded, and the cellular phone under the driver’s seat of the station wagon. He had put the loaded .38 under the driver’s seat of the truck. “We’ll be going through roadblocks. Cops find weapons on us they’ll nab us for sure. They’d have you back in Tomaston before lunch. Pity if you escaped prison just for a zoological experience in a ditch.”

Kriegel wished to be armed against the authorities.

Fletch wished himself and Carrie to be armed against Kriegel and Leary.

If biff came to bang, Fletch would be interested to see what John Fletcher Faoni would do.

Kriegel said, “I want my own bodyguard with me.”

“What?” Fletch asked. “Are you saying you don’t trust Jack?”

“It’s not that,” Kriegel said. “I need my bodyguard.”

“You’re not grasping the beauty of this plan,” Fletch said.

“What’s the beauty?” Kriegel rubbed his face.

“Leary,” Fletch said. “Leary is the beauty.”

“Leary is a beauty?” asked Kriegel.

“Oh, yes.” Fletch said: “Bait.”

“Bait!” Kriegel said.

“If the cops should happen to catch him over here”—

Fletch fingered Carrie’s route—“we’ll have a clearer road over here.” He fingered his own route.

“Oh, yes.” Kriegel looked around anxiously. He whispered, “Can he hear us?”

“He’s asleep.” Fletch had been certain Kriegel would no more mind throwing Leary to the cops to save his own freedom than Fletch had minded throwing all three of them to the snakes.

“Yes, I see,” Kriegel said.

“Wasn’t it Julius Caesar,” Fletch asked, “who said something about divide and skinny through?”

“He said, ‘All roads lead to Rome.’”

“That, too,” Fletch agreed. “Quite a phrasemaker, that Caesar feller. I knew you know your military history.”

“Oh, yes,” said Kriegel.

Fletch folded up the torn map. “Right! We’d better get going. Your followers await you.”

“GET ABOARD,” FLETCH said to Leary.

“How?”

In the driveway, Leary looked at the tall steel pen rising up from the back of the pickup truck. He was wearing Fletch’s rubber boots and the overalls split down to his thighs. The overalls were held up by straps over his shirtless shoulders.

“Oh, yeah,” Fletch said as if he had not considered the matter before.’ ‘You’re too big to climb over the grill, aren’t you?

“What’s that?” Leary pointed at the 450-pound bull calf already in the pen on the back of the truck.

“A little cow,” Fletch said.

“Why can’t I ride up front with the lady?” Leary asked.

“Because you have to hold on to the little cow,” Fletch said. “You don’t want it to get hurt, do you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. See, there’s hay there. You feed the little cow the hay as you go along.”

“Does the little cow need the hay as we go along?”

“You don’t think Ms. Carrie can drive the truck and feed the little cow hay at the same time, do you?”

“No.”

“This is a real job of work you’re doin’.”

“Oh.”

“The cops will never recognize you this way.”

“No.”

“This is a great disguise, you see.”

“Yeah.”

“And Ms. Carrie can’t reach back and hold on to the little cow, can she?”

“No,” Leary agreed. “I can see that.”

“So you have to ride in back with the little cow.”

“I don’t know,” Leary said. In the morning sunlight, sweat already was pouring down his fat, white skin.

Jack was standing at the back of the truck watching.

Kriegel had come out of the house and immediately slumped into the backseat of the station wagon. He sat with his head leaning on the palm of one hand.

Fletch stepped close to Leary and said, softly, “You’re not afraid, are you? Of that little cow?”

“Of course not!” Leary shouted.

With the driver’s door open, Carrie said, “We’ve got to get goin’.”

“Here, Jack.” Fletch grabbed the steel bars on one side of the rear grill. “Help me lift this up.”

They lifted that section of the grill just high enough for Leary to crawl under it onto the truck.

“Come on!” Fletch said sharply. “We can’t hold this thing all day! Get aboard, or I’ll put you down in the henhouse with the rest of the chickens!”

The bull calf, seeing the opening, tried to get under the grill to get off the truck.

Leary, crawling under the grill onto the truck, butted heads with the bull calf.

Neither expressed surprise or pain.

Fletch and Jack dropped the stanchions of the grill section into their deep holes.

Carrie gave Fletch a wide, delighted grin before stepping into the truck and starting the engine.

Fletch shouted at Leary, “Now, hold on to that little cow!”

Standing, with his feet spread, Leary grabbed the bull calf’s tail.

As Carrie started the truck down the driveway, Leary’s boots slipped in wet manure already on the floor of the pickup truck’s bed. He landed on his ass. On the manure.

Both his hands still held on to the bull calf’s tail.

“Hold on to it!” Fletch ordered.

“It’s shittin’ on me!” Leary yelled halfway down the driveway.

It certainly was.

Jack turned his back to the station wagon. Keeping his back, his shoulders steady, arms at his sides, he was laughing hard but silently.

Fletch watched Carrie drive the truck along the road out of sight. Leary was trying to stand up, regain his footing on the manure on the floor of the truck’s bed. He was doing a good job of holding on to the bull calf’s tail.

For his efforts he was getting liberally sprayed with wet dung.

Then Fletch watched Jack choking with laughter.

“Oh, hello.” Fletch slapped Jack on the back. “How are you feeling?”