The Big Dirt Nap

Thirty-three

The faint rumble outside grew louder. Lucy was hyperventilating. She stood up and held the poker like a golf club with instructions from me to aim at the knees, shins, or forearms—a cute cop in Virginia had once told me those were the best places to go for. Minimal strength required, maximum damage inflicted.

The door creaked open and we stood flattened against the wall behind it. In seconds, as I hoped, bodies tumbled over the bungee cords; in the dark I couldn't tell how many. I threw the tarp over them and Lucy started maniacally flailing away to a chorus of screams and "what the . . ." A figure in skintight jeans stood in the doorway, taking off a helmet and shaking out her hair. Babe Chinnery.

"Stop, stop." I pulled Lucy back before she killed somebody and three unhappy men scrambled to their feet.

"How did you get here? I would have sworn you weren't even going to get my message," I said.

"Alba's a good kid. She said you sounded funny, which at her age could mean anything from indigestion to an oncoming freight train. Then I remembered seeing you tear out of Springfield yesterday looking like the devil was chasing you, so I thought maybe something was up. Luckily Charlie, Danny, and Ken were in the diner when you called."

They had been heading back to Marcus Dairy to pick up Danny's bike. Since men don't usually say no to Babe, she had had her choice among three Harleys and she got them to take her to the reservation and then climb the mountain.

"I'd just gotten my turkey and cranberry wrap," Danny said, rubbing the life back into the thigh that Lucy had whacked. "It's probably all soggy by now."

"You have food?" Lucy asked, sidling up to him.

"You gotta be kidding. First you crack me in the leg with a poker and then you expect me to give you my dinner?"

"Some people might consider it foreplay."

"Ooooh, I like this girl. C'mon outside, honey, dinner is served."

"You're lucky Caroline Sturgis isn't here, too," Babe said, following Danny and Lucy out to the bikes.

That stopped me in my tracks. "Are you serious?"

"She's been camped out at the diner for thirty-six hours with some news she's itching to tell you," Babe said. "She needs to get out and have more fun . . . like you girls."

Oh, yeah, this was big fun.

"The ride was sweet," Danny said, climbing onto his bike with Lucy wrapping herself around him. "Until we met those a-holes."

"What a-holes?" I asked.

"Some big guy and a runt trying to get up the mountain in a crappy Toyota," Danny said. "They had a hell of a blowout. Looked like they drove over a steel claw."

"Hey, we told them we'd help them out on our way back, but they got rude, yelling in some foreign language. They left their car on the road, and started back down the hill, smacking each other and taking turns swigging from a bottle of vodka."