Plots, Pie and Jack Jones
Lovie and I have landed in a deep woods bar decorated with alligator hides. As if that weren’t enough to give us pause, this place has no pay phone and no cell phone service. No food, either, except for pie. Apple pie, peach pie, plum pie, every piece of it deep fried and reeking of grease. Still, I can’t remember the last meal I had, and at this point, I’d eat the doilies underneath the pie plates.
Yes, I said doiles. Who’d have thought a man the size of a double-door refrigerator who’s been bragging for two hours about how he killed the 8-foot ‘gator on the wall single-handedly would be the type to place frilly things under the pie?
“I’ll have another piece of that peach pie,” Lovie says, and he obliges by turning to scoop up two pieces.
“Just in case,” he says, then winks at her. He’s smitten. I know that look.
But tonight I’m not going to lecture her about playing the field when she has already landed the best man on the planet. Next to Jack, of course.
I’m not even going to point out that she’s on her sixth piece of pie. Or is it her seventh? After what we’ve been through, who’s counting?
“Are you sure we can’t walk out of here?” I ask him. I know. I know. It’s the fifth time, but I’m not sure I trust his offer of driving us back to Mooreville as soon as he closes the place. Especially since closing time is not till two o’clock in the morning.
I’ve already been carted through the woods in the middle of the night, thank you very much, and I’m not anxious for a repeat performance. With or without my hands tied.
“I wouldn’t advise it,” he says. “Especially not in the dark. The woods are full of snakes and I’d hate for you two pretty ladies to meet up with a partner to my pal up there.” He nods toward the alligator hide. “Besides that, my nephew spotted a wild hog in the woods. You wouldn’t want to tangle with that.”
I think I’ve already tangled with two men worse than wild hogs, but I’m not about to give him a blow by blow description of my abduction. I’m not even going to give him a hint. He looks like the kind of man who might just hold me hostage in hopes of getting reward money.
As far as Dick Shep is concerned – that’s what he said his name was, but it sounds made up to me – we’re just two women whose purses got stolen at the mall, and whose car broke down on the road going home. How on earth did we know we’d wandered so far off the road till we stumbled in here looking like we’d been beat up?
“No, I wouldn’t want to tangle with a wild hog,” I tell him. I feel myself nodding off, and I jerk awake like somebody on the front seat of church, guilty because the preacher was boring me to death.
“I’ve got a couple of cots back there,” Dick nods toward a burlap curtain with a creepy red light showing under the frayed hem. “You ladies sure you don’t want to lie down and rest a bit? I’ll wake you up when I close down.”
Lovie’s tilting sideways on her bar stool, dead for sleep, and I kick her so she won’t say yes.
“No thanks. I’m good. We’re both good.” I do some math in my head to see if I have enough stolen money to pay this bar bill. “I could use another cup of coffee, though.”
“Sure thing.”
He trots to the coffee pot and Lovie punches me on the arm.
“What’s that for?”
“That kick to the shins. And a little reminder that you’ve already had four cups. You’re going to be wired, Cal.”
I point to her beer. Her third, if I’m not mistaken.
“One of us has to stay awake.”
“Why do you think I’m eating so much pie?”
“You’re hungry?”
“Food soaks up alcohol, Cal. Give me enough pie and I could drink everybody in this room under the table.”
I’m not about to challenge Lovie to try that trick. We’re in enough trouble as it is. That’s the third time since we got here that Dick has offered us his cots behind the rotten curtain. It sounds more like a plot thickening than the offer of comfort.
The only thing that gives me any comfort is the fact that I walked out of that cabin with the metal ladder rung. It’s not much of a weapon, but I think it would get the job done.
Dick sets my coffee in front of me, sloshing some of onto the counter so he can linger there, rubbing at with a dirty cloth while he leers at me. I make up my mind then and there that I’m never going another place without a weapon.
Suddenly a large hand reaches over my shoulder and clamps down on Dick’s dish cloth.
“I’ll take it from here.”
“Jack!” I throw myself at him. Literally. “I’ve never been so glad to see anybody in my life!”
“You say that now, Cal. But how about fifty years from now?”
I’m so happy to be rescued that I get my moxie back.
“I guess you’ll have to marry me and find out, Jack Jones.”
“Deal!”
For a minute, I think he might break his own rule about public displays and kiss me right there by the alligator hides, but Elvis noses my leg and Uncle Charlie kisses my cheek and Lovie starts wrapping up pie to take home.
Thank goodness, my life is back to normal. Or as normal as it will ever get.