Unsightly Bulges Read online

  “Of course,” Bull said. He motioned to the posters on the wall, which I now noticed were not just pictures of prairie and blue sky, but of prairie dogs, prairie and blue sky. The one behind me featured a close-up of one standing, with his paws pressed together.

  “The city is trying to create a buffer zone” – his tone became mocking – “around the new soccer fields on the south side of town. The trouble is, that buffer zone gets bigger and bigger every year, and they signed an agreement four years ago that that land would be set aside for the habitat and remain that way into perpetuity. Now they’re trying to renege on that deal because this town needs more soccer fields lying idle six days a week.”

  I remembered the headline I’d read about the extermination equipment being vandalized over the weekend.

  I also remembered Bobby, talking low but loud enough for me to overhear. “They didn’t say anything about the PDDL, did they?”

  The rat.

  Viv nodded at Bull. “Well, that sounds like a very worthy cause.” Then, probably because everyone was staring at us and seemed a bit irritated that we’d interrupted their very important meeting, she said, “Do you take monetary contributions?”

  The speaker jumped to attention, leaning back to fish a plastic jug out from behind the podium. It was in the shape of a prairie dog. “We certainly do,” he said, shoving the thing at Viv. “Anything is appreciated. Anything at all.”

  The prairie dog had a slit in the top of his head, and his paws were placed together, like the one on the poster.

  “What, is he begging not to be exterminated?” I asked, stunned into saying exactly what I was thinking.

  “No, they do that,” ponytail guy said. “They actually stand like that every morning and every evening and face the sun. Their eyes closed and their paws together like that.” He gave me a meaningful look. “Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded that indeed it did, but I wasn’t sure at the moment what to think, aside from ways to make Bobby pay.

  Dale, ever slow on the uptake, continued to stare slack-jawed at the scene unfolding before him. Then he said, “Wait. This isn’t one of those anti-gay groups?”

  The room fell instantly silent. Dale waited for an answer.

  The guy with the ponytail gave him a steely look. “I should think not,” he said stiffly. “Seeing as how I’m gay.”

  I edged toward the door, but didn’t get far before Bull said, “Yeah, he’s gay. So am I.” He straightened from where he leaned against the wall and took a step toward us. He nodded toward Chuck, the biggest guy in the room. “So is my partner.”

  “We need to go,” Viv said. “Not because you’re gay, I mean. We just need to go because...”

  But apparently her normally fast thinking wasn’t working so fast at the moment. She looked desperately at me.

  “We have to...run!”

  I turned and ran, pushing one poor guy out of my way as I neared the outer door.

  Viv wasn’t far behind me, and she clicked her car remote to unlock the doors as we hopped over potholes. I threw myself into the front seat and slammed the door behind me.

  I looked into the side mirror. Where was Dale?

  Viv turned the key in the ignition. “Where is that idiot?”

  “Leave him!” I cried, picturing the blood-thirsty crowd coming after us in a frenzy.

  He came jogging out, though, a second later. He was alone.

  He jumped into the backseat and Viv floored the Caddy. It scraped the bottom as she hit the street, but if we’d done damage, she would just have to find it later.

  “Are you two crazy?” Dale grumbled from the back seat. “You just left me there!”

  “If you’d kept your mouth shut, we wouldn’t have had to run,” I said.

  “Well, you’re the one who told us this was a hate group.”

  I looked at Viv. “Bobby,” I said.

  “We’re going to have to make him pay for this one,” Viv said. She set her chin in that way I’d come to recognize as a sign of impending disaster. She gunned it and we were almost back to the Loop before I remembered Stump.

  “Wait!” I said. “We have to go back for Stump.”

  Viv muttered a bad word and swung the Caddy in a wide arc in the middle of the road, bouncing over the grassy median.

  As we got close to The Hangout, I saw a group of people standing in the parking lot, looking around.

  “Oh no! I think they’re looking for us.” I laid down on the seat.

  “Crap!” Viv said. She laid on top of me, one hand holding the wheel.

  As we sped by The Hangout, they must have seen a driverless car, with a guy in the back seat screaming like a little girl.

  Four

  As soon as Viv dropped me and Stump off at Flo’s, we loaded into our car and drove back to the dress shop. I was exhausted from all the drama and excitement and wanted to get home, but I had to do this first.

  Turns out it didn’t take long, though. The sales clerk had the Smaxx in a bag on the counter. She held it up as soon as I walked through the door.

  “I knew you’d be back,” she said. “Thirteen-eighty-seven.”

  I handed her a five and a ten, equal parts grateful and irritated. I leaned to the grateful side, however, when she handed me the change and said, “This will make a huge difference in the way that dress fits, believe me.”

  I passed the Matt Macon billboard on the way back to Trailertopia and decided to swing by the radio station for some reconnaissance. I had to find the station on the dial, because KBST played the kind of “hot hit country” that sometimes featured steel guitar, which makes me want to bang my head against a concrete block. I made it through three commercials before the DJ (not Matt Macon – this guy sounded about 20 and like he didn’t particularly like country music either) launched into just such a song. Stump cocked her head and stared at the speaker, then looked stonily at me.

  I punched the power button. “Don’t tell anyone we don’t like steel guitar,” I said. “They’ll kick us out of Texas.”

  KBST was in what looked like an old liquor store south of town. It was dusk, and the area was mostly scrap yards, heavy equipment sales and rentals, and a couple of “gentlemen’s” clubs featuring silhouettes of curvy-hipped big-boobed women. It was too late for the junk yards and too early for the strip clubs, so traffic was light.

  A small hatchback and a large double-cab pickup sat at the side of the building by the back door. My finely-honed detective skills told me the hatchback was driven by the DJ on duty, but the pickup was a new one, and clearly cost a fair amount of money. It probably took a general manager’s salary to pay for that.

  I pulled into the gravel parking lot and studied the car and building. There was nothing except a bumper sticker that said, “Good Stuff Happens Too” on the hatchback. I drove slowly past, then turned the car in a slow circle and drove back by. Nothing. I noticed a Dumpster between the radio station and the strip club, and figured that if I was Viv, I’d look through the trash to see if there were any clues. Then I thought, No, Viv would tell me to look.

  I pulled to the side of the dumpster and, hyper-aware of my last encounter with a dumpster, I got out of the car and edged slowly up to it. I had no clue what I was looking for. Maybe some handwritten notes saying, “Let’s kill CJ Hardin, signed Matt Macon.” I knew from several hundred hours of watching detective shows with Viv that the police always look in the trash. They must have a reason for it.

  “Damn it,” I said. All the trash was bagged. I found a stick – actually it was the spine from what had once been a giant tumbleweed – broke off the smaller branches and then leaned back over to stir the bags around to see if they covered anything. The stick just broke, though, and the smell old food – and who-knew-what-else – thrown out by the strip club was getting to me.

  “Am I going to have to open these frigging bags?” I asked Stump.

  Her ears perked up, and I decided to take that as a sign that indeed I sho
uld. Of course, she was probably just excited about the smell of the old buffalo wings and nachos that were likely in the bags, but I was in a place where I took whatever encouragement came my way.

  I climbed onto the edge of the dumpster, on the metal bar where the truck would have slid its forklift in to lift it. I reached out with the stick and stabbed at a bag, poking hard until a small hole appeared. I dragged the stick toward me to stretch the hole bigger. I pulled back and down hard. Man, I need to find out what brand of garbage bags those are, I thought as sweat broke out on my lip. They were strong. I adjusted my grip on the stick and tugged even harder. I could tell the hole was getting bigger, but not much. I tugged harder.

  The stick slipped, I lost my balance, and then pinwheeled my arms and fell off the dumpster.

  “Hey! What are you doing out there?”

  I jumped up and tried to scramble to the car, but I tripped over my feet and fell again.

  “You damned drunks,” the guy said. “They don’t throw the leftover liquor out with the trash, sweetheart. You’re wasting your time.”

  I drew my head back in indignation. He thought I was digging for something to drink!

  It was Matt Macon. He had a booming DJ voice and that obnoxious I-know-I’m-a-big-deal attitude that Trisha sometimes got. He sounded just like he did on the radio, which was not a point in his favor, in my opinion. Plus, he called me sweetheart and thought I was dumpster diving for a bottle. I hated him instantly.

  “I am not looking for a drink,” I said. “I am...”

  And then, here’s what happened. I’m not really proud of this, but it is what it is. I happen to be fairly skilled at lying. I’ve always had a natural talent, I guess, but I got really good at it when I was drinking. You have to be, when you’re explaining to people why you can’t pay your bill or how something got broken or messed up, but you still want them to be your friend or leave your electricity on. It’s a survival skill.

  Once I quit drinking, I made a conscience effort to be honest – with myself and with everyone else. I found that honesty, like drinking, permeates every part of your life whether you want it to or not. I had learned not to say the first thing that popped into my mind, but I found that, if words came out of my mouth, they were usually honest words.

  But, I don’t know. This guy ticked me off. He called me a ‘damned drunk.’ I thought for a second, what if I was a drunk? What if I was so desperate for a drink I’d resorted to dumpster-diving? This is how he would treat me – with utter contempt.

  So I opened my mouth, and this big dramatic whopper of a lie came out.

  “I’m looking for my husband’s wedding ring.” I made my voice go tight on the last word, and put my hand over my mouth like I was choking back a sob. I drew my eyebrows together. I looked away.

  “Your husband’s what?”

  “His wedding ring!” I flung a hand toward the strip clubs. “He was in there and he took it off, and he said one of the waitresses must have picked it up with a napkin and tossed it or something.” I ducked my head like I couldn’t stand it, but cut my eyes toward him to see if he was buying it.

  He looked kind of disgusted, but I wasn’t sure if it was at me or at my “husband.”

  I did a little sob for good measure. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t be out here doing this, I just...I know he’s going to regret this so much. He’s going to be so sorry, and that is just not another burden he needs to be bearing right now. He’s been under a lot of pressure lately, a lot of stress.” I remembered one of Matt Macon’s favorite rants was on hard-working Americans not able to get by because their jobs were being farmed out overseas or given to unqualified minorities for affirmative action quotas. “He works so hard but we can’t get by, especially now that the plant is outsourcing so much of the work he used to do. His hours keep getting cut back. He just came out here to blow off some steam, he said. A man should have a right to do that.”

  I did another quick check. Macon looked almost sympathetic now.

  Jerk, I thought. Call me a damned drunk. “I thought if I could maybe come out here and find it, I could slip it into his pocket or something and make him think he just misplaced it.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” Macon said. “Sounds like your husband has a very loving and supportive wife.”

  “He deserves it,” I said. “He’s always been so good to me. I mean, sure, we don’t have a fancy house or drive fancy cars. But he goes out and works hard, takes care of things around the house, sets a good example for our kids.”

  “Sounds like a good man.”

  “Oh, he is. He’s a very good man.”

  It hadn’t been my intention to drag this out, but now that I was going, I thought that maybe I could get Macon talking. Maybe if he thought I was part of his demographic, he’d talk to me and tell me if he knew anything about CJ.

  “He was kind of drunk when he came home last night, I don’t know if he even remembers telling me about the ring. I didn’t say anything about it when I packed his lunch this morning. He just seemed so defeated, you know? Finding the ring would cheer him up, I think. He needs that right now, with all the work and money stuff, and then we find out that our son’s pediatrician...” I thought about HomeschooMomofOneGreatBoy.

  I started to say, “We found out my son’s pediatrician was a pervert,” but the image of Marky’s face, tortured by the knowledge of what CJ must have endured, kept the words stuck in my throat.

  But I didn’t need to cast my line anymore than that. Matt Macon bit and started nodding.

  “One of Dr. Hardin’s patients, huh?”

  I hung my head.

  “That’s got a lot of people torn up,” he said. “And rightly so. I’m sorry you have to go through this. That sounds like a lot for one family to take on at once.”

  I shrugged again. “I just...I wish I knew who did it, you know? To Dr. Hardin? I’d like to know that.”

  “Wouldn’t we all?” He turned and looked into the dumpster. “I suppose we could dig through these bags and see if there are any napkins in there.”

  It struck me then just what kind of horrifyingly disgusting scenario I had set up here. Digging through used napkins in a strip club’s garbage. Ummm...ewww.

  “I really couldn’t ask you to do that,” I said. Because no way was I going to do it myself. Not happening. Even for the world’s greatest “husband.” “That’s really...too much to ask.”

  “You’re a good wife,” he said again. I noticed he didn’t argue with me. But I couldn’t say that I blamed him. “I have some plastic gloves in my truck, if you want to borrow them.”

  Damn. “Sure, that sounds great. I should have thought of that.”

  I followed him to his pickup and he pulled a box of disposable plastic gloves out of his glove compartment. “Are you allergic to latex?” he asked.

  A way out! “Yes!” I said, with the attitude of someone who’s just scored a bingo.

  “So am I,” he said. “These are latex free.”

  “Excellent,” I said through gritted teeth. “That’s just excellent.”

  “You’re going to need to rebag everything once you’ve gone through it, or else the garbage people are going to raise Cain with us.” He reached into the bed of his pickup and pulled out a roll of plastic garbage bags. He spun six or eight off the roll, ripped them off and handed them to me. “Here you go.”

  “You’re really too kind,” I said, meaning every syllable. “Really.”

  “Don’t mention it.” He nodded toward the dumpster. “Looks like you’re all set.”

  “Looks like it.” I faced the Dumpster, pulling on my latex-free disposable gloves. Part of me wondered if he was on to me – or at least he thought he was on to me – and that’s why he was so helpful. He was calling my bluff.

  I hauled myself back up to the side of the Dumpster and looked over the edge. It had looked bad enough when I just planned on poke at things with a stick. Now it looked like a raging biohazard. I sl
ung one leg over, fully expecting to die the instant the bottom of my shoe made contact with the garbage.

  “He looks up to you, you know,” I said in desperation. “My husband. He thinks you’re very wise.”

  “That’s flattering,” Macon said.

  “I’ll bet you get that a lot.”

  He shrugged. “I get everything a lot. A lot of positive, a lot of negative. The occasional death threat.”

  “Dale – that’s my husband –” What the heck!? Why did I choose that name? I put my head down again like I was holding back more tears, when really I was just trying to get the howler monkeys that suddenly filled my brain to pipe down. “He – he was just telling me that he figured you probably knew who murdered CJ Hardin. Or at least had a pretty good idea.”

  “Sure, I’ve got a good idea. He was killed by someone who thought it would be a better world without him.”

  I was so anxious to get into the shower that I actually still had my socks on when I stepped into the water. I had to tug them off and slop them onto the side of the tub. I scrubbed with everything I was worth, then scrubbed some more. I washed my hair three times. I got out of the tub, remembered where I’d been, then got back in and washed some more. I washed until I ran out of hot water.

  I finally resolved that I had to quit thinking about it. I would develop OCD if I didn’t, and Lord knew I did not need another charming but inconvenient quirk. I pulled on pajamas and decided to do some more internet reconnaissance. But first, dinner.

  I took turns standing before the open fridge and pantry doors, willing something decent to appear. I finally gave up with a sigh and looked at Stump. “Would it kill you to go to the grocery store every once in a while?”

  She yawned and flopped to the floor.

  I poured a bowl of high-fiber raisin bran and sliced up a banana into the bowl. Stump, bless her ever hopeful heart, saw the bowl in my hand and perked up.

  I curled my lip a little. “You won’t like this any more than you have every other time you’ve tried it,” I said as I poured in the skim milk. Stump was even more disenchanted with this Fat Fighters thing than I was, if that was possible. So far not one thing I’d offered her from my menu had appealed to her.