I, Racki (Part IX)

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“Why do you want to talk to her?”

“Courtesy,” I said. “Plans change.”

“Meaning?”

“Going to the Prom means the dress shop, the hair salon, the tanning bed. Not going to the Prom means renting movies, baking cookies, inviting your fat friends over.”

“You’re dumping her the day of Prom, Racki?”

I finished my Mr. Pibb. I put the can on the floor and stomped it flat with my heel with a noise that startled Randy. Part of him was thinking about Jailey and her hurt feelings. Most of him was probably thinking about how he was going to use these hurt feelings to get another part of him into part of Jailey.

I have a sense about these things. I said, “It’s none of your business, but I was able to upgrade.” I kicked the can into a corner. “Can you honestly say you’d do any different?”

“That’s just wrong, buddy.”

“I’m not your buddy. And you didn’t answer me.”

“Yes.”

“Liar.”

“I’m not lying.”

“But you fired her.” I gave him my trademark one-finger salute and left the store in a much better mood. I stood out there on the sunny sidewalk watching the race and blocking traffic, then turned my head right as Mosley’s tire clipped a hay bale and he went spaceborn. There was a gasp from the gallery and a collective shudder when the hard earth took him back. Then I watched the Steve Brinkle and a group of men in fireproof suits and the medic on loan from the Clinic run down Main Street toward the wreck with fire extinguishers and it occurred to me that there probably wouldn’t be a line at the pork fritter stand if I went now.

* * *

I was getting a little pissed. There is a limit to how far a guy should be expected to go out of his way for something like this and if Jailey didn’t want to be found then she was just going to have to find out when I didn’t pick her up tonight. Maybe after that, her family would go buy a damn answering machine. But I had things to do, and I was going to do them.

In the nineteenth century a robber baron named Samuel “Railroad Spike” Benjamin mapped out the town of Stone Creek and built a mansion, about a mile east of the town, a blocky Georgian Revival set back in a foresty parcel of land over by where the golf course would eventually be, a haven of brick and symmetry with a balustraded deck on top so he could see his enemies coming.

It was big. I was impressed. I saw the special on TV, the occasional picture, loose talk around Tom’s Garage, and the interrogation transcripts of that nutcase bum Elmore “Molar” Jones, but until this very day I had yet to see Salome Wilson’s house in person. There was a squad of soldiers in black SWAT gear up on the roof training their weapons on me as I walked up to the portico as well as a mounted .50 caliber machine gun just in case I had been thinking about blowing the gate with my Monte Carlo.

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