The Shack series

Chapter 14

One month later

***

The Sheriff stared at me. "Are we doing this the easy way or the hard way?"

"What's the easy way?"

"Get in the car and we drive over."

"What's the hard way?"

He held up his radio mike. "I call for back up. We Taser your a*s, handcuff you. You end up in the car anyway."

I sighed, put the wrench down, and walked over.

We drove in silence for a couple minutes before he asked.

"Is this over, Needles?"

"Is what over?"

"I can read the papers, asshole."

"Still looking for the centerfold in the Wall Street Journal?"

"A house full of g**g members blows up. A g**g member we just released gets shot in a park in North Carolina. Guys high-diving out of windows, and politicians trying to suck-start handguns. But it's been quiet for over a month. Just tell me it's over."

Damn, he was good at putting s**t together. "I didn't Damning start it."

"I know." He rubbed his forehead. "Jesus. Somebody needs to slap a warning label on your a*s. 'Do Not Touch, High Explosive.'"

"As far as I know, it's Damning over."

"As far as you know?"

I shrugged. "I think everybody involved is dead. Except my b***h ex-wife, and I don't know how much she knew."

He pulled up in front of the steak house. "Let's go. Or do I need to call back up."

As soon as we walked in, I seriously considered that I'd hit my head on something. I didn't even recognize Delaney, at first. She was wearing a black dress, looking uncertain and nervous.

The Damning "Happy Birthday" banner over the table was excruciatingly cheerful.

Sheree was sitting with a smug smile. She'd warned me I was having a birthday party whether I wanted one or not. I just didn't expect her to play quite that Damning dirty. At least she was wearing a pretty low-cut blouse as an unspoken apology for being so under-handed. Women.

Still, the steak was great and she'd even managed to get Tiffany and Tara there.

After we ate the cake, Delaney stood up nervously. "I got you a present. Sort of. It's kind of ratty and a little Damned up. Nobody else seems to want it, but I thought, maybe, you could figure out what to do with it."

I eyed her suspiciously she handed me a flat package with shaking hands.

I carefully opened it to find a stack of papers, the top one labeled "Petition for Adoption." I carefully paged through it and saw Charlotte's signature agreeing to the adoption already in place.

Delaney was pale as a ghost when I looked up. "This is pretty much the perfect gift. It's exactly what I've always wanted."

She rushed forward, latched on to me and started bawling into my shirt. I looked around, Sheree was crying, Tiffany was crying, even Tara, steely-eyed lawyer that she was, had glassy eyes.

It took Delaney a while to calm down, Sheree pulled chair between us and Delaney parked herself on it. She took a deep breath. "It's part of a set though."

Tara handed me two more sheaves of paper, a bit of her lawyer face in place. Tiffany reached over and gripped her sister's hand. "We know it's kind of late, but..."

I looked at the two sets of adult adoption papers. "Is this legal?"

Tara nodded. "Special circumstances. It's a little unusual, but it is legal."

"I was just curious, I'd have taken them even it was completely illegal."

Tiffany gave a weak smile.

*****

I watched the embers of the fire, listening to the late winter wind against the cabin; Sheree shifted a little against me, tugged her blanket a little higher and put her arm back over Delaney. On the other end of the huge couch, Tiffany and Tara were out cold, lying against each other in a mound of blankets just like they had when they were five.

I could just see an empty cookie tray, covered in piecrust crumbs and stacked with empty hot chocolate mugs on the kitchen counter.

They wouldn't be able to do it every Friday. Tiffany had a fiancé and emergency-room shifts to deal with, and Tara's new job required a lot of travel, but for now everything was good.

It was Movie Night.

Tacos."

I looked over at Delaney. "Tacos?"

She nodded gravely. "It's Tuesday. Taco Tuesday."

"Sh..." I glanced down at the dollar bill-filled pouch on the console that served as our "swear jar" in the truck. "The only taco place near here is Taco Grande."

She sat up straighter. "Casa del Taco Grande! Best tacos in Virginia! Three Cheese Tacos, Chipotle Power Tacos, Cilantro Lime Tacos, Beefy Bean Tacos, Cheesy Bean Tacos! We ought to get the Big Taco Sampler so we can try them all. Twelve Amazing Tacos!"

I winced when she cheerfully quoted their tag line. "Ramone makes better ones at his food truck. And that damn place is always full of stoners. I hear you can order a dime bag of w**d right at the counter."

"I know, it's called the 'Happy-Happy Taco Special'." She grinned. "Ramone is on the other side of the county. And you owe a dollar."

"For what?"

"You said 'damn'."

"That's not a Damning swear word."

"Ha!"

"Dammit."

"Three dollars!" She lit up gleefully.

"I'll put in a dollar. Damn doesn't count." Sheree had made that call for us, saying we needed to at least manage to keep enough money to buy food and gas. Sheree had no idea what Delany was planning to use the money for, but she'd agreed to "referee" for us.

Sheree's birthday was six months away. At the rate we were filling the swear jar, I was beginning to think Delany was going to be able to buy her a new car.

From the smirk on Delaney's face, I could see she'd gotten exactly what she'd wanted. She punctuated her victory with an irritating buzz from the circuit tester she was playing with.

"You're gonna run the damn batteries down."

She snickered and gave another short buzz with it before stuffing it in her pocket.

She'd come up with the idea of a "swear jar," and I thought she'd lost her mind, but every time she cussed, she dutifully put in a quarter. She insisted my 'rate' was a dollar, since I was an adult.

I couldn't b***h about it too much.

Hell, it was kind of my fault, anyway. I'd talked to a friend named Kurt who ran his own security services and training company down in Texas, figuring on making arrangements for Delaney to go down for a "crash bang" driving course in a few years as I'd promised her, and instead, he'd jumped on it immediately. An old team-mate of ours, Tony, who occasionally did work for him, was getting married and he'd talked Kurt and his wife Katie into watching over his new stepdaughter while the happy couple went on a honeymoon.

Delaney got to go to Texas for three weeks for what amounted to an abbreviated bodyguard training course, mostly driving, with some shooting and first aid, along with a couple of other girls about her age. Kurt based it off the training they gave to teenage family members in high-risk situations.

Sheree and I had taken advantage of the situation ourselves; it wasn't really a honeymoon, but I'd taken her to Jamaica for a couple weeks. We got a little sunburned in some interesting places.

When Delaney got off the plane in a black T-shirt with a cartoon drawing of a flipped over burning car with three stick figure girls dancing around it and the logo "Camp Mayhem... Drive It Like You Stole It!" she was practically skipping.

She'd fit in.

All the time we'd spent working on cars and driving them around the lot and the old quarry had really paid off. Probably for the first time in her life, she was the cool kid who could answer the questions every time. When they introduced the girls to the cars and told them to look them over, Delaney had promptly checked the tires, popped the hoods and climbed up to check fluid levels. She'd almost broken the evasion course record set by a professional driver. She helped me when I worked at the free clinic on Thursday evenings, so most of the first aid was pretty easy for her, too.

Most of all, though, she'd made friends, real ones. Delaney called her Camp Mayhem classmates, Mackenzie and Tess, on a video call, every Thursday, to talk about whatever the hell it is that teenage girls talk about. They emailed back and forth, mostly pictures of cars, cats and guns. She'd even brought home a picture of the three of them sitting on the crumpled wreck of a car and hung it up in her room.

She'd also brought home the idea of a swear jar. Apparently, Kurt and Katie thought professional bodyguards and drivers should watch their language, so it was a tradition at the school. I was pretty impressed that she'd only had to pay in thirty dollars, until she admitted that she'd only had to pay a quarter each time.

That sounded a helluva lot more like her.

When Delaney had put the swear jar out in the truck, she'd explained she wanted to use it to get Sheree something for her birthday, so I wasn't dead set against. It did seem to drain the cash out of my wallet regularly.

I finally gave in. We both knew I would, since going to Ramone's would take another forty-five minutes. I pulled the rollback into the parking lot and got out, while Delaney jumped down and bounced alongside me to the front door.

The cashier, a pimple covered guy with long fried bleached-out hair sticking out in all directions from under his cap, stared at us dazedly for a long moment, trying to figure out why on earth anyone would come into a restaurant, then he shook his head and started.

"Welcome to... uh, welcome to..."

I sighed. "Taco Grande. It's 'Welcome to Taco Grande,' and you are going to take our order."

"Hehe. Yeah, that. Dude."

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "It's just a little early to be this baked, isn't it?"

"Heh. Yeah..." He grinned, then stopped as he tried dazedly to remember what we were talking about.

"Look, we'll take..." I glanced down at Delaney who looked back at me hopefully. "...a Big Taco Sampler and two large Cokes."

He punched at the register for a while, apparently randomly. I could see two guys in the back snickering, obviously just as stoned as he was. "Uh... Two, uh, Big Sombrero combos, right?"

"Jesus, look..."

I was cut off by the loud buzz of the circuit tester in Delaney's pocket. I looked down at her sharply. She looked back up at me in pretend alarm. "Your ankle monitor is going off." She peered anxiously outside at the parking lot, then looked up at the stoner. "We should really get this to go."

He stared at us both in shock for a moment, then spun and started grabbing handfuls of tacos off the warmer shelf and stuffing them in a bag. He shoved the bag at us with two large cups. "That'll be... uh..."

"Five bucks?" offered Delaney helpfully.

"Yeah, uh, five bucks."

Delaney giggled all the way out to the rollback. I watched her pull herself up into the cab. "Did you enjoy that?"

She rolled her eyes. "We'd a been there all day. Besides..." she peeked in the bag. "He musta put thirty Damning tacos in here."

"You owe a quarter, Buttercup."

"Dammit."

Just as we were pulling out, the Sheriff's black-and-gold Tahoe pulled in. Delaney frantically rolled her window down and waved at him wildly. "Get the Big Taco Sampler, it's awesome!"

She suddenly fell back into the cab, gasping for breath between fits of laughter. "Look... look at the back..."

I could see three red, green and white clad figures sprinting frantically from the back of the store, the blonde mop on the last one bobbing comically.

*****

We'd been back at the yard for almost an hour before the Sheriff pulled in, eying me laconically for a moment, then shook his head at a near-comatose Delaney laying across the top of the right side tool case on the rollback, a stack of taco wrappers on her chest.

He got out and walked over and glanced at her as she groaned. "What's with her?"

"Taco-induced paralysis."

"Is that fatal?

"Not usually. The antidote seems to be a candy bar." Delaney opened one eye to peer at me in the hope that I might produce an actual candy bar.

"Huh." He leaned on the truck. "You two see anything weird at Taco Grande today?"

"Like what?"

"Like something that might cause me to find an abandoned flooded restaurant?"

"Flooded? I didn't see anything like that."

"Water was pouring out of the men's bathroom. Seems somebody tried to flush a kilo of w**d down the toilet." Delaney tried to stifle a giggle, but it got out. The Sheriff gave her a completely ineffective glare. It didn't help that she knew he had a soft spot for her.

I shrugged. "News to us. You'd think a taco joint would have a... sturdier toilet than that. With all those beans and everything."

"It'd probably have helped if they'd have taken it out of the plastic bags."

Delaney giggled again and rolled on to her side, then squawked her circuit tester. I sighed. "The i***t with the blond hair at the counter may have been under the mistaken impression that I had an ankle monitor on and that local law enforcement just might be looking for me."

"That's an oddly specific mistaken impression." He chuckled.

"It is, isn't it?"

Delaney pulled herself to a seated position with a tiny belch. "I wasn't trying to get them in trouble."

The Sheriff tipped his hat back a bit. "They aren't. I could roll up Mooky any time I wanted; it's just not worth the trouble."

"Mooky?" Delaney brightened. "Mooky‽"

"Burton Murkowski Jr. aka, 'Mooky.' Has a little trailer grow house off Route 19 in a little clearing at the end of the spur back by Copper Creek. Small time pot grower, he likes to think of himself as the Robin Hood of w**d. He doesn't cause any trouble, doesn't lace his s**t with anything and doesn't sell to kids, so I just leave him alone."

I understood, but Delaney stared at him puzzled. "But if you know what he's doing and where he's growing stuff..."

"I have more important things to spend resources on than a guy like Mooky. I get elected here to keep a peaceful community. If the State or the feds want to chase after him, that's their problem. He's pretty much harmless. Probably even does some good."

Delaney looked doubtful; she knew my history with drugs and knew I stayed well away from them. The Sheriff caught the look. "You know Friendship Village?"

She nodded. "The old folks home."

"They prefer 'retirement community.' There are a number of cancer patients out there. A lot of chronic pain. Some people swear by m*******a for that kind of stuff. Rumor has it that Mooky really believes in the healing power of w**d and goes out there a lot, only takes token payments."