Black Cat Weekly #50

Chapter 5

byWednesday evening, after Florence Quigly closed Flo’s Flowers & More—her nursery in Theodore, Texas—she sent her middle-aged grandson home. When she was finally alone, she stood at one of the counters in the back room preparing her special sachets for that evening’s meeting of the Ladies of Wednesday Tea. Veronica, Betty, and Kevin—three tailless Manx cats she’d rescued from a drainpipe when they were just-weaned kittens—lay in various locations around the room watching her. She thought she had locked the front door several minutes earlier when she’d flipped the sign from Open to Closed, so she was surprised when she heard the tinkle of the brass bell affixed to the door.

OpenClosed,Flo stopped what she was doing and stepped from the back room onto the dimly lit sales floor, where she found a stocky man staring at a display of seed packets. Broad shoulders and thick chest tapered down to a narrow waist. Muscled arms strained the short sleeves of his navy-blue polo shirt, and tight-fitting jeans hugged his hips and thighs. Dark hair stood up straight in a butch-waxed flat top above a weathered face, and the Confederate flag tattooed on his left forearm caught her attention. She said, “May I help you?”

He turned with a start, and his eyes narrowed as he took her in.

Though weathered by decades working in the sun, Flo stood ramrod-straight. Wavy gray hair framed her narrow face and her ice-blue eyes tracked his every move. “We’re closed, but I would be happy to assist you.”

He poked a finger at one of the seed packets. “The petunias,” he said, his voice deep and low. “How much?”

“Two-seventy-nine.”

Kevin had followed Flo from the back room, and he took an interest in the stranger.

“You have a nice place here,” the man said. “Surprised I hadn’t noticed it before.”

“You from around here?”

“I pass through now and then.”

“So would you like me to ring up one of those seed packets?”

“Another time,” the stranger said as Kevin rubbed against his leg. He kicked the cat aside as he turned to leave. “Another time.”

Dee, Charlene, and Twiz were well into their second glasses of wine when Flo finally bustled into Dee’s dining room. As she handed each of them one of her special sachets, she told them about the customer who had delayed her arrival. She described his appearance and repeated everything he said, ending with, “He kicked Kevin.”

“He kicked Kevin?” Charlene asked. “Why would anyone kick Kevin? Kevin’s the sweetest cat ever!”

“I had locked the door but had not set the deadbolt,” Flo said. “When I finally locked up for the night, I double-checked. There were marks around the strike plate. I think he jimmied the lock.”

“Why would he do that? What do you think he wanted?” Twiz asked.

“To steal something, obviously.”

“But what? A rake? A sack of compost? You don’t have anything of value to a non-gardener,” Charlene said. Flo’s Flowers & More sold everything a gardener might need—bags of compost and fertilizer, various forms of pest control, drip irrigation systems, gardening tools such as trowels, cultivators, rakes, shovels, and pitchforks. In the greenhouse behind the concrete block building housing the sales floor, checkout counter, and office, were all manner of potted plants suitable for East Texas.

“Cash,” suggested Twiz.

“What cash? Most everybody pays by credit card these days.”

They stared at one another and fingered their sachets, small muslin bags filled with dried herbs that would ease Dee’s glaucoma, Twiz’s arthritis, and Charlene’s anxiety.

“You don’t think... ?”

Flo shook her head. “How would he know?”

After a moment of silence, Dee said, “Well, he’s gone now, and nothing happened.” Then she handed Flo a glass of the red she and the other ladies were drinking. “You have some catching up to do.”

The oldest by only a few months, Flo had been a surprise gift her father gave her mother upon his return from serving in the European theater during WWII, and the other members of the group had likewise been post-war babies. Friends since childhood, they had aged into their seventies with various amounts of grace.

Flo began Flo’s Flowers & More when she was a young mother, supporting her family after her alcoholic husband disappeared. Growing flowers and vegetables to sell at weekend farmers markets slowly developed into a full-time business, and several decades after selling her first pansies, she owned the nursery on the edge of town, where she still worked five or more days each week.

Dee Goldstein, the first female criminal court judge in East Texas, nicknamed “Gallows Goldstein” by defense attorneys for her harsh punishments, had faced criminals of all stripes across the bench. She had received so many threats that she took to carrying a snub-nosed .38 beneath her judicial robes.

Charlene Whit followed the path of her father, working for him in the only compounding pharmacy in a hundred-mile radius. He berated her almost daily until he died in a hunting accident, and she ran the pharmacy alone until it became obvious she could no longer compete with the chain retailers.

Red-headed Twiz Hanson, the youngest of the four and the only one who still dyed her hair, had married well, never worked a day in her life, and had the misfortune of being exceedingly clumsy, having fallen down stairs and run into open doors throughout the seventeen years of her marriage. When her husband died of a prescription-medicine overdose, she publicly mourned for an appropriate amount of time, and she never again visited the hospital due to an accidental fall.

Twiz changed the subject. “How’s that grandson of yours?”

“Bless his heart, but sometimes I think Dickie’s dumber than a sack of rocks,” Flo said. “I swear he’ll be the death of me. If he wasn’t blood, I would’ve cut him loose a long time ago.”

“Men,” Charlene said with a weary shake of her head. “They’re all the same.”

“I tried to explain that to my daughter,” Flo said, “but she was boy crazy just like we were when we were young.”

“So how is your daughter?”

“Older and wiser,” Flo said, “and I’m stuck taking care of her life lesson.”

“Who needs a man?” Dee asked. “If I want something to clean up after, I’ll get a dog.”

They all laughed.

“We’ll never need another man,” Twiz said. Over the years each had lost a spouse or a significant male figure, though lost might not be the appropriate term. They knew where the bodies were. “As long as we have each other, we have everything we’ll ever need.”

They all raised their glasses.

Mid-morning the next day, Richard “Little Dickie” Rhodes worried his red bandanna between his fingers as he stepped into his grandmother’s office. With his hawk nose and weak chin, he resembled his father’s side of the family more than his mother’s, but he had none of his father’s swagger. “I was wondering if I could get an advance on my—”

Flo stopped petting Veronica and looked up from the seed catalog open on her desk. “What now?”

“I owe a guy some money.”

“I’ve already advanced your pay into the middle of next month.” Veronica jumped from her lap and climbed onto one of the filing cabinets with Betty and Kevin.

“Yeah, but—”

“Isn’t it about time you learned how to manage your money?”

“Just a couple of hundred, Nana,” Little Dickie said. “That’s all I need.”

“That’s all you ever need,” she said. “You planning to bleed me dry a couple of hundred at a time?”

“No, I—”

“Well, that’s what you’re doing, and it’s time to put an end to this,” Flo said. “I promised your mother I would look after you, but there’s a limit to my generosity.”

“But, Nana—”

“Take your ‘but’ out of my office and go help Hector load the Johnsons’ compost order.”

Little Dickie opened his mouth to protest yet again but withered under his grandmother’s gaze.

A few hours later, Dee brought Flo lunch from the Piney Woods Café. After leaving Hector in charge of the cash register, they brushed cats off of Flo’s desk and opened Styrofoam containers overflowing with chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and purple-hull peas, all smothered in white gravy.

“I didn’t want to say anything in front of the others,” Dee said after she closed the office door, “but that tattoo on your visitor the other night is a problem.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s Confederate Mafia.” The Confederate Mafia controlled much of the illegal activity in East Texas and West Louisiana. “I probably put that man’s pappy or grandpappy in Huntsville. Why would they be interested in you?”

“There’s no reason they should be,” Flo said before she scooped potatoes and gravy into her mouth.

“I ran your description past a retired cop I know,” Dee continued. She reached into her oversized purse and pulled out a stenographer’s notepad upon which she had made notes. “She said he sounds like Jace Parker, a top lieutenant for Caden Black. Black was in my court a few times, but never convicted. Apparently, he’s moved up the food chain these past few years.”

“I still don’t know what this has to do with me.”

Kevin jumped into Dee’s lap and tried to stick his nose into her plate. She gently pushed him away. “Whatever Jace wanted, you’d best be ready for him to come back for it.”

Little Dickie did not show up for work Friday morning, and it wasn’t the first time he’d proven unreliable. Flo called his cellphone several times throughout the day, leaving messages to remind her grandson of the tenuousness of his continued employment, but he never showed up and he never returned her calls. Luckily, foot traffic remained slow, so Flo and Hector were able to meet the needs of their few customers that day.

That evening, after Flo sent Hector home and she shut off the lights, she stepped outside. While searching her ring for the correct key to set the deadbolt, a deep male voice behind her said, “I think you have a problem.”

Startled, Flo dropped everything. She turned to see the man who had visited her two nights earlier. She asked, “Change your mind about the petunias, Jace?”

He ignored her question. “Your grandson owes my boss a good bit of money.”

“And what’s that to me?”

“He says you’ll make good.”

“He does, does he? Why would he think that?”

“You’ve got a good thing going here,” he said. “Hate for anything to happen to your side business, or to Little Dickie.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“If you ever want to see your grandson again, you’ll meet with my boss tomorrow afternoon.” He told her a time and gave her an address. “And don’t be late.”

He turned, and she watched as he climbed into a black Ford F-150 and drove away.

After she collected her key ring from the ground and locked the deadbolt, Flo used her cellphone to call Dee.

Despite glaucoma’s impact on her peripheral vision, Dee drove Saturday afternoon, following directions from the GPS system on Flo’s phone, to a home deep in the Piney Woods an hour north of Theodore. She parked in front of a single-wide mobile home next to a creek that ultimately fed into the Sabine River. No other homes were nearby, and in the side yard lay a twelve-foot-long alligator, a steel collar padlocked around its neck. A thick chain affixed the collar to a steel post driven deep into the ground, and a great length of chain allowed the alligator to soak in the creek if it so desired.

The front door opened at Flo’s knock and Flo led the way into the mobile home to find two men—the man who had twice visited her and a heavyset man with a bulbous nose and a Confederate flag tattooed on his left forearm—standing on either side of Flo’s grandson, holding him upright by gripping his arms. Little Dickie had his hands zip-tied behind his back, and bruises on his face made it clear he had gotten the worst of whatever had happened since Flo had last seen him.

“You’re late,” the heavyset man said. He nodded at the window overlooking the side yard. “We were just about to feed Burt Reynolds. It’s past his lunch time.”

Dee stepped around Flo. “Hello, Caden.”

“Good afternoon, Judge,” the heavyset man said. He turned to Flo and asked, “Why’s she here?”

“To help me negotiate.”

“Negotiate? I don’t negotiate.” He shook Little Dickie. “I get a piece of your business and you get this piece of s**t back.”

Dee rummaged through her oversized purse. She pulled out a snub-nosed .38, pressed it against Caden’s crotch, and c****d the hammer.

His eyes widened. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Dee smiled. “Now we’re negotiating.”

The heavyset man stared into the judge’s eyes and swallowed hard.

“Boss?”

“Step back, Jace.”

Without taking her eyes off the heavyset man, Dee instructed Flo to take Jace’s truck keys and leave with Little Dickie.

Flo asked, “What about you?”

Dee winked at Caden. “I’ll be fine.”

Two hours later, Dee walked into Flo’s Flowers & More.

Surprised, Flo asked, “How’d you get away?”

“I shot him.”

“Caden’s dead?”

“I just shot him in the thigh. A flesh wound. He’ll be fine.”

“But what if the police get involved?”

“He won’t call the police. He can’t afford to. Then they’ll start looking at him.” Dee glanced around. “Where’s your grandson?”

“I sent him to his mother’s in New Mexico. He’s her problem now.”

“He’s the one who told them about your special sachets, isn’t he?”

“He said as much when I threatened to give him a few more bruises before I let him go.”

Flo’s Flowers & More was closed on Sundays but Flo often spent her afternoon in the office catching up on bookkeeping. When she arrived, she discovered that someone had turned her greenhouse into a veritable killing field. All the potted plants had been overturned and dumped on the pea gravel walkways, bits of shattered statuary were scattered throughout the mess, and Veronica, Betty and Kevin were nowhere to be found.

Flo phoned Dee, Twiz, and Charlene and the three women arrived within half an hour. They lined their purses up on the front counter before Flo led them into the greenhouse. As they inspected the destruction, Dee told Twiz and Charlene what had happened.

“No man is going to threaten us and get away with it,” Charlene said.

“Well, then, let’s clean this up.”

They’d been at it for almost an hour before Veronica, Betty, and Kevin finally surfaced, and all three cats watched from a safe distance as the women worked. By early evening the women had the greenhouse in some semblance of order, and Flo stepped into the building housing the sales floor to call for a pizza delivery.

She reappeared a moment later with a g*n pointed at her head.

Jace eyed the women and said, “Looks like you brought the whole g**g this time.”

He made Flo call her friends into the building, where Caden Black waited. As the women filed in, followed by all three of the inquisitive cats, Caden warned Jace, “Keep them away from their purses.”

Jaden directed them away from the front counter.

“We only expected two of you,” Caden said, “but it don’t matter. We’re going to make an example of you ladies. Nobody pushes dope around these parts without my permission, and”—he waved his g*n at the judge—“nobody shoots me and gets away with it.”

Twiz stepped forward. “You can’t—”

Jace backhanded her.

Twiz had lived through worse. She rope-a-doped the slap and stood her ground.

Kevin leapt on Jace’s head, digging his claws into the man’s cheeks. Jace spun around and tried to bat the cat away.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Charlene grabbed an aerosol can of bug killer from the shelf and sprayed it into Caden’s eyes.

Dee grabbed a three-pronged cultivator, swung it like a ping-pong paddle, and buried the prongs into Caden’s neck.

Jace finally knocked Kevin free, but as he did, he stumbled backward, squeezed the trigger of his pistol as he fell, and died when the bullet ricocheted off a shovel and buried itself between his eyes.

Caden tried to remove the cultivator from his neck with his free hand while drawing down on Dee. Before he could squeeze the trigger, Flo drove a pitchfork through his lower back.

When the four women caught their breath, Twiz looked at the mess and asked, “What do we do now?”

Flo smiled. “I know where there’s a hungry ’gator.”

Michael Bracken (CrimeFictionWriter.com) is the Edgar and Shamus Award-nominated author of 1,200-plus short stories published in The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Black Cat Mystery Magazine and several anthologies, including Anthony Award-nominated The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods. He lives and writes in Texas.