Patricia Cornwell - Southern Cross

Bubba was thinking the same thing. He believed Chief Hammer should not be riding in an open car in the Azalea Parade, and worse, it had been in the newspaper so everybody knew it. It was possible this was where all roads met. Bubba had been called to save her from a terrible danger. Bubba also figured the Pikes somehow factored in.

At eight o'clock this morning, he was already parking in front of Green Top Sporting Goods on U.S. Route 1, some twenty minutes outside of Richmond. There was no place Bubba would rather be. The minute he walked through the door and was greeted by thousands of fishing rods and all that went with them, his pulse quickened. When he turned to the right and saw hundreds of rifles, shotguns, pistols and revolvers, he got flushed. He felt lust in a way he had never experienced with Honey.

'Hey, what'cha know.' He was enthusiastically greeted by Fig Winnick, the assistant manager.

By Virginia law, a citizen could buy one handgun every thirty days and no more. This had given rise to the tongue-in-cheek Gun-of-the-Month Club. It was a small but clever group of one hundred and eighty-nine men and sixty-two women who sent each other reminders when their thirty days, loosely interpreted as a month, were up. It was April 2.

'If only I'd come in two days ago, I could have bought a gun then and another one today,' Bubba misinterpreted, as usual.

'Wishful thinking,' Winnick told him again. 'Doesn't work that way, Bubba. And it sure as hell is too damn bad.'

'So you're saying it's not once a month,' Bubba challenged what he refused to believe.

'Not literally. But sort of. If you start with the first day of each month.'

'You know, someone stole all my guns.' Bubba browsed.

'The guys were talking about it,' Winnick sympathized.

'So all I got left's the Anaconda and I need something I can pack easier,' Bubba spoke the language.

'I got just the thing.'

Winnick lovingly opened a showcase and gently pulled out a Browning 40 S amp;W Hi-Power Mark III pistol. He handed the beauty to Bubba.

'Oh God,' Bubba muttered as he fondled the silver chrome pistol. 'Oh, oh, oh.'

'Molded polyamide grips with thumb rest,' Winnick said. 'Weighs thirty-five ounces, four and three-quarters barrel. Feels great to the hand, huh?'

'Boy. No kidding.'

Bubba pulled back the slide and snapped it forward. There was just no better sound than that.

'Low profile front sight blade, drift-adjustable rear sight,' Winnick went on. 'Ambidextrous safety, ten-round magazine.'

'Imported from Belgium.' Bubba wasn't going to be fooled. 'The genuine thing.'

'Nothing but.'

'What about a matte blue finish?' Bubba inquired. 'It doesn't show up as much.'

'Sorry,' Winnick apologized. 'Damn. If only you had come in yesterday. We had about eleven left.'

'Well, I guess this one will have to do,' Bubba said.

Patty Passman also was thinking ahead. She hadn't missed an Azalea Parade in twelve years and she didn't intend to miss this one. Although Rhoad had unfairly charged her with many things, it was only assault on a police officer that had stuck. She wished bail bondsman Willy 'Lucky' Loving would show up to get her the hell out of here.

Lockup was just a holding area and inmates wore their own clothes, giving up only their belts to make it trickier to commit suicide. Passman was sticky, her panty hose so torn up she'd had no choice but to take them off right in front of her cellmate, Tinky Meaney, a truck driver for Dixie Motorfreight, who had gotten picked up for getting into a scuffle in the parking lot of the Power Clean Grill on Hull Street. Passman didn't know the details, but of one thing she was certain, Tinky Meaney wasn't on the list of those Passman might have invited to a slumber party.

'I sure wish he'd hurry up,' Passman said from her narrow steel pull-down bed.

She said this often to make certain Meaney didn't think that Passman enjoyed Meaney's company and was in no hurry to leave it. Meaney was a big woman. She was the sort who always said they weren't fat, just big-boned and solid. This was nonsense.

Meaney's thighs were thicker than the biggest Smithfield hams Passman had ever seen, and every time Meaney stalked about the tiny cell, her jeans swished as her upper legs rubbed together. Her hands were thick with stubby fingers and big knuckles that were scraped and bruised from the fistfight that had landed her here. She had no neck. As she sat on the edge of her bed staring at Passman, Meaney's breasts sagged over her empty belt loops. Unshaved pale legs showed between the hem of her jeans and the top of her hand-tooled black and red cowboy boots.

'What the hell are you staring at?' Meaney caught Passman looking.

'Nothing,' Passman lied.

Meaney stretched out on her side and propped up on an elbow, chin in hand. She stared without blinking, a look in her tiny dark eyes that Passman recognized instantly. At the same time Passman realized in amazement that Meaney's breasts were even bigger than Passman had thought. One was hanging over the side of the bed, almost touching the floor, and brought to mind a sandbag. Passman realized Meaney wasn't wearing a bra under her Motor Mile Towing amp; Flatbed Service sweatshirt.

Passman was painfully reminded of yet one more lousy card she'd been dealt in life. No matter how much weight she had put on over the years, her breasts were elusive. Their fat cells dodged any opportunity for growth and development and always had. She suspected that when, as a young girl, she had tried to be a boy, that part of the programming never got deleted when she later returned to her proper gender.

It was unbearably humiliating in eighth-grade health class to watch the films on menstruation, the female outline on the screen developing right before Passman's eyes, the breasts rounding, the pear-shaped muscular uterus discharging its menses in little hatch-marks flowing through the mature female outline, then out of it, on the screen.

All the other girls could relate. Passman could not. She could have gotten by in life without a bra, had she been honest about it. Her periods were more like commas, brief pauses each month that exacerbated her hypoglycemia and made her very cranky.

Passman was still staring, lost in tortured memories of puberty. Meaney smiled like a jack-o'-lantern and stretched provocatively. Passman carne to. She quickly averted her gaze.

'I sure wish he'd hurry up,' Passman said again, this time with more emphasis.

'It ain't so bad in here,' Meaney said in her twangy drawl. 'I recognize your voice. Hear you all the time when I'm in the vincinity, riding through. Channels one, two and three, know 'em by heart. Four-sixty point one hundred megs, 460.200, 460.325. I always thought you had a nice voice.'

'Thank you,' Passman said. 'So, what'd you do?'

Passman thought it wise to send out a warning. 'Beat the shit out of some guy,' she answered. 'I lost control and should've held back a little more than I did. Huge son of a bitch. Had it coming.'

Meaney nodded. 'Mine had it coming, too, fucking son of a bitch. I'm sitting in the bar minding my own business, you know, after a long day on the road, I mean long. He comes over to my table, this big ole trashy fucker in a cowboy hat. I recognized him.' She nodded. 'And he recognized me.' She nodded again. 'He was in his personal car this night. Nineteen ninety-two Chevy Dually, lowered, loaded, four-fifty-four, aluminum wheels, tinted windows, air ride, all the hitches.

'It was in the lot and he asked if I liked it. I said I did.

He asked what I drove. I told him a Mack. He asked if I'd ever drove a Peterbilt. I said I'd driven all there was. He asked if I'd ever had a blowout in a Peterbilt. I said I hadn't. He asked if I wanted to. I said, Why would I? And he yanked down his zipper, so I threw him up against his Chevy Dually.