“Run up yonder in the trees,” I told Reese.
“Huh?”
“I just want to get a feel for why the killer shot past somebody. Get far enough back in the pines so that you can see the truck but you’re mostly hidden.”
“Dwight deputize you or something?” Reese grumbled, but he climbed the bank and did as I’d asked. A minute later, he called, “Here, okay?”
“Can you see the truck?”
“Yeah, but I can’t see you.”
From my position in the ditch, I couldn’t see him either.
“I bet the guy didn’t think anybody was anywhere 9 around,” said A.K., who’d watched with interest. “If I didn’t know Reese was back there, I would never’ve noticed him till he moved, and this is with the sun shining.
Been getting on for dark and he stood still, wouldn’t anybody see him.”
My theory exactly and, despite Reese’s smart-mouthing, one I’d share with Dwight when he got home because I drive past the Johnson farm all the time and know its layout. If the shooter had been in the pasture, he and the Harper woman would have surely seen each other.
I took a fresh bag and they drove on down to the others to pick up some of the filled bags and take a first load to the county dumpsters at Pleasant’s Crossroads, about four miles away.
Our road connects Old Forty-Eight to a shortcut that leads to Fuquay and eventually to Chapel Hill, so we get our share of traffic. All the same, it was appalling to see how much trash had been thrown out, most of it from fast-food places. As I picked up yet another paper clamshell from Wendy’s and retrieved a bunch of unused napkins with the McDonald’s logo, I kept remembering Cedar Gap, the pretty little mountain resort town where I’d held court last fall.
“I thought they were just being prissy to ban all fast-food chains,” I told Minnie and Doris when I caught up with them. “Now I see their point. Seems like there’s a lot more today than the last time we did this.”
“It’s that new shopping center,” said Doris as she stooped for a cardboard Bojangles’ tray. “Fast food’s not to blame. It’s the trashy people who won’t keep a litter bag in their car.”
With so many of us working, we finished well before noon and gathered at the barbecue house for lunch, Daddy’s treat.
“We don’t need to wait so long to do this again,” said Doris. “I was getting right ashamed to have our name on that sign.”
Now that the job was over, it was easy to agree with her.
As we rode back to Seth’s for me to pick up my car, a silver Acura zipped around us. Just as it entered the rising curve ahead, we saw a telltale yellow-and-red bag go flying out the window onto the shoulder and bounce down into the ditch.
“What the hell?” cried Reese.
Enraged, he floored the accelerator, flashing his lights and blowing his horn.
“Write down their license number,” he yelled, reading it off to us.
“No pencil,” said A.K., who was also cursing the driver ahead.
I was equally furious. Less than an hour after we’d cleaned our road and somebody was already trashing it?
“If I catch him, can we make a citizen’s arrest?” Reese asked.
“Go for it, Gomer,” I said. All I had in my pocket was a lipstick, but I used it to write the number on my hand in case the car got away.
That wasn’t necessary, though. Bewildered by the lights and horn, the Acura slowed and pulled to a stop in front of Doris and Robert’s drive.
Reese was out of the truck before it quit rolling and I made A.K. put down the window on that side.
“What’s wrong?” asked the teenaged driver.
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong, you jerk!” Reese shouted as he approached the car. “What the hell kind of slob are you to dump your fu—fricking garbage out the window?”
I admired his restraint. Angry as he was, he’d realized at the last minute that the driver was a shorthaired girl instead of a guy.
“Huh?” The girl looked past Reese and recognized my other nephew. “A.K.?”
“Sorry, Angie,” he said, “but we just spent the whole morning cleaning up the road and the first time we drive back down it, we see you trashing it.”
The girl had the grace to look embarrassed. She apologized and offered to go back and pick up the Bojangles’
bag.
Mollified but still steamed, Reese pulled his truck forward so that she could turn around and then he sat there with his engine running till he saw her get out of her car and retrieve the bag.
A.K. was also watching in the side-view mirror. “Okay, she’s got it, so let’s go,” he said. He seemed almost as embarrassed by the incident as the girl.
Reese grinned at his discomfort, but drove on down to Seth and Minnie’s, where he came to a stop beside my car. “Girlfriend of yours?”
