“What are you holding her on?” she asked. Deputy Holt was now kneeling on the girl’s thrashing, shapely bottom to keep it immobile while he fumbled for a handkerchief for his bitten hand.
It was Mose Holt who answered. “Miss Susan, there was two of them Scraggses. I brought them in for vagrancy and maybe assault the way the old lady was yelling, but the youngest Scraggs girl did a bolt and run just as I was getting them into the patrol car. The last time I saw her – the one they call Farrah Fawcett Scraggs – she was running fit to bust.”
“
He nodded curtly. “Devil Anse’s granddaughters. And there’s a lot of things I’d rather find under my Christmas tree than any of that tribe.”
“I can’t believe it,” the caseworker murmured.
She turned back to the scantily clad hoyden who was now attempting to bite the deputy’s wrist. The outlaw Scraggs clan, the curse of the Jackson County law-enforcement and social-welfare services, seldom ventured very far from their hideouts in the “hollers” of the Blue Ridge. The family patriarch – if you could call him that – old “Devil Anse” Scraggs, had been north Georgia’s biggest bootlegger until he took up armed robbery, car theft, and other more sophisticated operations. At any rate his operational base was so deep in the mountains that even Buck’s father, the first Sheriff Grissom, hadn’t been able to rout him out.
Four months ago Sheriff Buck had managed to personally apprehend and send the oldest boy, Elvis Presley Scraggs, to state prison for car theft and attempted homicide, all accomplished one night when two of the older Scraggs boys had come to town for a little hell-raising.
Now Buck looked down at their struggling prisoner with an expression of bleak disapproval. “You’d think the old reprobate would spend money on clothes for his girl children. Especially one as – uh, well developed as this one. Go get a blanket, Mose,” he told his deputy. “She’s so cold she’s blue around the edges.”
“Well developed” was one way to describe it, Susan observed. She didn’t like to give an official opinion, but it was obvious the girl was no juvenile. Not with those legs – and that body. Although, she had to admit, it was hard to tell: the Scraggs children attended school so irregularly one could never be certain of their ages.
“I wonder,” she said, “if this is the one that somehow got as far as high school. Almost graduated, I think, before the grandfather found out and wouldn’t let her finish. She was an interesting child, poor thing. Now, what was her name?”
“Better let her up,” Buck ordered the deputy. “Now that Miss Susan is here we’ve got to be careful about inflicting physical pain, or – uh, mental anguish.”
Susan shot him a sharp look. Since they’d broken off their engagement Buck couldn’t resist a barb or two.
Moses Holt pried the girl off his chest. She sprang up from the floor in a fighting crouch. The deputy stepped back in time to miss a kick aimed at his crotch, when Buck suddenly made his move. Before the Scraggs girl knew what was happening he had seized her, levered her against the wall, then shoved her into the nearest cell. They heard it close and lock automatically.
“Dirty po-lice pigs!” The Scraggs granddaughter grabbed the bars of the cell with both hands, her pointed young breasts heaving. “Lowlife mudsuckers! You can’t hold me in here, I ain’t done nothing! When I get out of this place I’m going to make you sorry you ever did this to me!”
Deputy Holt brushed off the front of his uniform with shaking hands. “I was clean before I got near that lowdown female,” he complained. “Ifn I was you, Sheriff, I’d get the matron to give that hellcat a bath with lye soap and a stiff brush!”
Susan Huddleston stepped forward. Clearly the girl didn’t belong in jail, but neither could one discount the dangerous Scraggs factor, either. “Buck, I’d be very careful with all aspects of this,” she warned.
Sheriff Buck only grunted. When he was still a young county deputy, before he’d taken over his father’s job, he’d been called to the Nancyville middle school one day on a complaint of disorderly conduct and fighting. He’d gotten a faceful of scratches before the alleged culprit had taken off across the field in back of the school, never to be seen again. But before she’d hightailed it Buck had had a glimpse of a long-legged, scrawny vixen with the blackest eyes he’d ever seen.
Now, studying this female in the lockup, he couldn’t swear she wasn’t the same one. Although he tried not to look below her grimy neck where the old sweater and skimpy cotton dress left little to the imagination.
Susan said, “I don’t suppose there’s any doubt she’s a Scraggs?”
The deputy promptly responded, “No doubt at all, Miss Susan. They call this one Scarlett O’Hara Scraggs. Her mamma gave them all fancy names. The sheriff here put one of her no-good relatives, Elvis Presley -”
“Yes, I know,” Susan said quickly. It wasn’t wise at that particular moment to bring up the sentence the oldest boy was doing in the state pen. And who had put him there. “I don’t think you can charge her with a felony, Buck. Loitering’s only a misdemeanor.”
At her words the figure behind the bars stiffened.
“You can’t keep me here!” the girl shrilled. Her black eyes flashed. “Yore fat old deputy whopped Demon for no reason at all and laid its head open, and my little sister ran off!”
“You did something to the little sister?” Buck turned to his deputy, frowning. “Who’s this you whopped?”
Deputy Holt sucked on his bitten finger. “Buck, will you let me say something? These two Scraggs –
“Did not,” the prisoner yelled. “That’s a lie!”
“Mrs. Stevens called for police assistance,” Mose went on doggedly. “When I got there these two were attempting forced entry on Mrs. Stevens’s front door -”
“That old cow hit Farrah Fawcett,” the prisoner shouted, “when we wasn’t doing anything!”
“- threatening to assault Mrs. Stevens, and throwing rocks at her house. This one told Mrs. Stevens she was going to – ah -” – Deputy Holt’s face grew even redder – “snatch off certain parts of Mrs. Stevens’s – ah, body.”
“Tits!” the prisoner behind the bars screeched. “I told her I’d pull off her old flappy tits if she ever hit Farrah Fawcett again!”
Deputy Holt reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his face. “Buck, I never heard no young woman talk like that. I swear, there’s just no telling the words that are going to come out of that mouth!”
“Where’s my sister?” Scarlett O’Hara gripped the bars with both hands. “My little sister Farrie’s run off in the cold, and she’s lost and it’s your fault, you old -”
Buck stepped toward her. “That’s enough of that.” The steely authority that had made his late father famous and which he had passed on to Buck in a considerable degree made the girl suddenly close her mouth. “Now let’s hold it down,” he ordered.
Scowling, the Scraggs girl tilted her head back to get a good look. The fluorescent light of the cell block illuminated Buck’s square-jawed face and stern, unfriendly expression.
Buck was thinking Miss Scarlett O’Hara Scraggs looked wild and unmanageable. On the other hand, from her nearly bare feet to the top of her gypsy-black curls she projected so much – Buck’s mind stumbled over the thought – well,
“How old is the little sister?” he asked.
“Ten, eleven, somewheres around there,” the deputy answered.
“And this one?”
Mose Holt shrugged. “She won’t say.”
