Moonlight and Mistletoe

As Demon followed him the other man called out, “That’s a nice dog you’ve got, Sheriff, she’d make a good bear hunter. Let me know if you ever want to sell her.”

Buck would have sold the Scraggs dog on the spot if he thought he could get away with it. Now the animal rushed past him in spite of his shouts, leaped through the open window on the passenger side with a great flailing of legs and claws and damage to the Blazer’s paint, and threw itself down in the seat.

Muttering under his breath, Buck eased himself into the Blazer. He considered taking his arm out of the sling, but a few minutes driving without it coming down had proved what the doctor had said: the arm needed a rest. When it didn’t get it, it hurt like hell.

Buck shifted gears carefully with his left hand and pulled the Blazer out onto the highway. It was not easy going even with two working hands; they were in the high Blue Ridge where the grades were steep, slippery, and filled with early traffic. The black ribbon of the road slashed through second-growth forest and on both sides rose green-black mountain pines, bare thickets of oaks and beeches. The woods had taken over the mountains after more than a century and a half of not-too-successful farming; down the road in the back country there were people who still lived in cabins and cooked on wood stoves and ate by the light of kerosene lanterns. And where deer, wild pigs, and bear were still hunted by the inhabitants, in or out of season. Protected by law or not.

And, Buck was suddenly reminded, up there somewhere in a hollow that lawmen, including his late father, had yet to locate, was the kingfish of all southern Appalachian outlaws, Mr. Ancil Scraggs. And all his thieving, conniving, alcohol-tax-evading, breaking-and-entering, grand-theft-auto, assault-with-a- deadly-weapon kin.

Except for two.

Reluctantly, Buck’s thoughts went to Scarlett O’Hara Scraggs. That black-eyed, long-legged vision that flitted distractingly through his mind when he least wanted her to.

What in the devil, he wondered, had prevailed upon her to practically attack him night before last? Some sort of backwoods experiment? If so, it had been unnerving, plus he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it and that worried him.

When he’d been engaged to Susan, Buck told himself irritably, she’d never preyed on his mind like that. On the contrary, theirs was a rational, well-adjusted relationship.

On the other hand, Scarlett Scraggs was a mental toothache, one that wouldn’t leave him alone, lovely and troubling and presumably innocent enough so that you had to wonder how she’d managed even to exist in the Scraggses’ degenerate, criminal environment. Of course she’d been dedicated to bringing up the strange little sister. That had isolated both of them to some extent, he supposed.

What, he suddenly asked himself, was he going to do about Scarlett Scraggs? He’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t imagine turning her and her sister over to Susan Huddleston after the holidays and just walking away, never to find out what had become of them.

As a law-enforcement officer, Buck’s professional detachment was second nature. These two, he told himself, were just strays. Runaways. A case for the county and the state social services.

But, the other part of Buck’s mind argued, Scarlett O’Hara Scraggs was different. All you had to do was see her in those jeans, properly cleaned up, with a ribbon in her hair, to know how different.

Dammit, if they ever did get to Atlanta he knew what would become of them; any cop could read you that scenario. The sleazeballs told girls who looked like Scarlett that they could get them into modeling school where they could make lots of money. Only there was no modeling school.

Buck carefully steered the Blazer onto a side road, the short cut into Nancyville. Some idiot, he saw in the rearview mirror, was riding his bumper, indifferent to the sheriff’s-department insignia on the Blazer and the telltale police radio antenna.

He still had to make one stop at the office for a meeting with a Hare Krishna delegation from Atlanta who wanted to talk to the sheriff about alternate forms of winter-solstice celebrations. Buck intended to listen to them but politely turn them down. Then he was going to take the afternoon off and go home.

He found he was looking forward to it. He had to fight down the anticipation of delectable odors of cooking in the house, wondering what Scarlett had fixed. It was the pits, as he had found out last night, to get a McDonald’s hamburger and fries and eat it alone in the den in front of the television when there were better things to be had in the kitchen.

Tonight, Buck promised himself, he would sit down to dinner with Scarlett and Farrie. What had happened the other night was best forgotten – a mistake, that was all. God only knows he wished he could forget the look on Scarlett’s face when she asked him if he could kiss her again. Just thinking about it made his body ache. He was going to have to keep that under control, too.

The 1993 Dodge pickup behind him pulled out as if to pass and then suddenly dropped back, neatly sideswiping the Blazer’s bumper.

Buck stared into the rearview mirror, amazed. Was there somebody in Jackson County who had a perverted desire to spend the rest of the year in jail? The way this idiot was driving it looked like it!

Gingerly, favoring his right arm, Buck pulled the Blazer to the edge of the road and slowed down to give the jackass the benefit of the doubt and let him get by. After all, he thought a little self- righteously, it was the holiday season.

The police radio suddenly came on.

“Sheriff,” the dispatcher’s voice said, “I got a message from a Mr. Rama Rasmurtha McNally of the Hare Krishnas that they’re running a little late for your meeting.”

“Cancel it,” Buck told him curtly. The pickup truck had made another dive at the Blazer’s front fender. He couldn’t believe it, but it was trying to run him off the road. “Right now I haven’t got time for any more holiday freaks.”

The pickup dropped back in another sideswipe. There was a metallic tearing sound. The Blazer lurched wildly. Buck seized the steering wheel with both hands. That hurt like hell; he suppressed an anguished yelp.

“Sheriff?” the dispatcher said.

Buck looked in the side mirror.

The blue pickup was accelerating in the left lane. Coming back again. Through the Dodge’s windshield he could see a wild-eyed, contorted face under a cowboy hat.

Buck cursed.

What had old Ancil Scraggs said about trading off for a ’93 Dodge pickup? Some redneck moron named – something. Potter?

Buck gave the side mirror a savage glance. The Dodge pickup gladiator looked as though he were dumb enough to have a name like Potter. Like one of the shiftless Potter clan that ran a service station over White Creek Gap.

The idea that Devil Anse would try to give his own granddaughter to some cretin like the one trying to smash in the Blazer filled Buck with fury. Forgetting his sore shoulder, he jerked the van into the path of the truck as it came on again.

The two vehicles, both doing about fifty miles an hour on the narrow road, collided with an earsplitting clang. Snarling with pain and temper, Buck spun the Blazer’s wheel left again. The Blazer creamed the pickup a second time.

Zigzagging, the truck went out of control and ran off the road on the far side. Buck slammed on the brakes. Before he could get the Blazer turned around, working furiously even with his arm in the sling, the blue pickup backed up, turned with tires skidding, and roared off in the opposite direction.

On the radio, his dispatcher was practically yelling for instructions. Buck fumbled the receiver to his shoulder with his throbbing right hand.

Demon, who had been crouched beside him through the whole thing, now leaned out the window barking wildly at the retreating pickup.