“GET ABOARD,” FLETCH said to Leary.
“How?”
In the driveway, Leary looked at the tall steel pen rising up from the back of the pickup truck. He was wearing Fletch’s rubber boots and the overalls split down to his thighs. The overalls were held up by straps over his shirtless shoulders.
“Oh, yeah,” Fletch said as if he had not considered the matter before.’ ‘You’re too big to climb over the grill, aren’t you?
“What’s that?” Leary pointed at the 450-pound bull calf already in the pen on the back of the truck.
“A little cow,” Fletch said.
“Why can’t I ride up front with the lady?” Leary asked.
“Because you have to hold on to the little cow,” Fletch said. “You don’t want it to get hurt, do you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. See, there’s hay there. You feed the little cow the hay as you go along.”
“Does the little cow need the hay as we go along?”
“You don’t think Ms. Carrie can drive the truck and feed the little cow hay at the same time, do you?”
“No.”
“This is a real job of work you’re doin’.”
“Oh.”
“The cops will never recognize you this way.”
“No.”
“This is a great disguise, you see.”
“Yeah.”
“And Ms. Carrie can’t reach back and hold on to the little cow, can she?”
“No,” Leary agreed. “I can see that.”
“So you have to ride in back with the little cow.”
“I don’t know,” Leary said. In the morning sunlight, sweat already was pouring down his fat, white skin.
Jack was standing at the back of the truck watching.
Kriegel had come out of the house and immediately slumped into the backseat of the station wagon. He sat with his head leaning on the palm of one hand.
Fletch stepped close to Leary and said, softly, “You’re not afraid, are you? Of that little cow?”
“Of course not!” Leary shouted.
With the driver’s door open, Carrie said, “We’ve got to get goin’.”
“Here, Jack.” Fletch grabbed the steel bars on one side of the rear grill. “Help me lift this up.”
They lifted that section of the grill just high enough for Leary to crawl under it onto the truck.
“Come on!” Fletch said sharply. “We can’t hold this thing all day! Get aboard, or I’ll put you down in the henhouse with the rest of the chickens!”
The bull calf, seeing the opening, tried to get under the grill to get off the truck.
Leary, crawling under the grill onto the truck, butted heads with the bull calf.
Neither expressed surprise or pain.
Fletch and Jack dropped the stanchions of the grill section into their deep holes.
Carrie gave Fletch a wide, delighted grin before stepping into the truck and starting the engine.
Fletch shouted at Leary, “Now, hold on to that little cow!”
Standing, with his feet spread, Leary grabbed the bull calf’s tail.
As Carrie started the truck down the driveway, Leary’s boots slipped in wet manure already on the floor of the pickup truck’s bed. He landed on his ass. On the manure.
Both his hands still held on to the bull calf’s tail.
“Hold on to it!” Fletch ordered.
“It’s shittin’ on me!” Leary yelled halfway down the driveway.
It certainly was.
Jack turned his back to the station wagon. Keeping his back, his shoulders steady, arms at his sides, he was laughing hard but silently.
Fletch watched Carrie drive the truck along the road out of sight. Leary was trying to stand up, regain his footing on the manure on the floor of the truck’s bed. He was doing a good job of holding on to the bull calf’s tail.
For his efforts he was getting liberally sprayed with wet dung.
Then Fletch watched Jack choking with laughter.
“Oh, hello.” Fletch slapped Jack on the back. “How are you feeling?”
10
T
He was driving with the windows open. The station wagon’s air conditioner was not on.
From the car’s passenger seat, Jack watched Fletch’s face. “I wonder how Carrie and Leary are doing.”
The dashboard clock said nine-fifteen. If all had gone well, Leary was in chains in the back of a police car on his way back to prison. Carrie was on her way back to the farm. The bull calf was on his way back to pasture, of course having no idea why he had been loaded on a truck and taken for a ride to nowhere that morning.
If all had gone well.
Jack looked into the backseat where Professor The Reverend Doctor Kris Kriegel slept soundly. His pudgy hands were folded in his lap. He snored.
Jack said, “Leary certainly was a sight, being dragged down the road in a pen on the back of Carrie’s truck, being shit on and kicked by that young bull all the way.”
“Wasn’t he though?” Fletch agreed. “I wonder if he felt anything at all like that young woman he kidnapped?”
Jack smiled. “Shall I sing a few bars of ‘Let the Punishment Fit the Crime’?”
“Can you?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
Jack said, “I’m amazed at the way you have kept us all weak, incapacitated.”
“All?”
“Not Moreno, of course. Him you got killed.”
“Are you incapacitated?”
“No, “Jack said. “Why aren’t I? Why didn’t you put me in the gully, too? You could have talked me into it.” Fletch did not answer. “I know. Because you’re curious. ‘Mildly curious’ about me. You want to see what I will do. Do you think you can handle me? Or is it that you trust me?”
“Neither.”
“So you’re just taking a chance with me.”
“A very big chance.”
Rounding a curve in the road, they came across a dozen vehicles lined up, stopped. They were waiting to go through a roadblock.
Fletch slowed the station wagon but proceeded up the left lane.
“What are you doing?” Jack asked in alarm.
“Not waiting for the roadblock. I hope my neighbors don’t think me arrogant. Can’t quite explain to them I have the fugitives the cops are looking for, can I?”
“Are you turning us in?”
His arm out the window, Fletch waved at Deputy Michael Jackson.
Michael waved back and shouted, “Hey, wait!”
