Lennie got her another lemonade and helped himself to another beer. Getting her drunk used to work, but now all it did was make her groggy and distant.
“I can’t keep on living like this,” he said. “I work my ass off selling real estate and half the time come home and babysit while you visit with invalids or your lady friends up and down the street. Then you’re too damn tired for me, or maybe you’re just tired of me.”
“A girl needs her girlfriends, you know.” Barbie was having a hard time enunciating. “I don’t think men understand about our need for our girlfriends. How many extra tickets did you get?”
“Yeah, well, maybe I need a girlfriend, too,” he said in a sharper tone.
Barbie began to cry. She simply could not endure his temper or ugliness, and she wilted in the heat of his fury. “I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry, Lennie. I try so hard to please you, honey. But ever since I turned forty, I just haven’t felt like it, you know, like doing it at all. It’s not your fault. I’m sure it can’t be your fault. Maybe I need to see someone and talk about it.”
“Oh God.” Lennie rolled his eyes. “Now I’m going to pay for a therapist, I guess! And what sense does that make? Here you are a volunteer counselor. Why can’t you talk to yourself?”
She cried harder and he felt awful. Lennie hugged her and begged her to be happy.
“You need to talk to someone, sweetpea, you go right ahead,” he softly assured her. “I got two tickets and could probably get a few more from that General Motors executive who just retired down here and bought that big house on the river.”
Andy and Hammer turned into the alleyway behind Freckles and noticed that all the streetlights were out. Trader, covered in filth, was sitting on a package by a Dumpster that was spilling over with sour-smelling garbage. Trader was out of ammunition and still fighting with his zipper, near hysterics and desperate to pee.
“For God’s sake,” Hammer said to her least favorite government official. “What the hell are you doing sitting out here on a package and firing a gun? And why is your suit so dirty?”
“My zipper’s stoppered shut!” Trader exploded in rage.
Hammer bent over to inspect the problem as Andy noticed a woman lurking in the shadows a safe distance away.
“That’s because you’ve managed to zip your underwear in it,” Hammer said. “How’d the little slide get all dented up?”
“I been trying to shit it off!”
“Now settle down,” Hammer ordered. “Let me see what I can do.”
She touched Trader’s zipper slide, careful not to touch anything else. Within seconds, she had unsnagged Trader’s underwear and the zipper smiled open. Trader darted behind the Dumpster and began to pee like a horse.
“Jesus Christ,” Andy said in disgust.
He inspected the package and shook his head as he counted five high-powered pistols and several boxes of ammunition.
“Looks like he’s got all kinds of little businesses on the side,” Andy said.
“Huh,” Hammer remarked angrily. “What a disgrace.”
“Hey!” Andy called out to the woman hanging back in the shadows, unable to make out anything except a silhouette of dreadlocks and high heels. “Come here!”
Hooter wobbled through the dirt, a little nervous that she might be in trouble, too, but not sure for what.
“Oh, I recognize you two,” Hooter said in surprise. “You that woman police chief, only you ain’t the chief no more ’cause you took over the troopers. And you the nice trooper who tried to help me when that man with the bag on his head tried to stick me up at the tollbooth last year,” she declared to Andy.
“What do you know about this?” Andy nodded in the direction of Trader, who was still relieving himself.
“I just know I come out the bar and he was hopping around in the alleyway and then sat hisself on a package. Oh my Lord, look at all them guns! Why he was out here sitting on guns by a Dumpster, I’ll never know. I told him it was dangerous, but he wouldn’t get off the package and was holding hisself. So I don’t know nothing more than that ‘cept all a sudden he started shooting all over the place and I ran for cover and yelled for help.”