A part of him said simply go for the ride and enjoy the hell out of yourself. You could be dead from a heart attack next year, what the hell did it matter? The other part of him, though, he was afraid, was winning the day. He knew that he could be LuAnn’s friend for the rest of his life, but he didn’t know if he could do it close-up, every day, with the knowledge that it might end abruptly. “Shit,” he muttered. It came down to pure envy, he decided. If he were only twenty—he shrugged—okay, thirty years younger. Envy of the guy who would eventually win her. Win her love, a love that he was sure would last forever, at least on her side. And heaven help the poor man who betrayed her. She was a hellcat, that was easy to see. A firecracker with a heart of gold, but that was a big part of the attraction: Polar opposites like that in the same fragile shell of skin and bones and raw nerve endings was a rare find.
Charlie abruptly stopped his musings and looked up at the stage. The entire crowd seemed to tense all at once, like a biceps flexing and forming a ridge of muscle. Then the cameras started clicking away as LuAnn, tall, queenly, and calm, walked gracefully into their field of vision and stood before them all. Charlie shook his head in silent wonderment. “Damn,” he said under his breath. She had just made his decision that much harder.
Sheriff Roy Waymer nearly spit his mouthful of beer clear across the room as he watched LuAnn Tyler waving back at him from the TV. “Jesus, Joseph, Mary!” He looked over at his wife, Doris, whose eyes were boring into the twenty-seven-inch screen.
“You been looking for her all over the county and there she is right there in New York City,” Doris exclaimed. “The gall of that girl. And she just won all that money.” Doris said this bitterly as she wrung her hands together; twenty-four torn-up lottery tickets resided in the trash can in her back yard.
Waymer wrestled his considerable girth out of his La-Z-Boy and headed toward the telephone. “I phoned up to the train stations around here and at the airport in Atlanta, but I hadn’t heard nothing back yet. I didn’t take her to be heading up to no New York, though. I didn’t put no APB out on LuAnn because I didn’t think she’d be able to get out of the county, much less the state. I mean, the girl ain’t even got a car. And she had the baby and all. I thought for sure she’d just hightail it over to some friend’s house.”
“Well, it sure looks like she slipped right out on you.” Doris pointed at LuAnn on the TV. “Right or wrong there ain’t many people that look like that, that’s for sure.”
“Well, Mother,” he said to his wife, “we don’t exactly have the manpower of the FBI down here. With Freddie out with his back I only got two uniformed officers on duty. And the state police are up to their eyeballs in work; they couldn’t spare nobody.” He picked up the phone.
Doris looked at him anxiously. “You think LuAnn killed Duane and that other boy?”
Waymer held the phone up to his ear and shrugged. “LuAnn could kick the crap out of most men I know. She sure as hell could Duane. But that other guy was a hoss, almost three hundred pounds.” He started punching in numbers on the phone. “But she coulda snuck up behind him and smashed that phone over his head. She’d been in a fight. More than one person saw her with a bandage on her chin that day.”
“Drugs was behind it, that’s for sure,” Doris said. “That poor little baby in that trailer with all them drugs.”
Waymer was nodding his head. “I know that.”
“I bet’cha LuAnn was the brains behind it all. She’s sharp, all right, we all know that. And she was always too good for us. She tried to hide it, but we could all see through that. She didn’t belong here, she wanted to get out, but she didn’t have no way. Drug money, that was her way, you mark my words, Roy.”