Southern Poison Read Free Page B

the Block, ripping right through one of the giant metal garage doors. Spud’s car was parked outside said garage door and the huge truck’s front-end forks had pierced it like toothpicks going through a fat olive. After being forked and crushed, the Chrysler was peppered with incoming rounds from no fewer than twenty handguns. When the firestorm ended, the tow-truck driver couldn’t figure out how to safely haul away the garbage truck with Spud’s car attached—and suspended a foot off the ground. A forward-thinking kind of guy, he called a welder to cut through the metal prongs, effectively amputating them from the truck. Victorious, he towed the garbage truck away, leaving the impaled, smashed, shot-up Chrysler sitting in a patch of grass outside my bar, two long forked rods protruding through its belly.
    Spud retrieved his walking cane so he could poke it into the concrete floor a few times. “Well, I’m tired of waiting! It’s been almost a month now. That car was fully insured and I want my money. Any idiot can see that it’s totaled, for crying out loud.” That was an understatement. Demolished would be more like it.
    I bit a hush puppy in half and let it melt on my tongue. “Calm down, Spud. They’re probably just reviewing the police report. Maybe they found out that the car had been sunk, burned, and almost stolen during your failed foray into insurance fraud.”
    “Yeah.” Bobby spurred it on. “Maybe they’ve launched an official investigation.”
    “Well the insurance company can launch this.” Spud shoved his cane in the air, in lieu of an arthritic middle finger.
    Before he could get into a full-blown tirade about the insurance industry, Hal and Trip showed up. My father and his three poker friends—after much old-age shuffling and grunting—headed upstairs to Spud’s kitchen table for a round of Texas hold ’em.
    I tried to focus on the information in front of me but couldn’t help but to look at Ox instead and wonder—if my budding retirement hadn’t been so rudely interrupted—whether we might have finished what we started. The night of the shootout at the Block, he had stayed with me and I distinctly remember the glorious sensation of being enveloped in his arms as I drifted into the deepest sleep I’d had in a long time. Physically and emotionally drained from the week’s events and relaxed by too much alcohol, my body wouldn’t cooperate with my mind’s desire to ravage Ox’s body. Awakening beside him the next morning, I quickly came to my senses. He was certainly willing, but sex with my best friend could change everything. There might be no turning back. Ox is tall and has traditional Native American features with some surprises tossed into his DNA, such as the dimple set into a square chin and a unique cinnamon eye color that changes with his mood. Just hearing him speak sometimes drives me crazy. A Lumbee can be anywhere in the country and immediately recognize another Lumbee, simply by hearing the other speak. Their unique dialect is sort of Southern, but influenced by several ancestral sources and Ox retained the distinctive manner of speaking even though he’d led a mobile military life. When he first appeared in Wilmington, I didn’t fall into bed with Ox because he needed time to heal after a nasty divorce. In the years to follow, he always had a gorgeous woman on his arm and I always had a somewhat steady male companion. The timing had never been right. Either that, or the spirits had different plans for us.
    “What’s on your mind?” he said.
    “Oh, uh, nothing really.”
Just thinking how good it would feel to press our naked bodies together.
“I’m still blown away by this assignment. I feel like a commodity, like they own me or something.”
    “You’re mad because you are accustomed to doing things your own way, on your own terms.” He had a knack for seeing through bullshit. Hopefully, though, he didn’t know what was
really
on my mind. Him.