Turkey Ranch Road Rage Read Free

Rambo over something a little more personal, like campers behind the azaleas.
    Indeed, I could see my militia-minded mother quite clearly, her hair pristinely coifed, eyebrows and lips freshly painted, clusters of purple balls dangling from her earlobes, her glittery bespangled sweatshirt crisscrossed with bandoliers, and an automatic weapon in each hand, the purple nail polish of her trigger fingers providing a lovely contrast to the gray-green gunmetal. Laugh if you will, but Lucille Jackson is a card-carrying member of the NRA, has both a concealed weapon and a legal permit for the same, is fond of laser sights and has a lifetime membership to the Redwater Falls Gun Club. In fact, I would only be mildly surprised to learn that she has a box of AK-47s stuffed under her bed, and the surprising part would be that they were under her bed rather than on a display rack above it.
    Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but only a little. I don’t really know what all the woman is capable of. I’ve found out more about my mother in the last few months than in the entire rest of my life combined. It has made me both jaded and wary. During this same time period I have also learned to trust my gut. So, regardless of what my guilt-trained mind might say—like, “you really should go, she’s your mother”—my wiser inner warning system screamed “Are you stupid!”
    When Jerry finished regaling me with things I’d rather not know, I reiterated my position on the situation. “I said I’d pay her fine, Jerry, or whatever, but there is no reason for me to drive down there to do it. My VISA number is—”
    “You don’t have a choice.”
    “Oh, yes, I do,” I said, the scar tissue in my upper arm twitched and throbbed. “I’m not the woman’s babysitter or her legal guardian.”
    “You will be if I get her declared incapable of caring for herself.”
    A cold chill swept up my spine. Would he do that? Could he do that? Or, was he just threatening me to get his own way, assuming I wouldn’t know one way or another, which I did not. “You can’t do that.”
    “I can. I don’t want to, but I can.”
    “Blackmail does not endear you to me, Sheriff Parker.”
    “Oh, now, Jolene,” he said, his voice softening to a cajoling rumble, dipping into that tone that makes my brain turn to mush. “Once you get here everything will settle right down. If your mother isn’t stirring up the AAC people, they’ll leave and everything will get back to normal in no time.”
    “Fat chance,” I grumbled.
    First of all, nothing about Kickapoo, Texas resembled my idea of normal. Ever. Second of all, what sounded mildly eccentric over the phone had a nasty habit of transmuting into wildly deranged when you had to face it in person. And thirdly, but not leastly, my mother was not only in the middle of the current mayhem, she was the ringleader of it.
    For not the first time, or the fiftieth time for that matter, I wondered exactly why I’d been born to Lucille Jackson. What grave past-life crime had I committed to warrant this kind of punishment? Some soul-searching theories propose that we choose the circumstances of our birth and parents so as to overcome particular challenges in this lifetime. That these specific circumstances will help us evolve into more enlightened beings. It’s kind of a neat theory until you really think about it. I mean really think about it. I asked for this?
    Since there wasn’t a New Age theory yet devised that could explain my mother and make me like it, I was rethinking my stance on the whole Satan-is-out-to-get-you thing when Jerry cleared his throat to remind me he was still on the line. “So when do you think you’ll get here?”
    Before I could come up with a clever variation of “when Hell freezes over,” I heard a series of loud pops, like the rat-a-tat-tat of a string of firecrackers. Or bullets. Then, a thundering boom followed by what sounded like one of my favorite four letter expletives