Free Etta Mae's Worst Bad-Luck Day by Ann B. Ross

you!”
    “You was somewhere else? With somebody who can back you up?”
    “Well,” I said, my brain running all over the place. Emmett could back me up, but would he? Mr. Howard could back me up, but could he? And I’d been so careful not to let anybody else see me.
    “Maybe you better come on down to the station with me,” Clyde said, touching my shoulder. “Come on now. Let’s don’t have no fussin’ and fightin’ about it.”
    “Fussin’ and fightin’! Clyde Maybry, I’m just as upset about this as you are, and I want to know who did this as bad as you do, but you don’t have to treat me like I’m gonna go crazy on you!”
    “Well, but, Etta Mae, everybody knows you got a temper, and I expect that’s what happened here. Come on now.” He took my arm and pulled me to my feet. “We’ll talk about this at the station where it’s all nice and calm.”
    I let him lead me out to his cruiser, aware of my neighbors watching from the sidelines. If I hadn’t been so scared, I’d’ve been embarrassed to death. Clyde pushed my head down, squashing my hair flat, as I climbed into the backseat.
    There was no arguing with him. I did have a temper, and everybody knew what I’d done to Bobby Lee the time he danced twice in one night with Darla Davis out at the County Line Two-Step Tavern. And I mean on the same night he’d been in my bed all afternoon.
    And, to make it worse, he’d been out there dancing with her to Garth Brooks singing “To Make You Love Me,” and I’d thought that was
our
song.
    I still wasn’t sorry about the new windshield he’d had to put on his truck.
    But that was all long gone and past. Right now, I was in the sweaty hands of Clyde Maybry, who’d love to lock me up and throw away the key. I scrunched down in the corner of the backseat, thinking about what Junior Connard could do to me, so scared now that I could hardly get my breath. I knew what happened to anybody who had run-ins with rich people in our neck of the woods.
    But by the time we were halfway to the station, which was on a side street in downtown Delmont, I’d about gotten over being scared. Clyde didn’t have a thing on me, and I’d be damned if he was going to treat me like a suspect or a perpetrator or whatever else he could think of.
    “Clyde!” I yelled over the calls from his police band radio and the country music blaring from his car radio. I banged against the wire partition between us. “Clyde! Let me out of this cop car cage! I’m not under arrest and you don’t have a right to put me back here. I ought to be riding up front with you, and besides it smells to high heaven back here.”
    “Can’t do it, Etta Mae,” he said, turning his head slightly toward me, his eyes still on the road. “Can’t have a woman in the front seat. Too many opportunities for inappropriate behavior.”
    “On whose part, you big ox?” I was practically screaming at him. Clyde Maybry had hit on me one too many times with no success, and now he was getting back at me.
    I flopped back against the seat and folded my arms, temporarily resigned to being treated like a criminal.
    Then I popped back up again. “Well, tell me this. Is he dead?”
    “No, he ain’t dead. Just pret’ near it. Man, Etta Mae, when you do a job, you evermore do it. Now, why don’t you calm yourself down and get your story straight. I ain’t supposed to tell you what to say, but I expect one thing just led to another and before you knew it he got conked on the head. That about the way it was?”
    “No, and nowhere near it. What do you want me to do, Clyde, tell you how I tore up my trailer, too?”
    “Well, I expect Junior had a part in that. Maybe that’s what made you so mad. Now, you just tell it thataway, and we’ll have this all wrapped up by morning.”
    “I’m not telling it any way except the way it was. Which is to say, I don’t know anything about it. I wasn’t there. You hear me, Clyde.” I rattled the cage again. “I