Free Southern Cross by Patricia Cornwell

joints from aching. What’dya try to fix this time?” Muskrat’s voice was muffled under a jacked-up 1996 Mercury Cougar.
    “Who tried to fix?” Bubba accused.
    Muskrat was flat on his back on a creeper. He rolled out from underneath the car, suddenly there, a wizard in a mechanic’s blue work pants and shirt and a NAPA Auto Parts cap.
    “What do you mean, I tried?” asked Muskrat, who was at least seventy, with hands rough and hard like horn.
    “Windshield’s leaking again,” Bubba let him know. “You fixed it last, Scrat.”
    “Uh huh,” Muskrat blandly said as he snatched toilet paper from an industrial roll overhead and began cleaning his glasses. “Well, drive her on in here, Bubba. I’ll take a look but I keep telling you to get the boys at Harding Glass to put in a new windshield. Or dump the damn thing altogether and get something that don’t break down every other minute.”
    Bubba walked out of the garage, not listening. He got into his Jeep and cranked the engine as anger pecked at him. He could not and would not believe that his buddy Smudge had cheated him. It couldn’t be that Smudge had sold him a piece of shit. The possibility of it resurrected other injustices as Bubba parked inside the garage, in the bay next to the Cougar, and climbed out.
    “I got to tell you right now, Scrat, there’s police brutality in this city,” Bubba announced.
    “Oh yeah?” Muskrat mumbled as he started looking at the windshield.
    “I think something’s telling me to do something about it.”
    “Bubba, something’s always telling you something.”
    “There’re reasons too complicated to go into that the new chief, that new woman who just moved here, needs my help, Scrat.”
    “And you always got complicated reasons, Bubba. I’d stay out of it if I were you.”
    Bubba could not stop thinking about Chief Hammer. He had heard her name on his cell phone this morning. There was a reason for this; it was not random.
    “It’s time we mobilize, Scrat.”
    “Who’s we?”
    “Citizens like us,” Bubba said. “We gotta get involved.”
    “I can’t find your leak,” Muskrat said.
    “Right here.” Bubba pointed to the top of the windshield, near the rearview mirror. “The water drips in from this spot here. Want a cigarette?”
    Bubba pulled out a pack.
    “You need to cut back, boy,” Muskrat said. “Chew gum. That’s what I do to kill the craving when I’m around gasoline and what all.”
    “You forget I got TMJ. My jaws are killing me.” Bubba clicked them side to side.
    “I told you not to get all those damn crowns,” Muskrat said as he retrieved a Windex spray bottle full of water and uncoiled an air hose. “You’d probably be better off if he just yanked all of ’em out and fixed you up with a pair of clackers like I got.”
    Muskrat grinned, showing off his dentures.
    “I’ll get on the inside with the hose, and when I tell you to, you start spraying,” said Muskrat.
    “Same thing we did last time,” Bubba said. “And a lot of good it did.”
    “It’s like fixing those crowns of yours,” Muskrat wouldn’t let up as he sat in the driver’s seat. “All you do is go to the dentist. I’d get new ones that don’t look like piano keys if I were you. And you sure as hell ought to replace this windshield. The car’s been wrecked.” Muskrat had told him this before. “That’s why everything keeps going wrong with it, that and the fact that you’re always trying to fix it yourself, Bubba.”
    “It ain’t been wrecked, good buddy,” Bubba said.
    “It sure as hell has. Where you think all that Bondo came from, the factory?”
    “I won’t have you talking about Smudge that way,” Bubba told him.
    “I didn’t say a word about Smudge.”
    “Smudge has been my good buddy since we were in Sunday school together, way back.”
    “Way back when you used to go to church and listen to your daddy,” Muskrat reminded him. “Don’t forget, you was the preacher’s