Free Southern Cross by Patricia Cornwell Page A

kid.”
    Bubba was shocked by another memory of name-calling. The flucking preacher’s kid. He had forgotten all about it. For a moment, he couldn’t speak. His bowels came alive.
    “I’m just pointing out, for your own good, Bubba, that itdidn’t hurt Smudge one bit to be on the preacher’s good side. Not everybody has as high opinion of Smudge as you do.”
    Muskrat had heard every tale there was about everybody in the city who had ever owned a car that needed fixing, including the Dodge Dart belonging to Miss Prum, who happened to be the director of Christian education at the historic downtown Second Presbyterian Church, where Dr. But Fluck had been the senior minister.
    “Look, it’s already six-thirty and I gotta start my shift early tonight, as if my day hasn’t been bad enough. So I guess we’d better get this leak taken care of,” Bubba said as an Escort drove up and parked outside the shop.
    “I’m going as fast as I can,” Muskrat said.
    He peeled the Jeep’s headliner and its cardboard away from the ceiling and examined the rubbery black polyurethane in the pitch well.
    “Least you didn’t try to fix this one yourself,” Muskrat observed.
    “Didn’t have time,” Bubba said.
    “Good thing, since you’re always screwing up things worse,” Muskrat candidly said.
    They did not see the clean-cut kid walk in until he was so close he startled them.
    “Hi,” the kid said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
    “Don’t go sneaking up on people like that, son,” Muskrat said.
    “I got a stuck window,” the kid told him.
    “Well, you just stand on back and hold your horses,” Muskrat said. “I’ll get with you as soon as I wind up here.”
    Bubba hadn’t finished arguing yet.
    “I did my own pigtail wiring on my trailer hitch,” he said.
    “And you got the turn signal lights backwards,” Muskrat countered.
    “So what, big deal.”
    “Well, I’ll remind you of a big deal. Remember the serpentine belt?” Muskrat talked on.
    “The directions weren’t clear,” Bubba answered.
    “Well, you fought it out with that one for five hours and still put it on wrong—ribbed against smooth instead of ribbed against ribbed and smooth against smooth, and next thing you’ve lost the alternator, power steering, water pump. You’re just lucky you didn’t lock up the engine and have to get a new one. Bubba, you can start spraying.”
    “Excuse me?” the kid politely said. “You know how long you’ll be?”
    “You’ll have to hold off for just a minute,” Muskrat told him.
    Bubba worked the Windex bottle along the top of the windshield, spraying water near the rearview mirror while Muskrat blasted compressed air at the seal from the inside.
    “Before that,” Muskrat picked up where he’d left off, “you replaced the mercury switch in the trunk and did that wrong, too. So the trunk light stayed on all the time and your battery kept going dead. Before that it was replacing your brakes and putting the pad in backwards, and the time before that, you left out the antirattle spring, the horseshoe clip in the emergency brake, and the lever fell into the drum.”
    Bubba winked at the kid as if to imply that Muskrat was exaggerating. Muskrat walked over to a workbench, where the heater box was warming up several tubes of SikaTack Ultrafast polyurethane. He picked up a caulking gun and dropped a tube inside it.
    “Remember the time you forgot the cotter pin and the tire rod fell off and both wheels went out spread-eagle?” Muskrat kept on.
    “He can tell a story,” Bubba said to the kid.
    Water trickled down the inside of the glass. Muskrat ran a thick bead of black polyurethane, licking his finger and pressing it flat. He stepped out of the car and ran a thin bead on the outside of the glass.
    “We need to wait about fifteen minutes to test it again,” he said. “Truth is, none of the seals in this thing are tight. Bet you get a lot of wind noise.”
    Bubba wasn’t going to admit it.