Free Switcheroo by Robert Lewis Clark

serious love
connection.  She was a divorcé with a kid in middle school.  When you’re my age
and single most potential dates are divorcés.  I would be scared to try seeing
a girl over thirty that no one had thought to marry yet.  She would most likely
be ugly, psychotic, into scrap-booking or in a convent.  Anyway, Wendy was
pretty, with a generous figure.
    “What about Briana?” Briana is her
daughter.
    “Staying with her Grandma,” she
smiled.
    “OK, I guess. When do we leave?”
    “Saturday at eleven. Swing by and
pick me up,” she said, touching my hand. “Thank you so much.”
    I left her the memory card from
the digital camera and my chicken-scratched notes for the reports from that
day.  I left quickly, followed by the watchful gaze of Thelma, the office Nazi.
     
    I called Tammy at her Grandma’s to
make sure we were on for tonight.  I was to pick her up around seven. The truck
was gassed up and ready.  There was an answering machine message from Officer
Billingsworth from KPD.
    “Mr. Stover, I need you to come
downtown and make a statement to one of the detectives about this thug you
stuck in the trunk of his own car.  Come by at 9:00 tomorrow morning, good
day.”  Billingsworth’s voice was deep, like James Earl Jones only there was a
gangster rap accent to it.
    I got out my checkbook, wrote out
November’s pointless rent payment and mailed it to my mother’s real estate
office. I wrote a check for eighty dollars to Wendy and left it on my desk for
her to get in the morning. I would not see her since I would be at the police
station making my statement.
    The Knoxville Police Department is
near downtown, close to a rough neighborhood.  This is good, since a lot of
city police patrol calls are made in East Knoxville.
    I met Billingsworth at the office
and he introduced me to Detective Stratton, who would take my statement. 
Stratton knew I had been on the force, but we had not worked together. So he
did not hate me.
    Stratton was sort of a Big Bopper
looking guy, without the booming singing voice. He sat down with a pen and
recorder and asked about the events leading up to Cedric Litton’s imprisonment
in his own trunk. When he was almost done he looked over his cheater glasses at
me and said, “You know, Mr. Stover, I thought the gun in the video footage
looked pretty shiny. The .22 we recovered was cheap gunmetal. Did that dude
have more than one gun?”
    I looked him in the eye and said,
“That was the only one I saw.”
    “I see, you didn’t take anything
else off him?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talkin’
about,” Playing dumb, not hard for me. We shook hands and I left. I didn’t know
why I wanted the nickel-plated piece at the time, but it ended up at the bottom
of the Tennessee River later that week when my conscience caught up with me.
For now, it was in the glove box of the LeBaron with my police special
revolver.
    I hopped into the Chrysler and
headed to Straw Plains to pick up my little waitress. Oh, sorry, server.
    Tammy was her usual cute self when
I got there.  Grandma Tuttle was putting Hannah to bed so we headed to the garage. 
The truck had not been used for a while, it wouldn’t start.
    I pushed it out of the garage and
jumped it off with the cables I kept in the LeBaron.  Watching Tammy lean
forward under the hood made me want a jump of another kind. No time. We had an
eight o’clock appointment.
    I followed in the LeBaron as Tammy
drove the Ranger out onto the highway. It had been a long time since I had been
to Oakridge.
    The nuclear epicenter of the world
in the time leading up to World War II had changed.  Now the government housing
had all been sold to regular folk. There was nuclear power and research, but no
more bombs were being built.
    Tammy took the back way up Clinton Highway and then left on Emory Road.  This was okay with me; it made a nice country
drive.  Now we turned right and followed the river past a landing where
sculling teams