Free Billy Bob Walker Got Married by Lisa G. Brown

has to drag you."
    "He'll have to catch me first," she cried over her shoulder; then she ran, heels, black dress, and all, out into the night.
     

    The Porsche burned the wind down the long, stretching road, flying past dark, flat cotton and rice fields and the squat, shadowy little shacks that lay along Highway 25 as it ran west, leading to the delta, miles away.
     
    They wouldn't make her face Michael tonight. She pressed down on the gas pedal, shooting through Mississippi—at least her piece of it—at ninety miles an hour.
     
    A revival was going on at the Church of God on the corner, two buildings down the dark, quiet street from the jail. The preacher was loud and long and not half bad—and Billy Bob ought to know. He'd been hearing the man's sermons drift in on the night air for most of the week, ringing out the raised windows of the old clapboard church and floating down the road and through the open, but barred, ones of the jail, bringing salvation right to the only sinner T-Tommy had in custody these days—himself.
     
    The crowd down at the little steepled building, with their shouts of "amen" and their loud music, was nearly as rowdy as the one at the Country Palace, Billy Bob thought wryly, but at least their enthusiasm was taking them to heaven, not to accommodations provided by Briskin County.
    He leaned backward against the cool, gray-painted concrete blocks of the wall beside the window and watched a huge luna moth flutter inquiringly around the distant yellow glow of the naked bulb in the ceiling. In this old jail, the ceilings were twelve feet high, so that the light got lost long before it could reach down to find him. It cast only a sort of dim glow over the bars and the narrow cot where Bill) Bob slept.
    Eleven days he'd been here. Nineteen more to go, if he could just grit his teeth and bear it. To some people, the inactivity and the monotony might have been nothing.
    They were about to kill Billy Bob.
    He would have begged if that would make them let him go. Fifteen days for fighting. He had to serve that. And another fifteen if, by next Monday, he couldn't come up with the additional five-hundred-dollar fine Sewell had slapped on him at the last minute for shooting off his mouth.
    Fat chance.
    Any money Billy got hold of would have to go to Bud, to pay for the damage at the Palace.
    Just where was he supposed to get money, anyway? He couldn't work and earn it. not stuck here in jail—but nobody wanted to think about that. And what happened the day he was supposed to be released and they discovered he still couldn't pay Bud? Were they going to give him time to make the money, or was he going to wind up spending the rest of his life in jail?
    Surely he didn't deserve all this just because he'd let a streak of contrariness land him in front of Robert Sewell.
    His father, the judge.
    Billy Bob fought down the wave of bitterness that threatened to swamp him. He wouldn't let it have him; it was the kind of searing, dark emotion that could bring a man down and cripple him for life, and he had the sense to know it.
    He kept making himself look the truth in the face: It was his own fault he was in here, just as he'd told Grandpa.
    And he must never let the judge have the satisfaction of knowing how much all of this hurt him.
    Billy Bob came restlessly to his bare feet, his open shirt flapping carelessly around the bare skin of his sides above his blue jeans as he stared out the window again.
    A bass voice in the distant church congregation filled out the chorus of a hymn with exuberance. Resting with his forehead against the chilly metal bars, Billy concentrated on the music, trying to pick out individual voices, wondering if he knew any of them.
    "I wasn't going a hundred miles an hour. And I wasn't running from him, T-Tommy. I just thought he was you, trying to drag me back home. I didn't know he was a real cop!"
    He knew that voice in a heartbeat. It was clear and angry as it cut across the room, and