Free Peckerwood by Jedidiah Ayres Page B

his hands through her hair, kneading the back of her neck and shoulders while she worked on him.
    While he watched her head bob, he straightened himself and she responded by digging her head further beneath his gut. As her head disappeared from view, he focused on that big ol’ ass of hers waving higher in the air. He clamped onto it with both hands, pushing her gently, but firmly, down. His grip tightened, then he slapped it and she grunted in response. He felt just a hint of teeth at the base of his pecker and it sent a shiver through him that ended with Hettie getting up and retreating to the bathroom to spit and gargle.
    He lay back and briefly enjoyed his cleared head. Leisurely, he skimmed the edges of his consciousness for something worth fixing on. He thought about Hettie back when they’d met. That snake tattoo had just about been the sexiest thing he’d ever seen and it held a power over him from the first time he saw it. When she’d told him she was pregnant by him he’d married her the next day and when Irm had come along, it’d seemed like the most natural progression of events to quit the Bucs and make a home somewhere.
    The plan hadn’t come all at once and they’d been in no rush to conceive one. Hettie told him that he was in charge and she’d go along with whatever he said. The underlying, but unspoken understanding was as long as you say the right thing. That’s the way it’d always been between them. Even when she was mad at him, and he’d given her reason to be a time or two, she never said anything but how he was in charge. He was the man. His was the responsibility to lead and hers was to follow. But damn, when she said it, it didn’t have the effect of making him free. Rather she’d bound him to her more tightly. She never busted his balls about other women long as he didn’t rub her nose in it and when he did eventually leave the Bucs, ten years later, and took her and Irm to the Missouri hills without a word of what he had in mind, she never complained.
    She was a hell of a woman and he was a lucky man.
    He was more than lucky, though. He was good. He ran a good business. Chowder’s Bait ’N More was a money-maker on its own, but Darlin’s had made it a cornerstone of the local economy. Now some shitweasel was trying to bring him down and he needed to put a name and face on that threat quick. Until he knew for sure, it remained between him and the sheriff, the only two he could be a hundred percent sure of.
    He couldn’t even tell his wife or daughter. Not that he believed Irm or Hettie would ever turn on him, but he couldn’t be sure how they’d handle the knowledge that somebody was talking to the government.
    There was a sound from the bathroom that he registered as the top popping off of a pill bottle and then the running faucet. The door opened and Hettie stood there, hair pulled back in a tail, breasts supported by her round gut looking angry, hungry and mean. She held a green plastic cup of tap water in one hand and a little blue pill in the other.
    Chowder rolled over and pulled the sheet over his head. Hettie’s voice was full of authority. “Oh hell no. You don’t get off that easy.”
     

 
     
     
     
    CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    MONDALE
     
    The stretch of 71b that led south from Neosho toward the Arkansas border was a gold mine for speeding tickets. The two lane highway wound through the hills with speed limits jumping from sixty-five to forty-five, then up to fifty-five every few minutes with a traffic signal or two thrown in to further complicate things. A cruiser placed around any bend or in the parking lot of a convenience mart was a sure fire money-maker for all of the hamlets dotting the map, including Spruce.
    Mondale sat in his own prowler along the path to Pineville for hours. The sun had set on him and he’d not issued a single ticket. He’d sat in silence and now in darkness going over the situation with the ASA endlessly.
    Mondale’d just about punched the