Free The Tramp (The Bound Chronicles #1) by Sarah Wathen Page B

suffocated in his crowded little house on wheels in the musty, windless cove. He couldn’t get to Candy fast enough. Not even glancing at his mother, who was still passed out and snoring on the couch, he strode through the trailer and out the front door. He let the spring snap the door shut behind him with a sharp, metallic slap.

chapter nine
    Charlotte Finley massaged her temples, careful not to smear the long tails of black eyeliner, and tossed aside her dog-eared copy of Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
    Where is that little Hershey squirt?
    It had to be past nine by then; he must have had a rough night at After Dark, the little hidey hole in the hollows that passed for a night club. She spun her chair around and kicked her high-heels up to rest on a copper beer keg adapter. She thought about kicking it in an inconspicuous location.
    Uncle Rottenbrain Twatts would never know a leak from his tight little asshole. That moonshine probably smells just as fresh.
    Instead, she got up off her perch and pulled her long pencil skirt down tight over her round fanny, then appraised that endowment in the copper mirror of a nearby distilling tank. She stuck her cheeks out further to swell into the convex reflection, gave one a slap, then licked her finger and mimed a sizzle on her hip. Leaning down to correct a lipstick smear at the corner of her mouth, she saw her uncle stumble through the front door. She leaned down lower and squeezed her cleavage together for his viewing displeasure.
    “Girl,” he sighed. He shuffled past her, exasperated and already sweating in the muggy morning. “I can see clear down to your navel. Why you dress like that?”
    “It’s funny you should think of something shaped like a navel, when gazing into peaches, Uncle Boobie—I mean, Bobby.” She followed him back into the man-cave they called an office, stepping around a collection of empty beer bottles. She kicked a stray cigarette butt. Nasty monkeys. “Where were you poking that gaze of yours last night, anyway?”
    Robert Watts pinched the bridge of his nose and whined, “I don’t have the head for that crap this morning, Charlotte; what are you doing here?” He was no match for Charlotte, whatever she had planned. He plopped some Alka-Seltzer into his Irish coffee and lumbered onto the closest Barcalounger, his eyes closed in a wince as the recliner careened backwards against his weight.
    “I know; I should be at church,” she vowed hollowly, in a cherry-red pout. Her uncle nodded in dazed, self-righteous agreement until she added, under her breath, “I have so many…sins to confess. Maybe I will, next time I see Father Ringold.”
    Robert’s blood-shot eyes ratcheted open, his pudgy knuckles turning white on the armrests—she had his full attention.
    Charlotte smirked. Nothing wrong with a little threat and a diddle sweat.
    She rifled through desk drawers and paperclip holders that held random trash, wrappers, lost pen caps, and flicked a cockroach off the table lamp, wondering exactly how far she could push it. She was so tired of being a Finley Minion to the Squattin’ Twatts. Looking over at the shivery mass of quaking blubber that was her uncle, she wondered how it had happened, not for the first time.
    They were all equals in the beginning, both families moonshiners and both selling it fair and square; but somehow, in the salad days things got nasty, and—Charlotte still didn’t really know how—the Wattses ended up cranking the gears while the Finleys ended up being the grease. We kept making the product and they kept running the show; a case of hard work not paying off. She thought of her honest, hardworking father, who, for all of his ethical convictions and moral codes, was now employed as a menial house servant. His hands were clean but his wife had died cleaning toilets. His brother Virgil hadn’t minded slaving away for pennies on the dollar either, and now that the Wattses could smuggle in the fancy stuff, moonshine