Free Stuffed by Brian M. Wiprud Page B

with his frenetic performance at Gunderson’s, complete with breaking voice. The guy with the raspy voice easily could have been Slim, a smoker. He certainly fit Otto’s bull’s-eye description: “Teeth big, vood in leeps.”
    I watched as the old truck lurched and rattled its way down the road, a blue haze of exhaust floating in its wake.
    Options presented themselves. They’d spotted me, no doubt about that, but probably felt I had no way of connecting them to the ski-masked assault in Manhattan. My return to Bermuda would be setting off alarms, though. They would figure that I may have recognized one of them somehow, and since I’d only seen Bret before, they’d deduce that I’d come up here to track him down. Or track down the white crow. The Three Amigos would have to stop me cold or blow town. And they didn’t look like they were headed for the hills in that old green pickup.
    So: Did they plan to do something about me? That very night?
    I waited in the shadows until Bret finished his beer, left the tavern, got into a dented Honda Civic, and whirred off down the street. Lucky nobody happened by or I might have been chased down the street as a peeping Tom. I guess angry Vermont mobs don’t lynch perverts—probably drown them in maple syrup.
    Am I plum loco? My assumptions were galling. Was my secret greed for vengeance playing tricks on me, putting square pegs in round holes, making three hapless strangers into the ones who had assaulted me and Angie? I went through it again, point by point, looking for a lapse in judgment. Basically, other than Bret having been angry about the crow, what possible reason would he have for stealing it? Let me guess—it was a family heirloom? A deceased pet? A substitute security blanket, his very own pink blankey, Bret all curled up in bed with a cold bell jar, sucking his thumb?
    And the bridge over the Connecticut—why drop my dead stuff there? It was over a hundred miles away from Bermuda. But at night, it was probably pretty desolate and they had little chance of being spotted.
    And how did they find me in Manhattan, after all? Perhaps the business card I gave that shopkeeper Gunderson? The yellow pages? Both possible, but anybody could put my pin in the map that way.
    And if they were the ones?
    Well, I could roust Angie and we could pile back into the Lincoln and make for the interstate. But maybe they were waiting for us down the road, the pavement littered with carpet tacks. I’d end up stooped behind the car, gripping a car jack in the glow of the red taillights, my back to the dark forest. Then where would we be? Alone on a desolate country road, at the mercy of insane killer clowns from another planet? I’d seen that kind of thing in way too many horror pics.
    I decided to stay where there were lights and phones and an innkeeper who probably had her twelve-gauge side-by-side loaded and at the ready in case the local cocktail set had one too many cosmos and decided to trash the place.
    I went into the bar and asked for a second cabin, farthest from Cabin #1, which Bret’s pals had seen me sign for.
    The barmaid eyed me, and I shrugged.
    “We have these awful fights.”
    Her eyebrows went up, and I went out with the key to Cabin #9. Jostling Angie from her slumber, I said the barmaid had mistakenly given us Cabin #1, the hut with the rat, and that we should move to the cabin on the far end if we didn’t cotton to bedding with scaly-tailed vermin. Angie wiped the Sandman from her eyes and swiftly gathered her belongings and relocated to the new cabin without too much protest. I left the Lincoln at Cabin #1, told Angie the Late Nite Show was about to come on, and excused myself to the bar.
    Was I convinced they were really coming back for a little midnight slice n’ dice? All I could be sure of was my bristling neck hair—that and my determination to protect Angie. Of course, the logical move would have been to tell Angie what I saw and suggest we vamoose. Not