"Oh yeah, Rufus, there's a spot or two on your rug down here, ‘cause I made sure to rub some on it, so there would be no doubt you were up to something in here. Oh, and there are a couple more places around here with your cum on them too, but I don't think I'll tell you where they are just now. Maybe, if I have to tell her about all this, Imogene'll tell you where they are and you two can come find them together. Sound like a fun afternoon to you, Rufus; you and the little missus together on a scavenger hunt for cum spots?"
"Anne, you wouldn't."
"You bet your ass I would, ‘cause I have nothing to loose, have I? I'll just collect my things and pop on over to your house to have a chat with Imogene on my way out of town. What you want to bet that, after she hears what I have to say and checks your bank account for a recent, rather large withdrawal, she'll be eager to follow me home to collect my little frozen specimen and hang you out to dry with it? Unless, of course, you can come up with something to tell her that will explain how I came to have a quart of the Headmaster's precious reproductive fluid in my freezer."
Her words connected in his consciousness like a couple of overweighted freight cars coupling in a railroad switchyard. He turned white as a sheet, and his mouth dropped open. Subconsciously, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a handkerchief to mop his brow, and she snickered at the gesture because he revealed himself in it.
"Well?"
"All right, all right, you win. You can have the damn pictures." Even as he spoke he was fishing his key ring out of his pocket.
"Good choice, Rufus. You give me the photos, and I am out of your life forever."
"What about the handkerchief?"
"You'll just have to worry about that for a while, baby; I'm hanging on to it till I feel safe from you and everybody else around here, and then I'll throw it away. `Till then, it's my insurance policy that you won't do anything too stupid where I am concerned."
"How do I know I can trust you?"
"Brother," she said in exasperation, "don't be a moron now. You got no alternative, do you, buddy; you either give me the photos and trust me to keep quiet, or you hang on to them, and I give your wife your cum rag and point her toward your pecker tracks around here and the bank. Best course for you to take seems pretty clear to me."
"All right, Anne," he sighed, recognizing defeat when it was staring him in the face. He pulled open the bottom drawer and extracted a stack of glossy photographs and the three videos. He tossed the materials on his desk, and said "There, take them."
"Not so fast, Rufus." She stepped around the desk just as he was pushing the drawer closed. "Open it up and let me see if you forgot something."
He leaned back in his chair and glared at her, but she ignored the look and bent to open the drawer herself. He didn't move to stop her, and the drawer slid open easily. It was nearly empty, but on the bottom, lying face down was what appeared to be another photograph.
"Rufus, you scoundrel, you're holding out on me, I do believe," she said, scolding him like a schoolboy. She retrieved the photo, and three others, which were concealed beneath it, and flipped them over to confirm that they were a part of Cletus' package. She laid them carefully on the pile of photos already on Rufus' desk.
"Count `em, Rufus, and there better be a hundred of `em there, or Imogene's going to have something to put in her freezer tonight and it ain't gonna be a frozen dinner, unless of course you consider cooked goose to be dinner."
He counted the pictures and satisfied her that all were accounted for. She collected them, pushing them into a neat pile, and walked to the corner by the coat rack, where Rufus' briefcase leaned against the wall. She picked up the briefcase and dumped the contents on the floor. Then, she began placing the photos and videos into the empty satchel, and blithely disregarded his venomous looks.
"Nice briefcase, Rufus," she said admiringly as she snapped the clasps shut, "`Mark Cross' no less, it must have cost you a bundle. I know you don't mind if I borrow it for a while, do you? I don't think it would do for me to be traipsing around school with these pictures under my arm, don't you agree?"
"Get out. Just go. I want you out of the building in an hour, understand?"
"Oh, I surely do," she replied sweetly, and she blew him a kiss as she walked out the door.
* * *
She didn't go to her classroom. There was nothing personal there to collect, and she had no intention of hanging around to pack a few pencils, rulers and a handful of papers, while the authorities, or worse, Cletus and Nadeen, closed in on her. Instead, she bypassed her classroom and slipped unobtrusively out of the building through a seldom-used exit at the end of the hall and bolted for her car.
She glanced nervously around the faculty parking lot, fully expecting to see Cletus' beat up van lurking in the shadows, but she saw nothing except familiar sports cars and expensive SUVs, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She sped down the drive to the highway and turned toward home, thankful that she had been careful to give the personnel office a false residential address. It was one of those things that had become ingrained, second nature to her, and as a result, she never left tracks or a trail wherever she went. She also collected little in the way of material things, expressly for times like these, so she could pick up and disappear in a matter of minutes. A morbid fear of Cletus and Nadeen compelled her to behave like a fugitive, and she had moved twice since Cletus’ appearance with the pictures a couple of weeks earlier. She had refined moving to an art; her worldly possessions, a desktop, TV and toaster and a couple of suitcases of clothes, fit easily into the trunk of her car, and, start to finish, she could be packed and gone in under a quarter hour.
She picked Trash Can at random out of a phone book and took a circuitous route to his office, driving a hundred and twenty miles to cover what a crow could do in twenty minutes. She had known nothing about lawyers beyond what little she had learned during the probate of her father's estate, but she thought his picture in the Yellow Pages made him look gentlemanly, and the fact his office was located well away from the usual business traffic way was reassuring. She had appeared at the U-Haul office unannounced and without an appointment, but Trash Can hadn't been busy and saw her immediately. The interview stretched into the evening hours, because she was skittish and reluctant to divulge many of the details of the events he had asked her about. Well after dark, he convinced her that she would be safe in the local motel and drove her there himself, leaving her car parked out of sight in the U-Haul repair shed behind his office. She was still at the motel when Trash Can called for help.
* * *
Caleb finished reading and dropped the report on his desk. He checked his watch. It was nearly 2:00 a.m. and he was mentally and physically exhausted. He quickly gathered up the report and his notes and returned them to the folder. He picked up the photo of Gweneth Paltrow and, laughing at himself a little, said aloud, "In you go, imposter," and he stuffed the picture into the folder with his other papers. Finally, he took the folder and locked it in his file cabinet, before turning off the lights and locking up his office.
He went directly home and packed an overnight bag, because he didn't know how long he would be gone. He wrote himself a note to call Mildred first thing in the morning to have her cancel court for the day and his afternoon appointments, and then he went to bed to get a few hours sleep, but he was too anxious, keyed up, he rationalized, by the anticipation of meeting the woman in the report to actually sleep, so he wound up watching an old movie on the TV, and, by the time the sun was up, he was already an hour west of home and had the new bridge over the Mississippi River in sight.
His course to the river took him through the broad, flat plains of the delta along roads that ran straight and true atop endless, interconnecting levees, which had been built to protect soybeans and cotton from the inevitable floods. He turned on the CD and in seconds "The City of New Orleans" was playing, and he and Arlo were rolling "past the houses, farms and fields, and the graveyards of the rusted automobiles," and he was exhilarated by a newfound sense of adventure. The fields he passed were quiet, dark and brown, withered by fall's heavy frosts, and the farm- to- market roads through them were virtually empty, so he traveled in the dim, half-light of the early dawn with out distractions or external stimulation, and his thoughts turned to the girl he was rushing to meet and his soaring expectations.
She would be pretty, of that much he was sure; all of the sources in the report had agreed on that point, and he had Moon Dog's judgment, and Terrell's, to corroborate them. Not that beauty was the only consideration, but it certainly didn't diminish his convictions any, when the people he set out to help turned out to be desperate and attractive, too. And, this girl surely was desperate for help from someone, after all that she had been through already and, now, with the added threat of being hunted and pursued by people with pretty apparent reasons to do her harm, she had cause to be panicked. She also had an amazing sexual appetite that wasn't, so far as he could determine, fettered by much commitment to modesty, and she had no reluctance whatsoever to putting her sexuality to use for her advantage whenever and wherever she could. The way she had used her body to manipulate that Justice guy, and then, the way she had stood up to him and had gotten her pictures back in the end, were nothing short of impressive, and he suspected that she was more of a force to be reckoned with at the Caruthers' household than either she or Nadeen would admit.
She was a complex mixture of contradictions; sweet, innocent vulnerability on the one hand, ruthlessly cunning culpability on the other, and the prospect of learning how she balanced those conflicting characteristics intrigued him. It was the certainty that he was about to meet a beautiful woman, who desperately needed his help, and who was willing, even eager it seemed, to use sex to get what she needed, that sent him hurtling toward her through the pre-dawn darkness, and it was almost more than he could manage to keep the throttle off the floorboard.
