I spent most of the night holding her, comforting her when she would whimper in her sleep, and plotting an assassination. I was one of those "tweeners" when I did my trick for my country. Vietnam was in the past when I joined, and I didn't make the Grenada thing. Delta Force was something new but I did make the Rangers, 1st Battalion. 75th Regiment based at Hunter, in Georgia where we trained incessantly and I qualified on small arms from our Baretta M9 through the M4, M60, and Remington 700 in.308 where the qualification was done at 500 yards. I even fired one of those insane Baretts although that hog was WAY too much for me. We learned a dozen hand-to-hand techniques and I was still spending a couple of hours a night two nights a week until we went full-time in the travel trailer in a Shaolin do (the classic Chinese Kung Fu) dojo.
In other words, when I say I was plotting an assassination, I'm not bullshitting.
I could see it in my mind, easy as a walk in the park. These guys would do that to a woman? I figured I'd just walk into their group, my well-broken in Colt Defender in.45 ACP in hand, and start shooting. The first 8 would be easy, one shot each, center mass, drop the magazine and reload. Then I figured it would just be mop up. I imagined a few would get away, nothing to do about that, but I doubted they would do much but run. Then drop the pistol into a lake, regretfully, I really like that little gun, come back to the trailer, hook up, and be gone.
I could see it, and, honestly, I was enjoying it.
I was in full rage, you know? Adrenalin was flowing and I WANTED to do it.
She broke my fantasy (my reverie?) with a groan and said, softly, her voice breaking a little, "help me up, David, please. I need to pee."
So I rolled out of bed, helped her stand, steadied her when she stumbled, and went into the kitchen while she did her business. I got one of our travel cups with a straw, filled it with ice and water, shook a couple more of the Tramadol into my hand, and when she opened the door I handed them to her.
She smiled, took the pills, sucked at the straw, handed it back, and limped back into the bedroom.
I crawled in with her, brushed the hair back from her face, kissed her forehead, told her she was beautiful, and held her until I felt her go back to sleep.
I was too keyed up to sleep and when she started snoring, a dangerous-sounding snore deep in her throat. I watched for a few minutes to make sure she was okay.
Then I moved into the kitchen area, sat at the little table, broke the little Colt down, and cleaned it carefully.
I was still up when she limped into the front room.
She smiled a half smile through a puffy lip and a swollen eye.
"Put that away, David," she said, pointing at the gun on the table, "it's done so let's move on."
"Ashley," I started but she closed the distance between us, and touched my lips with her fingertip shushing me.
"Put that away, David," she said again, "let's head out. There's no good if you wind up in prison."
"I won't," I said, feeling confident.
"No, you won't," she said, brushing my forehead, "because there will be no reason. Now feed me something and hook us up and get us out of here."
So I did.
And we left the Texas/Oklahoma border behind us.
I just drove west for two hours and at the next town with "Camping" on one of the little blue roadside signs I pulled off, found the campground, something called, unimaginatively,
Sleepy Hollow
. They had a space so I gave them the credit card and spent a half hour getting everything set up.
"Put out the flamingos," she said.
When I didn't move she smiled, that crooked smile.
"Don't worry, David, I won't be riding off on any motorcycles again," she said, "but I need someone to show a real interest."
When I still didn't move she stepped to me, kissed me, and said, "go ahead now."
So I did.
I tuned up and started strumming and in a few minutes, she came out of the trailer in her, well, what I was thinking of as her "fuck me" outfit. She had on Daisy Duke cutoffs that left the bottom third of those big globes of her bubble butt on display, and a long-sleeved checked shirt, I think it's called Gingham, tied below her clearly bra-free breasts, making kind of a titsack. Her sandals had ankle straps. If it hadn't been for the bruises so dramatically on display, she would have looked very good. Well, she looked good anyway, but the bruises did detract from the image.
A couple of couples stopped by but when they looked more closely at her they walked on.
The third couple showed a huge age gap. The man was, I guessed, 40 or so, very, well, "substantial" is the word for his appearance. He was very well groomed, with hair suggesting weekly trips to a barber or stylist, a firm body showing regular trips to the gym, carefully maintained tan showing a lot of work on it. Dark hair shot with grey and ridiculous, almost movie star, good looks.
If he was 40, the woman on his arm was pushing 80. She was tiny, wrinkled, cute rather than pretty, but cute nonetheless.
He ignored me and went to Ashley.
"Who did this to you?" he asked, brushing his fingers very carefully over her damaged face and scowling at me. I was pretty sure if she pointed at me I'd have a fight on my hands. But she didn't.
"I got in with a bad group the last town we were in," she said.
He looked at her, very carefully, very professionally I thought, and then looked at me.
I rolled up onto the balls of my feet, ready if I needed to defend myself, but he just offered his hand. "I'm Brett," he said, "and I'm a doctor. If you'll take care of my grandmother here I'll take her back to my trailer and make sure she's okay."
I laughed.
"You do know," I said, "that if I read this in a book I'd probably throw the damn thing across the room for having an unbelievable plot line. But sure," I added, "I'm Dave, this is Ashley, and I'll be happy to tend to your grandmother."
He chuckled and shook, a firm handshake, and then crooked his finger, beckoning the tiny woman over. She came, moving slowly in that way of truly old people and I raised my estimate of her age to 80-something.
"David, meet my grandmother MaryLou. Gramma, meet Dave," he said, very formally.
Up close I could see that this was a truly old woman. Her face was a mask of wrinkles. She had that wrinkled skin, what I've heard called "crepe skin" everywhere you could see. Her hair was obviously a wig, and not a particularly good one at that. Her glasses were thick, making her eyes big, and she had old-person-hair sprouting from her ears.
For all of that, she wasn't unattractive. She certainly wasn't pretty but she was kind of cute and certainly was interesting.
"I'm worried," Brett said to Ashley but loud enough that I could hear, "about this," and he touched her cheek below her eye where she was very swollen, "and this," and he touched the very black bruise on the small of her back on the left side. "So please let me check you over," he finished.
She smiled up at him, the first true smile I had seen since she got back from her misadventure.
"That would be nice," she said.
He bent and kissed his gramma on the forehead, took Ashley's hand, and they headed off.
"Well," MaryLou said, moving close and doing the two-hands-on-the-arm thing women seem to know on an instinctive level gets to men, "it's just you and me I guess."
Up close, she was even tinier than I thought. She was maybe 5 feet tall although I guessed more like 4'10" or 4'11" and certainly no more than 80 pounds or so. Her tight jeans set off how tiny she was and the sleeveless blouse she wore showed the arms of a stick figure.