a café and restaurant over in Peninsula. It was successful enough they opened another larger restaurant in Akron, where they moved to a few years back. Weasel remained behind in the family house, receiving a comfortable allowance every month for doing nothing but sitting on his ass all day. Why someone so stupid got such a lucky break in life, Cleavon didn’t know. Cleavon himself had worked like a son of a bitch for most of his miserable life, and he’d never once been given a break.
“That them?” Jesse said, looking at the bodies lying on the ground some twenty yards away and illuminated by the fire from the blazing wreckage: Cueball, the mocha-skinned girl, Cherry, and the handsome cripple. The way they were lined up side by side, they resembled corpses waiting for their coffins.
“’Course that’s them,” Cleavon said. “Who the fuck else they gonna be?”
“What I meant is, where’s the rest of them?”
“Already gone when me and the boys arrived.” Cleavon scowled at Weasel. “You see how you fucked up, Weasel? You see what you did now?”
Weasel stared at his boots. “I know I fucked up, Cleave, and I said I’m sorry.”
“Sorry, huh? They get to town, if Lonnie don’t stop them and they get to town…” He shook his head. He wasn’t going to entertain that thought right now. “Jess, you bring the fire extinguisher?”
“Ayuh. On the back seat.”
“Weasel, go put out the fire. You can do that, can’t you?”
“Yeah, Cleave.” He started toward the burning car.
“You gonna put it out with your fuckin’ hands? Get the extinguisher!”
Weasel blushed. “Right, Cleave.” He opened the back door, grabbed the red fire extinguisher, and trotted toward the burning car.
“That boy got about as much sense as God gave a goose,” Cleavon muttered.
“Ayuh,” Jesse said, though he was still looking at the three bodies. Given the hungry glint in his eyes, Cleavon suspected he was looking more at Cherry than the other two. Sprawled how she was, her denim skirt pushed up her thighs, she was showing more than leg.
Just then Earl and Floyd emerged from the forest, their flashlights pointed at the ground ahead of them, their heads lowered. They knew they were in trouble and trying to play ostrich. Fucking retards.
“Earl!” Cleavon shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Get your ass over here.”
“The hell they doing in the woods?” Jesse said.
“Looking for the one that got away.”
Jesse raised his eyebrows. “The one that got away?”
“I had the bitch by the throat, I had her, then she goes and kicks me right where it hurts and got away.”
“Shit, Cleave, how we gonna find her?”
“We’re not, not now,” he said. “Where she gonna go? It’s the others we need to think about right now. We gotta deal with them first. Then we can worry about finding the bitch.”
Earl approached in his lumbering size-sixteen-boot gait, red-faced and out of breath. Floyd was behind him, also huffing and puffing. Unless you gave Floyd a direct order—one he could understand, mind you—he’d simply follow Earl everywhere.
“We couldn’t find her, Cleave,” Earl said shyly, staring at his boots. “She took off like a rabbit, and we couldn’t find her. If you didn’t let her go, if you didn’t do that, we woulda had her, we woulda had everyone. Why’d you let her go, Cleave? She’s nothing but a girl.”
Cleavon wanted to kick Earl in the nuts and see how quickly he reacted afterward, but he didn’t dare. Earl had a temper like you’d never seen. You get him worked up, you better be faster than a striped-ass ape. It wasn’t that Earl got it in his head to kill you; he simply might do it unintentionally. He didn’t realize his own strength, or if he did, he forgot about it when he got worked up and emotional.
Back when Cleavon was twenty or thereabouts he’d been feuding with Earl over some fucking thing and had gone into Earl’s room and took his pet mouse from the aquarium and cut off the thing’s head with a straight razor. Earl, only fifteen but already huge, caught Cleavon red-handed and went crazy, tossing the bed out of the way to get at him. He slammed Cleavon against the wall hard enough to knock all the pictures to the floor. Then he heaved Cleavon up like he weighed nothing and launched him straight out the second-floor window. Luckily it had been winter then, and a couple feet of snowfall had cushioned Cleavon’s fall. Still, he’d broken his left