Before he left, Steve had a good night’s sleep with Ann at his side. She’d come to join him like she had the night before, but this time she had been wearing only a garter belt, black stockings, and heels. That showed Steve she’d gone a long way toward getting over her fears and had every indication of turning into a real firecracker in bed. It was hard to believe that this was the same woman who had mostly been an iceberg for so long, not that he was complaining in the slightest. The future looked very promising and he couldn’t wait to get back to her.

Rather than drive straight through, Steve left at midday and drove for a while then got a motel for the night. As had become his norm when he had an evening to kill on the road, he had taken his tool box with his engraving tools into the room, sat down at the desk, and set to work on a much less-than-perfect 1914 Indian head nickel. It was going to be a hell of a job to turn the Indian into a profile view of Ann, but it would kill some time, which is all he asked of it. His skills were improving and he wanted to do a really good job.

The night stop meant he pulled into Pendersburg toward the middle of the day and reasonably rested. Baldwynn Chevrolet-Buick had changed a lot in the relatively brief time Steve had been away from Pendersburg. It was still recognizably the same place, but the appearance and the attitude were a lot different, indicative of the new regime set in place when Forrest Baldwynn took over.

Salesmen assaulted him the moment he walked in the door, of course. That was to be expected at any car dealership. He shrugged them off and headed to the office to find that the receptionist wasn’t the gum-popping, nail-tending Jodi he remembered, but a pleasant, efficient-looking little brunette. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Steve Taylor. I’m here to see Mr. Baldwynn.”

“I know he’s pretty busy, but I’ll ask,” the girl replied, and then announced him over the intercom.

Within seconds the door flew open and a smiling Forrest was standing there. “Steve, it’s good to see you again! How’s that LaCrosse treating you?”

“I think I’ve figured out about a third of the gadgets. So how are things down here?”

“Busy, but we’re finally getting a handle on things. Something tells me you’re not down here looking for a routine oil change, though. Would you like some coffee?”

“Talked me into it.”

“Melanie, go get us some coffee, please. You still take it black, right Steve?”

“Fine with me.”

A minute or so later they were back in Forrest’s office with fresh coffee in their hands. “She sure seems to be a whole lot better than that Jodi creature Junior used to have out there,” Steve commented.

“Oh, yeah, she’s made a world of difference around here. She’s a distant relative. She had some trouble up around her home, and I brought her down here to get her out of town. It was one of the better moves I made. She’s taking hold of the job real well.”

“Good, glad to hear it. So has anything else interesting been happening?”

“Oh, we’ve had a few things. I guess you know the auditors turned up a whole damn pot full of stuff on Junior and his asshole buddy accountant.”

“I can remember the accountants literally cackling with delight,” Steve grinned. “That bunch of assault auditors proved helpful to me in a few other ways, too. So what happened to Junior?”

“Well, the trial date is still a while off, but no matter how much money his mother pisses away at lawyers he’s going to be a guest of the prison system for a while. She calls me every day, sometimes two or three times a day to complain how I’ve ruined his life. Tough shit. I don’t think we’re going to recover much in the way of money since it looks like he spent a lot of it on drugs. I have a lawsuit going to recover it in company stock, but I’m going to have to wait and see how that comes out. So what can I do for you, Steve?”

“I’m just looking for a little information,” Steve replied, getting down to business. “Like before, I’m just the leg man on this one and I can’t reveal who I’m working for or why, so please don’t ask.”

“You do a lot of that, don’t you?”

“It’s what I do, like you sell cars,” Steve shrugged. “But I’m curious. There used to be a guy by the name of Jim Baldwynn, same spelling. Was he any kind of relation to you?”

“Yeah, he was. Second cousin, up in Milton. He was killed, oh, fourteen or fifteen years ago, I’m not sure. The speculation around the family is that the local sheriff up there ran him off the road, but nobody was able to prove it, not that they tried very hard. I told him before he went there that no damn good could come of him living in that place, and I was right. The damn town is a snake pit, and I don’t go there, even to drive through it. What’s your interest in Jim?”

“We, and by that I’m including the people I work for, think he may have known a guy by the name of Seth Greer. We’re trying to track him down.”

“You won’t find him in Milton,” Baldwynn replied. “Try the burn unit in the university hospital. Damn good place for him, too.”

“Burn unit? What happened?”

“He pissed off the wrong guy, specifically Melanie’s boyfriend,” he replied, nodding his head toward the front office. “That’s why I have her here. Someone had to get her out of that hellhole or she could have wound up even worse off than she was. But believe me, she could tell you a hell of a lot more than I can.”

“Would you mind if I talk to her?”

“Not really, but only if you don’t tell anyone around here about it, and I’ll have to grease the skids for you. She doesn’t like to talk about it much, and I for one don’t goddamn blame her.”

Steve thought for a moment. The chances were good that Forrest had already told him most of what he’d come down here to find out, and then a little bit. On the other hand, his curiosity was aroused – there was more here than Forrest had let on. “Yeah,” he said finally. “She might be able to fill in a few things.”

“All right, I’ll introduce you,” Forrest replied. “Steve, don’t push her too hard. It won’t solve anything and might make things worse for her. If she can’t tell you what you want to know, I’ll try to fill you in from what I know. I’ll bet you have something in mind, and I’ll bet it involves something I wouldn’t mind seeing happen, too.”

“Don’t speculate, Forrest. I don’t even know what the people I work for have in mind.”

“If it involves that son of a bitch it can’t come out much different,” Forrest snorted as he turned to the intercom. “Melanie, can you come in here, please?”

The brunette was in the office in seconds. “Yes, sir?”

“Close the door, Melanie,” Forrest told her. “Then take a seat. Melanie, this gentleman is Steve Taylor, and I owe him a couple of huge favors. Among other things, he’s the reason both of us are working here today. Melanie, I know this is hard for you, but he’s here to find out about Seth Greer.”

“That son of a bitch,” she snarled. “At least he got what was coming to him, but I wish I could have Bobby back. At least Bobby gave him the treatment he deserved.”

“Melanie,” Steve asked gently, “Did this Greer hurt you?”

“Oh, Christ yes, he hurt me,” she replied. “He ironed me.”

“Ironed you?”

Melanie stood up, took off the vest she was wearing, and slowly unbuttoned her blouse. She turned her back to him, and took the blouse off. There in the middle of her back between her shoulder blades was a livid scar in the shape of an iron. That had to have hurt, Steve thought. It even hurt to look at it, much less even think about it. That bastard must sure like burning people, he thought. “I see, Melanie,” Steve said as levelly as he could, trying to repress the rage he felt rising in him. “Why would he do something like that?”

“Because he felt like it,” she replied angrily. “He burned me like that and it hurt like hell, and it hurt even worse when he raped me afterwards.”

It didn’t take Steve much to imagine the weight in his hands of that varmint rifle he’d mentioned to Ann and Uncle Homer, but he tried to keep his cool. After all, if Greer were in a burn unit, someone, apparently this Bobby, had given him the treatment he deserved. “Thank you, Melanie,” he said. “You can go ahead and put your blouse back on.”

“Thank you, sir. I know it looks like hell, but at least I can show you what that sanctimonious, hypocritical bastard is really like.”

“How did you get involved with him, Melanie?” Steve asked as she was buttoning her blouse back up.

“My idiot mother joined his church,” she replied. “The goddamn fool. I guess the bastard liked what he saw, and figured he could get away with it. Thank god Bobby didn’t let him.”

“What happened, Melanie?”

“After it was over with, I, well, I had to sneak out of our house. It hurt like hell but I knew I couldn’t stay there or he’d do it worse. I couldn’t think of anything else, so I went to Bobby’s. He’s my boyfriend, and I really owe him for what he did.”

“What did he do?”

“It couldn’t have been ten minutes after I got to Bobby’s when the bastard showed up looking for me. I guess he wanted to give me another dose just for daring to sneak off, but Bobby laid him out with a baseball bat to the gut. Then Bobby said if he liked to burn people so damn much he needed to burn a little himself. Bobby threw him in the back of his truck, drove out of town a ways, tied his hands to a tree branch overhead, and then dumped a can of gas from a chainsaw down the front of his pants. After he was lit up, he screamed real nice for a while.”

There was something in the detail of Melanie’s story that told him that she knew a little more than she was saying. She may have witnessed the burning – in fact, probably had – and Steve wouldn’t have put it past her to be the one to light the match. If so, good for her! But it was something he didn’t dare say.

“It sounds like he deserved it,” was the best and most neutral thing he could think of to say, and it took him a while to come up with that.

“I’m sorry the bastard didn’t die,” she said flatly, “but at least he got his dick and his balls burned off, so he won’t be raping anyone else.”

“There is that,” Steve nodded. “So what happened after that?”

Melanie took a deep breath before she went on. “Bobby put me in his truck,” she managed, “and he brought me to the hospital here in Pendersburg. They, well, they couldn’t do much for my back, but at least it wasn’t as painful after a while.”

“I found out about it through the family grapevine,” Forrest put in. “She didn’t have any insurance, of course, only Medicaid, so they didn’t do anything more than they had to. That was before you came to me, Steve, and there was only so much I could do to help.”

“You helped, Forrest,” Melanie sighed. “That was more than anyone in Milton would do, except for Bobby. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t helped me. I just wish there was something I could do to help Bobby.”

“What happened to him?”

“He’s in prison,” she replied. “He’s going to be there for a while. We were going to get married, Mr. Taylor. We were going to have children. Now all I can hope is he gets out before I’m too old to have them. I see Bobby as much as they’ll let me visit, and I always tell him that I’ll wait for him however long it takes. I owe him that much.”

“The trial was an absolute Milton railroad job,” Forrest explained. “From what I’ve been told it was like his defense attorney was working for the prosecution and the jury was all church members. I don’t think it lasted half an hour.”

“Shit,” Steve shook his head. “The more I hear about that town, the better I’d feel about using tactical nuclear weapons on it.”

“You could make a real good argument for that,” Forrest agreed. “The hell of it is that there are a few good people there. Or at least there were before both Melanie and Bobby had to leave. Even if he was out of prison he wouldn’t dare go back with all of those people around. He wouldn’t last a day. It’s why Melanie can’t go back, either.”

“Melanie, Bobby deserves a good and loyal girl like you,” Steve sighed. “I don’t know what I can do, but there has to be something. All I can do is look into it.”

“Please, sir,” she replied, the tears rolling now, “I owe Bobby so much, I’ll do anything I can to help him.”

“No promises, Melanie, but I’ll see if there’s anything I can do. Melanie, thank you for telling me all this. I know it’s been hard on you.”

“That’s all right, sir. At least I know that now there’s both you and Forrest who’ll try to help me. There hasn’t been anyone else.”

“Steve, I’ve tried to help,” Forrest told him. “There really hasn’t been much I could do. But I hope you’ll be able to come up with something.”

“Keep her safe, Forrest. I’ll look into that, too, and I don’t intend to take too long.”

Steve felt a definite breath of fresh air when he stepped outside. That bastard Greer was really a monster, and the members of his church didn’t sound like they were much better to have supported him over all the shit he’d pulled. Nothing had been said, but Steve would have bet a great deal of money that Ann and Melanie weren’t the only girls he’d hurt badly – and get away with it! A tactical nuke still seemed like a good idea, but he didn’t think even Uncle Homer had the kind of money it would take to arrange that. But there were still things that could be done.

He really hated to call Uncle Homer and Ann in the middle of the day, when they would normally be sleeping, but this was in a good cause and his rage was up enough that he didn’t want to wait a second more than he had to. There was no point in calling Uncle Homer directly; besides, at this hour Ann would be picking up the phone anyway. He got into the LaCrosse, set up the phone, and dialed her. “Steve,” she yawned when he heard his voice. “Why would you be calling at this hour?”

“Simply, Ann, because I’ve got good news and bad news, but there are some decisions that should be made as soon as possible. Get Uncle Homer up and get some coffee into him. Call me back when you get him running.”

“Are you all right, Steve? Have you done anything I should worry about?”

“Not yet, Ann but that’s what we have to talk about. It’s not a huge rush, but I don’t think we should take the risk of waiting, either. I’m just going to sit here and think about options until you call back.”

“All right, Steve, but I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Steve didn’t just sit out there in front of Baldwynn Chevrolet-Buick; he was hungry, and thought he needed some food to help him think. A drive-through at a nearby burger shack settled that issue quickly, and it gave him the time to come up with a couple angles he hadn’t considered before.

He was still sitting in the parking lot of the burger shack when Ann called him back. “We’re both sitting here yawning, sir,” she reported. “I gave Mr. Taylor real coffee, and he seems happy about that. We’re on the speakerphone, so you might not want to get too personal, sir.”

“I almost had forgotten what it was like to not have to drink that decaffeinated crap,” he heard Uncle Homer say. “It’s been years since Ann has let me have real coffee. So what’s this all about?”

“Well, the good news is that someone else gave Greer the treatment he deserved. In fact, it couldn’t have been more appropriate.” He gave Uncle Homer and Ann a brief description of what Bobby – and presumably Melanie, although he didn’t say that – had done to Greer. “I don’t have many details, but it sounds like just about the best that could have happened to him. In fact, it sounds like if anyone tried to do anything else to him, it might kill him anyway.”

“But you don’t know the details, right?”

“I haven’t had time to investigate yet and under the circumstances, I don’t feel I should right now. It falls in the category of ‘nice to know but not essential’ anyway. I don’t know if Chipperdude can crack into patient records at the university hospital, though I’m not sure it’s necessary right now. But there are bigger problems, specifically, Bobby and Melanie. I think we owe them for taking care of the problem for us.”

“It sounds like they did about what we would have liked to do,” Uncle Homer said. “And you’re right, I think we owe them. What do you suggest we do?”

“There are two separate problems, but they’re interrelated. First, Bobby. The problem is simple, get him out of the slammer as quickly and thoroughly as we can. I’m no lawyer, but from what Forrest tells me the trial was a mockery of the word. I’d be willing to bet that any halfway competent shyster could find reasons to get the verdict thrown out and ask for a new trial, and I’m not exactly suggesting we throw only halfway competent shysters at it, either.”

“That could get expensive,” Uncle Homer pointed out.

“So it’s only money, and don’t we owe Bobby? Besides, I remembered a few minutes ago that there are organizations that work to get wrongly convicted people freed.”

“There are, but they mostly work on DNA evidence,” Uncle Homer replied.

“If I recall correctly, they also get along on donations, volunteer attorneys, free work by law students, and so on. They’re starved for money. I’ll bet that if we were to walk into one of them and offer them a nice healthy donation large enough for them to bring in competent attorneys, along with the promise of a larger donation when they’re successful, they’d hop all over it.”

“That seems like the long way around, sir,” Ann pointed out.

“True, but doing it that way with the right organization would be tax deductible.”

“Tax deductible,” Ann replied in a sultry, sexy voice that Steve had only previously heard out of her when they were in bed. “Sir, those are my second favorite words.”

“Out of curiosity, what are the first?” Steve laughed.

“Not in front of Mr. Taylor, sir,” she giggled, “but you know what they are.”

“You two are stirring up my imagination too much for a man as old as I am,” Uncle Homer snickered, then got back on topic. “It sounds like a workable plan, and we’ll start investigating,” he went on. “What’s the problem with Melanie?”

“Melanie has that ugly scar on her back, and I can’t believe there isn’t something that can be done about it.”

“Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis has the reputation for having just about the best burn treatment center in the country,” Uncle Homer replied. “I’d imagine they ought to be able to find someone who would know something about it.”

“I hadn’t thought about them, but I figured there had to be someone we could find, and I think we can afford to throw some money at it.”

“Fixing the damage Greer did to her ought to be easier than fixing what he did to me,” Ann said flatly. “I’ll cover the cost even if Mr. Taylor won’t.”

“Oh, I’ll chip in,” Uncle Homer said. “I just think we need to use our heads about it. We won’t throw money at it directly. We’ll remember Ann’s second favorite words and use the Agnes Cooper Foundation.”

Steve let out a long sigh. “I should have known you had a tame foundation up your sleeve somewhere, and that’s even what I figured it would be named.”

“We just hadn’t gotten around to telling you about it,” Uncle Homer told him. “We keep it quiet, Steve. As much as I would like to, I can’t afford to support the whole medical establishment. Have you ever walked into a convenience store and seen a homemade poster advertising a spaghetti supper to raise money to help pay the bills for some kid who has cancer?”

“Very often. They’re not as frequent as they used to be, but I see them.”

“The Agnes Cooper Foundation also supports other things, but sometimes those people find they hold a really profitable spaghetti supper. We investigate those things, of course, but once in a while there’s an angel wearing sunglasses who drops a thick envelope of cash into the donation can.”

They all laughed at that. “It’s where the money from selling my nickels goes. The sad part about it, sir,” Ann said, “Is that I’ve never been around when they get around to counting the money in the donation cans. I can’t help but think I’ve set off a heart attack or two, but it’s fun to imagine it.”

“All right, I guess that’s settled too,” Steve told them, “but it just happened to strike me right now that maybe we don’t want to be in a big hurry about it. I should let Melanie know it’s going to happen when the time comes, but the thought crosses my mind that a decent attorney might be able to make a case for Bobby being innocent by reason of temporary insanity. It wouldn’t surprise me if any self-respecting juror is going to understand why he did what he did when they see the iron scar on her back.”

“You’re probably right, sir,” Ann replied. “I think we ought to at least wait until we consult with Bobby’s attorneys before trying to get it fixed.”

“I don’t think she’ll mind waiting if she knows it may help her get Bobby out of prison,” Steve said thoughtfully. “I’ve had a couple other ideas, but those are the critical ones for now. I guess the logical thing for me to do is to go back over to the dealership and let Melanie know that there’s help on the way. I just hope she doesn’t kiss me to death when she finds out.”

“She’d better not, sir,” Ann laughed. “Otherwise she’ll have to deal with Ann the Vampire.”

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