Chapter 8
Tess
Five minutes after I opened the shop, a masked man walked in and tried to rob me.
I knew I should have stayed in bed.
He shoved something approximately gun-barrel shaped in his pocket toward me. “Hand over the goods, and nobody gets hurt.”
Having faced down a lot worse over the past year, I didn’t freak out. Instead, I looked slowly and deliberately around my empty shop. “Nobody? There’s just you and me here. So, do you mean I won’t get hurt? Or that you might hurt yourself?”
“What?” The mask covered the lower part of his face, but his distinctive blue-green eyes narrowed as he tried to puzzle that out. Since I’d known Joe Bob for most of my life, I knew this could take a while, and I didn’t want this … whatever this was … to still be happening when any customers walked in.
I put my hands on my hips. “Joe Bob Turner, what is your mama going to say when I tell her about this at church?”
“I’m not me! I mean, him!”
With two fingers, I pointed at my eyes and then at his. “Should have worn sunglasses, Joe Bob. Your eyes will give you away every time with that gorgeous color.”
He hesitated, but then pulled the mask down. “Aw, Tess. I knew I’d forget something. But you really think my eyes are gorgeous?”
“Really? That’s what you think is important? Why in the world would you come in here like that? What if Eleanor or, worse, my new employee had been here? You’d have scared Tina to death! And Eleanor probably would have shot you, since I know that’s not a gun in your coat pocket.”
He sheepishly pulled out a Twinkie.
Great. I was almost robbed by a snack cake.
“Joe Bob? You’d better try to give me one good reason not to call Sheriff Gonzalez right now to arrest you.”
“Aw, Tess. Don’t do that. I’m really sorry. I was desperate.” He ran a hand through his thick, wavy blond hair. The man was pretty enough to be a model on one of those man-of-the-month calendars, but he wasn’t—as Uncle Mike had said once or twice—the sharpest tool in the shed.
I was working my way up to a good mad, though. What right did he have to pull this stunt in my shop? Another thought crossed my mind, and I gasped.
“Joe Bob! You have no idea how lucky you are. If Jack had been here …”
Joe Bob turned so pale, I thought he might pass out. “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Tess, please, please don’t tell Jack. I swear I’ll do anything. I’ll … I’ll clean your shop for a month!”
I sighed. “I can clean my shop. How about you just explain why you did this, and I’ll decide what to do after that?”
A group of Orlando tourists came in just then, all of them sunburned and wearing theme park T-shirts and funny hats.
I pointed at Joe Bob. “You. Sit right there on that stool until I have time to deal with you.”
He rushed right over and plopped his butt on the stool, the fear of Jack probably uppermost on his mind.
The group spent about twenty minutes—and three hundred dollars—in my shop. After they walked out the door, I turned to Joe Bob.
“All right. Spill.” I was a little worried that he’d had time to think up a good story, but not horribly so. This was Joe Bob, after all.
He hunched over on the stool and clasped his hands between his knees. “My girl said she’d leave me if I didn’t give her an engagement ring by next Saturday.”
“Are you still dating Donna?” Donna Portnoy was a very nice woman. She’d been married to a pro golfer, but it hadn’t worked out because he traveled all the time. After the divorce a couple of years before, she’d moved home to Dead End with her young son. I seemed to remember that she worked as a medical transcriptionist and volunteered at the elementary school.
I wasn’t sure what she saw in Joe Bob, beyond his good looks. On the other hand, when he wasn’t embarking on a life of crime, he was a nice guy who’d stay home with her instead of traveling the world playing the most boring sport in the history of sports.
I forced my mind back to the criminal at hand. “You couldn’t just come in and buy a ring? Joe Bob, you know I would have worked with you on a price.”
He ducked his head, the picture of abject remorse, like Pickles when she got caught peeing on the rug. “I know. I didn’t want you to think I was a loser.”
“But it’s okay if I think you’re a criminal?”
“I’m so sorry, Tess. I wasted most of my paycheck playing online poker, trying to make enough to buy a ring. And then this morning, Donna kicked me out and said I was disrespecting her since we’d been dating for more than a year and I still hadn’t proposed.”
That caught me off guard. Was there a time limit? Jack and I hadn’t been officially dating for a year, but … Did I even want to get married? What if … I suddenly realized Joe Bob was talking to me.
“What?”
“I said, would you please be willing to forgive this as temporary lovestruck-ness? I’ll do anything. You can have the Twinkie, too.”
He looked so miserable that I was tempted to tell him everything was okay, but then he wouldn’t learn anything.
“Argh!” I smacked myself in the forehead. Now I was hearing Uncle Mike’s life lessons in my brain.
Uncle Mike was usually right about life lessons, though.
“Okay,” I said, deciding. We needed to get this over with before customers showed up. “Here’s what we’re going to do. First, do you really love Donna? I mean, really, really love her and her son? And keep in mind that she will not want to marry a criminal.”
He jumped up from the stool and nodded. “I love her more than I’ve ever loved anybody in my life, Tess. And I’d die for that little boy.”
Since Joe Bob was such a terrible liar (and thief), the opposite was true, too. His sincerity shone in his face and voice loud and clear.
“All right. Here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to write a statement about what you tried to do today, and you’re going to sign it. I’ll stick it in my vault and forget about it. Forever.”
“Oh, Tess, you’re the best?—”
“Hold on. Forever, unless—and this is a big unless—you ever pull anything like this again. If you do, I’ll give the paper to the sheriff, and you’ll be in big trouble.”
“Like double jeopardy,” he said in an awed tone.
“Yes, exactly like double jeopardy.”
It was nothing like double jeopardy, but whatever scared him straight, so to speak.
“Do you agree?”
He did.
We put the plan in place. Luckily, it was slow for a Saturday, so we weren’t interrupted. After I put the signed statement in my cash register drawer, Joe Bob shoved his hands in his pockets.
“I guess I should go now?”
I argued with myself for a good minute before sighing and shaking my head. “How about we look at engagement rings, instead? I can set you up with a payment plan.”
The pure joy on his face made up for everything else. He even rushed at me with his arms out, like he wanted to hug me, before he skidded to a stop.
“Sorry, Tess! Sorry. I won’t touch you. I know better.”
“No worries. Now, does Donna prefer silver or gold?”
We spent an enjoyable quarter of an hour picking out Donna’s engagement ring, and I even threw in a magically enhanced toy truck that drove itself around the room for an hour every morning for her little boy. He signed all the paperwork, gave me a down payment, and gleefully headed off to his job at the Dead End Feed Store, saved from his future as a terrible criminal and potential jailbird.
On balance, I felt pretty good about it. Even smug.
Until Jack called and said he was at the Riverton sheriff’s office, where they’d just arrested Brenda for suspected murder.