Twenty-Eight
BURT HAS ARRIVED on the scene with an older cop, Case Miller, who manages to get the Crockett boys under control without having to pull his service weapon on them, even as they keep shouting at me across Rowdy’s about payback.
Burt finally walks over to them himself and points out to both Roof and Lynyrd that the last thing either one of them wants is for their father to be forced to come bail them out.
Or be told that Silas Tucker whupped both of their asses with just one good arm.
“Why shouldn’t somebody have to bail his ass out?” Roof yells across the bar, pointing past Burt and Case at me. “He started it.”
“And I hear you were the one swinging that stick like a Louisville Slugger,” Burt says.
As Case Miller is finally walking the two Crocketts outside, I can’t resist calling over to say, “You boys drive home safely, hear?”
Burt, who I’ve never once heard cuss in front of a lady, turns around to me then and says, “Will you please shut the fuck up?”
Vince has already said he’ll drive Abby home. Before they leave, she tells me to call her tomorrow, or else. If not sooner.
“Already can’t wait to see what our next date night will be like,” she says.
When they’re gone, it’s just Burt and me sitting at the table. He doesn’t say anything right away, just makes me wait, almost cop-style, like we’re in some interrogation room.
Finally, he says this: “I love you like a brother. We both know that. And we both know how much my wife loves you. But I heard what happened at the high school and have to tell you now that you can’t go around beating up the whole town.
” He sighs and shakes his head, as if his day has been even longer than mine.
“And there’s one other thing you need to keep in mind.
I am your friend and always will be. But Nash Hader is not.
You probably got off easy with him today. ”
“Everybody who caught a beating today deserved it, and you know it, Burt,” I say.
“I do know it,” he says. “But unfortunately, buddy, that’s not the way the law works. Mine or Sheriff Hader’s.”
“If either one of the Crocketts had talked to Taylor the way they talked to Abby, or put a hand to her, you would have thrown them through the front window of this place,” I say.
He shakes his head.
“They wouldn’t have dared,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have done anything if they had, because not only do I like this job, I need it. Tay and I both need it. And while it may surprise you, I’m pretty damn good at it around covering your ass.”
“I’d do the same for you.”
“I know you would,” he says.
There are still a few people left in Rowdy’s, but the place has mostly cleared out since my fight with Roof and Lynyrd. I can hear Emmylou singing “One Big Love.”
“You need a ride home?” he asks, nodding at the pitcher of beer.
I shake my head. “Didn’t even finish one glass before all the fun started.”
“Define fun,” Burt says.
We bump each other some fist and he leaves. I take one more sip of beer, walk over and leave a fifty for Earl on the bar, and apologize to him one final time.
I’m just getting behind the wheel when I hear the blast of a shotgun, what I know right away is a 12-gauge double-barrel from all the times my father used to take me duck hunting, just as what has to be bird shot explodes against the middle of the windshield, the shattered glass hitting me in the face.
I know enough to realize that if it had been buckshot or a slug, I’d be dead behind the wheel.
But I’m not thinking now, despite what’s just happened—I’m reacting, telling myself I’m not going to be a sitting duck, staying as low as I can as I put the truck into gear and drive right the hell at where I think the shots had to have come from.
I press hard on the horn as I do, the shattered windshield not slowing what the old man used to call the “giddy up” in his F-150 even a little bit.
The horn is still blaring like I’m sounding a siren of my own as I think something I’ve thought a lot in my life.
Game on.