Fat Assassins (23 page)

I was just about to suggest we leave when Ulyysa yelped and pointed.

“JMJ! Is that Tater?” She said gesturing towards the garden section as a riding lawnmower came cruising through the gate.

I looked at the turbaned driver in hammer pants and black gloves. “Yup. That’s Tater! That red flannel he’s wearing on his head is the one I gave him last Christmas! He’s looks like a dang terrorist!”

“What the hell is he dragging behind that mower?”

“I think that’s a cart full of our stuff!”

We both slunk down in the seat and readjusted our Grouch glasses and mustaches. Ulyssa crossed herself and started praying to Saint Eustace.

“Saint Eustace?” I asked.

“Patron Saint of Difficult Situations.” I would never tell her, but sometimes she’s the spitting image of her mother.

“Why haven’t you been praying to him the whole time?” My voice was sharper than I had intended. The dang mullet wig was making my head sweaty and itchy and the abrasive polyester pants were irritating my thighs.

She was riveted by the situation and ignored my hateful attitude. “What the hell is he thinking?! He’s dressed like a terrorist dragging bomb materials out of Home Depot on a mower! This is his great plan? Seriously? That thing has a top speed of 10MPH and we’re at least ten miles from Nitro! We’re going to jail!” Ulyssa shifted into reverse and hit the accelerator to back out of the parking space. A thud and scrapping metal made her jump and slam on the brakes.

“Crud! I forgot how dang long the truck bed is on this thing, I bet I hit a freaking shopping cart. Cornnut is gonna kill us for scratching his car. Lazy people. Don’t know how to put their carts away!”

We looked up at Tater, who was slowly making his way down Liberty Park Drive. “At least we don’t have to worry about him getting too far away.” I said.

We hopped out of the car and walked around the back to clear the path. A hoverround scooter was laying on it’s side with Roberta Smith still stuck in the seat.

How are we gonna get out of this one?

Roberta started yelling at us not giving us much time to formulate a game plan.

“I should have known you wuz illegals! First you take my social security and now you’re running me over.” 

We recoiled with genuine confusion. 

“Do you even speaka da English?” She pried herself out of the cart and pushed herself to her feet using her cane. “I want to see your licenseo and el insuranceo. You’ll pay dinero for my scooter or I’ll have you arrested.”

“Lo siento, senorita!” I said, wishing I would had listened more in ninth grade Spanish.

“What does that mean? What did you just say to me?” She puffed up.

“Um. Uno taquito, dos chalupas y bell grande!” Ulyssa added.

Roberta stared back and forth between us. “If you’re in America, you need to speak American. You dang communists!”

We lost sight of the mower.

“No English!” I set the hoverround back on all four wheels, shoving it aside to clear a path for the car. Ulyssa ran back to the driver’s side and started the car.

“Don’t touch that! You’re messing with a crime scene!” She started hitting me with her cane.

“Ouch-o!” I yelped. She kept hitting me with the cane, but I stood my ground and waved my hands to help Ulyssa back it out of the parking spot.

“Adios!” I hopped in the passenger seat as Ulyssa maneuvered around a fuming Roberta.

She was screaming at us. “You cain’t just leave! That’s hit and run!”

“Whew! I’m gonna have bruises all over my body! She was beating the hell outta me! These are great disguises though! I’m glad she didn’t recognize us.” I glanced over at Ulyssa and stopped talking.

“What?” She followed my gaze out the window. “You have got to be kidding me!” Roberta was pacing her hoverround with our car as we made our way down the street.

Dang, those things are fast.

Pop! Pop! We both jumped as Roberta started beating the car with her cane.

She was driving the cart with one hand and using the other hand to wield her cane like a battering ram.

“She’s freaking crazy! How are we going to get rid of her?” Ulyssa asked.

I watched Tater make a right turn half a mile in front of us and hoped we might be able to shake her if we took the same turn quickly.

“Take that turn without slowing down.” I said.

Ulyssa checked for traffic before swinging the El Camino right. Roberta cornered the scooter on two wheels. It seems like my plan had the opposite effect on her. She started crashing her hoverround into the El Camino trying to run us off the road.

Thudunk!

Thudunk!

“What are we gonna do? She won’t go away?” We maintained a safe distance from Tater.

“We could ram back.” Ulyssa offered, flexing her hands on the steering wheel.

“That could hurt her!” I protested.

“I’m all out of non-violent options. What’s your idea?” We inhaled sharply when a police cruiser pull out from a side street and turn right to follow Tater. The flashing red and blue lights confirmed that Tater had been busted.

“I think we’re going to have to leave Tater on his own.” Ulyssa decided.

“We’re not going to be able to shake her and we’re getting too close. If that cop looks in the rearview mirror - we’re finished!”

Thudunk!

Thudunk!

“Hold on!” Ulyssa hit the brakes and the hoverround flew past us. Roberta looked over her shoulder, squinted at us and laid down over the hoverround steering handles like she was on a sport bike. All this convoy needs is a marching band and it'd be the Nitro Christmas parade.

“Oh shit! She’s going to try to catch the cops!” I yelled. “Drive! Ulyssa! Drive!”

Ulyssa threw the car into reverse and backed down the road. I braced myself against the dashboard hoping for an empty road. At the first opportunity, she spun the car around and sped down the road barely keeping all four wheels on the ground as she squealed around the turns. She was driving so fast that when she hit the 3rd street bridge the car went airborne. She accidentally smacked the horn midflight, so La Cucaracha was blaring when we landed in Nitro. Our trip took eight minutes flat.

Ulyssa pulled the El Camino into the dirt lot next to the Pinto. We had parked it near the old electric station because it was a good place to switch vehicles and don our disguises without being noticed. We changed out of our disguises and tossed them in the truck bed of the El Camino. We started driving a loop between the two main bridges into town looking for Tater. We were fourty-five minutes into our search and rescue efforts when we finally spotted him limping along the road.

“Hey Tater!” I stopped the truck next to him.

He looked like he’d been crying. “Boy am I glad to see y’all!”

“You okay? Why are you limping?”

He pulled the PVC piping and the rest of the items from his pants and shoved them inside the Pinto.

“Yeah. I’m okay. I didn’t think I wuz gonna get away, so I started praying real hard.” He sniffed.

“Somebody musta heard my prayers and sent that crazy, old woman on the scooter to distract the police.”

“I don’t know if that was divine intervention…” I started, but he just kept talking.

“I ain’t led a Christian life up to now, but I’m back in church first thing Sunday.”

“That’s good Tater.” I hoped his newfound religion would keep him out of trouble for a while. “Thank you for doing this. We’re even now.”

“Do you want us to drop you off at the house?” Ulyssa asked.

“Nah. Would you mind dropping me off at Buck’s. I need a drink.”

“I thought you were turning over a new leaf.” I asked.

“Don’t judge me. Jesus drank wine.”

We dropped him at the front door of Buck’s.

“See ya later, cuz!”

Some small part of me felt guilty about his traumatic experience, but mostly it seemed fair since he’d given me that dang lottery ticket. But we’re square now.

Ulyssa drove us back over to the deserted parking lot and positioned the Pinto where we could use the headlights from both cars to work on the bomb. We pulled the stolen goods out of the Pinto and Ulyssa handed me the directions. “I’m the scientist. I’ll put everything together. You read me the directions.”

“Step one - mix the peroxide and the acetone together.” Ulyssa repeated the directions as she poured the peroxide into the giant paint bucket and opened the nail polish remover.

I scanned the papers while she screwed the lid back on the nail polish remover.

“Did you know that this type of bomb is known as the ‘Mother of Satan’ bomb cause it’s highly unstable.”

She startled. “What?”

“Yeah. Apparently it’s real easy to set it off with friction or sparks.”

“Damn! I coulda just blown us up! How are we gonna do this where it doesn’t kill us.”

“I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t do this. It seems pretty dangerous.” I was losing confidence in this plan.

Since it's her plan, Ulyssa was determined to see it succeed. “What else does it say we need to do?”

“It says we need to connect the detonator. That’s what should set off the explosion.”

Ulyssa picked up the small circuit board. “So I guess that’s what this is for…?

What else does it say?”

“It says we should put the mixture in a stable container.” I held up the short, round pipe and stared at Ulyssa through hollow center. “This doesn’t look very stable. It kinda looks like there’s fiberglass on the inside.”

“Grrrr! It shouldn’t be this hard.” She said looking at all the materials strewn on the ground. “Fine let’s put all the crap back in the bucket. We’re going to have to come up with another way to kill Marcus!”

The peroxide splashed as we dumped the circuit board, fiberglass piping, and everything into the bucket. Ulyssa put the nail polish remover in her pocket. “We can use this later, plus I don’t want to take a chance of it leaking into the peroxide and killing us.”

“We just gonna leave this sitting here?”

“Let’s hide it back here behind the electric grid box thingy.” Ulyssa grabbed the bucket and hid it behind a large grey box. “This place is deserted, so hopefully nobody finds it and ties it to the Home Depot robbery.” We removed our gloves. “Don’t want to leave any DNA laying around. Let’s put these with our disguises in the El Camino. We’ll come back and pick up the car in a few days when things have cooled off a bit.” 

“Shasta! Shasta! Wake up!” Ulyssa shook me. “We’re not going to jail anymore. We’re going to prison. We’re not buff enough to go to prison. We need to start working out or get tattoos. We need to look tough.” 

I staggered out of bed, smoothing down my curls. “I don’t understand. Make us some mochas. I’ll be in the living room in a minute. I have to go to the bathroom.”

When I walked into the living room, she stopped doing pushups and jumped up. “Are there women in San Quentin? Cause that’s where they’re gonna send us!”

I stared past her at the two blended mochas sitting on the coffee table. I grabbed one and sat down on the couch. “Stop being dramatic. We’re not going to prison.”

“Oh, yes we are. A Nitro electrical plant was blown up this morning!” I choked on the icy coffee. “What?”

“It was destroyed when a homemade bomb detonated nearby.” She turned up the TV volume and I watched in horror as the local police stretched yellow tape around the scene. Flames had engulfed an elongated metal shape.

“Shit! The El Camino! We gotta go see Cornnut!” I jumped off the couch still holding my coffee.

“The El Camino!” Ulyssa slipped on her shoes, then looked at me. “Um. You gonna wear your Hello Kitty pajamas over there?”

“We don’t have time for fashion. Besides it’s Cornnut!” 

Cornnut was fishing for tourists when we stopped by his house, so we drove the Sidekick down the dirt road and parked it near the hidden tow truck. He was sitting on the cooler by himself today.

“Hey Cornnut! How’s it going?”

“Not too bad girls. Just got word that a big fish is heading this way. Driving one of those Suburbans. Should be worth a pretty penny to pull that thing outta the lake.” He winked at us. “Y’all done with the El Camino?”

“That’s what we need to talk to you about….” Ulyssa started.

“Hold that thought! We got a live one. Try to act natural!” A giant, black Suburban came tearing down the road and drove straight into the lake.

“C’mon girls! Help me out!” Ulyssa just stood on the bank staring as I followed him into the water. He opened the driver door and I waded around to help the passenger.

I swung the door open and shoved the airbag towards the dashboard. “You okay?”

A pair of intense blue eyes swiveled towards me. “Yeah. I’m okay.” He struggled to step out of the truck and stumbled when he tried to walk through the water.

“Whoa. You sure you’re okay?”

He groaned and slid an arm around my shoulder to keep his balance while I guided him around the back of the truck out of the lake. Cornnut was standing on the bank with Ulyssa and the driver.

“We’ve only been in town ten minutes and you’re already picking up the ladies, Agent McAllister?”

Agent?

I gave him a quick inspection. Confident posture, dark blue suit and closely shorn haircut.