Wrong Side of the Briar Patch 17/27
Title: Wrong Side of the Briar Patch
Author: NDF/TS Blue
Fandom: Dukes
Rating: PG, maybe. It's not quite all sunshine and roses, anyway.
Summary: It's a summer of freedom and hardship, of love and calamities. Daisy and Bo have just graduated into adulthood and Luke is back from war. It ought to be the best time of their lives, but one disaster follows another. Who would want the Dukes hurt? Prequel, gen.
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Seventeen: Cuffed and Stuffed
July 30, 1974
Well. He'd be a horny toad. It was almost enough to make a man seek out the immediate presence of one Jefferson Davis Hogg and deliver the good news. (Almost, not quite. He figured tomorrow would be soon enough to see the man. Besides, there was nothing wrong with taking a little time to figure out how to make himself look good in the telling of the news.)
His rookie deputy had caught the Duke boys, red handed, breaking and entering (and otherwise sullying) the courthouse.
"We ain't broke nothing," Bo Duke had insisted from between the bars.
"My hands ain't red," Luke had added, showing his palms.
But it didn't matter how much they sassed, those sweaty sodbusters were caged. Right there in the upstairs cell in the squad room. And Enos Strate, who was standing far too close to Rosco while doing his own heavy perspiring, had put them in there. All by himself.
(But see, it wouldn't do to tell it to Hogg quite that way. Maybe something more along the lines of how Rosco had hired and trained the kid that had done the arresting.)
At first Rosco had been calling Enos all manner of names for having tracked him down, off-duty, at his mother's dinner table (which was serving as more of a late-night-snack table at the time) to say he needed help back at the courthouse. But the scolding had been Enos' own fault. He had been yammering on about possums and gumbushes and squealing like he was snake-bit and frothing at the mouth. It took a while to find the patience to tell him to just calm down, and then it took Enos a while to actually do it, and then there were those words: Bo and Luke, records office, sneaking around, caught them, locked them up.
The Duke boys had been cuffed and stuffed.
Enos' first arrest, and Rosco hadn't gotten that far along in training him. But by now it was mighty close to midnight and he didn't want to spend all night here at the courthouse, teaching the boy the ropes.
(Needed some sleep so he could figure out exactly how to express tonight's events to J.D. Hogg. Maybe he'd just announce that the sheriff's department had made the prize bust and leave out the particulars.)
"Just fill out the form," he was explaining to Enos, pointing at the typewriter with the stack of triplicate forms next to it. Could be faulty advice when the boy was known to overthink that kind of thing. Wanting to write words where ten-codes would do fine, but if Rosco went over it with him, line by line, and argued the merits of the precise words, he'd be getting home to bed sometime next week. "I've already got their fingerprints," and Luke Duke's sarcastic eyebrow found that quite interesting. But he did, he even had fairly recent fingerprints of both boys, having arrested them earlier this month. "And their pictures," he added, couldn't help but let out a little kyu of a giggle after that. Oh, telling Hogg about this was going to be fun. Enos sighed out whatever nerves or regrets he had, and headed over to the desk to do as he was told.
(Shoot, he might as well go straight out for saying he'd been responsible for the bust. J.D. was a busy man who didn't care about picayune details anyway.)
"What about our phone call?" Luke Duke jumped right on in. Where he wasn't invited, but wasn't that just like a Duke?
"Yeah, we're entitled to one phone call," Bo echoed, and that was just like a Duke, too.
Enos quit right in the middle of rolling the incident form into the typewriter. It was amazing that the boy had managed to catch those Dukes, honestly. And made up his mind to herd them up the stairs and into the jail at gunpoint when he was so conflicted about everything that had happened since. Prone to being swayed by the prisoners' complaints and orders - like they had any right to be telling a lawman what to do under the current circumstances - and unsure of himself.
"You process them first, Enos, then you let them make that call." Rosco went looking for his hat, then remembered he hadn't come with one. He wasn't in uniform because he wasn't on duty, and he didn't plan on being here any longer than he already had been. The taste of his mama's chocolate cake was old and nearly rancid on his tongue; he needed to get back and cut himself a slice of the hair of the dog.
"Yes, sir," Enos answered, licking his lips in the sort of nervous gesture that just wasn't befitting an officer of the law. The kid was apparently good enough to bring in the Dukes, but Rosco wasn't entirely sure he was good enough to keep them.
All the same. That cake wouldn't eat itself. (If he wasn't quick about it, Lulu would most likely eat it for him.) Rosco was not planning to stay here tonight.
"You process them," Rosco repeated, giving up on finding the hat he didn't have and leaning over to the barren desk that used to belong to Deputy Miller before the previous round of deputies had been canned, and wrapping his hand around the cold plastic of the telephone there. It was heavy and let out a little jingle of protest when he hefted it, but the cord was plenty long, so he moved it over to one of the rolling chairs. "Then you keep them in there and you roll this phone right up to them so they can make their call. From behind them bars Enos, not in front."
"Rosco," Bo protested, or maybe Luke. He wasn't looking at them because he was watching Enos' face for acknowledgement that he's been understood. Got a nod, but those wrinkles on the deputy's forehead didn't seem too sure.
"All right, Sheriff," sounded unsure as the wrinkles looked. The lip biting that followed was even less sure than that.
"You keep your eye on them all night, and don't you even go near their cell." Because Dukes were sneaky. And long-armed, and if Enos got too close, they'd probably grab him. Maybe go for his guns (no, they wouldn't do that, they were sneaky but not mean or dangerous - not mostly, anyway) or his keys or his handcuffs, and make a mess of this whole thing.
"Yes, sir." Oh, but those eyes were near as big as dinner plates. "I just reckon their family's worried about them. Ain't it okay if I let them make their phone call first?"
Hadn't they already been over this? He'd been perfectly clear in his instructions. And his mama's cake was sweet and delicious and probably almost gone by now.
"No, it ain't okay if you let them make their phone call first. Enos," it was late, his eyes were sore and tired, he was in jeans and a flannel shirt when all he wanted was to be in pajamas. "Just do what I said." He shuffled over to the typewriter desk and cranked the form in a little more, just to make his point clear.
He'd already told J.D. Hogg what Enos had seen when he was watching over the Duke farm a couple of days back - the odd comings and goings. Oh, he'd left Enos' name out of the discussion. Just said it all careful-like about what had been seen and when and where, and let J.D. draw his own conclusions about who had done the seeing. Not that it had mattered, because there were no congratulations forthcoming. Just a lot of 'I told you sos' and smugness, followed by questions about what, exactly, he planned to do about it. Rosco only had until morning to figure out exactly how to report the Duke boys' arrest so that it favored him most. He needed to get back to his mother's place and fill his belly and snooze so he could think right.
"I'll be back by eight, Enos. You just do what I said and you don't take your eyes off them all night long. Don't let them hoodwink you."
"Yes, sir," the deputy said. Rosco checked for his hat again (remembered that it wasn't here again) and headed toward the door, while Enos settled himself on the squeaky chair and got serious about doing his job. Forehead shiny and wrinkled, he pounded down a key, then looked up at the jail cell. Bead of sweat on his temple that he wiped away. Pounded down another key and looked again.
Because he was an earnest boy with clear instructions and he was going to follow them to the letter.
July 31, 1974
In her dream, Enos was there, smiling at her. Beyond the curve of his cheek, there was green. Maybe the grass in the middle of Hazzard Square or maybe down by the pond. She had a sense of floating, so maybe they were in a boat, and the green was the trees reflecting on the water's surface. Didn't matter, Enos was there.
It was a good dream, one where everything felt right. Enos was in that plaid shirt she'd first seen him in back in the high school parking lot, the one that pulled out all the autumn-like flecks of color in his eyes and left them warm and gentle. His head was tipped to the side, his grin was loose and happy, and she got ready to be kissed. But there was something in his hand, something red, something he was trying to give her. A rose, maybe? But not, she saw when his hand came closer, on a stem. How sweet, she thought, no thorns. Except it kept getting closer, like he was going to mash it into her face, and then she realized it was a strawberry. Out of season, and where had he gotten it? But it was a good dream, so it didn't matter. The only important thing was that Enos had found it for her, was offering it to her. Was about to put it right into her mouth when: Crack!
That was a problem; boats shouldn't crack. Or thud, or rock, sway, flip over fast enough to make her dizzy. Stomach churning, under the water, the layer of lily pads greener than the green trees, sinking in the warm liquid and though she knew she shouldn't, she sucked in a breath…
"Boys!" was what finally shook her from the green depths of her sleep into the pitch-black of her bedroom. Jesse hollering - hollering? Into the night - for Bo and Luke. Which meant trouble, meant there was some reason he needed his young, strong nephews, and she was on her feet. Running, barking her shin on a hard surface, stumbling, hand down for balance, catching on something soft and and warm.
"Oof," someone said. (Alice, that was Alice. Alice in Daisy's bed, she'd tripped over her own bed because there were two guests staying there while she'd been on the floor on a pile of blankets and Bo's sleeping bag. Which meant the door was left, not right.)
"Uncle Jesse?" she called. She'd meant to be out there by now, meant to be helping him, but she'd gotten lost in her own room.
"Land sakes, child," came a scold in a low rasp. "You holler loud enough to wake the dead."
Or just the guests, which was rude, but she couldn't care a whole lot; just needed to get her foot untangled from the blanket it was caught in, needed to get turned around and headed for the door.
"Git!" came from the living room or the kitchen, and she quit worrying about the bed, about Alice or Molly (and the creaking springs went to prove that they were sitting up or rolling off or something, anyway), her barked shin or the blanket that was doing its best to trip her. She shoved herself forward, to her door, pulled it open. Hollered in frustration when it smacked into her foot, went through it.
Hallway, just as dark as her bedroom. Hands out to find the walls, then there was a flash, and blam!
"Uncle Jesse?" That was his old flintlock, had to be. If it wasn't it was something else, something worse, some other firearm in someone else's hands-
Blam!
Maudine, off in her temporary home, whinnied a complaint about the noise.
"Git!" hollered again went to prove that even if someone was shooting at Uncle Jesse, he was still alive.
Hand feeling along the wall, running toward the sound until she came to the living room with its frilly curtains and the light of an almost full moon shining through. From there to the gun-powdery kitchen in no time at all.
"Uncle Jesse!" He was there, on his feet, the white of his hair and his long nightshirt showing in the moonlight. "What is it?"
"Some varmints in the kitchen," he growled, staring out through the open door, over the porch and off toward the paddock and the fields beyond. Holding his gun and Daisy sheltered herself behind his warm solidness, peering around his width to see what he was looking at. "Two legged varmints," he added. "Reckon they won't be back soon."
No, they were running off. Two of them, as far as Daisy could see. Men, she figured, from their shapes and sizes, and one of them was limping. Or running funny, anyway, one leg turning at an odd angle as he went.
"Did you shoot him?"
Her uncle turned then, away from the scampering burglars and back to her. "No, I didn't shoot him. I wasn't even aiming at them." He put the safety lock on the rifle, stood it on its butt by the door.
"What's going on?" That was Alice, coming through the arch from the living room. Yawning and scratching at her straw-like hair. Like she thought maybe Jesse and Daisy were snacking on warm milk and cookies and forgot to invite her. Molly was behind her, a little more alert.
"What happened, Jess?"
Her uncle waved his hand through the air in frustration. "Some dang fools thought they'd ransack our kitchen, is all."
Daisy looked around. Nothing but moonlight to see by, but she could still tell that the kitchen table was shoved out of position, one of the chairs was on its side and another was missing altogether.
"They steal anything?" Molly asked.
The whites of Jesse's eyes gleamed in the moon's glow - he was probably rolling them in frustration. "Ain't much of nothing to steal," he scolded. "I reckon you know that as well as I do."
Still, Daisy figured it would be a good idea to turn on the lights and get a better look. She started to cross the kitchen, and then remembered the word that had interrupted her dreams, and the reason she was even awake.
"Where's Bo and Luke?" They'd gone out before she'd gone to bed, but they should have been home by now, shouldn't they? What time was it anyway?
"Boys!" Jesse hollered, the same as he had earlier. Started shuffling in his deceptively quick way toward the opening to the living room, calling the two of them by name.
That was when the phone rang.
"Enos," Luke was saying, in that voice: Marine sergeant commanding his troops. "We got a right to make that phone call before either one of us dies of old age." Or before they melted into a puddle in the hot, airless cell.
"I know that, Luke, and I promise, I'll let you make it as soon as I do what the sheriff said." Head down in serious concentration, then: peck! He found his next letter.
Bo wasn't too sure why Luke was in such an all-fired hurry to rouse their ill-tempered uncle from his sleep, anyway. They would be spending the night here one way or the other, and getting yelled at could wait until morning, as far as he was concerned. Heck, it could all wait, because after the yelling came the whipping, and even if he was just about eighteen and too old to be whipped now, Bo figured Jesse might not see it that way.
He wondered whether he'd get a last meal, first. The cell smelled vaguely of old pizza, and he figured maybe he'd prevail upon Enos to go find them one. Seemed unlikely to work, when Enos would have to go all the way to Atlanta to find a pizza at this hour, and he'd been quite earnestly heeding Rosco's instructions about never taking his eyes off the jail cell.
"Almost done," Enos promised, staring at the keys in front of him, tongue at the corner of his mouth as he found the one he wanted, then pounded it down with an echoing peck! Luke sat there the whole time on the end of the cot, his hands wrapped around the bars in anticipation. Bo was content to sit behind him, at a ninety-degree angle, and leaning back against the wall. Thinking.
Last time they'd been here, it hadn't been their faults. This time-
"Done," Enos, announced, rolling the triplicate form out of the typewriter with a flourish of glee. He got up with a bounce, put the form in a basket on one of the desks, then hustled over to the chair on which Rosco had left the phone. As if he wasn't tired, and he should be. It had to be almost two in the morning. "But, Luke, Bo, can't you tell me why you done it?" All the joy of having completed his report sagged out of him, his forehead wrinkled around his confused eyebrows. "I mean…"
"Enos," Luke was out of patience. Heck, patience was a dim memory from 1965, as far as Luke was concerned. Now he was fully on his way to surly, mean, dangerous. "We ain't saying nothing to you without our lawyer present."
This time they were guilty of exactly what they were being charged with.
"But, Luke, we was-" raised together. That's where Enos was going; he'd been there a few times tonight already. Not understanding how two boys raised so right could go so wrong. (Bo mostly blamed Luke.)
"And now you're a lawman."
Enos sighed, looked away. Then he looked back, offered up a brave nod that was a lot closer to sad. Steely breath, and he shoved the chair forward toward the bars, stepping away as though he could give them privacy when he was sworn to watch them every second. Luke ignored their friend's token gesture and grabbed the phone like it was a morsel of food after a forty day famine. Put the handset up to his ear, then pulled it slightly away.
"Get over here, Bo."
Right, that was how it worked. They faced trouble shoulder to shoulder (even if it was mostly Luke's fault, most of the time) and took their lumps together. So he slid closer. Maybe an eighth of an inch, but he was closer.
Luke snorted. "He ain't going to whip you through the phone," his courageous cousin informed him, but Bo was content exactly where he was, so he just shrugged, and Luke dialed zero. A seemingly endless series of clicks as the rotary went around, a short discussion with the night operator, Gussie, and then he was being put through. Bo might have been mistaken, but he thought Luke was just the slightest bit pale, and his Adam's apple bobbed in anticipation of the call getting answered.
But even from where he was, a clear foot away, Bo could hear that it was Daisy who answered the phone, and on the first ring, too. Luke asked her to put Jesse on, but she started hollering instead. Which made Luke stop holding the phone out and put it right up to his ear, effectively cutting Bo off from hearing. Which he ought to be grateful for, but-
"Daisy, Daisy, whoa. Slow down. You what?" But Luke was getting loud. Or worked up, and Luke almost never got worked up. "Who? What do you mean you don't-" Something was wrong, something worse than them being in jail. Luke's shoulders were hunched with tense muscle. "Is everyone all right?" Now that was just a plain old bad question. Bo leaned closer.
"Luke?" he said. "What's going on?" But he got waved off like he didn't matter, or his question wasn't important, when it dang well was.
Even Enos knew that. Just look at how he'd reversed his direction to come close to the bars, how he was studying and fussing with his own fingers and not even pretending to be doing anything other than what he was doing: eavesdropping on Luke's call.
Bo shuffled close enough to feel Luke's heat, but his cousin didn't offer to let him listen in. All he could hear was the pitch of Daisy's voice, which was two shades past upset and well-nigh on towards hysterical.
"Me and Bo's-we can't come home right now… no, Daisy, I ain't… just… we'll be there as soon as we can be… don't… Daisy! Daisy?" Luke pulled the receiver away from his ear and looked at it like he could see down through the lines all the way back to home. "She hung up," he said with some measure of amazement. As if Luke Duke had never been hung up on by a girl before, but Bo knew full well that he had, more than a few times.
"Enos," Bo said, because he didn't know what Daisy had said to Luke, but he knew the sound of trouble when he heard it. "You got to let us out of here."
Enos let his hands fall to his sides. "Now, you boys know I can't do that." But he didn't sound entirely convinced.
"Enos," Bo tried again, on his feet and not clear how or when he'd gotten that way. Stepping closer to the bars, which made Enos step back. Rosco had told him to look out for any tricks, after all. "Please. Something's happened. Luke, what happened?"
"Someone broke in," Luke said. The bell inside the phone jingled a bit when Luke stopped staring at the receiver and hung it up.
"Into the house?" Bo's voice cracked at the end of that question. "Our house?"
"Into our house," Luke echoed, still sitting, still staring dumbly at the phone. Thinking, no doubt, and this was no time for that sort of pointlessness. This was a time to do something. They needed out of here, and now.
"Enos, you got to let us out."
"I can't do that, Bo." Their friend's tone all but pleaded with them to understand. But there was nothing to understand, other than that Jesse and Daisy were in trouble.
"Enos," Luke said, hauling himself to his feet. Hands gripping the bars, like if he were strong enough, he could bend them and escape. "If you can't let us go, you got to go to the farm. You're the law, after all." Enos was biting his lip, looking from one to the other of them. "We'll be model prisoners while you're gone. We won't even try to escape."
It was sincere, or as sincere as it could be, under the circumstances. Right now, in this minute, Luke wasn't planning on trying to break out of jail. But if Enos went like he was asked to, Bo didn't figure there was anything Luke wouldn't do to try to get the two of them free.
Enos must have figured about the same as Bo did.
"I can't," he repeated, wrinkles making waves across his forehead.
"Enos, you can't leave them there, defenseless," Luke explained. "They're okay for now, but what if whoever it was comes back? Jesse ain't as young as he used to be and Daisy, well, who knows what they might do to her."
Enos' eyes popped wide at that thought.
"Enos, she just hung up on me. For all I know, whoever it was that broke in is already back there. You got to-"
"I can't," Enos said again, but it sounded different this time. Not so much defeat as-and there was almost a smile on his face. "But I know someone who can."
So he marched up to grab the telephone, taking it over to a desk and dialing it. Asked for the Coltrane residence.
"Great," Bo informed Luke. "He's sending Rosco."
"Better than nobody," Luke informed him.
Bo wasn't so sure about that.
Author: NDF/TS Blue
Fandom: Dukes
Rating: PG, maybe. It's not quite all sunshine and roses, anyway.
Summary: It's a summer of freedom and hardship, of love and calamities. Daisy and Bo have just graduated into adulthood and Luke is back from war. It ought to be the best time of their lives, but one disaster follows another. Who would want the Dukes hurt? Prequel, gen.
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Seventeen: Cuffed and Stuffed
July 30, 1974
Well. He'd be a horny toad. It was almost enough to make a man seek out the immediate presence of one Jefferson Davis Hogg and deliver the good news. (Almost, not quite. He figured tomorrow would be soon enough to see the man. Besides, there was nothing wrong with taking a little time to figure out how to make himself look good in the telling of the news.)
His rookie deputy had caught the Duke boys, red handed, breaking and entering (and otherwise sullying) the courthouse.
"We ain't broke nothing," Bo Duke had insisted from between the bars.
"My hands ain't red," Luke had added, showing his palms.
But it didn't matter how much they sassed, those sweaty sodbusters were caged. Right there in the upstairs cell in the squad room. And Enos Strate, who was standing far too close to Rosco while doing his own heavy perspiring, had put them in there. All by himself.
(But see, it wouldn't do to tell it to Hogg quite that way. Maybe something more along the lines of how Rosco had hired and trained the kid that had done the arresting.)
At first Rosco had been calling Enos all manner of names for having tracked him down, off-duty, at his mother's dinner table (which was serving as more of a late-night-snack table at the time) to say he needed help back at the courthouse. But the scolding had been Enos' own fault. He had been yammering on about possums and gumbushes and squealing like he was snake-bit and frothing at the mouth. It took a while to find the patience to tell him to just calm down, and then it took Enos a while to actually do it, and then there were those words: Bo and Luke, records office, sneaking around, caught them, locked them up.
The Duke boys had been cuffed and stuffed.
Enos' first arrest, and Rosco hadn't gotten that far along in training him. But by now it was mighty close to midnight and he didn't want to spend all night here at the courthouse, teaching the boy the ropes.
(Needed some sleep so he could figure out exactly how to express tonight's events to J.D. Hogg. Maybe he'd just announce that the sheriff's department had made the prize bust and leave out the particulars.)
"Just fill out the form," he was explaining to Enos, pointing at the typewriter with the stack of triplicate forms next to it. Could be faulty advice when the boy was known to overthink that kind of thing. Wanting to write words where ten-codes would do fine, but if Rosco went over it with him, line by line, and argued the merits of the precise words, he'd be getting home to bed sometime next week. "I've already got their fingerprints," and Luke Duke's sarcastic eyebrow found that quite interesting. But he did, he even had fairly recent fingerprints of both boys, having arrested them earlier this month. "And their pictures," he added, couldn't help but let out a little kyu of a giggle after that. Oh, telling Hogg about this was going to be fun. Enos sighed out whatever nerves or regrets he had, and headed over to the desk to do as he was told.
(Shoot, he might as well go straight out for saying he'd been responsible for the bust. J.D. was a busy man who didn't care about picayune details anyway.)
"What about our phone call?" Luke Duke jumped right on in. Where he wasn't invited, but wasn't that just like a Duke?
"Yeah, we're entitled to one phone call," Bo echoed, and that was just like a Duke, too.
Enos quit right in the middle of rolling the incident form into the typewriter. It was amazing that the boy had managed to catch those Dukes, honestly. And made up his mind to herd them up the stairs and into the jail at gunpoint when he was so conflicted about everything that had happened since. Prone to being swayed by the prisoners' complaints and orders - like they had any right to be telling a lawman what to do under the current circumstances - and unsure of himself.
"You process them first, Enos, then you let them make that call." Rosco went looking for his hat, then remembered he hadn't come with one. He wasn't in uniform because he wasn't on duty, and he didn't plan on being here any longer than he already had been. The taste of his mama's chocolate cake was old and nearly rancid on his tongue; he needed to get back and cut himself a slice of the hair of the dog.
"Yes, sir," Enos answered, licking his lips in the sort of nervous gesture that just wasn't befitting an officer of the law. The kid was apparently good enough to bring in the Dukes, but Rosco wasn't entirely sure he was good enough to keep them.
All the same. That cake wouldn't eat itself. (If he wasn't quick about it, Lulu would most likely eat it for him.) Rosco was not planning to stay here tonight.
"You process them," Rosco repeated, giving up on finding the hat he didn't have and leaning over to the barren desk that used to belong to Deputy Miller before the previous round of deputies had been canned, and wrapping his hand around the cold plastic of the telephone there. It was heavy and let out a little jingle of protest when he hefted it, but the cord was plenty long, so he moved it over to one of the rolling chairs. "Then you keep them in there and you roll this phone right up to them so they can make their call. From behind them bars Enos, not in front."
"Rosco," Bo protested, or maybe Luke. He wasn't looking at them because he was watching Enos' face for acknowledgement that he's been understood. Got a nod, but those wrinkles on the deputy's forehead didn't seem too sure.
"All right, Sheriff," sounded unsure as the wrinkles looked. The lip biting that followed was even less sure than that.
"You keep your eye on them all night, and don't you even go near their cell." Because Dukes were sneaky. And long-armed, and if Enos got too close, they'd probably grab him. Maybe go for his guns (no, they wouldn't do that, they were sneaky but not mean or dangerous - not mostly, anyway) or his keys or his handcuffs, and make a mess of this whole thing.
"Yes, sir." Oh, but those eyes were near as big as dinner plates. "I just reckon their family's worried about them. Ain't it okay if I let them make their phone call first?"
Hadn't they already been over this? He'd been perfectly clear in his instructions. And his mama's cake was sweet and delicious and probably almost gone by now.
"No, it ain't okay if you let them make their phone call first. Enos," it was late, his eyes were sore and tired, he was in jeans and a flannel shirt when all he wanted was to be in pajamas. "Just do what I said." He shuffled over to the typewriter desk and cranked the form in a little more, just to make his point clear.
He'd already told J.D. Hogg what Enos had seen when he was watching over the Duke farm a couple of days back - the odd comings and goings. Oh, he'd left Enos' name out of the discussion. Just said it all careful-like about what had been seen and when and where, and let J.D. draw his own conclusions about who had done the seeing. Not that it had mattered, because there were no congratulations forthcoming. Just a lot of 'I told you sos' and smugness, followed by questions about what, exactly, he planned to do about it. Rosco only had until morning to figure out exactly how to report the Duke boys' arrest so that it favored him most. He needed to get back to his mother's place and fill his belly and snooze so he could think right.
"I'll be back by eight, Enos. You just do what I said and you don't take your eyes off them all night long. Don't let them hoodwink you."
"Yes, sir," the deputy said. Rosco checked for his hat again (remembered that it wasn't here again) and headed toward the door, while Enos settled himself on the squeaky chair and got serious about doing his job. Forehead shiny and wrinkled, he pounded down a key, then looked up at the jail cell. Bead of sweat on his temple that he wiped away. Pounded down another key and looked again.
Because he was an earnest boy with clear instructions and he was going to follow them to the letter.
July 31, 1974
In her dream, Enos was there, smiling at her. Beyond the curve of his cheek, there was green. Maybe the grass in the middle of Hazzard Square or maybe down by the pond. She had a sense of floating, so maybe they were in a boat, and the green was the trees reflecting on the water's surface. Didn't matter, Enos was there.
It was a good dream, one where everything felt right. Enos was in that plaid shirt she'd first seen him in back in the high school parking lot, the one that pulled out all the autumn-like flecks of color in his eyes and left them warm and gentle. His head was tipped to the side, his grin was loose and happy, and she got ready to be kissed. But there was something in his hand, something red, something he was trying to give her. A rose, maybe? But not, she saw when his hand came closer, on a stem. How sweet, she thought, no thorns. Except it kept getting closer, like he was going to mash it into her face, and then she realized it was a strawberry. Out of season, and where had he gotten it? But it was a good dream, so it didn't matter. The only important thing was that Enos had found it for her, was offering it to her. Was about to put it right into her mouth when: Crack!
That was a problem; boats shouldn't crack. Or thud, or rock, sway, flip over fast enough to make her dizzy. Stomach churning, under the water, the layer of lily pads greener than the green trees, sinking in the warm liquid and though she knew she shouldn't, she sucked in a breath…
"Boys!" was what finally shook her from the green depths of her sleep into the pitch-black of her bedroom. Jesse hollering - hollering? Into the night - for Bo and Luke. Which meant trouble, meant there was some reason he needed his young, strong nephews, and she was on her feet. Running, barking her shin on a hard surface, stumbling, hand down for balance, catching on something soft and and warm.
"Oof," someone said. (Alice, that was Alice. Alice in Daisy's bed, she'd tripped over her own bed because there were two guests staying there while she'd been on the floor on a pile of blankets and Bo's sleeping bag. Which meant the door was left, not right.)
"Uncle Jesse?" she called. She'd meant to be out there by now, meant to be helping him, but she'd gotten lost in her own room.
"Land sakes, child," came a scold in a low rasp. "You holler loud enough to wake the dead."
Or just the guests, which was rude, but she couldn't care a whole lot; just needed to get her foot untangled from the blanket it was caught in, needed to get turned around and headed for the door.
"Git!" came from the living room or the kitchen, and she quit worrying about the bed, about Alice or Molly (and the creaking springs went to prove that they were sitting up or rolling off or something, anyway), her barked shin or the blanket that was doing its best to trip her. She shoved herself forward, to her door, pulled it open. Hollered in frustration when it smacked into her foot, went through it.
Hallway, just as dark as her bedroom. Hands out to find the walls, then there was a flash, and blam!
"Uncle Jesse?" That was his old flintlock, had to be. If it wasn't it was something else, something worse, some other firearm in someone else's hands-
Blam!
Maudine, off in her temporary home, whinnied a complaint about the noise.
"Git!" hollered again went to prove that even if someone was shooting at Uncle Jesse, he was still alive.
Hand feeling along the wall, running toward the sound until she came to the living room with its frilly curtains and the light of an almost full moon shining through. From there to the gun-powdery kitchen in no time at all.
"Uncle Jesse!" He was there, on his feet, the white of his hair and his long nightshirt showing in the moonlight. "What is it?"
"Some varmints in the kitchen," he growled, staring out through the open door, over the porch and off toward the paddock and the fields beyond. Holding his gun and Daisy sheltered herself behind his warm solidness, peering around his width to see what he was looking at. "Two legged varmints," he added. "Reckon they won't be back soon."
No, they were running off. Two of them, as far as Daisy could see. Men, she figured, from their shapes and sizes, and one of them was limping. Or running funny, anyway, one leg turning at an odd angle as he went.
"Did you shoot him?"
Her uncle turned then, away from the scampering burglars and back to her. "No, I didn't shoot him. I wasn't even aiming at them." He put the safety lock on the rifle, stood it on its butt by the door.
"What's going on?" That was Alice, coming through the arch from the living room. Yawning and scratching at her straw-like hair. Like she thought maybe Jesse and Daisy were snacking on warm milk and cookies and forgot to invite her. Molly was behind her, a little more alert.
"What happened, Jess?"
Her uncle waved his hand through the air in frustration. "Some dang fools thought they'd ransack our kitchen, is all."
Daisy looked around. Nothing but moonlight to see by, but she could still tell that the kitchen table was shoved out of position, one of the chairs was on its side and another was missing altogether.
"They steal anything?" Molly asked.
The whites of Jesse's eyes gleamed in the moon's glow - he was probably rolling them in frustration. "Ain't much of nothing to steal," he scolded. "I reckon you know that as well as I do."
Still, Daisy figured it would be a good idea to turn on the lights and get a better look. She started to cross the kitchen, and then remembered the word that had interrupted her dreams, and the reason she was even awake.
"Where's Bo and Luke?" They'd gone out before she'd gone to bed, but they should have been home by now, shouldn't they? What time was it anyway?
"Boys!" Jesse hollered, the same as he had earlier. Started shuffling in his deceptively quick way toward the opening to the living room, calling the two of them by name.
That was when the phone rang.
"Enos," Luke was saying, in that voice: Marine sergeant commanding his troops. "We got a right to make that phone call before either one of us dies of old age." Or before they melted into a puddle in the hot, airless cell.
"I know that, Luke, and I promise, I'll let you make it as soon as I do what the sheriff said." Head down in serious concentration, then: peck! He found his next letter.
Bo wasn't too sure why Luke was in such an all-fired hurry to rouse their ill-tempered uncle from his sleep, anyway. They would be spending the night here one way or the other, and getting yelled at could wait until morning, as far as he was concerned. Heck, it could all wait, because after the yelling came the whipping, and even if he was just about eighteen and too old to be whipped now, Bo figured Jesse might not see it that way.
He wondered whether he'd get a last meal, first. The cell smelled vaguely of old pizza, and he figured maybe he'd prevail upon Enos to go find them one. Seemed unlikely to work, when Enos would have to go all the way to Atlanta to find a pizza at this hour, and he'd been quite earnestly heeding Rosco's instructions about never taking his eyes off the jail cell.
"Almost done," Enos promised, staring at the keys in front of him, tongue at the corner of his mouth as he found the one he wanted, then pounded it down with an echoing peck! Luke sat there the whole time on the end of the cot, his hands wrapped around the bars in anticipation. Bo was content to sit behind him, at a ninety-degree angle, and leaning back against the wall. Thinking.
Last time they'd been here, it hadn't been their faults. This time-
"Done," Enos, announced, rolling the triplicate form out of the typewriter with a flourish of glee. He got up with a bounce, put the form in a basket on one of the desks, then hustled over to the chair on which Rosco had left the phone. As if he wasn't tired, and he should be. It had to be almost two in the morning. "But, Luke, Bo, can't you tell me why you done it?" All the joy of having completed his report sagged out of him, his forehead wrinkled around his confused eyebrows. "I mean…"
"Enos," Luke was out of patience. Heck, patience was a dim memory from 1965, as far as Luke was concerned. Now he was fully on his way to surly, mean, dangerous. "We ain't saying nothing to you without our lawyer present."
This time they were guilty of exactly what they were being charged with.
"But, Luke, we was-" raised together. That's where Enos was going; he'd been there a few times tonight already. Not understanding how two boys raised so right could go so wrong. (Bo mostly blamed Luke.)
"And now you're a lawman."
Enos sighed, looked away. Then he looked back, offered up a brave nod that was a lot closer to sad. Steely breath, and he shoved the chair forward toward the bars, stepping away as though he could give them privacy when he was sworn to watch them every second. Luke ignored their friend's token gesture and grabbed the phone like it was a morsel of food after a forty day famine. Put the handset up to his ear, then pulled it slightly away.
"Get over here, Bo."
Right, that was how it worked. They faced trouble shoulder to shoulder (even if it was mostly Luke's fault, most of the time) and took their lumps together. So he slid closer. Maybe an eighth of an inch, but he was closer.
Luke snorted. "He ain't going to whip you through the phone," his courageous cousin informed him, but Bo was content exactly where he was, so he just shrugged, and Luke dialed zero. A seemingly endless series of clicks as the rotary went around, a short discussion with the night operator, Gussie, and then he was being put through. Bo might have been mistaken, but he thought Luke was just the slightest bit pale, and his Adam's apple bobbed in anticipation of the call getting answered.
But even from where he was, a clear foot away, Bo could hear that it was Daisy who answered the phone, and on the first ring, too. Luke asked her to put Jesse on, but she started hollering instead. Which made Luke stop holding the phone out and put it right up to his ear, effectively cutting Bo off from hearing. Which he ought to be grateful for, but-
"Daisy, Daisy, whoa. Slow down. You what?" But Luke was getting loud. Or worked up, and Luke almost never got worked up. "Who? What do you mean you don't-" Something was wrong, something worse than them being in jail. Luke's shoulders were hunched with tense muscle. "Is everyone all right?" Now that was just a plain old bad question. Bo leaned closer.
"Luke?" he said. "What's going on?" But he got waved off like he didn't matter, or his question wasn't important, when it dang well was.
Even Enos knew that. Just look at how he'd reversed his direction to come close to the bars, how he was studying and fussing with his own fingers and not even pretending to be doing anything other than what he was doing: eavesdropping on Luke's call.
Bo shuffled close enough to feel Luke's heat, but his cousin didn't offer to let him listen in. All he could hear was the pitch of Daisy's voice, which was two shades past upset and well-nigh on towards hysterical.
"Me and Bo's-we can't come home right now… no, Daisy, I ain't… just… we'll be there as soon as we can be… don't… Daisy! Daisy?" Luke pulled the receiver away from his ear and looked at it like he could see down through the lines all the way back to home. "She hung up," he said with some measure of amazement. As if Luke Duke had never been hung up on by a girl before, but Bo knew full well that he had, more than a few times.
"Enos," Bo said, because he didn't know what Daisy had said to Luke, but he knew the sound of trouble when he heard it. "You got to let us out of here."
Enos let his hands fall to his sides. "Now, you boys know I can't do that." But he didn't sound entirely convinced.
"Enos," Bo tried again, on his feet and not clear how or when he'd gotten that way. Stepping closer to the bars, which made Enos step back. Rosco had told him to look out for any tricks, after all. "Please. Something's happened. Luke, what happened?"
"Someone broke in," Luke said. The bell inside the phone jingled a bit when Luke stopped staring at the receiver and hung it up.
"Into the house?" Bo's voice cracked at the end of that question. "Our house?"
"Into our house," Luke echoed, still sitting, still staring dumbly at the phone. Thinking, no doubt, and this was no time for that sort of pointlessness. This was a time to do something. They needed out of here, and now.
"Enos, you got to let us out."
"I can't do that, Bo." Their friend's tone all but pleaded with them to understand. But there was nothing to understand, other than that Jesse and Daisy were in trouble.
"Enos," Luke said, hauling himself to his feet. Hands gripping the bars, like if he were strong enough, he could bend them and escape. "If you can't let us go, you got to go to the farm. You're the law, after all." Enos was biting his lip, looking from one to the other of them. "We'll be model prisoners while you're gone. We won't even try to escape."
It was sincere, or as sincere as it could be, under the circumstances. Right now, in this minute, Luke wasn't planning on trying to break out of jail. But if Enos went like he was asked to, Bo didn't figure there was anything Luke wouldn't do to try to get the two of them free.
Enos must have figured about the same as Bo did.
"I can't," he repeated, wrinkles making waves across his forehead.
"Enos, you can't leave them there, defenseless," Luke explained. "They're okay for now, but what if whoever it was comes back? Jesse ain't as young as he used to be and Daisy, well, who knows what they might do to her."
Enos' eyes popped wide at that thought.
"Enos, she just hung up on me. For all I know, whoever it was that broke in is already back there. You got to-"
"I can't," Enos said again, but it sounded different this time. Not so much defeat as-and there was almost a smile on his face. "But I know someone who can."
So he marched up to grab the telephone, taking it over to a desk and dialing it. Asked for the Coltrane residence.
"Great," Bo informed Luke. "He's sending Rosco."
"Better than nobody," Luke informed him.
Bo wasn't so sure about that.