Mean Woman Blues

minutes if they haven’t processed her yet.”
    “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
    An hour and forty minutes later, the doors finally opened, and out walked a bedraggled Terri, who started crying the second she saw him. “The asshole ate french fries!” she managed to blubber.
    Isaac wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What asshole?”
    “The deputy. They processed me an hour ago, but he knew I hadn’t eaten all day, so he made me sit on a bench and watch him while he ate his fries. One at a time. Slowly. Chewing twenty times each.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    David Wright (“Mr. Right” to an increasing number of Americans) sat in his paneled wood den in University Park and nervously fingered his remote as he tried to digest what he was seeing on television. It was a news story about his own son’s sentencing for what the newscaster called “heinous crimes.” He flicked the remote again and again, trying a bunch of other stations, and it was the same damn thing.
    He should have been watching a story about the shooting death of New Orleans’s hot-dog cop Skip Langdon. He tried not to think about that part because if he did it was going to make him mad and he was going to throw the remote, wrecking the expensive oversized screen and scaring Karen half to death. This kind of fuck-up just didn’t happen when Errol Jacomine was there to run the show. The ironic part was that it was Devil-Woman’s fault Jacomine didn’t exist anymore. So she got to live a little bit longer while Daniel spent the rest of his life in the joint. David Wright simply could not countenance it. Absolutely had to make it right. Was driven to.
    Actually, Daniel had defied the Lord and deserved what he got. David Wright had no real problems with that part and in truth had nothing but ill will toward his son. It was Langdon’s arrogance that galled him, that she could think she could do this to him, David Wright, and get away with it. That was what he found insupportable.
    He was afraid of her too. She was probably the only person in the world who could bring him down at this point and not because she was so almighty smart and talented.
    Because she had special knowledge, goddamn her.
    “Honey, what’s wrong? You look like you’re ’bout to cry.” Karen spoke in that Texas twang so many of them had around here, that soft feminine musical way that let you know the speaker was a blonde before you even saw her.
    He said, “I’m listenin’ to the news. That’s all.” (Sometimes, at home, he dropped his g’s; he never did in public any more.)
    They had two big, deep, plaid-covered sofas arranged in an L for watching television, which was now part of his job; when you’re on television, you watch it.
    Karen came and cuddled up with him. Idly, he grabbed a breast. Ever since he could remember, he’d gotten all the pussy he wanted, but he’d had very few women in the same class as Karen.
    Rosemarie Owens— now that was another matter. She was one of a kind.
    He always pretty much expected the best around to come his way; he just hadn’t been around the ones like Karen much. Karen came to him because she had a problem— the reason a lot of people had come to him over the years and especially came now— and she had stayed and become his wife.
    There were things about it that tickled him. She didn’t know either of his true ages; in fact she thought he was in his mid-fifties, though his body was older. That part would probably fly, she was so crazy in love with him. But he was also less than two years old. That would probably give her a start.
    The last time he saw that bitch Langdon he knew Errol Jacomine had to disappear, and fortunately he had the wherewithal to make it happen. Or Rosemarie Owens did. He’d laid low for a while, staying in cheap motels and wearing a pulled-down baseball cap in the daytime, and found it was pretty easy to get along if you looked like nobody in particular. He wore jeans and T-shirts like everybody else, and for a while he shaved his head, but nobody paid him any mind anyway. He was just another itinerant nobody, going no place and no place to go.
    For the first few nights, he had a hidey-hole, an abandoned house scoped out far in advance. He also had enough money to last awhile and a car registered to someone else, but not stolen— a car someone had bought for him under their own name; thus, a perfectly legitimate registration. The house was in a neighborhood where there were both blacks and whites,