Back Roads & Hat Check Page 5

  “Ooooh,” RayRay squeezed her boobs.

  Becky whimpered and heaved. RayRay rolled to the side and whumped into the wall. Becky jumped up, seeing that RayRay was trying to get to his feet, she started for the door. Right there, where she had left it, was her backpack. And on the ground, next to her pack, were his glasses. She grabbed both and darted into the hall.

  “STREAKER, STREAKER, STREAKER!” the crowd had turned the corner and was now cheering after her again.

  She ran to the elevator and clicked the button desperately. Thankfully, it dinged quickly and she jumped inside. She reached over to push the lobby button and realized she wasn’t alone… Again? She thought, for Christ’s sake, will this never end? Looking at the boy standing there, she recognized it was Chase, they guy she’d met earlier tonight.

  “Still dabbling in nudism, I see,” he smiled at her.

  Becky slid down in the elevator, covering herself with her backpack. Chase pulled off his shirt and handed it to her.

  “Here,” he said, “take this. Looks like you need it more than I do.”

  She jerked the shirt over her bare chest. Thankfully, it was long enough to cover the rest of her body down to her thighs as well.

  “Thanks,” she said shyly.

  Chase turned around, “I wasn’t sure I’d get to see you again so soon.”

  “Yeah,” Becky inhaled deeply, “wasn’t exactly in the plan.”

  “I’m not sure that I want to know what plan that was,” he laughed and held out a hand to help her up.

  “Long story,” she said pulling herself up.

  “Maybe you can tell me about it tomorrow?” he asked with a million-dollar smile, “Over a coffee?”

  The elevator dinged and the doors slip open.

  “I’d like that,” she returned his smile.

  “I’ll call you,” he said, “now take care of that plan.”

  Oh, yeah. The plan. She stepped into the lobby and unzipped her backpack. She still had the spray paint. She walked outside and laid the glasses on the newspaper. Opening the black paint, she sprayed the lenses until they were completely covered. Less than three minutes later, they were almost dry, tacky enough to touch. She picked them up and walked back into the lobby. The elevator dinged and oddly, there was RayRay, walking out.

  “Hey Ray,” she said cheerfully, acting like she had just seen him for the first time tonight.

  “Becky-san?” he asked, “were you upstairs just a few minutes ago?”

  “Uh, no,” she said matter-of-factly, “I just got back from studying at the coffee shop.”

  “Ohhh,” RayRay said, “I could have sworn that I felt your…”

  “Nope,” she interrupted him, “wasn’t me. Anyway, I found your glasses at the shop. You must’ve left them behind.”

  “Hmmm,” RayRay said, “that is strange. I could swear I left them on my…”

  “Okay,” she interrupted him again, “Well, I gotta go. See you tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, Becky-san,” RayRay smiled and put the glasses on, “I wish I could’ve seen what happened upstairs earlier. We had a streaker! Can you believe it?”

  “Haha,” Becky laughed nervously, “crazy kids, eh?”

  “Yes,” RayRay agreed, “crazy.”

  Becky turned and walked out. When she got back to her dorm, she took the hottest shower she had ever taken. Urine, acid, sweat… ugh, she was a disgusting mess. When she finally felt human again, she collapsed and fell asleep within minutes.

  The next day, walking across campus, she began to realize people were staring at her. Some were pointing and whispering. What the hell, people? She put her head down and rushed into her sculpture class. Samantha and Alain were there waiting on her.

  Alain was smiling broadly and licked his lips, “well, good morning, Becky. Surprised to see you wore clothes.”

  “Huh?” she asked.

  “Girl, what did you do last night?” Samantha demanded.

  Her friend slapped a copy of the school newspaper down on the desk in front of her. In giant block letters across the top… the first and only headline on the front page… SCAD STREAKER. And underneath that, in full color, filling the entire space above the fold was a picture of Becky, running down the hall at The Colony… naked.

  She slapped her hand against her forehead, “Oh, shit.”

  Thankfully, her body was covered in impossibly small blurry areas to keep the photo rated PG-13. As she stared in horror at the image, RayRay walked into class. He was wearing his glasses… his newly blacked out lenses covering his eyes. Becky couldn’t help but appreciate the irony.

  She’d spent all night trying to cover the eyes of the one guy who couldn’t see her and now everyone else saw her… in all her splendid, nude, glory… on the front page. It was going to be a long year.

  Becky, RayRay, Samantha, and Alain appear in the forthcoming Stealing Savannah – A Troy Bodean Adventure #4

  Coming Soon

  Darren and Man’Ti

  A Slow Boat From New Zealand

  The Gallup Girls

  Dancin’ For Bana

  Ryan “RB” Bodean

  Midnight Flying

  The following is an excerpt from book one in the Troy Bodean Adventure Series.

  HAT CHECK

  __________________________

  A Troy Bodean Adventure

  By: David F. Berens

  Hat Check

  A Troy Bodean Adventure

  All Rights Reserved © 2017 by David F. Berens

  Hat Check: A Troy Bodean Adventure is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Prologue

  Non-Discretionary Spending

  __________________________

  Rick Hairre had not known before today that the barrel of a gun tasted like pennies. Or maybe the taste was the coppery tang of his own blood pooling in the crevices of his ever-swelling mouth. He also had not known the butt of a gun felt so heavy and cold when used as a hammer on one’s head. He guessed he would probably lose most of the teeth he’d spent so much on veneering prior to the last election cycle. He wondered if he’d ever get a chance to see his dentist again… an odd longing… to see the dentist.

  As the current Vice-Chairman of the 2012 Murrell’s Inlet’s Board of Directors, he counted his acquisition of funding in excess of seven million dollars for the Tourism Conservation and Wetland Education Project as his crowning achievement. It was a private deal with several under-the-table understandings. All parties to the deal would remain anonymous and a small fee of half-a-million deposited directly into another account of his choosing for managing the deal with… discretion.

  But beyond selfish interests, the money would provide the local community with informational pamphlets, catchy bumper stickers, kids coloring books and rental home refrigerator magnets discussing and educating tourists about the delicate ecosystem at work in his precious inlet home. Counting the zeroes on the check helped him stomach the fact that the money had come from the nearby Consolidated Paper Mill. Naturally, the check had come with an understanding – Rick would bury any mention of the pollution the independent environmental scientists had discovered traveling downstream from the mill. The mill’s owner had channeled the money through a governmental sounding company and encouraged Rick to say he’d procured a federal grant for the work. With this cover story, he’d soon be rising above Vice-Chairman.

  As the blood trickled from his nose, he vaguely wondered if the two hooded men interrogating him suspected that a completely untraceable cashier’s check with a seven and six zeroes was tucked away in his Outback Tea Stained straw cowboy hat. Another thought occurred to him through his throbbing haze of pain. What if these two men had been sent by the mill owner to collect the check
and get rid of any evidence of the deal – namely Rick. But that didn’t make any sense. The deal had just been made and everyone was happy to go along with the stipulations of said deal.

  Ok, happy was a stretch. But when Rick had chosen the life of a politician, he’d been too green to know the lower tier guys in local governments made little if any in the way of salaries. Some were even volunteer posts. Most were only in it for the power. He smiled wanly at that last thought… what power did the Vice-Chairman of the 2012 Murrell’s Inlet’s Board of Directors actually have? Not much.

  But his acquisition of these funds – however ill gotten – would’ve gone a long way to further his ambitions. And he’d long since given up being selfish in that regard. He was in it for his daughter. He thanked God he’d had the foresight to wire his half a million straight into her account. He smiled at the thought of her checking her balance the next time. He ached with the thought that he probably wouldn’t be around to explain the huge addition of funds to her.

  The Outback Tea Stained straw cowboy hat he wore had been a gift from her long ago. She’d only been six or seven at the time and thought the hat was just perfect for her dad. And though it was somewhat out of character for a short, pudgy, bald man to wear such a thing, he wore it proudly. As he struggled to maintain consciousness, he couldn’t remember why he had folded the check and slipped it into the band of his hat behind the colorful peacock feather perched there, but there it remained.

  Rick retraced his steps back to the meeting at the mill and sorted through what he could remember of the conversation, but nothing struck him as sinister. He’d walked out after shaking hands with the mill’s owner and there had been smiles all around. His last text to his daughter (a newly acquired skill for him) had said he’d be stopping by for dinner. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what had prompted his sudden kidnapping outside Lee’s Inlet Kitchen and was even more unsure of why they had smashed the butt of what had appeared to be an AK-47 against his face sending his beloved hat skidding across the floor. He would’ve handed over the check had they just asked! He’d tried to tell them that, but now his efforts to speak were hampered by his crushed jaw.

  His dinner of Lee’s homemade clam chowder exploded violently from his stomach with the pain from the first wicked blow to his skull and he was still retching as they hovered around him whispering to each other.

  “Where is it, mate?” one of the hooded men growled in a strange broken accent. Maybe Australian… or South African?

  Rick opened his mouth to answer but all that came out was more of his favorite from the appetizer menu at Lee’s.

  This apparently was an unacceptable answer as the man’s fist slammed into the top of Rick’s head dislodging his expensive European hairpiece. Guaranteed to stay on in a hurricane, my ass, he thought to himself as the toupee flopped to the ground.

  His baldpate glistened brightly as blood began to flow warmly down into his eyes. His thoughts began to jumble wildly through his life and he saw himself in his high school senior pictures with already thinning hair. After a few unsuccessful attempts at a comb-over, he just clipped it closer and closer to his head. By the summer of his senior year, he was a nineteen-year-old bald guy. It’d been bad enough that he was born with a build like that of Danny DeVito and not as good-looking as most of the guys he’d played with on the football team, but his last name was Hairre. Hairre, for God’s sake. With a name like that, and a chance to re-invent himself upon starting college, he’d sought out remedies to his ever-expanding baldness. Since the summer between high school and his freshman year at Clemson University, he’d been a closet member of the Hairre Club for Men.

  Before the chocolate-brown strand-by-strand woven head of hair had become part of him, his high-school classmates often asked if he had shaved it because of sickness or cancer treatments; sometimes he said yes. Years later, his wife, Susan, of fourteen anniversaries had succumbed to the pancreatic version of his lie. When he visited her in the hospital, he would remove his hairpiece and be bald with her as she suffered. He wondered if his current hair-jarring episode was karma circling back around for another go at him.

  As the images faded from his mind, he wasn’t sure if he was losing consciousness, the blood was clouding his eyes, or his thick-rimmed glasses had finally shattered away, but his vision began to swim and darken. His head lolled down to touch his chest and he thought with sadness that he would never get the blossoming red stains out of his seersucker sport coat. God, he loved that jacket… just like Matlock.

  As if on cue, South African number one ripped the front of the jacket open and shoved his hands down into the inside pockets.

  “No,” Rick moaned, but no one was paying any attention to him – just like no one paid attention to him at the city council board meetings. But all that would change when he delivered the seven-million-dollar check.

  His view of the world was dimming rapidly when the man tore into his pants pockets, scattering the assorted contents on the concrete floor of… wherever they had taken him. A small crumpled toddler picture of his now grown stepdaughter floated out of the hooded man’s grasp and hit the floor. A spatter of blood from Rick’s forehead dripped down on the picture. Everything was in slow motion now. He knew his end was near.

  He wanted to cry out, take my wallet, take my ’56 Dodge Royal convertible… take anything you want… take the check for God’s sake, just let me live to tell my sweet girl I still love her! But his wrecked jaw could only mumble and spew blood.

  The check! In his final thoughts, he wondered how they had missed it. His eyes flitted to the forgotten cowboy hat lazily tilting to and fro under a nearby metal table. And that’s when the darkness ended Rick Hairre’s tenure as the 2012 Vice-Chairman of the Murrell’s Inlet’s Board of Directors.

  1

  Troy’s Crick

  __________________________

  Troy Clint Bodean stood motionless on the rickety wooden dock. The sun had risen slowly above him and the heat of the day was just beginning to warm his skin. He had his brand new, ridiculously expensive, Loki Lightning Redfish Rod propped against his left thigh and his right hand gently tested the silvery web of line for any sign of resistance. He dabbed a trickle of sweat from his eyes with the light blue bandana around his neck and pushed his salt-stained LSU cap back on his head. Two hours of daylight had brought him absolutely nothing; not a tremble, not a bite, not even a nibble. Damn you, Debby, he thought rolling a toothpick back and forth between his teeth.

  The tropical storm that grew only slightly above the hurricane designation – dubbed Debby by the World Meteorological Organization – had plowed through Northern Florida and churned up the East Coast leaving Pawleys Island with nothing to catch but a sunburn. But no one else was out so he thought the few fish that may have been left in the storm’s wake might be hungry and food might be scarce. It was looking more and more like he was the only one out today… including the fish.

  Hurricane Debby, he thought, was a perfect name for the storm, just like his ex-girlfriend, Debby Robinson, in Vegas who had crashed into (and out of) his life and left nothing but baggage and debris in her wake. Good riddance, he thought as he chewed a little harder on the toothpick between his teeth.

  Troy had seen a great many things in his life. He’d had a relatively incident free tour as an Apache AH-64 pilot in Afghanistan that ended abruptly with a shrapnel-ruined right ACL. Upon rehabilitation and return to the states, he’d found his only surviving relative, his youngest brother, Ryan, had been honorably discharged (reason unknown) and disappeared. Troy had been shot at from kingdom to come, took a hit to the knee that almost cost him his leg, and survived hell on earth… only to find that he had no one to come home to – no friends, no family, no nothing.

  Down and out and alone, he grabbed one of the few vocational opportunities offered to an injured war vet – bartending in a shady Las Vegas strip joint, The Peppermint Hippo. More than a few of his war buddie
s were patrons of such establishments, drinking and laughing loudly over the sound of gunfire in their heads. His own tour had been short enough that he never heard those phantom screams.

  After a few desperate months of searching for work, he’d taken the job of D.J./bouncer. Lucky for him, the job included the apartment above the club that was little more than a one-room loft with a bug-ridden bed, a futon, a dorm-room refrigerator and a hot plate. After the thumping stripper tunes finally went quiet around five in the morning, he’d slept on the futon and eaten lukewarm SpaghettiO’s out of the can. More than once, a strung-out stripper or two had crashed in his bed – without him. A hero’s welcome indeed.

  But Debby had been different, or so he thought. She wasn’t called Cinnamon or Candy or Porsche on stage, but rather Gidget… a name he fondly attached to the movie starring Sandra Dee. Her music had always been rather tame as well – leaning more toward Bon Jovi than Marilyn Manson.

  He’d never seen her touch alcohol or any of the other mind candy handed out in the alley back behind the club. She always made the customer happy without crossing whatever professional line there could be between a stripper and her mark. When she’d asked to stay with him, it’d been because her Mercedes had refused to start after her shift and she wasn’t going to let Slick Mick’s Quick Towing screw it up like she’d seen done to so many abandoned cars in the club’s gravel lot. Even if it was only a C-class, it deserved better than that.

  He’d offered her a beer and they’d finished what was left of a Longboard twelve-pack by seven-thirty. They hadn’t even slept when the Mercedes dealer’s flatbed truck came to rescue her ride. In the glow of their buzz, she’d grabbed his cellphone and typed in her number.