Chapter 12

You guessed it Lorrie called to tell Lucy that she was headed back to the holler. She took her scooter and planned on a full day’s ride on Black Friday. I had no idea how that would work for her, but I silently wished her the best.

“I need to get in touch with her,” Lucy said. “I don’t need any help this winter with the green houses, but I will in the spring and summer. What do you think she’s got herself into?”

“I got no idea. I hope she didn’t get into anything with the law,” I answered. In the back of my mind, I saw her in the waiting room of the ‘Doc in a Box’. I could only imagine it was worse. If she was smart she gave the fake address I had provided her, Lucy and I should be okay. If the cop came to our place looking for her, we were good and truly fucked.

Lucy left three messages in all before Lorrie called her back. She had indeed gotten into an argument at a girlfriend’s house. The neighbor’s called the cops who came. She was able to bluff them using the address of the space above Trina’s store as her home address. It was in the middle of the night and the other girl said she wasn’t hurt. They had just had loud words according to her.

Lorrie probably scared the shit out of her, I thought when I was told about it. Lorrie was better off in the holler. At least until things blew over. Lucy made notes on her laptop before she hung up. When she told me about Lorrie leaving town, she also told me that the scooter was in the driveway of a sawmill on a back road on the way to the holler.

“I promised her we would get the scooter and bring it here for her,” She said.

“Then she plans to come back when it blows over,” I asked.

“She didn’t say,” Lucy informed me.

“Well it is a back road and it is too late to go tonight. Tomorrow we can leave early and find it at least before dark. It is Saturday tomorrow, but there shouldn’t be too much traffic.” I explained my thinking as to why I didn’t rush right out looking for it. The truth was I didn’t care if the sawmill owner had it towed away. I had already said goodbye to Lorrie in my mind.

During the evening of that black Friday, I could tell Lucy was concerned about something. “What’s wrong Lucy. Do you want to talk about it.”

“Not really, I just don’t think we can risk having Lorrie around any longer,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. It will be risky if she does come back,” I agreed.

“Tyler, I have a dozen unmarried cousins both male and female. I have a feeling all of them are flawed in some way. Some, if not all, could be worse than Lorrie. I do have a cousin who had a baby a couple of years back. Mama says she has settled down now, but I don’t know how much mama knows about her. We have a lot to lose, not the least of which is our freedom,” Lucy said.

“We can scale back the weed business. Get it back to where we can handle it with just the two of us,” I suggested.

“Let’s pick up the scooter and deliver it to Lorrie. We can spend the night in a motel and you can visit with your mama. Maybe we can find our next employee, who is not such a close family member,” I suggested.

Lucy went to bed first. I sat up and had a glass of tea, while I watched a really bad movie on the computer. I thought it all over carefully and weighed the pros and cons of Lorrie coming back with us. When I went to bed with Lucy, I hadn’t come to any real decisions.

Lucy and I loaded two backpacks into the space behind the seat of the Ford truck. We could have put the backpacks in the bed of the truck, since there would be room. We didn’t because it was supposed to rain that day.

It took us about an hour to get to the GPS coordinates Lucy had written down. Sure enough there was a sawmill a few feet past them. The scooter was a couple of yards past it. Lucy and I were able to load the scooter using the ramp and wench. It also took some muscle. It always did when I used those things to load landscape business tools into the truck bed. Sometimes even the Cub Tractor had to be moved with the truck alone.

I had the scooter tied down, and the ramps stored beside it, during our next hour’s drive to the holler. There were some really bad roads as we neared Lucy’s Mama’s place. I was glad that every thing was strapped down.

When we parked the truck in her mother’s grassed yard, Lucy and I went inside to speak to her Mama before we unloaded the scooter. It was a good thing since Lorrie was staying with a married cousin. Lucy and I made the drive to the cousin’s trailer house. When we pulled into the yard Lorrie came out to greet us.

Lorrie came running out to greet her sister. Needless to say she was glad to see Lucy. She left her place with only the clothes on her back. Lucy had her clothes in the backpack which was still inside the truck. Everything else in the shack belonged to us.

I had ten, one hundred dollar bills in an envelope for her as well. That would hold her over for a while. After that I expected she would be working for one of the grow farm in the spring. She might even start growing on her mama’s plot. She knew more than anyone in the holler about the modern way of growing pot.

“Lorrie, I want you to know that I like you, I just can’t trust you,” I explained. “And you are known to the cops. You did good at protecting us. That’s what the money is for.”

“Thanks Tyler,” she kissed me, but not like a friend of the family. Nothing Lorrie did surprised me.

Lucy and I took the truck and drove to another cabin with a bad access road. A woman who was close to a two hundred pounds came out to greet us. Lucy introduced me to Ruth. Ruth was her cousin who was a widow, or at least there was no man around. Lucy and I had discussed it and decided to offer her a job from June 1st until Thanksgiving.