Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4) by Nick Pirog (best ereader for textbooks .TXT) 📗

to get the wood on top of the car to fly off and go all over the road.”

He didn’t laugh. He did say, “I clocked you going fifty-seven. Speed limit is fifty.”

“Right.”

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

It’s the way he said it that tipped me off. A little too matter-of-fact. It’s a slippery slope, asking questions you already know the answer to. Pulling me over wasn’t a coincidence. He was waiting for me.

“I’m headed to the Humphries Farm.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, keeping up the charade. “What business you got there?”

“It’s my farm.” My tone was a touch less friendly.

“Yours? You buy it?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

His eyes narrowed. “What did you say?”

“It’s not much of your business.”

He glared at me for a long second, then said, “License and registration.”

I handed them over.

He looked at my license, then he looked at my registration. He handed my registration back and said, “This is an old Blockbuster receipt.”

“Oh, sorry. This is my dad’s old car. I thought that was the registration.”

Hahahahaha.

I stuck my hand in the glove compartment and rooted around. “Is this it?”

He glanced at it. “No, that’s another Blockbuster receipt.”

“Sorry, they look the same.”

They do not.

I thought about handing him another of my father’s many old Blockbuster receipts filling the glove compartment, but Officer Tiny’s hand had moved dangerously close to the gun on his hip.

I found the registration and handed it over, and he walked back to his cruiser.

I gazed forward and pondered why Officer Tiny was waiting for me. Was it because I was the new kid on the block? Was this some sort of small town initiation? Did this happen to everyone or had he made special considerations for yours truly?

Officer Tiny returned and handed me back my license and registration.

If he did a comprehensive background check on me, he didn’t say. Though I had a feeling he already knew a thing or two about Thomas Dergen Prescott before he pulled me over.

“I’m gonna let you slide on the speeding today,” he said, forcing a smile. “You being new and all.”

“That’s awful kind of you, sir.” Sir came out suh.

He leaned down, his chin-ass where the window would have been, and said, “Can I give you a piece of advice, Thomas?”

I jutted out my chin, the international signal for let's hear it.

“Leave it alone,” he said.

Then he smacked the top of the Range Rover and walked back to his cruiser.

“This little piggy went to the bathtub,” I said, setting May in the two inches of warm water. She sat down on her rump and gave the water a couple licks. “And this little piggy went to the bathtub.” I picked up Harold and set him next to his sister. He looked down at the water, then back up at me, as if to say, “I don’t like this one bit. Not one bit.”

I squeezed some Johnson’s baby shampoo in my hand and began scrubbing the two of them. Drying them off, I set them on the bed and gave each of them a little piglet backrub. Then I fed them for the last time and took them outside to go to the bathroom.

Lying down in bed, the two little piglets smelling like heaven and snoring, I reminisced on the advice Officer Tiny had given.

Leave it alone.

There was only one thing he could be talking about.

The Save-More murders.

And the only way he could have known I’d taken an interest is if he was tipped-off about my internet search at the library. They must have a program that alerted them when someone searched specific keywords. And then traced it to my login.

“Leave it alone,” he’d said.

And I would have.

If only he hadn’t told me to.

Chapter Seven

The barn smelled horrific.

“What do you think?” I asked Randall.

Randall Jones didn’t look like he belonged on a farm. He looked like he belonged on a football field. He was wearing a floppy straw hat and had a spongy black beard an inch thick that was three shades darker than his skin. He wore a near-constant grin that revealed a small gap between his two front teeth.

“I think,” he said, his voice as gruff as his beard, “that you have a dead pig in your loft.”

I stared down at Miss Piggy, whose carcass was now bloated and covered in maggots, and said “Yep.”

I initially called Randall—his phone number had been scribbled on the back of my feed store receipt—to help me repair the pigpen. My body was still in too much pain to lug around lumber and wield a hammer.

When he arrived in a beat-up Ford Bronco, I decided that Harold and May’s deceased mother was higher on the priority list than the busted pigpen. The piglets would just have to sleep in bed with me for another day.

Darn.

“We could just roll her off,” I said. “Let her fall to the ground.”

Randall shook his head. “Nope, she’ll explode, then you’re never gonna get rid of that smell.”

“What if we move a bunch of the hay bales underneath us then roll her onto those?”

He mulled this over. “Probably be soft enough to keep her from exploding.”

We spent the next ten minutes moving hay bales to the drop site.

Back up top, Randall asked, “You ready?”

We both took two deep breaths then began pushing the huge pig toward the edge. Three hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight feels like twice that, but luckily Randall was even stronger than his frame indicated.

Miss Piggy fell over the precipice, and I yelled, “Timber!”

We both watched as Miss Piggy dropped into the hay, then, like hitting a trampoline, bounced off the hay bales and fell to the earth.

Where she promptly exploded.

Randall cut his eyes at me, then tilted his head back and let out a riotous laugh. Soon we were both in hysterics.

A minute later, wiping his eyes, Randall said, “I guess that didn’t work after all.”

Randall handed me a pair of purple kitchen gloves and said, “Put these on, you don’t want to get that stink