The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) by Stan Hayes Read Free Book Online

or so back into town, the road changing names to Academy Street at the city limits. Waiting for a break in the Saturday afternoon traffic at the Lee Street stop sign, Jack smiled and said “Country-come-to-town.”
    “What?”
    “That’s what Pap used to say about Saturdays,” he said as he slipped the wagon through a break in the traffic. “People from out in the county making their weekly trek to Bisque for supplies and entertainment, clogging up traffic and doing slow country business. Not that he minded; he knew damn well you couldn’t speed ’em up; it was simply a cost of doing business. ‘Aw, it’s just country-come-to-town.’ Sounded to me like sump’m he’d heard growin’ up in the Tennessee hills. Only my guess is that it was him and his folks being referred to that way, instead of the other way around.”
    “Tennessee, huh? So how is it that he made it all away down here in to red-clay country?”
    “The army. The ‘State Guard,’ that is. Pap was a in a Tennessee State Guard unit that was sent to Camp McPherson, over in Atlanta, for their active duty training, back before World War I. He met Pete Hartwell, the guy who was carrying on with my grandma, there. Pete brought ’im home for a visit. One thing led to another, and he ended up going to work alongside Pete at Old Man Hartwell’s cotton brokerage.”
    “Hell, another Pete! And one of those ‘things that led to another’ was your grandma.”
    “The lovely Rose Watkins, eldest daughter of a once-prominent Richmond County plantation family, who wanted in the worst way to marry Pete, who wasn’t having any of it. In wedlock, that is. Not so old Pap, as I’ve told you. Well, there it is,” he said shortly after a left turn on Seventh Street. “The Hamm County Beverage Company. Everybody went home at noon, but I thought you might be interested in looking at ‘The House That Mose Built’ without the distraction of a lot of ‘hey-how’re-you’s’. There’ll be lots of time for those later.” Pulling into a parking spot next to the building, stenciled letters on its wall identifying it as belonging to the Employee Of The Month, Jack said, “I’ll meet you at the front door. Gotta shut off the alarm.”
    He opened the two deadbolt locks securing the heavily-barred plate glass door, holding it open for her as he reached to the right to flip the light switches for the office. “Hamm County people must drink a lot of beer, judging from the size of this place,” Linda said as she peered down a long passageway that ended in double doors.
    “They do, but we reach out a little farther than that. We’re licensed in eight counties, with more to come when a few more dry counties vote the right way.” Putting a hand on her shoulder, he steered her slightly to the left to a door that led to a still-darkened office. He flipped a switch on the inside of the doorjamb that turned on twin lamps that sat on a credenza and a green-glass-shaded gooseneck desk lamp. “Voilá; the operation’s nerve center.”
    She looked silently around the room. Then she said, “Looks pretty much like I thought it would. No concession to fluorescent light for him. The house in Cuba had them in the kitchen; he had them torn out and replaced with a big-ass chandelier.”
    “Hm. You know, I never thought about it, but I can’t think of a single one out at the house. And I thought I knew everything there was to know about him.”
    “So did I, at one time. Well, show me the rest of this joint.”
    They were back in the car in less than half an hour, joined by a paper bag shrouding the distinctive rectangular shape of a fifth of Ballantine Scotch Whisky. “Let’s take a quick run through the Park,” he said as the wagon rolled out of the parking lot. “Gotta go through niggertown, but we can do the round trip before dark, which is a good idea for white folks on Saturday.”
    “Fair enough,” she said with a giggle.
    “What’s so funny?”
    “I was just