Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts Read Free Book Online

flashlight.
    “What did I do?” Willy Jack asked, but the sheriff had walked to the back of the car where he was copying the license tag number onto a ticket.
    “You lied to me about your wallet, didn’t you?” the girl asked.
    “I took care of it today.”
    “How? How did you take care of it?”
    “Look. Let’s pull together on this. Okay? We both want the same thing, don’t we? To go to Las Vegas. Together.” He reached across the seat for her hand. “Right?”
    The lights from the patrol car cast his face in a neon hue.
    “Isn’t that right?” he asked as he tightened his hold on her hand.
    Willy Jack turned when he heard the swish of gabardine at the window.
    “You just passing through, Mr. Pickens?”
    “He’s with me, Frank,” the girl said.
    The sheriff bent down and flashed his light across the front seat.
    “Hello, Jolene. I didn’t know you were in there.”
    “We’re going to Albuquerque to see a movie,” she said. “This is my boyfriend.”
    “I see.”
    Then he directed the light into the back seat. Jolene had loaded it with boxes and suitcases. Clothes hung from a hook over the back door; the floor was a jumble of shoes.
    “You’re taking a lot of stuff just to be going to a movie.”
    “We’re going to stop at the laundrymat. Do some washing.”
    “Wonder if you all would mind stepping outside the car.”
    Willy Jack took his time, but the girl scrambled out, too fast, too eager to cooperate. When the lights of a passing car moved over them, she ducked her head.
    “How long you been in town, Mr. Pickens?”
    “Not long,” Willy Jack answered.
    “Just a few days,” Jolene said. “Three or four.”
    “Sir, would you open the trunk for me?”
    Willy Jack leaned through the window, grabbed the keys, then went around to the back and unlocked the trunk. It was more or less the way he had left it, except his suitcase was open and there was a plastic garbage bag beside it. The sheriff pushed things around inside the suitcase, then untied the bag and rummaged through it for several seconds.
    “You smoke, Mr. Pickens?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What brand?”
    Willy Jack pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and held them out for the sheriff to see.
    “Wonder what you’re doing with fourteen cartons of Winstons then.”
    “What?” Willy Jack’s voice sounded squeezed. “They’re not mine.”
    Then the sheriff looked at Jolene.
    “I don’t smoke,” she said.
    “Mr. Pickens, you’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent . . .”
    Willy Jack had watched Hill Street Blues back in Tellico Plains, so he knew the words, knew them by heart. He even thought the sheriff there behind him sounded a little bit like Renko.
    A deputy stood near the door. Frank, the one who had arrested Willy Jack, sat beside a desk, facing him. The girl was in a chair beside him, but he never looked at her. Not once. The money she had given him was spread out on the desk.
    “Look,” Willy Jack said. “I run out of money. I just come here to see what I could hustle up.”
    “And you hustled up two hundred eighteen dollars and fourteen cartons of Winstons—Winston Light 100s. And you run into the strangest coincidence because that’s exactly what someone stole from the 7-Eleven in Puerto De Luna on Wednesday morning.”
    “I wasn’t even here Wednesday morning. I was in Oklahoma.”
    “Anyone who can prove that?”
    “Yeah. My girlfriend, Novalee. She was with me.”
    Jolene shifted in her chair; one of the wooden slats at the back made a sharp cracking sound.
    “Where is she now?” the sheriff asked. “This girlfriend.”
    “I left her in Oklahoma. Some town starts with an S.”
    The sheriff pulled an atlas from a drawer in his desk, thumbed through it a few seconds, then turned it toward Willy Jack.
    “There’s Oklahoma. Find the town.”
    Willy Jack ran his finger part way across the map, then tapped it twice.
    “Sequoyah, right there.”
    “So, you left that