.

in the stock market because of them.

      Why the devil hadn’t he simply flown down to Texas, as he usually did?

       Because Sidney said you needed time off.

      The first thing he planned to do upon checking in at his hotel was to call his golf-partner-cum-physician and tell him what he could do with himself the next time he got another of his brainstorms. “’Your blood pressure is going through the ceiling,’” he mimicked Sid with disgust. “’Slow down now or the only golf you’ll be playing is with the likes of J. Paul Getty and Diamond Jim Brady at that great country club in the sky.’”

      So what had he done? When the business trip to Oklahoma City and Houston came up, he’d let Sid talk him into renting a car and driving down from Chicago. Driving. “Take time to notice the scenery for a change. Then catch a connecting flight to the Cayman Islands for a week and ingest some sea air. Ease up on the old ticker. Do it for me, okay?”

      Well, he had news for Sid; if the Great Accountant in the Sky had wanted him to waste his time taxiing himself along some of the flattest geography in this country, He would never have allowed the invention of supersonic jets.

      He sighed with exasperation as he exited for Peavy’s Country Store and Gas, thinking that the place damn well better provide the twenty-four-hour service it advertised.

      Pine trees towered on either side of him as he coasted to a stop at the unlit crossroads. In fact, he couldn’t see a light of any kind in either direction, let alone a hint of any type of man-made structure.

       It’s enough to make you miss downtown Chicago. At rush hour.

      With a long-suffering sigh, he cut a sharp left turn as the advertisement had directed and thought he would like a few words with the environmentalists who kept crying wolf about the world’s population dilemma. The only thing in excess around here seemed to be trees.

      He drove for about a quarter of a mile. The view didn’t change: varying degrees of blackness continued to cocoon him, thanks to the encroaching woods, and all that his headlights picked up was—

      “What the…?”

      His car’s beams illuminated a white compact with its hood raised. But what sent his mood plummeting straight into gloom was seeing that the driver was female.

      Just what he needed. More woman problems.

      If it had been a guy, he would have kept driving and notified the attendant at the station; but no such luck. The woman stood beside the car waving a white handkerchief or something. Apparently no one had ever told her that it was unsafe to get out of her car at night and flag down strangers.

      “Brainless twit. You’re a walking crime statistic waiting to happen.” Lucky for her, he’d come along, because there was only one thing on his mind and it wasn’t trouble.

      He turned on his emergency flashers and pulled up beside the miniskirted brunette. As he lowered the passenger window at the push of a button, she pressed a hand to her low-necked blouse and leaned over to eye him anxiously.

      Now she got cautious? he fumed silently. He didn’t bother responding to her tentative smile. “Engine trouble?”

      She eyed his attire and visibly relaxed.

      “Thank God. I thought I was going to have to spend the whole night stranded out here. Do you know how to change a flat tire, sir?”

      He stretched to peer at the compact’s front and back wheels. “I don’t see any flat.”

      “It’s the front right one. I hate to trouble you.”

      Right. He watched her abandon demureness to brush her hair back from her face, which gave him a blatant view of generous cleavage and creamy skin swelling over the cups of a lacy black bra. Sure, you hate to trouble me.

      He sighed. “Save the floor show, honey. I’m in a hurry, but I will drive you to the station down the street. Peavy’s, I think the sign said. Someone there should be able to help you.”

      For an instant her expression hardened, but she quickly replaced it with a beguiling smile. “You’re obviously not from around here or you’d know that place went out of business ages ago.”

      Swearing under his breath, he downshifted, and climbed out of the car. What choice did he have? Contrary to what his last secretary had accused as she’d walked out on him, he wasn’t a bastard; just disciplined and busy. In any case, if the woman was a local and knew about Peavy’s, maybe she could tell him where the nextPreoccupied, his senses as numb as his body from the hours of monotonous driving, he was slow to hear someone approaching him from behind, slow to react. He began to turn, only to be stopped by a sharp blow to the back of his head.

      The night exploded into dozens of headlights that blinded him. A sonic boom roared in his ears. As panic splintered every bone in his frame, he tried to run; but his legs betrayed him and he toppled to the street.

      He knew another savage instant of pain as he hit the oily road. Then he knew nothing at all.

       One

      “Frankie—dance with me!”

      “Thank you, Moose. But I value my toes too much to expose them to those clodhoppers of yours. Besides, it’s time for last call. Want another beer before you go home for the night?”

      He did and he ordered another round for the other two regulars seated with him. Frankie nodded, wheeled around to her next table, and repeated the question.

      “I got a better idea, Frankie, darlin’,” the potbellied man at the farthest end drawled with a tomcat smile. “Why don’t you take me home to that li’l ol’ trailer of yours? I’ve got a powerful hankerin’ to be tucked in t’night.”

      “There’s no missing that you need tucking in, Howie,” she told him, as she exchanged the filled ashtray on the table for a clean one. “But what would your wife say?”

      He grinned and his twinkling eyes vanished in the folds of his pudgy face. “That you didn’t have the sense of a chigger.

      ”

      Frankie waited for his buddies to stop guffawing and slapping at the table. “Well, you know I do respect Pru’s judgment. On top of that, you don’t like animals. The man who gets tucked in by me has to be crazy about my pets, too.”

      “Aw, ain’t nobody on earth ‘cept you could find those critters lovable, Frankie.”

      With a shrug and a smile, she collected several longnecked beer bottles and added them to the empties on her tray. “They may not all be as pretty as Lassie or hold a conversation like Mr. Ed, but they’re better company than the two-legged critters I’ve gone out with. Stayed around longer, too,” she added with a wink. “Now except for Howie, who’s going to have coffee or else have his keys taken, what’ll it be, boys?”

      A few requested a repeat of their last order, and she returned to the bar and called her list to Benny. As the owner of The Two-Step Club reached into the cooler for the beers, Frankie dropped the empty cans and bottles in their proper recycling drums.

      When she’d started working here fourteen months ago, the routine was to toss everything into the industrial garbage receptacle out back. She convinced everyone to separate aluminum from glass. Once a week Benny loaded the barrels into her truck, and she took them to the recycling plant in the next town. Once a month the proceeds were split between owner and employees.

      “Sure has been slow since those timber-company fellas moved up the road,” Benny muttered, adding a bourbon and water to her tray.

      Frankie wrinkled her nose, as much for the cigarette-buttfilled ashtrays she dumped as for his observation. Just because her boss didn’t have people stacked