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nothing would bite me, and (b) I wanted her phone for thirty seconds to send a code to the sim card and clone it, so I could get a grip on this twittering business before I got fired again, but (c) got a handful of cold, hard, trouble instead. It felt like a Glock.
Not one piece of Strike was falling into place for a smooth run. Not one piece. At this rate, I may be single for the rest of my life.
* * *
On Tuesday morning, I hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob of control central in our basement offices, then locked myself in. I had serious work to do. Before I went downstairs, I went upstairs and snagged Little Sanders. He was my ward for the morning. (#FallBreakFail) I parked his butt outside the office with a laptop stuffed full of Strike pictures from the night before and told him he’d better not move a muscle or I’d deliver him to his father for another day of watching him work. Or worse, to his mother, for a day of watching her watch herself.
He said, “Duuuuude.”
He complained because he couldn’t play with the Baylor dude, and asked what he was supposed to do all day.
“You’re going to tweet, post, and make little movies.”
“And do what with them?”
“Give them to me, so I can stop what I’m doing every hour and send them out for the next ten days.”
He said, “Dude, HootSuite them.”
“Who?”
HootSuite is a social media manager. Somehow Little Sanders knew all about it. For a small fee, it would manage all the social media sites, integrate them, track them, analyze them, and best of all, it could be loaded up with scheduled posts and tweets well into the future. HootSuite would do for me what I was supposed to be doing for Elspeth. Which would free me up. “Do it, Thomas,” I said. “Load me up with ten days’ worth of stuff.”
Baylor and Fantasy were recovering from their morning Bellissimo Ballet Barre at Fantasy’s allergist’s. Fantasy is allergic to all the usual suspects. In addition, she’s allergic to nickel—her gun is solid steel, her personal electronics all in OtterBox cases, and she never touched coins—red dye #40, and fingernail polish. Today she was welcoming the newest member to her allergen family—Aroma Brand, Chocolate Chip Cookie flavor.
We’d already seen a sneaky exchange between Cassidy Banking and Missy and Red Jennings. (Right?) And now Hashtag Elspeth was, for whatever reasons, packing heat and carrying concealed. Our team had gone from Code Let’s-Get-This-Over-With to Code Uh-Oh to Code High-Alert.
Fantasy’s doc needed to fix her up and fast.
I settled in at the computer with a large cup of coffee and blueberry frosted Pop Tarts. The most pressing question on my mind was, did he know? Had he been waiting for this day to come? Or had it, like most things, slipped right by him without registering in his pea brain?
My ex-ex-husband, Eddie the Ass Crawford, looked and moved like Rhett Butler, but he did it with the mental wherewithal of Pee Wee Herman. The reasons I married him twice are blurry, painful, and well behind me. They can be attributed, for the most part, to me having been born and raised in Pine Apple, Alabama, population two: me and him. I truly, at the time (times), didn’t know any better.
The court’s clerk in Camden told us we couldn’t see the docket, because she had no idea where it was. The filings, proceedings, and rulings for my old divorce were in off-site storage, with seven off-site storage facilities to choose from.
“We hired this company out of Montgomery to scan everything into our system and all they did was rip us off.” She dropped her mouth wide open and slid her lower jaw back and forth. Pop, pop. “So we dumped it all over town. We don’t have room to keep it here, except murders and stuff.” She cracked her knuckles, one hand, and then the other. Crunch, crunch. “All’s I can tell you is the divorce never was finalized because your husband didn’t live in
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