The Minotauress

White Shirt offered a warm smile. "Congratulations, Officer. I'm sure you'll make an exemplary federal agent, and I share in your exuberance."

Stu continued to hoot and holler, doing an awkward moonwalk about the booking room. Then he stopped abruptly and stared at White Shirt.

"You! Stand up!"

White Shirt did so, and Stu took off his handcuffs.

"Hit the road!"

The man turned. "Thank you very, very much, Officer... "

Stu pumped his fist in the air and did a Rebel Yell worthy of any redneck this side of the Mississippi. "Courtney? Gimme the key to the chief's office! He's got a bottle of Jack in there, and you and me are SURE AS SHIT gonna party tonight!"

White Shirt lit a cigarette and quietly left the station.

(XI)

"We gotta get out'a here and dump this U-Haul ‘fore that cop comes back," Dicky panicked in the front seat. He dug in his pocket and pulled up some change. "I gots seven cents! How much you got?"

"Fuck me and the horse my mamma rode in on!" Balls yammered, searching his own pockets. "Shee-it, look! Two quarters on the floor!"

"That's enough to get us out'a here!"

Balls ran in, paid, and pumped fifty-seven cents worth of regular unleaded into the car.

Dicky hauled out of the lot, engine screaming. "I cain't believe that shit, man! Of all the fucked up thangs!"

"Fuckin'-A... "

"We gotta bury this U-Haul in the woods somewhere—deep, Balls! Can you imagine if he'd opened it up and seed that thing back there?"

"Ya ain't gotta tell me, brother. But ya know... " Suddenly a calm settled into Balls. " I ak-shure-lee don't thank we got anything ta worry 'bout."

Dicky slowed down, staring. "What'cha mean? The Writer's gonna finger us to that cop!"

Balls stroked the goatee. "Naw, Dicky, I bet he don't... 'cos it ain't lodger-kul."

"We abducter'd him, man, and we was fixin' ta kill him! We made him help us rob a house and then he watched us sacker-fice Cora! That's murder, Balls! We'se'll get the death penalty!"

"Ain't gonna happen, Dicky."

"How ya figgure that?"

Balls let his long black redneck hair blow serenely out the window. "If the Writer was gonna finger us, he would'a done it right in front of the cop. He would'a showed him what's in the U-Haul and he would'a sung like a canary 'bout Crafter's house. But he didn't do none'a that."

Dicky seemed to chew on the speculation.

"Instead? He took the credit card rap and let hisself git arrested so's we could get away."

"Well... yeah," Dicky said in a slow drawl. "Now that I thank about it, I reckon yer right."

"Ya know, Dicky? The Writer's a geek and a tubesteak but he's also a stand-up guy."

"Dang straight—"

CLANK!

Dicky weaved in startlement. The sudden sound caused them both to flinch.

"Did you just throw a fuckin' rod?" Balls asked.

"Naw, man—" Dicky looked over his shoulder. "Sounded like it come from the back."

"Somethin' must'a falled over in the U-Haul. Pull'er over... "

Dicky idled the ‘Mino to the shoulder and cut the big engine. They both jumped out and ran back—

They stood.

They stared.

They slumped.

The U-Haul's door had been busted open from the inside, its steel latch bent and unseated. Inside, there was no sign of the Minotauress.

"That magic cum-spell must'a wore off!" Dicky exclaimed.

Behind them, in the woods, they heard a thrashing laced by vicious snorts. The sounds seemed to dim and eventually disappear as their source receded.

"There goes our million bucks," Balls lamented, hands on hips. He half-laughed to Dicky, then said, "Ain't that just a great big kick in the behind?"

But Balls had pronounced the word behind as "bee-hand."

EPILOGUE

It took the Writer two hours to walk back to downtown Luntville, yet he did so with a lively step and a studied joy on his face. The warm night's caress accompanied him, along with the gibbous moon and the aural sweep of crickets. Along the way, he pondered everything that had happened to him today and realized that the entire ordeal nearly existed as an allegorical masterpiece. Yes... Intrigue and advents, epiphanies and a resultant actualization, all wrapped up in an ever-important anti-climax. All necessary ingredients for fiction of literary worth—especially the latter component. Like Pope's Rape of the Lock, Melville's Bartleby, Lewis' Main Street, and—the best always last—Sartre's monumental "The Wall... " A gentle satisfaction swept the Writer, because he knew that the truth of his own life reflected the greatness of classic fiction along the same lines as A Tale of Two Cites and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...  Back at the Gilman House, he stepped into proverbial pin-drop silence. He thought of Poe's quintessential protagonist stepping across the threshold of the brooding House of Usher...