Lord of the Fleas Page 2

  “That’s great.” My enthusiasm wasn’t totally selfless. I’d been Becky’s guinea pig for new massage techniques. I missed those free massages.

  Rustling, gurgling sounds emanated from the baby monitor. “Break time’s over,” Becky said, with a small groan.

  I smiled, resisting the urge to rub my hands together. Time to spoil some rug rats.

  The next morning, I expected to have trouble staying awake during the prayer service. As a kid, I’d always found the readings and prayers the most boring parts of church. Even the sermon was better, because my dad had a good sense of humor. I didn’t always know why the adults were laughing, but it was fun to be able to make noise for a few seconds, off and on during his sermons.

  Today, I was pleasantly surprised. The sixty-something man, with a stringy gray ponytail hanging below a baseball cap, kept things hopping. I assumed he must be Zeke. He was a skinny guy, wearing an overlarge green Army jacket and clutching a tattered leather-bound Bible in his weathered hands.

  He’d read a short passage of scripture or say a short prayer, then launch us into another hymn. They were popular ones, and I remembered most of the words. Which was a good thing, since there were no hymnals.

  Only forty or so souls singing their hearts out, from narrow folding chairs crammed into the house trailer’s living room. Even with all the other furniture removed, the room was way too small for the crowd, but that didn’t seem to slow anybody down.

  By the third hymn, everyone was standing, arms in the air, swaying back and forth. I stood with them, feeling a little foolish. But by the last hymn—a rousing rendition of an old Sunday School favorite, This Little Light of Mine—I found my hands were creeping up and my hips were bopping back and forth.

  The song ended abruptly and heat crept up my cheeks. I lowered my arms.

  Zeke raised his hands in the air. “Hallelujah and amen!” he shouted.

  “Hallelujah and amen,” everyone yelled back.

  And suddenly the organized rows of worshipers dissolved into a gaggle of folks, shoving folding chairs aside, shaking hands, slapping shoulders, exchanging hugs, and all talking loudly.

  “Come on,” Derek shouted above the noise. He moved off, balanced between two walking sticks, his jeans-clad legs seeming too thin to hold up his bulk. The crowd parted for him and greeted him warmly, smiling, patting his arm, exchanging a few words.

  The dogs and I trailed behind and waited for introductions in each small cluster of folks.

  Most people, especially the women, leaned down to fuss over the dogs. No way was I going to try to explain, under these circumstances, that they shouldn’t be treated as pets. It wasn’t something you wanted to yell at the top of your lungs.

  I’d go through the drill tomorrow with Derek about making it clear when others could or could not pet Fred, and we’d devise a plan for setting those limits with the vendors and customers.

  I wasn’t going to remember all these people’s names and faces, but it was good to know my client was part of this community. It was too easy for combat veterans, especially ones with PTSD, to end up isolating from people. I’ve heard more than one variation of “others haven’t seen what I’ve seen; I don’t fit in with normal society anymore” from my clients.

  Derek didn’t seem to have that problem. And now I better understood his upset over the thefts. The “insider” who was stealing things was breaking faith with this tight-knit group of vendors.

  He was one of its youngest members. Most of the vendors were middle-aged or older. About half the men, and some of the women, wore military insignia on jackets or baseball caps.

  Which explained why Derek did not have that all-too-common isolation issue. More than a few of these people had probably seen combat.

  Two people stood out in my mind enough that I remembered their names. One, Denny, was a robust gentleman with a loud voice. Like Zeke, he wore a Vietnam Veteran’s baseball cap, which meant he had to be at least in his sixties. His wife was rail thin, with too-evenly-dyed dark hair. I didn’t catch her name.

  Then Derek lingered a bit with a woman around his age, whom he introduced as Nell Benson. Hers was one of the few introductions that included a last name.

  She wore a gray sweatshirt and loose jeans—which only somewhat disguised a great figure—with long blonde hair, big blue eyes and a porcelain complexion. She reminded me of the china-doll collection my grandmother had passed down to me, and I had passed on to my niece.

  She seemed shy and ducked her head a lot as Derek chatted with her. I couldn’t tell if he was just being kind or if he was attracted to her.

  Eventually, the group started to break up, people wandering off to open their stalls. We moved out onto a poured-cement porch, the dogs following.

  “See ya later, Nell,” Derek said. She gave a small wave and jumped off the porch, then walked around the outside of the flea market building.

  I glanced up. A small wooden steeple had been added to the house trailer’s roof. It sat at a slight cant, perhaps as a result of some tropical storm. That and its flaking white paint made it look a little sad.

  Zeke appeared and followed us as Derek maneuvered his way down the ramp with his walking sticks. At the bottom, he steadied himself beside his motorized cart, loaded the sticks into the plastic basket attached to its front, and climbed aboard.

  We headed toward his stall, Zeke keeping pace with us.

  “Hope you enjoyed the service,” he said in a gravelly voice devoid of a Southern accent. Another Northern transplant like myself maybe? It was hard to tell. Some natives retained the Florida Cracker accent while others, especially those who’d spent any amount of time up North, did not.

  “Yes, very much so,” I said, and found that I meant it.

  We came to a stall that was surrounded by make-shift curtains of heavy chain-link fencing material. They met in the middle and were held together with two combination padlocks. Zeke unlocked them and shoved the fencing curtains aside.

  Inside was a rough-hewn wooden table covered with a gruesome array of knives. One section was for kitchen knives—everything from paring to steak to butcher, some in blocks, some in cases. On the other half were every kind of cutting instrument imaginable—pen knives, hunting knives, daggers. Some were probably antiques, with ornate patterns on their handles and sheaths.

  On the back wall, various swords were displayed. Zeke reached up and touched the blade of one of the unsheathed swords. “Ouch.” He snatched his hand back and put a finger in his mouth.

  “That baby’s my good luck charm,” he said around his wounded appendage, “I touch her every day, but half the time she bites me back.” He grinned at me. “Kinda reminds me of a cat I once had.”

  I gave a weak smile back. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this guy. He had a certain charisma, but…

  Derek obviously liked him. His face beamed as he shook Zeke’s hand goodbye.

  The dogs trailing along, he and I moved on to his stall. It had a fancier mesh-metal curtain around it. Derek dug a small remote from his pocket and hit a button. The curtain, hanging from a track, slid smoothly aside and retracted along the sides of the stall.

  “If Zeke’s the owner,” I blurted out, “why doesn’t he have a nicer gate like this?”

  My inner mom tsk-tsked at my rude curiosity. Heat rose in my cheeks.

  But Derek didn’t seem to mind my nosiness. “I think a previous vendor added this one at their own expense.” He pulled his walking sticks out of the cart’s basket. “Could you put these back in the rack for me? I rotate the ones I use, to show them off.”

  I smiled at him and took the sticks. He might seem like an innocent, but I was starting to think he was a pretty savvy marketer.

  I walked over to the display. “Where’s the fancy one?”

  “Getting it out now.” Derek headed for the back of the stall. He maneuvered himself off of the cart and, hanging onto a railing along the very back wall, disappeared behind a curtain.

  I looked around at the other vendors, bustling about their stalls. Nell’s was across the aisle and two down, stuffed with all kinds of kitchen gadgets.

  Feeling the lure of all those gizmos promising to make food prep sublimely easy, I took a step in that direction.

  A bellow thundered behind me. I jumped an inch. Crapola!

  Whirling around, I raced in the direction of the yelling…toward the back of Derek’s stall.

  Chapter Two

  Hanging onto the railing across the back of his stall, Derek stood over a steamer-type trunk, his face beet red, cursing a blue streak.

  I hate swearing—another trait I’d picked up from my mother—but now was not the time to convey that to my client. “What’s the matter?” I had to raise my voice to be heard.

  “It’s gone,” he yelled, gesturing toward the trunk. “The dragonhead cane is gone.” He turned, letting go of the railing, and lost his balance. Grabbing for a set of metal shelves beside the trunk, he nearly brought them over on himself. Tools and chunks of wood rattled, a few of the latter tumbling to the ground.

  I held out my hands in a placating gesture. “Take it easy. Are you sure you put it in there?”

  “Of course, I did,” he yelled, not quite as loudly. But his face was still red. I worried he’d give himself a stroke.

  He took a deep breath. “I always keep it locked in there,” he said, his volume closer to normal. “The padlock’s been cut off.”

  “Can I take a look?”

  Derek backed out of the narrow space between the curtain and the back wall. He glanced my way, then ducked his head. “Sorry I yelled at you.”

  “No problem.” Telling the dogs to lie down and stay, I slipped past him to the open trunk. A padlock lay on the floor, its shank cleanly
cut, most likely with bolt cutters.

  Inside the trunk was some folded cloth on one side, and on the other, a metal cashbox and a couple of small power tools—apparently expensive enough to merit being locked up.

  “They didn’t take the other stuff.” He’d moved up behind me. His voice sounded rough.

  I looked over my shoulder. “You should call the police.”

  He shook his head. “Zeke might not like that. He’s not fond of cops.”

  That surprised me some. As a military veteran, I’d expect Zeke to be pro-law-and-order.

  “We need to at least tell him,” I said.

  Derek hung his head. “He’s gonna be pissed that I lost his cane.”

  “His cane?”

  “He was the one who gave it to me.”

  “Well, you didn’t lose it. You had it locked up, but it was stolen.” I patted his arm that clung to the railing. “You finish setting up your stall. I’ll go get him.”

  Zeke wasn’t particularly upset about the stolen cane. He seemed rather blasé about the thefts in general, but I didn’t know him well. Maybe that was only his surface reaction.

  He took a couple of photos of the trunk and the cut lock with his phone. Then he picked up the lock in his bare hand.

  I winced. Now his prints were on it, and the thief’s prints were probably smudged.

  “I’ll hang on to this as evidence,” Zeke said, “in case we ever do catch whoever’s doing this.”

  That isn’t gonna happen anytime soon, Ms. Snark commented internally, with this guy in charge.

  I nodded slightly to myself, then realized, with some consternation, that I’d been agreeing with Ms. Snark a lot lately.

  “I wish you’d sold the dang thing,” Zeke said. “I gave it to you ’cause it fit in better with your stuff than mine. You should’ve priced it right and made some money off of it.”

  Derek pressed his lips together and swallowed hard, but didn’t say anything.

  Meanwhile I was trying to make sense of Zeke’s words. Why would he give away such a valuable item just because it wasn’t a sword or knife?

  Aha! Maybe he’d wanted to help Derek out financially, but in a way that allowed him to save face.

  Zeke gently patted the younger man’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. It is what it is.” He walked away.

  I was a little worried about Derek. He seemed so shaken by the theft.

  I ushered the dogs behind the curtain to where he had set up a large dog bed and water dish, at the opposite end from the steamer trunk. I signaled for them to lie down.

  Fred’s dark brown eyes watched me from his lighter brown face. He rested his chin on a white paw. Most of the rest of his wiry coat was white, with flecks of gray and a wide swath of black across his back, like a saddle. He wasn’t a particularly attractive dog, but he had a cute face, and he was smart as a whip.

  I smiled down at him. “Stay,” I said, holding my hand up, palm out.

  Buddy promptly closed his eyes and went to sleep, but Fred’s gaze followed me as I left the back area.

  Out front, Derek, on his motorized cart, was conversing with a customer. The elderly man seemed interested in a cane that was hanging from the rafters above the stall.

  Derek maneuvered his cart under it, then stood, holding onto the edge of a table for balance. Hefting a long-handled mechanical grabber in his other hand, he snagged the cane off its hook and brought it down.

  The old man’s face had shut down. “Why’re you in that cart, pretendin’ to be crippled?”

  I shot him a dirty look, which he ignored.

  “You tryin’ to get people to buy your stuff ’cause they feel sorry for you?”

  I heard a low growling sound and looked around for Buddy. He wasn’t there. I realized the sound was coming from my own throat.

  Meanwhile, Derek, whose cheeks had reddened, was saying in a calm voice, “I’ve got back and balance issues.”

  “From a war injury,” I added, glaring at the old man.

  His cheeks turned red. He gave the cane a perfunctory glance, mumbled something about he’d think about it and wandered off.

  I took a deep breath to calm down.

  Derek shook his head. “I get that sometimes. People have trouble with the idea that you can be partially paralyzed. If they see me first in my wheelchair or on the cart, and then I stand up…they get all weird about it.”

  “What causes that exactly, the partial paralysis I mean?” I told myself the information would be useful to me, as the trainer of his service dog, but mostly I was curious—a chronic condition that my mother frequently reminds me can be lethal to cats. Thank heavens, I’m not a cat.

  “I’ve got what they call an incomplete spinal cord injury,” Derek said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “What’s that?”

  “An IED went off a ways behind me. The shock wave damaged my spinal cord but didn’t sever it. My doc described it as someone takin’ a hammer to a hot dog, but not quite hard enough to smash it completely. It’s smushed in the middle.”

  That mental image did help me to understand, but it also made me shudder. And I suspected I’d be off hot dogs for a while.

  “My left leg doesn’t really listen all that well to my brain’s signals to move,” Derek said, “although I can swing it from the hip. The right leg, the muscles work okay, but it doesn’t have much feeling. So I gotta be careful I don’t overdo, ’cause it can’t tell me when it’s tired.” He looked down at that leg. “And I’ve cut or burned it a few times, and didn’t realize it right away.”

  The information was actually useful—I made a mental note to teach Fred to stay on Derek’s right side instead of the left, where service dogs of right-handed owners usually walk, so he wouldn’t impede Derek’s ability to swing his paralyzed leg.

  But the info also made me sad.

  As a distraction, I grabbed up one of the wooden toys from the table. It was a train engine, brightly colored, with big, googly eyes on the front end. “This is cool.”

  The gesture worked. Derek’s face brightened. “I’ve got the whole train up there.” He pointed to a shelf.

  My mouth fell open. Each car in the train was made to look like a different animal, but it was still somehow a train car. The lion and tiger were both box cars, with their stubby legs ending at wide wooden wheels. And the giraffe sat on a flatbed car, long legs tucked under him. A tanker car was an elephant, and the caboose was a bear with a reddish-brown coat.

  “Awesome. Did you make that?”

  He nodded with a self-effacing smile.

  How much is the whole train?”

  “For you, free.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not allowed to take gifts from clients, but thank you. I’d like to buy it, though, for my godchildren for Christmas.”

  “Forty dollars.”

  I knew darn well that was lower than the normal price, but the look on Derek’s face kept me from arguing. He was totally tickled that I wanted the train.

  He used the long-handled grabber to gently lift each car down, and then nestled them in tissue paper in a box.

  One major Christmas present taken care of. If only I could find an anniversary present for Will so easily.

  Hmm, the first anniversary present was traditionally supposed to be paper. Maybe a gift certificate was a good idea. But I wanted it to be for something grander than a free massage from Becky.

  I glanced at my watch. Speaking of Becky, she’d be wondering where I was.

  A huge grin splitting his face, Derek rolled his cart over and handed me the box.

  “Thanks so much.” I paid him. “I gotta run. I’ll be at your house bright and early tomorrow.”

  “Sounds good.”

  With dogs in tow, I carried the box to my car, a distinct bounce in my step. The kids would love playing with the train, and its nature-based motif would appeal to my best friend.

  Becky’s husband had the day off. It was cool watching all of them around the lunch table. Andy’s light tan skin and tightly curled dark hair spoke of his African-American heritage, but a slight copper tone—brought out even more by the Florida sun—said there was a Native American or two in his family tree somewhere.