Author's Note: Well, my chapter titles continue to get sillier, so I feel compelled to post the reminder that they are really there to keep you in tune with which episode(s) I am paralleling at any given time. Which I tell you now so that you won't get to wondering why Jesse never runs away...


Chapter Eight - Arrest Jesse, the Runaway

"He's a crazy one."

Had he really let Bo go with as little as that? There were excuses, maybe. Thin ones, just about transparent, but he could make them if he wanted to.

They could cover more ground if they split up. Bo had offered to go off on his own. The scrawny farm kid had grown up to over six feet with broad shoulders and work-strengthened muscles; he could take care of himself. Bo knew the land better than any stranger to these parts ever would. He had that blonde charm and with any luck he wouldn't come up against a .38.

That was Luke's story in a nutshell, and it wasn't good enough, by miles, to pass the Jesse Duke test. Not that it would get that far, because it had already failed the Luke Duke test and here he was with a head full of regrets and no sign of Bo.

Girls. That was where it all fell apart. Girls.

That was where everything always fell apart, and Luke should have known better. Two would never be enough for Bo – twins, dropping out of the heavens to appear on Hazzard's roadways, just cruising up Route Thirty-six in a semi – and they were only a way-station, a moment of kissing between here and there. Bo needed multiples of girls, two becoming four before he'd get the half of what he wanted.

Four girls, pretty enough, but not a one of them worthy of the time Bo took to drool at them. Running the Dixie Auto Supply store and he really should have put it together sooner, before Jesse got arrested for a crime he would never think to commit, before the General had been stripped down to his bare bones, before Daisy had nearly driven them over a cliff in pursuit of the pretty little fillies that had been stripping cars then selling their parts to Cooter so he could put them right back into those very same cars, before Bo had gone off on his own. Looking for girls.

Bo had been a smart enough kid, once. Still blonde, still gullible and plenty lazy, but he'd had the basic ability to think and reason. And then a case of the stupids had broken out like the pimples across his cheeks. His legs had lengthened, his hair had curled, his voice had begun to deepen, and his brains had gone on hiatus. From then on, everything was girls. With Bo, standing in the midst of them all but shouting that he was ready to be led astray. He'd follow a girl anywhere she led, so long as it meant trouble, danger or risk.

"This is just a little strange," Bo had said, not two hours back when they were on the run in Cooter's pickup with those very same girls on their back door, wielding weapons. "I ain't never had no girl shooting at me before."

And back then, when his only worry had been that maybe one of those bullets whizzing through the air might actually come within reasonable range of actually hitting the borrowed pickup, Luke had taken the time to be witty. "Generally it's the girl's father that's shooting at you."

Not that it mattered much to Bo which way it went, the young ladies doing the shooting or their daddies – if there were girls to get closer to, that little magnet inside his cousin would draw him to them regardless of the artillery.

And Luke knew that, had been fully aware of that little fact for close to a decade now. The sun rose in the east and Bo liked girls a mite more than he liked having all his teeth and a body that was free of wonton bullet holes. But Luke had let him go, had accepted the flimsy, fragile reasoning that they would have a better chance of fixing the problem of Jesse's incarceration by going off in opposite directions.

Because Luke was his own brand of fool, and he might just as well admit that to himself right now. He'd been so enamored of that little picture in his mind (what if we made the General into a four-wheeler?) that if the suggestion had been made that Bo just go right on back to the edge of the cliff they'd just walked away from and then jump off, Luke might just have nodded and told him to watch that first step, it was a doozy.

But now that he had his own wish fulfilled, and the dust of the bluffs was flying around him as he bumped through parts Hazzard's wastelands, over roots and through streams that the General would never have been able to forge before, he could recognize that he was a fool.

"I'm just so worried about Bo," Daisy chirped in his ear, and that made it worse. Because now he had to comfort her when he hadn't even begun to figure out how to comfort himself.

"Ah, he's a Duke, he's got at least twelve lives," worked well enough, sounded like utter confidence in his own ears. Daisy was convinced (or at least she was convinced not to express her fears to Luke anymore) and actually set to watching for dust to be kicked up by the jeeps that the thieving girls had been spotted driving.

It was enough, directing traffic and giving orders to the other searchers, to distract him. To keep his mind from berating him on endless repeat for mistakes made and consequences yet to be paid. Until, that was, he saw them. All three of the jeeps belonging to the car-stripping girls, and up front, in the red one, Bo. Tied to the roll bar, his arms spread eagle and the charming little lady behind the wheel was driving like she didn't have a six-and-a-half foot human protuberance hanging out of the open top of her vehicle.

He'd been so cocky, such an idiot, getting the General all hiked up like this, driving him out of the garage with glee and shouting, "You can relax, the Marines have landed." Then he'd wasted time dickering with Boss and now he was anything but relaxed and his Marine training was useless against a bunch of girls that had fulfilled Bo's fondest dream and kidnapped him. Of course, Bo usually woke up a sweaty mess before he got to the part where the girls tried to behead him by driving through trees with low-hanging branches.

Wasn't much of an effort to overtake the jeep at the back of the pack; the girl behind the wheel wasn't half the driver she needed to be to handle the thing anyway. But that was just the green jeep, and it didn't matter, because Bo was in the red jeep, and somewhere in between the two there was a yellow jeep.

No one could get hurt, it was the cardinal rule that followed them over peaks and into down into valleys when they delivered moonshine, that chased them when they ran from Rosco. And it applied here, even if it was half anger that made him turn the steering wheel over to Daisy as he grabbed his compound bow, leaned out the window, nocked an arrow and pulled the sting as taut as it had ever been before letting loose. Couldn't hurt anyone, but they could take out a tire here and there and as long as the jeep stayed upright and no one fell out, Luke was approximately playing by the rules.

Even if he halfway did want to hit the girls and his uncle had forbid him from ever doing any such thing before he had even reached school age.

The yellow jeep fell to the wayside, and he was nocking his next arrow when Daisy steered them into a bump. Lost the bow to the dirt of the road beneath them, and that was probably divine intervention, because there Bo was, not a hundred yards in front of them, still on his feet in the back seat of the jeep, hands tied tight and no place to go if the jeep rolled.

Seconds to minutes, and Luke was as helpless as he had ever been. Nothing to do but berate himself for being an idiot, for knowing Bo's luck with women and letting him go running out after them alone anyway. And then, finally, his cousin went and showed that he could, in fact, be trusted to look after himself. A shift of hips and Bo's fingertips were digging into that little pouch on his belt, and producing a knife. If there was one thing Bo always had been, it was deft of hand, and he made short work of cutting through one rope, then the other, even as the jeep continued hurtling forward as fast as its driver could make it go. Free, his cousin was finally free, finally sitting back down out of the deadly dangerous position he'd been in.

And that was where it all went crazily awry all over again. Because instead of getting away from the girl, Bo went toward her. Arms around her and—

"The cliff," Daisy was shouting.

No time to waste thinking or deciding anything at all, Luke just pulled even with the jeep and hollered a few words of his own about cliffs ahead and bailing out.

Bo, to his credit, listened. He rolled right out of that fast-moving jeep.

And brought the girl with him. Luke could have justified that with the niggling notion that no one was allowed to get hurt, and it might have held a small kernel of truth. But that bigger kernel was still there, undeniable in its accuracy: Bo Duke's brain went into remission whenever he got within smelling distance of a girl.


"Bo."

Luke hadn't trusted him for awhile, he knew that. Could feel the tension of it in the vinyl of the bench seat between them. And maybe he had his reasons. Or reason, there was only one that Bo could think of. All right, sure, it was a big one, one that ended in a fireball at the bottom of Kissing Cliff, but it was still only one reason. When Bo had already proved himself reliable and honorable a hundred times over before they even got close to the edge.

"It ain't nothing, Luke."

Thing was, a 'shine delivery was not a real good time for all that lack of trust to go asserting itself.

"It's something," the answer came back, followed by Luke twisting in his seat to get a good look out Sweet Tilly's back window.

But then Luke always had expected the worst. Out of most things, not necessarily out of Bo.

"It ain't nothing to worry about," Bo corrected, but he was starting to have his doubts. Luke (and only Luke) could do that to him.

"It's moving," came his cousin's assertion. "As fast as we are. It's something."

"Maybe it's a shadow."

It was dark, black on black with no real shades of gray. Absent moon, stars veiled behind clouds. Nothing to see inside the car or out, but he knew that Luke's lips went flat at those last words, that those eyes, so blue they ought to be visible even in the gloom that surrounded them, were squinted down. Announcing, with just that, how little he appreciated that particular bit of wisdom.

"You reckon you can keep her on the road?" And see, that right there. Luke had never asked him that (okay, he'd asked him that a number of times with sarcasm just dripping off his tongue, but he had never, in all seriousness, asked Bo that kind of question) over all their years of driving together, and now—"if we take her down to the old Ridge Road?" One failure, and it wasn't even his, but Luke was going to harp on it. "There ain't no shadow," ah, now there was the missing sarcasm, found all over again, "that would follow us down there."

"It wasn't me, it was the accelerator," came snapping out of him like it had a dozen times before. "I'm good, Luke, but even I can't get a car stopped if the accelerator gets stuck."

"The accelerator working now?"

"Yeah."

"Then step on it."

Yes, sir.

Luke pulled himself up onto his knees then, fully turned around and watching out the back window, looking for trouble that just wasn't there. "Besides," came mumbling out of his mouth, like it was supposed to be under his breath. "It was your turn to tune her car anyways. And check her accelerator, but you was too busy doing a little body work," but it was plenty loud enough for Bo to hear, and Luke knew it. He just wanted the right to look innocent when Bo got pushed far enough to start hollering at him. "With Lorianne Barlow."

And anyway, Luke could go on all day about how Bo ought to have done a safety inspection on Daisy's car before they found themselves on the run from Rosco and Enos, their female cousin's Roadrunner bumping over divots and kicking up dust as they tore down the hillside toward the cliff. Both of them in this car knew that Luke liked to tinker and Bo liked to drive, and there'd never been anything like a schedule when it came to who looked after the cars in the family. Luke did it and he didn't complain about it until something went wrong on one of them, and then, suddenly, there'd be all those cross words about how it had been Bo's turn to fix it.

"It ain't no shadow," Luke announced. "It's Buchanan. Hit it Bo!"

And just like that, all of Luke's concerns about whether Bo could hold to the road disappeared. He started giving quick orders, the sort that would have been wild to anyone else's ears, but Bo understood them well enough. Out toward the swamp where they'd lost many a revenue agent before, and even if this one was a little more experienced, a little more dogged than any they'd faced in a few years, he'd be a fool to chase the Dukes that far.

Hazzard went through revenuers in the same fashion that it went through seasons – some burned out under the hot sun, others disappeared in a spring storm of fury, some just fell to the side like leaves out of trees while others froze up. Bo took a certain pride in the way they got driven to desk jobs or retirement after only a short stay in this region. He figured he had a pretty strong hand in their career decisions.

"Left, left," Luke was hollering, trying to send them over the high road, but Bo had other ideas. Yeah, there were thicker trees up above, but down here there were murky shadows that he could hide in. "Dang it, Bo!"

And there it was again. Luke didn't trust him. And he'd like to blame it on the demise of Daisy's car. (Heck, he'd like to blame it on Daisy herself, who had been the one most interested in seeing that Susie Holmes girl married to her farmer boyfriend, Fred. The Duke boys wouldn't even have been in her car at all if Luke hadn't gotten the brilliant idea to switch cars so Daisy could decoy Rosco over to the far ends of the county while they took off in the opposite direction. But it wasn't Daisy's fault that she believed in love, even over family objections, and Bo reckoned that if he couldn't have the girl himself, Fred looked like a nice enough guy for her to be with. Love was a good thing, even if Luke couldn't quite get himself to believe it was after that red-headed racecar driver broke his heart.) But it wasn't about any of that, and it didn't have to do with his driving, exactly. Luke trusted the way he handled a car, he just didn't like the way Bo used his brain. And that was too damned bad.

Because Bo had himself a plan that was going to work, down here where he had the advantage of a lifetime spent in Hazzard. And if his tongue burned with the urge to tell Luke so, he bit it back in deference to the need to concentrate on his surroundings.

Buchanan was Luke's kind of guy – too smart for his own good – and Bo figured that under different circumstances the two ought to hit it off perfectly. An overconfident fool, the sort of revenuer that would run just as dark as his quarry, no headlights, taillights or reflectors of any kind, and that gave Bo his second advantage. Skirting through the dust of roads he knew like he knew his own family, like Luke should know him. Should know full well that Bo had that third advantage up his sleeve, but somehow he didn't.

"Bo." He was agitated, too busy shuffling around in the passenger seat, probably hiding behind his own arm. "Watch the—" offering useless advice when Bo knew precisely what he was doing, driving them through the wash where the Hazzard dam had breached back in nineteen sixty-eight, where there was a gully that was still littered with boulders. "—Rocks," and yeah, Luke was too busy trying to protect his head, as though there was any danger at all that he'd lose it.

When there wasn't, because whether there was a load of moonshine in his trunk or a racing number on his door, Bo Duke was the best driver in three counties, and probably three states. Better than anyone who'd ever passed through Hazzard's borders, and that included his own kin.

"It's fine, Luke," he consoled, because his cousin always did expect the worst, and that was enough of an affliction to live with, he supposed.

"Bo!" started up again in the passenger seat, but got cut off by the way the car swerved, at the last possible second, to miss that two-ton iron boulder that sat in the middle of the field in front of them. And if Luke had more to say after that, it got lost under the sound of steel wrapping itself around stone. "Whoa," his cousin wound up saying instead of whatever groused complaints he intended to come out with. Genuine awe, and that was just music to Bo's ears. "Hold up a second," followed and there was no sign of that tight crouch his cousin's body had been in a few seconds back, not now that he was stretched out over the back to the seat, looking to see whether the hissing and ticking heap of a car contained a live revenuer or a—"He's okay; hit it, cuz!"

And all was right with Luke again. Except, of course, for the fact that they both knew that he didn't trust Bo.