Author's Note: Dumbest chapter title yet. I'll depart from canon soon, though, so at least it probably won't get any worse. And in creating this one, I realized I had misnamed the last one. It's been fixed now.


Chapter Nine - Rainy Day Treasure, Officer Daisy in Pursuit, Hey Jude

Bo's hair was flat. It was a tragedy, really, one that certainly merited the monumental amounts of pouting, huffing and blowing that his cousin was doing over there. All that pretty blonde fluff just hanging down into his eyes, and the boy was utterly put out. And that was before Daisy, who really ought to have known better, had the gall to stick out a hand and ruffle those low-hanging bangs.

She couldn't be blamed, really. The fall of hair across his forehead made Bo look like the little boy he'd been not so long ago, and no one could resist that. Besides, as far as Luke saw it, Daisy provided the near-perfect distraction.

Carrots and beans were easy, cucumbers presented something of a challenge, but onions, those were the real prize. Day after day of relentless rain, the sort that turned the roads of Hazzard into sucking mud and the farmyard into a swamp, and they'd been pinned to the indoors too long.

Daisy was trying to help. Sure, her methods lacked skill or subtlety, but her intentions were good. Playing with Bo's hair when the guy was already miserable about it was a pretty decent diversion – cucumber-worthy, when it came down to it. It was going to take a suddenly-appearing tornado (or, more likely an appealing girl) to create an onion-worthy distraction.

Cutting vegetables. Technically, that was what the Duke boys had been reduced to. Sitting at the old table while the world trickled and dripped around them, waiting for a brighter day, or for the old roof to give in to the sogginess and come crumbling down around them. By now they might have been rooting for the latter, because rebuilding would give them something to do after days of nothing.

Each of the boys had a pile of vegetables in front of him, while Daisy flitted around from stove to refrigerator, stopping to check on their progress. Luke's uncut pile was looking fine, fully three-quarters smaller than it had been when they started, while Bo's looked pretty close to how it always had. Frown about that crossing his female cousin's face, but Bo didn't see it and Luke ignored it, so it didn't matter. The pile of cut vegetables in the middle of the table was getting consistently bigger, and she ought to be happy enough about that.

"Have y'all figured out who you're going to take to the dance on Friday?" Now that was a fine distraction right there. Bo's eyes lost focus and his lips took on that silly smile as his brain turned itself off. Pretty pictures of young ladies in high-riding skirts and low-necked blouses flashing through his head, and Luke took the opportunity to roll an uncut onion from his pile onto Bo's.

Another frown from Daisy about that; he'd finally been caught. Sort of, it was just his girl cousin. He put a finger to his lips which only made her glower all the more, but she shut her mouth, which had been getting ready to say something that would likely put an end to his fun, with a solid click of her teeth. And kept giving him the stink-eye. Just, Luke Duke, the hard look on her face announced, when he figures it out, I'm gonna take his side.

"Holly Mae," Bo finally came out with, proving that unless Daisy helped him out, he'd never work out that Luke had been slowly unloading the uncut vegetables on his side of the table into the pile on Bo's side. Carrots and beans first, but they were too easy, hadn't presented enough of a challenge to be worth it. Now Bo had two more cucumbers and one more onion than he'd started with. And between the vegetables he'd gifted to Bo and the ones he'd actually cut, Luke was going to be done with his part of this little chore soon.

"Granny Annie will pull out all your fingernails if you try it." And his fingers to follow, just so Bo couldn't touch her curvaceous, blonde granddaughter, no matter how shameless the girl was in just about begging him to. Because she wasn't ripe enough for the picking, Granny had said, and she'd meant it.

"We saved her," Bo reminded him.

"Don't matter," he answered back, because it didn't. One of the strangest days of their lives, on the run with counterfeit money, and Rosco had caught them. Not a drop of moonshine in the car, just bill after bill of still wet and somewhat smudged greenbacks, but it hadn't mattered worth a pitcher of spit that the fake bills weren't theirs. The Hazzard law had been the laughing stock of the tri-county region for a while, and Luke figured that the Duke family's continued delivery of moonshine to customers high and low had a little something to do with that. Catching them doing anything at all that might put them away for a couple of years had to be Rosco's fondest dream.

But it was all in the name of a good cause. Old Granny was in love with her art, which included paintings of the mountains and the countryside, and then there was old Abe Lincoln, surrounded by a series of fives and the words legal tender. That love was just a touch passionate, a little too fervent for her own, or the Dukes', good. So they'd risked life and limb to save her from herself. But memories were conveniently faulty things, and Granny Annie would do a bucketful of forgetting if Bo showed up on her doorstep armed with some flowers and his brightest smile, asking to take Holly Mae to the Boar's Nest for the annual mid-winter Snowflake Ball (where no one wore a gown or a suit, and everyone danced disco instead of formal ball dancing). Out would come the pellet gun, the sweet old granny firing it the same as most fathers in the region would, aiming at Bo's feet until he danced himself right out of her yard.

"She ain't never gonna let you get near Holly Mae."

"Fine," Bo snapped at him, like it was his fault that Jesse's old friend would be protecting her young kin until poor Holly Mae was a senior citizen herself. "Who are you going to take?"

The cucumber in front of him, he found, suddenly needed to be cut. Carefully and with his full attention, because vegetables could be wily things.

Her name had been Laura, and she'd had that willowy look to her. Not skinny, not linebacker wide, just tall and capable. She could have been a Hazzard girl, hatched and grown up on the Porter farm, because she resembled that clan. But she wasn't.

She was a professor, an academic. The kind who read history out of proper books because she didn't have an uncle to ramble on about it, because she didn't have to work a farm or make liquor. She was smart, sure, but she was also sheltered. And he was a fool to have wanted her.

He knew that. He hadn't even kissed her because he couldn't quite picture it: moonshining Luke Duke, his hair slicked down with water, standing stiff in a three-piece suit, wide fingers struggling to hold onto a tiny wine glass, lips sipping delicately, offering his right hand to shake as his professor girlfriend introduced him to her colleagues at a cocktail party, biting his tongue so he could keep his promise to her about not saying ain't. Or double-damn, or any of the other words that would mark him as a hick, a rube, a plowboy. A farmer, and that's what he was. He'd never seen fit to be ashamed of it before and he didn't want to start now, which was why he couldn't have Laura. But he'd wanted her.

The flip side mental image wasn't any prettier. Laura trying to handle the basic necessities of survival in Hazzard when she didn't even know enough not to stand up in a boat that was surrounded by ravenous alligators.

He couldn't have her, and that was why he'd said goodbye without even thought of suggesting they see each other again. And the skies, mourning for something that had never existed, had opened up within hours of her departure, and hadn't seen fit to stop crying yet. Which left him and Bo with nothing to do but help Daisy with supper. Sort of. He had to admit that they hadn't been as attentive to the task as their female cousin would have liked.

"Nobody," he answered, which was only the truth. "Don't see no reason to go at all." And that part might or might not have been entirely honest. Because someone always made a fool of themselves, and someone else always riled Rosco to the point of ijits and wijits, and if nothing else, there was always the fifty-cent beer.

"What?" But saying it was enough to get Daisy wound up. "Luke Duke, I been on the planning committee for a month. A whole month I've spent in meetings figuring out what the theme was going to be and how to decorate and…" He stopped listening then. Because he knew how the lecture went and he knew she'd loved every minute of figuring this dance out, and if he didn't show (which he was going to, and all of them in this room knew it) she would still be at the center of it all, wide smile across her face. Besides, it was more important to take advantage of her pink-faced, arms-flailing distraction. An onion, over to Bo's pile.

But that had become easy now and it wasn't much of an accomplishment to do the same thing you'd already done. To make this interesting, he had to up the ante. A cucumber and an onion, now that would be worth it. So he started the transfer process, rolling, nudging.

"Luke Duke, are you listening to me?" And that put an end to it right there, Daisy's wild eyes focusing on him and Bo's following, caught somewhere between amusement and horror, because Luke had really done it this time and she wasn't just annoyed, she was mad. And a mad Daisy was a dangerous thing. Then again, a mad Bo Duke wasn't anything to sneeze at.

Reading Tom Sawyer never did make the boy any smarter and all these years of spending time with Luke at his side hadn't ever taken away the shocked look he always got when he realized he'd been had.

"Luke!" he complained, wide eyes staring at his own pile of uncut vegetables before looking over at Luke's. Trying to do the impossible math of how many he'd started with and what he had now, and he was just – shocked. Amazed, put out, downright angry. Eyebrows like caterpillars, angling in the middle as if they were planning to crawl down his nose.

Luke could, he supposed, have been a hundred miles from here, up in Durham, North Carolina with Laura. In a big and bright house with fine furniture, spotless because there would be no muddy farmyard and no livestock to tend to, so there'd be no reason to track anything unwanted into the house. And if, somehow, he or his professor girlfriend managed to make a mess anyway, there'd be the hired help to clean it up.

So utterly unlike what was happening right now: Bo, shoving the whole pile of vegetables in front of him towards Luke without halfway paying attention to the fact that carrots were getting away from him and falling to the floor, oblivious to the fact that Daisy was threatening to smack their heads together if they made a mess of her kitchen, and somewhere in the living room Jesse was glaring at them over his newspaper and silently praying for the sun to show up again real soon.

Yeah, he could be with Laura in some fancy place, doing fancy things. He'd reckoned he was happier to be right here.


A huff, a quick turn of a head, blonde hair caught in the glow of headlights from behind. Another huff and finally, "Luke!" A complaint.

In answer, a shrug. "Lose her."

"She ain't supposed to be chasing us in the first place," elicited a laugh in response.

"Ain't nothing in that manual of hers says she ain't." And Luke ought to know. He'd helped her study the dang thing from cover to cover, had quizzed her on her knowledge until she'd told him to knock it off. Daisy knew all the laws in Hazzard.

And was a sworn officer now, a deputy every bit as much as Enos was. Or twice as much as Enos was, because Enos wasn't chasing them now. But Daisy was.

"She ought to be working," Bo groused.

"She is working," Luke pointed out, but the truth didn't help much of anything. They had a load of moonshine in their trunk and a cousin, with a glowing roof rack over her head and a revolver on her hip, chasing them down.

"At the Boar's Nest," Bo clarified. "Where she'd be safe." Strutting around in tiny shorts while long-haul truckers who didn't know any better made grabs at her—yeah, she'd always been so safe at the Boar's Nest. A lot safer than she was skimming over deer paths that she knew just as well as her quarry did, at speeds that only a Duke would dare.

The whole thing was, Luke would have to admit, his fault. He'd gotten Daisy fired from one job and then helped her get hired at the other one. But he really would have figured that Jesse would have put a stop to it somewhere before the swearing-in could happen.

But, "What's so all-fired wrong with a Duke becoming a peace officer?" had been their uncle's contribution to this crazy little scenario that they had going now. "Us Dukes was not raised to be against law and order."

No, just to trick, tease, fool, bamboozle and otherwise escape those who wanted to enforce it. Which was awfully hard to do when the law pursuing you was your own cousin, who knew too well all the schemes you'd pulled in the past.

"Well, she ain't, she's just about in our back seat with us," Luke said, turning his head to squint into the glare of the light show behind them. "You're just going to have to lose her."

"Lose her," Bo complained. "How am I supposed to lose her when we taught her to drive?"

"I don't remember you doing a lot of the teaching," might not have been the smartest thing Luke could have said under the circumstances. "Considering you was still on bike wheels at the time," he finished, then threw his arm across his eyes. Low-hanging branches and Bo was cruising awfully close to Luke's side of the path.

"All right. You taught her. Ain't you the clever one," Bo answered back. "Now you figure our way out of this."

(Jesse, in the late-night meeting that had become almost habit between them and usually featured discussions of Luke's pitifully turnip-sized heart but this time was about Daisy's aspirations towards law enforcement, had been equally as unimpressed. "If you can't outrun a deputy," he'd pointed out, "you shouldn't be running 'shine." And when Luke had reminded him that Daisy wouldn't be just any deputy, she'd be a Duke, Jesse had raised an appraising eyebrow. "You really figure that you and Bo together can't figure out how to outrun her?"

"Well yeah," He'd answered back. "But we ain't allowed to hurt her."

"Luke," the old man had lectured. "You ain't allowed to hurt no one. Now you been lucky. It's been a lot of years since this area had a really good revenuer. And you boys has gotten a little too used to that. You're lazy, and your driving skills is getting rusty. If Daisy catches you, it'll be your own fault."

Which hadn't been helpful in the least.)

"I shouldn't have to," he informed Bo. "I taught her, but I taught you more."

A snort, either refuting him or pointing out that it didn't matter who taught whom what when there was a cruiser sticking to their back bumper like it had been glued there.

"Besides," Luke added on, mentally ticking over what kind of tricks he could use to get Daisy to back off, but she knew to hold a car steady no matter what manner of fireworks got tossed at her grille. "It ain't me that wanted her to become a deputy. You got to blame Enos for that." They didn't have any nails, and he didn't suppose he ought to go firing arrows at his girl cousin's tires. Not, that was, unless he wanted to find a snake in his bed (and it wasn't that he minded snakes, but they belonged out in the woods, not being hunted up by Daisy's revenge-seeking fingers and placed between his otherwise soft and welcoming sheets). "He's the one told her about the job."

"Yeah, well," Bo answered back, swerving the car a hard right to take it down a different trail, one that led to the swamp. But there wasn't any point in that; the girl knew her way around down there as well as either of them. "Enos ain't here. I'm blaming you."

Things sometimes had a way of coming into focus. Like windshield wipers across fogged glass, and suddenly everything was crystal clear. Like it had just been waiting there, just beyond where he could see, just needing him to clear away the condensation.

"That's it," he announced with a snap of his fingers. "I got it." Somehow, Bo didn't look terribly excited by this news. Maybe it was that whole notion that Luke's ideas got Bo into trouble burbling through his thoughts again. Funny how Bo could forget that Luke's ideas got them out of trouble just as often. "Go back towards Route Thirty-six."

"Luke—" was the start of a complaint, a very rational and sensible complaint, he was sure. About how close they were to what had always been safety before, hiding in the swamp, and how insane it would be to go out on the blacktop, and not just any blacktop, either. Where Luke wanted him to go was civilization, dang it, and what was he thinking?

"Just do it." There had been occasions when taking the time to listen to Bo's complaints had been worthwhile; this wasn't one of them. "Now." He'd learned, somewhere back in his Marine days, to give orders quietly. It was a lot harder to argue with a man that wasn't yelling at you.

Bo did as he was told, his lowered eyebrows silently cursing Luke for a fool, and Daisy obediently followed behind, zigging to every one of Bo's zags, trying for all the world to get in front while her siren screamed loud enough to wake the dead.

"Go left on Elm," Luke commanded.

"Oh, fine. Make me go across town with her back there. That's a great idea, Luke."

"Then," he went on in his instructions, utterly ignoring the complaints. "Go around the square twice."

"What?" Bo was the exact opposite of amused. "Luke, Enos' boarding house ain't but two buildings over from the courthouse. And the second he hears the siren go by—"

"He'll start running for his cruiser. By the time you get around the second time, he might just be ready to join the chase. If he ain't, you got to go around a third time."

"What?" Bo said again, and it was getting really annoying. Luke had been, he was certain, perfectly clear.

"Seems to me you keep bragging about how there ain't nobody in three states that can drive half as good as you," Luke reminded him, and just like that, Bo's temporary deafness cleared right up. He was even a good sport about the fact that Enos tripped because he was so busy fussing over strapping on his gun belt as he ran, and went around a fourth time, just to let him catch up.

Daisy, meanwhile, was getting too smart for her own good back there, pulling a one-eighty so she could go around the wrong way and try to cut them off, but Bo just took to the sidewalk to avoid her. Waited until both cruisers were lined up and ready for the chase, then, "Now what do I do?" he snapped.

"What comes naturally," Luke answered with a grin that he knew Bo wouldn't have appreciated even if he had been able to turn away from the road.

"Thanks a lot," he offered, but he put his foot down on the accelerator, and just like that his shoulders lost the tension they'd been holding as he entered that trance-like state that he always did when he became one with the car (or the road, or whatever it was that he melded with so seamlessly in ways that Luke had never quite understood).

Meanwhile, the headlights of two cruisers swerved behind them in some sort of unconscious ballet as Enos, a mass of tightly sprung chivalry, tried to take over the chase from Daisy.

Luke reached for the dashboard. "How about a little entertainment?" he asked, but Bo was too busy maintaining his transcendental state to answer.

"Now Daisy," came from the police band to which Luke had just turned the C.B.

"That's Officer Duke," was her curt correction.

"Yes, Ma'am." Enos was nothing if not unfailingly polite, even as he was back there trying to get in front of Daisy or at least next to her. "But I can take over now if you'd only let me get in front."

Which degenerated into static as the two argued, police style, over one way radios. It was music to his ears.

But they held somewhat steady for all their fancy moves, and somehow or other, did not cancel each other out.

"Bo," he said, like a bark, firm and commanding enough to wake his cousin up out of his communion with Sweet Tilly. "Jump something."

"Huh?" But he'd heard, that little curl at the corner of his lips went a long way toward proving that.

"Something small, Bo," or at least not the Styx River. Something manageable, something preferably wet at the bottom.

Bo's tongue came away from his teeth with a sucking sound of complaint at the restriction, but when he cranked the steering wheel it was to set a course to Cold Creek, which Luke figured was a perfectly good and logical choice.

Enos and Daisy back there had to give up their struggle for now – this path was one lane only, so Enos settled in behind their cousin; a perfect gentleman, letting the lady go first, even if he was also trying to save her the trouble of chasing after them at all.

Worked ideally for Luke's purposes anyway. Still watching out the back window when he felt the bump then lift that indicated they were airborne, saw how Daisy's headlights rose into the same arc behind them. Heard the splash when Enos got the angle all wrong, felt the whiplash as Bo pulled Tilly in a spin then to a stop to watch what came next.

Daisy instantly gave up the chase to turn back in an attempt to rescue Enos, who was using one dripping arm to wave her off, that high pitched voice of his squealing.

"How'd you know she was gonna do that?" Bo asked in response to the way Luke was grinning victory.

Well, that was easy. Daisy was the same kind of fool for love that Bo had always been, even if she wasn't quite willing to admit how she felt about the deputy. There were priorities in the world, and none of his kin could ever see them around the way they followed after their hearts.

"Hit it, Bo," Luke said instead of answering. "He ain't going to accept a lick of her help," up to his neck in water though he was, "until after she's done her sworn duty." Of catching them, that was, but she'd never have a chance because she was still arguing with Enos while they were already disappearing into the tree line.


He was—the guy was big. Mean-looking and he hated Luke. Hate at first sight and it didn't get any better when Luke went and tossed a rattlesnake at him. A live one with beady eyes; Luke threw it with that fine arm that the high school coaches had always bragged so much about, made sure it landed right in their tormentor's car with him. Watched and laughed as this Patch Loring, who had never liked Luke and now had himself a mighty fine reason to be feeling that way, panicked and rolled his car.

And, yes, okay. Luke had gathered up that rattler from where it had been carefully placed, on the floorboards of the General, right where Bo's feet normally took up residence. It had been a straightforward plan to save Bo from a painful and debilitating bite that had done it, as the two of them went about the process of pretending to prove themselves worthy of joining an outlaw's gang. Luke looking out for him because that was just the way it worked. Luke was older, used to be taller, was still somewhat stronger (couldn't drive as well even if he refused to admit that, most days), and it was a lifetime habit. Bo was threatened; Luke removed the threat.

He couldn't swear that that very simple sequence had ever reversed itself before. Sure, there'd been fights – in the Boar's Nest or out of it – and sometimes it took two Duke boys to handle one particularly burly combatant, but this wasn't that. It had been that, it had been a big old brawl of men with Luke on the bottom, but it had been a pretty even match all the same, until that Texas Ranger, Jude Emery, had tried to break it up.

And maybe this was what came of picking up strangers along the side of the road. Though this one had the cool assurance of John Wayne and spoke in the deep rumbling tones of Merle Haggard, so he couldn't be all bad, even when it turned out that he had a badge. He wasn't a revenuer, he was just a single-minded, somewhat misguided lawman, was all. He didn't know what the Dukes did for a living, and if he had, he might not have cared. What he wanted, with an almost amusing determination, was to wrap his handcuffs around the silliest-looking (and behaving) outlaw to ever pick Hazzard's outskirts to hide in: Snake Harmon.

Jude had taken a pretty instant shine to the Dukes (mostly Daisy, but he'd had some positive feeling left over for the men of the family, too) and trusted them to assist in this endeavor. He'd even, in a moment of generosity, suggested that they'd make decent lawmen, but they'd done their own turn as deputies and it had ended with them fighting over a girl that wasn't any good for either of them (and wasn't really a cop herself, so go figure).

"Naw, we're lucky enough just being Dukes," was how he evaded the suggestion, while Cooter just about suffocated on his own tongue that he was biting down on to keep from laughing at the notion of the moonshine-running Duke boys as Texas Rangers.

Luke was smarter than that, he'd just slung an arm over Bo's shoulder and added. "That's a fact."

But now his supposedly intelligent cousin had gone and riled a man that was just about twice his size. Had fought him and insulted him and if that wasn't enough, he had accepted the challenge to arm-wrestle him. Which could end one of two ways, really. Patch, who had apparently been charged with seeing to their demise, could rip Luke's arm right out of its socket. Or, if Snake Harmon's second in command was feeling generous, he could just mash Luke's wrist down into that cactus that would leave him with a permanently weeping wound.

"Luke," he called, because for a moment only, his cousin looked vulnerable. Like he was in trouble, but he couldn't be. It had to be an act to fool Snake, who had just told Patch to turn it on, to use his full strength against the Duke boy.

"Bo," came out as a grunt, like his cousin didn't have enough breath to say his name right. It was a trick, had to be. Not that he could see why Luke would be pretending to lose an arm-wrestling match, but he must have his reasons. Had to. He couldn't really be asking for Bo's help. Could he?

"Luke," he said louder, with more edge. Snap out of it, now. Stop the charade or at least give me a sign that you've got this thing under control.

There was that cactus, there was Luke's bare arm, mere fractions of an inch away from the spines. There was Patch's knowing smile and Jude's wince, and there was Luke's voice, a grumble in the sound of his name. It was enough that Bo's faith was shaken and he found himself in uncharted waters where it was him that was supposed to save Luke.

And then the moment was over, as Daisy crashed the party (in sort of a literal way) by driving Cooter's souped-up car right into the table that Luke and Patch's elbows had been resting on, making the men jump away while the cactus got pulverized.

He breathed then, hadn't realized when he'd stopped. Sudden inhalation and then it was giggles because he'd been fooled, just like all of Snake Harmon's gang had, into believing Luke was really in trouble. He'd been a fool, of course. Luke had never needed Bo's help a single day in his life.