Chapter Fourteen - Taking Orders from Idiots

It had been, he reflected, a long night. Mostly sleepless and Jesse would whip his tail for that if he knew: boy, you need to get enough rest before you go off jumping cars over other cars. His uncle never had been a big fan for the sort of vertical feats that Bo achieved, he was much more of a horizontal driver himself. So Bo could forgive the old man, sort of, for siding with Luke in calling the Leap for Life a fool stunt. It was Luke that ought to know better, who had experience with what a car could do and what Bo could do with a car, and should have trusted him.

But he hadn't and neither Bo's uncle nor his cousin was here to tell him how he should have slept. Instead, there was Diane, offering him kisses and praise because the General was in fine working order, or he was about to be. Bo had spent most of the night tinkering with this or that and never being wholly satisfied with his results, so in the end he'd made a run over to Cooter's farmhouse in the hours before dawn, thrown rocks at the mechanic's window until the man had woken up and cursed him a few times for the disruption, then followed him back to the fairgrounds to pull every plug, tug on every wire and check every connection in the Charger's engine until he ran smooth again.

It had been a long night and Cooter had things well in hand, which was why Bo left him to it, then came back to Diane's RV (which he wasn't quite ready to call "home" but he figured that pretty soon he would be) to get a shower. The sun had crested the horizon and he wouldn't be getting any sleep anytime soon. Diane was there in the kitchen when he emerged, his wet hair in those uncombed curls that he'd never let anyone but his family see before. She wasn't cooking; there'd be no farm breakfast here. No need for it when the carnival would be cranking up soon and there'd be all manner of food being prepared in all those little stands sprinkled around the fairgrounds and, as the star of the show, he could have as much of it as he wanted.

Which left him all the more time to slip his arms around his girl as she puttered around the sink, washing glasses from yesterday's champagne in anticipation of—

"You all set for your big day?" she asked, turning in his arms to face him.

—another toast after the jump was done.

"Diane," he answered, looking into those soft blue eyes that adored every move he made. "I had my big day when I met you."

"I hope you mean that, Bo, because I feel the same way about you."

Nothing to do then but to touch her face, to use his fingers to angle it just right for the kiss he gave her. Just a quiet little thing, a press of lips. It was only when her arms came around his bare back that he let it deepen and get more serious.

Just about got to the point where he figured this would work better if they were prone, when an echoing metallic bang set up on the door to the RV. Abrupt end to the kiss and Diane shoved him back.

"Carl," she hollered, heading toward the noise. "Didn't I tell you just to handle whatever—oh, hello officer," came out in a much more civil tone, laced with cool formality, as she swung the door open. "What can I do for you?"

"Excuse me, ma'am." That sounded an awful lot like Enos. "Is Bo here?" Enos, being earnest and nervous and talking too fast.

"Hi Enos," he answered back, taking a step closer to the door so the deputy could see him. He was still shirtless with his hair in a wreck, but old Enos sounded upset and Bo didn't figure that excusing himself to gussy up was appropriate just now. "Anything wrong?"

"You aren't here to arrest him again," Diane said, icily. "Are you? Because Carl already paid his bail and the impound fee, so if you and Mr. Hogg have some sort of a—"

"No, Ma'am," Enos interrupted, painfully politely. Like it actually distressed him to have to stop the sweet lady from talking now, but he really did have something he needed to say. "Bo, Luke sent me to fetch you."

Oh, that could not be good. Luke was barely on speaking terms with him right now. To send Enos out here in search of him had to mean—"Did something happen to Jesse or Daisy?" he asked, taking the small step that would put him next to Diane and closer to Enos.

"No, Bo, they're fine," the deputy answered, squinting up at him from where he stood on the tiny metal steps. Bo put his hand on the open door, holding it so that Diane wouldn't have to anymore. The motion kind of squeezed her over to the side so he could get right up close to his old friend, who had taken off his hat and was using a finger to fiddle with the tassel. "At least I think they are. It's Luke that's in trouble."

"Luke," Diane said, and she probably had some other choice words to add about his cousin, but she didn't need to waste her breath. Bo could say them for her.

"Luke don't need my help." He was, after all, too smart for anything Bo could offer him. At least that's what he always implied, all those times he'd compared Bo's brain to various vegetables or straight up called him an idiot. "He can take care of himself. And if he can't, Jesse and Daisy can help him out." That was how this little family divorce had worked out, wasn't it? Luke got their kin and the house they'd grown up in, and Bo got Diane and the General. It was about as fair as it could be, considering.

"Well Bo, I reckon you'd be right if Jesse and Daisy was here, but they ain't. And old Luke, he couldn't make his one phone call, 'cuz they's out of town and Cooter didn't answer, and he didn't have the phone number for here," because he'd never asked for it or Bo had never given it to him and what was that part about one phone call?

"Wait," Bo interrupted, making Enos twiddle the tassles on his hat even more vigorously. "Is Luke in jail again?"

"Bo," Diane was saying, trying to calm him down or get him to focus on her. And he would, in just a minute, as soon as he knew what Luke had gone and done this time.

"Yes, Bo, he is, and the Sheriff says he's going to call in the federal agents to come get him just as soon as the office in Atlanta opens later this morning."

"Federal agents?" Diane was saying, but Bo wasn't paying her any mind.

"What's the charge, Enos?" But he already knew.

"Luke's been arrested for transporting illegal intoxicants," the deputy answered. Then, in case Bo had trouble interpreting legalese (oh, but he didn't, never had), "Moonshining."

He'd been here before, sitting in this very cell, not twenty-four hours ago. Waiting on his kin and biding his time, but back then he'd had his righteous anger to keep him company. All he had now were his thoughts.

About things he'd done wrong and there were so many that he could take them one-by-one the whole day and he'd never get to them all. Like how he ought to have listened to Daisy when she told him to apologize to Bo about Roxanne Huntley and all the snide things he'd said after. How he'd never really made it up to his cousin like he should have after nearly taking his head off for letting that girl mechanic talk him into putting the General Lee up in a bet against Amy Creavy's Lucifer. That he'd made a promise to not compete with Bo over girls, but he hadn't been particularly good about keeping it. The way he'd so wholly blamed Bo when Jesse got a hankering to race again, then embarrassed him in front of Cale Yarborough and left him on his own when he went into the wilderness after those car-stripping girls. It had been one mistake after another, but nothing came close to the last few days. Diane was using Bo, Luke hadn't wavered on that. He just figured he'd given the boy every reason in the world to run off with her instead of staying in a farmhouse with a cousin that called him stupid at every turn.

Things go wrong sometimes, Luke, his uncle had informed him on one particularly temper-strewn day of his childhood. And when they do, you got to decide whether its more important to pitch a fit, or to fix them. Up until now, he'd gone the route of stamping his angry little foot and announcing what a moron his cousin was. This right here, the bars around him and the dank smell of defeat, was what happened when you waited until too late to start the fixing part.

The main thing, he'd decided during last night's chores, was keeping Bo alive. Because there was something fishy about that crash in Cedar City, and just because Luke didn't know what it was didn't mean it wasn't a fact. But he didn't have evidence (and he doubted that there was any to be found a week later) and there was no chance, after all the ways Luke had driven him away, that Bo would listen to just words.

So he'd sent Jesse and Daisy on what he figured was a wild goose chase, because he needed them out of the way. Then he'd gone ahead and ensured that he'd spend a few years in prison. But if he knew Bo, and he'd really like to believe he did, this whole fiasco ought to keep the boy from making the jump.

He hoped. Because if things didn't work the way he'd planned, there was no one left to get to Bo.

It was only the pain in his hand that made him realize that he'd slapped the bars in front of him. When he'd made this plan he'd accounted for as many things as possible. Like making sure there'd be no interference from his uncle, like carrying only a small amount of 'shine in hopes that it would keep his prison sentence to a minimum, but also making sure his bail would be too much for Bo to pay for out of his earnings if he made the jump. What he hadn't planned for was the way he'd be pacing now, running his fingers through his hair, smacking the unforgiving bars of the cell. Because it was done, he'd controlled everything he could and now it was other people's hands (and within his cousin's conscience) to see the plan the rest of the way through.

And it wasn't going to work. Bo was going to shrug his shoulders when Enos told him, he was going to say that with all the money he was making he could hire farmhands to replace both himself and Luke, he was going to make the jump anyway. And by the time Jesse got back to town, he was going to have one dead nephew and one on the way to prison.

Somewhere overhead there were chairs scraping and feet walking. The morning getting started in the courthouse and soon enough Boss would learn that basement contained one caged Duke and get all excited about it. Luke's bail would get set somewhere in the thousands; he was a moron and he was—

No longer alone.

Popcorn. That was the thing, through the whirl of his thoughts, that he could concentrate on. Somewhere popcorn was cooking and it smelled like every movie he'd ever been to. Made him picture Burt Reynolds with his mustache and his swagger, and the way he would have known what to do. Bo, well he wasn't in a movie and he didn't have a script or even a mustache. Which made everything much more difficult.

"Bo," Diane was trying to reason with him, but he could hardly hear her. White noise in his brain and it drowned out most of her logic about how there wasn't really much of anything he could do about Luke and he didn't need any distractions right now anyway, not when he ought to be concentrating on the jump he had to make in only a few hours.

"Where the heck are Jesse and Daisy?" he mumbled again, but Enos hadn't been able to tell him, and Diane had already become exasperated by the question.

His shirt, he needed a shirt. A shirtless man couldn't think straight. Seemed like he had proved that to himself a few times over, and still here he was, caught without a shirt again.

"Bo," Diane said to him again, and it was quiet. Gentle, not frustrated, not any of the things her tone had been ever since Enos had knocked on the door. Her hands on his arms stopped him from the pointless laps he'd been doing around her tiny bedroom in search of errant clothing. A rub of a soft palm against his bare skin, and then her arms were around his neck, hugging him, her body curling into his. He felt the warmth there, the sweetness, felt the kiss on his jaw. Felt the offer of calm respite and he welcomed it. Closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around her back, and let himself relax. Tiny fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck and he moved on instinct, let her tip her head back and kiss him for real this time. His hands slid down the curvature of her spine, finding the narrowness of her tiny waist.

Used his grip there to push her back, to separate their bodies and reach for his shirt on the back of her door, where he'd just remembered hanging it before stepping into the shower. Turned around so he could pull it onto one arm and then the other without accidentally punching Diane or a wall, then started buttoning it up.

"Bo," she complained to his back. "All you've had to say about him for days is that he doesn't show you enough respect and he doesn't believe in you. You're not going to go running off to help him now when all he's been doing is hurting you, are you?"

Boots. They were, out of farm-boy habit, by the door to the outside. He headed over to put them on, could feel the way his girlfriend followed right behind.

"Diane," he grunted as he bent down to tug on his left boot, "Luke's a jackass," then his right. "But he's family," and he would never have sent Enos out here in search of Bo if he'd had any other choice. Luke's pride was oversized, a dangerous thing to swallow unless he was willing to choke on it. "I'll be back, but," he said, kicking to seat the boot solidly on his right foot, then turning to kiss her again. Quick peck on the lips, because, "Right now, I've got to go." To find out precisely what kind of trouble the jackass had stirred up.

Out the door and he skipped the steps that always had been too tiny for his feet anyway, leaping straight to the ground. He could hear the banging as the last of the stunt apparatus was being set up over by the track, he could smell the funnel cake and cotton candy heating up in the booths that lined the grass just fifty feet from where he was sliding into the General's window, and somewhere beyond that was the smell of gasoline and motor oil. The chrome of thirty-two stacked cars gleamed and winked at him in the morning sun as he turned the key and the General's engine, perfectly tuned by a now-absent Cooter (who Bo could just catch sight of, over there at the hotdog stand and—the man had no idea what a proper breakfast food was) and put his foot down on the accelerator, waving out the window at the woman he was leaving behind.

Jesse, he thought as his tires screeched against the pavement and Diane's RV became a tiny speck in the rearview mirror. Where the heck was Jesse? As far as Bo knew, no one had taken sick. Not that there was much of anyone left to take sick, but Daisy's Aunt Kate still lived up in the Tennessee hills and if she was ill—

If she was ill, Jesse would have come and told him so, Bo was sure of it. Because even if she was only Daisy's aunt from her mother's side and not technically of the same blood as Bo, she was still family. So where the heck was Jesse? And Daisy?

The trees on either side of the road were nothing but blurs now, the pavement a stripe out ahead of him. Easy to move at this speed where the car made all the decisions for him and all he had to do was keep his foot down. Which left a lot of room in his brain for thinking.

Why would Luke be making a whiskey run when Jesse was out of town? Not that it couldn't be done, just that it never had been. Heck, they didn't even make runs when their uncle was off at another farm, midwifing a calf. Habit had the Duke boys out on the road while the man who had raised them sat home by the CB, just in case he was needed. Sure, without Bo at home Luke would have been the only one inside of Tilly, but he shouldn't have been making a run entirely alone. Jesse should have been just one distressed broadcast away.

And Daisy. Why, when Enos went looking for a Duke family member to call on, hadn't she been fussing over the stove and that old pilot light that went out and had to be relit most mornings before she could cook breakfast?

(And thinking of Enos, seemed he suddenly had himself a tail. White one with lights on the top and a screaming siren. Had to be the deputy, who had walked away from Diane's RV after imparting his unpleasant information. Could this all have been a trap? Sending Bo careening into town at illegal speeds so the deputy could hide in some bushes and catch him in the act? Maybe kick out another taillight and confiscate the General again? Enos was too honest for something like that wasn't he?)

He might have been a fool. Probably was, because there he was, driving around the town square and headed straight for the police station with a deputy on his tail, something no self-respecting moonshine runner ought ever do. And it might just be a trap, one laid out and set by his own cousin, but he didn't want to believe Luke would do that to him. Not again; he'd already done something like it once, and it had been one more provocation in their lock-step march towards coming to blows. Luke didn't like the feeling of a fist crashing into his chin (unless he did, seemed like his cousin had involved himself in plenty of barroom brawls over the years) so he wouldn't do it again. Bo set his mind to believing that, slammed his foot onto the brake pedal and skidded to a diagonal stop in front of the courthouse. Almost forgot to kill the engine before pulling himself out the window, heard the screech of tires behind him and sent up a quick prayer that the clumsy Enos wouldn't smack into his back bumper, at least not until he'd pulled himself all the way out of the window and gotten a safe distance away. There was no crash so he didn't look back, just took the steps two at a time and slammed his way into the main hall. Turned right, through the swinging doors and there was Rosco, rumpled and only halfway awake, standing in front of his own desk and looking like morning had come too soon. Didn't even offer an ijit of greeting.

"Where's Luke?" he demanded, got a blank look in response. Damn it all, if this was a trap—

If this was a trap, he'd already walked right into it, face first. There was Enos coming in behind him, shouting something or other, while Rosco shook himself awake and blurted a nonsensical response. Bo ignored them both and marched toward the stairs, because if this was a trap he might just as well keep going until he was all the way inside and it snapped closed around him.

Luke was a schemer. Always had been and often enough his little plots had gotten them into the sort of trouble that ended in a sore backside and extra chores. Luke schemed to get what he wanted, he schemed to keep their livelihood a secret from the feds, he schemed to keep the duly constituted law of this county from taking advantage of the people. He schemed to win races, he schemed to woo girls, he schemed to get extra sausages at breakfast.

But most of all, Luke schemed to take care of his family.

"Bo Duke," Rosco was hollering behind him, but he was halfway down the steps to the cells by then. "Halt! You just halt in the name of the law." Seemed a pointless order, what with how he was already turning that final corner and shoving at that metal gate that was meant to separate the jail from the upstairs, but never got more than halfway closed anyway. Stomping set up behind him as the lawmen finally figured out that they would have to pursue him if they really wanted him to stop, and he looked out toward the cells.

There was Luke, blue shirt wrinkled on his chest, only halfway tucked in and that was a bad sign. A terrible sign really, because the first thing his cousin did after crawling out of a wrecked car with its wheels in the air was to tuck in that shirt. Hands on his hips like maybe he expected a fight, but his face had a gray cast and his eyes looked like he'd taken some of Daisy's makeup and colored the bags underneath them purple. He looked tired and tense and that was the best of it.

Bo marched forward despite the way Luke squared himself off, planting his feet like maybe he was expecting another tooth-jarring punch from his younger cousin. Rosco and Enos were still tangled up somewhere behind him as he walked right up to the bars and reached a hand through. Took hold of the back of his cousin's neck and pulled forward against the automatic resistance there. He had all the leverage to Luke's none, wasn't half as tired or beaten looking as his cousin, so Bo won the struggle. Kept on pulling, steady pressure, even after Luke had taken that step closer to the bars. Leaned closer himself until their foreheads met, warmth of skin on skin with the chill of metal at each temple, and they just stood there. Nothing more than that, some sort of quiet communion between them.

"Bo Duke," still coming from the stairwell in the sheriff's screaming voice. "That's a federal prisoner, you ain't got no right—" got interrupted by some sort of excited chatter of Enos' about phone calls and right to representation.

Bo closed his eyes, let himself rest there a moment longer against Luke, felt the give when his cousin let go of the pretense of fighting against being this close. It was true, then. Luke was facing down a federal charge of running moonshine, probably as good as in prison right now. Maybe Bo halfway wished this had all been a sneaky trick to get the General impounded again after all.

"You're an idiot, you know," he informed his cousin.

Little exhale that might have been a wry laugh and Bo opened his eyes and moved his head back. Kept his hand where it was, holding Luke firm so he could get a good look at him. Hair in tangles and mats where he'd been running his hands through it, cheeks hollow, and those eyes. Shimmery, too blue, a little lost.

"I know," came the quiet answer, then Luke's eyes cleared. His head turned toward the cacophony of Enos and Rosco finally stumbling their way to the bottom of the stairs, just about tangled up in each other's legs. All manner of protests being lodged about rights and prisoners and, "Bo," Luke said quietly.

But he didn't have time for any of the people that were trying to tell him things. He stepped back from the bars, let go of Luke and, "I'm going to get you out," he swore. Pushed past the lawmen that were advancing on him anyway (thought he probably ought to thank Enos later, because he reckoned the deputy had deliberately run a certain amount of interference to give him time to talk to Luke), and ran up the steps.

"Bo," he heard behind him, and then some other words from Luke that got shouted down by Rosco. Which was fine. The whole bunch of them in that basement were idiots, and Bo was about dang tired of taking orders from the likes of idiots anyway.