Digging Up Bones

by Robin Smith

Chapter One

"Oh hell."

The exclamation fell out of her and landed with a sizzle on the hot highway shoulder and Kasia Payne stood over it, staring with dismay down the steep incline created by the overpass at the pleasant little truck stop that wasn't there.

There was a general assortment of buildings, just like her last ride had said, huddled around a worn parking lot like pioneer wagons protecting themselves from Indians, and yes, there was the post office and the gas station and the mercantile, and there was even a building with a sign that said Drive-In Eats, but the building was a burned out shell with no roof and the sign was sitting off to one side with the individual letters picked off, perhaps by vultures, leaving only the paler impressions to mark the places they'd stood out the years. The bustling wheel of commerce that had been Drive-In Eats was no more, and all its faithful clientele had clearly abandoned the rest of its orbiting pioneers to fate and the elements, and that left exactly two pickup trucks in the parking lot below and one of them was up on cinder blocks.

"Hell," Kasia said again, with even less spirit than she had the first time. She unshouldered her pack and let it drop with a thump to the pavement, pulled out her canteen and sat down on the cushion of her meager belongings to take the last two swallows and try and think.

No truck stop. After a two mile hike up the road from Tribulations, and the right turn that took her here instead of the left turn onto Highway 191 and over to Provo, no truck stop. No truck stop meant no ride, and no ride meant a whole lot of walking. A lot of walking meant...well now, just what did that mean? Kasia risked an upwards peek.

The skies burning over Utah in the middle of September this fine morning were stab-you-in-the-eye-blue and cloudless. It was just after ten and already hotter than hell and so dry it felt like her eyeballs were slowly turning into granite. Her feet were burning, even through the soles of her sneakers--not sore, but actually burning, as in 'flame'--and there was a hot, yellow taste to the air that just kind of crawled into your lungs and lay there.

A lot of walking was going to be a bad thing.

Kasia heaved herself up, pocketed her canteen and dragged her pack back up onto her shoulder. She had about fifteen bucks and some change left. She'd go down to the parking lot, see what building looked the most open, and see what there was to see. Sometimes folks off the beaten path like this didn't mind so much if a girl took a bath in the sink and then slept out the day in a store room. At the very least, she'd be able to fill her canteen.

She trudged down off the overpass shoulder and headed on over, feeling sunlight like molten lead on her head and shoulders. Her sneakers scuffed across the cracked, chapped asphalt, and then the cracked, chapped desert ground, and finally the cracked, chapped parking lot.

The lights in the gas station were on, but it looked empty. The doors to the post office were open, but it was dark and somehow not very official-looking. There was a small cabin-y looking brown shack off to one side of the lot, next to an enormous tin water tank, but although it looked like it saw a fair amount of use, there were no signs or hints of any kind to indicate what the heck it was. That left the store, through whose windows Kasia could see an old man in overalls moving around, and so she went toward it, although she was not encouraged.

There were a number of signs hung up around the windows, but they all seemed kind of abstract and faintly ominous to her. Hand-Dipped Cold Drinks, one said. This Is The Place, said another, with little quotes around it, and a couple weathered bumblebees painted at the edges. Opposite that, on a diamond-shaped piece of pressed aluminum, green letters advised her to 'Choose the Right'. On the door itself, beneath the hand-written slate of store hours, was a small sign with a stark message saying, 'Life was Not intended to be Easy'. There was a string of others, carefully etched on metal plates and mounted along the doorjamb: "Never let a day pass that you will have cause to say, I will do better tomorrow," "He Who Calmed the Seas Will Not Forsake Us", and "There is no cure for the ills of this world except the gospel of Jesus Christ". Over the door, on a plank of wood that looked almost old enough to be petrified, was one word in whitewash: STARVATION.

Kasia stood in front of that door for a long, long time.

At last, however, she opened it.

The first thing that struck her was a cool breeze--not a cold one, as it would take an air conditioner roughly the size of a Studebaker to get an edge up on a Utah heat, but cool was good enough and very welcome--and the second was the smell of something sizzling on a nice, greasy griddle. She leaned into the aroma and the breeze, pushing on the door hard to shut it, and became aware of an old man's gravelly voice having one side of a heated debate on oranges.

"It doesn't matter who squeezes the orange," the old man was saying earnestly. "Juice comes out. You could squeeze it, I could squeeze it. Usama Bin Laden could squeeze it! Juice comes out!"

'Oh boy,' thought Kasia, and despite the allure of the little stores climate controls, she found herself looking back through the window at the highway and thinking that it hadn't been all that hot....

"S'cuse me for a second, son. Little miss? Welcome to Starvation, honey--Oh gracious, you look like you're going to fall down dead in the doorway." The old man was coming toward her, wiping his hands on his short-order apron and pruning up with concern so spontaneous and genuine that Kasia felt a little ashamed of herself for her awkwardness of a moment before. "Come on in here and sit down. Got road trouble?"

"You could say that," she said, allowing the old man to lead her down a narrow aisle full of dog food, saddles, and cleaning supplies. "There's a road, anyway, and I don't have a real easy way down it."

"Oh uh-huh?" The old man sat her down before the high malt-shoppe-pink counter at the back of the store and bustled around to get behind it again. "Car broke down, did it? Let me give my son Mike a call and he'll go fetch it here for you--"

"No, thanks, I didn’t come in a car," Kasia said, eyeing the little hand-chalked menu on the back wall with naked yearning. "Um, could I have a water, please?"

A tall glass, wet and brittlely cold, was set before her on a napkin. The old man's face had pruned up again. "No car? Honey, you ain't walkin' out there!" A quaver at the end of his words put it halfway between a question and an exclamation, but in either case, the answer was the same.

"Yes, sir," she said, and drank.

"Well, where are you headed? I'll get Mike out here and give you a lift, it ain't no trouble at--"

"Georgia coastline," she answered, setting the empty glass down. "Thanks anyway, though."

"Oh." He continued to stand there, nonplussed, for a beat or two before comprehension flooded his face and leant it profound gravity. "Oh, little miss, you ain't hitchin', are you?"

He said "hitchin'" like it meant "whorin'". Kasia fished an ice cube out of her glass, wrapped it in a napkin, and rubbed at her eyes with it. She nodded, forcing a smile and feeling tired. "And before you ask, no, I'm not a runaway; no, I'm not in trouble with the law; yes, I know what I'm doing; and yes, my parents know where I am." That last one wasn't strictly true, but she doubted it would come as a shock to either of them, assuming they could be found and prompted to remember who she was. "I've been living in Seattle for a while, and now I just need to get somewhere warm and easy for the winter."

The old man looked at her, his eyes now almost buried by furrowed, frowning wrinkles. "Do you have a home, honey?" he asked quietly.

She smiled at him, a little more easily this time. "No, sir. But I'm okay, I swear."

"You shouldn't ought to be hitching," the old man said stubbornly, sorrowfully. "Bring you to a bad end."

"You allergic to work?" someone asked suddenly, and Kasia just about fell off the stool trying to jump and look around at the same time.

There was a man sitting on her right, a man who had gone completely unnoticed all this time, between the whole ice-water and interrogation thing. He had his elbow on the table and his chin in one hand, sitting easy just two stools down with his foot up on the kick bar. There was a plate with half a bacon sandwich on it in front of him and the dregs of an orange soda; he was chewing idly on the straw. He looked about mid-thirties, but he wore it young. He had a thick head of hair that looked like it was trying very hard to jump off his head, strong bones and a clear complexion, and a sporty little black Van Dyke to put a point on an otherwise square jaw. Add to that a pair of intense Gypsy eyes and it was kind of hard to see beyond to the rest of him.

Her first thought was, 'Damn, that's a good-looking guy!', and it took her a little time to regroup from that. Her second was, 'What did he--gosh, really good looking!--just say?', and her third was, 'And just what the hell gives him the right to say it to me!?'

"No, I'm not allergic to work!" she sputtered, the fires of her initial attraction freezing immediately over. "And I pay taxes and I never took a dime off the government after I turned sixteen! I work everywhere I go and I bet I work harder than any six people you know!"

The stranger showed his teeth (and his straw) in a quick grin. "That a fact?"

"That's a fact!" Kasia dropped her pack in a dusty heap on the floor and held out her upturned palms defiantly, displaying the scars and yellowed calluses that ridged and pocked and whorled across her hands. "That's four months on a landscaping crew in Seattle, buster, and three weeks picking oranges in California!"

The stranger leaned in to have a closer look, prodding at one of her fingers like he was kicking a tire on a car he meant to buy.

Kasia snatched her hand back, locked both of them around her empty water glass, and glared at him. "So there!"

"Ha." The stranger rolled back to face the old man, pointing at Kasia with his chewed-on straw. "Let's get a plate of something and some more water for this one," he said, making it sound like a completely original idea, something that ought to be patented, perhaps. "I've got a business proposition for you," he added, before Kasia could even begin to hotly refuse his hospitality. "But I'm going to need to butter you up first, because it's clear you don't harbor a lot of trust for strange men in small towns."

"You know me so well, then you know what you can do with your 'business' proposition," she countered, but her eye kept getting distracted by the eggs and bacon that the old man was heating up on the griddle. "I'm going to eat that food," she announced, "But don't think for one second that entitles you to a damn thing!"

"Check that gutter talk, honey," the old man remarked.

"Sorry," she grumbled. "But the sentiment stands."

"Fair enough." Unruffled, the stranger stuck out his hand. "I'm Esben. Professor Emory Esben, a pleasure and a privilege to meet you. Call me Ez."

Kasia ignored the hand and turned her head to run a huffy eye over the merchandise crowding the diner's corner. Undaunted, the straw-chewing Ez took a handful of her hair, gave it two quick pumps in a gentleman's shake, and let go before she could react.

"What would you say to six weeks alone with me in the desert under the hot sun digging up fifty-pound blocks of fossils with a garden trowel?" he said cheerfully, and immediately held up both hands like a man at a mugging. "Oh, but wait, there's more! You get your own tent, air mattress, sleeping bag and not one but two pillows! There's a chair and a deck of cards, flashlights in every color of God's rainbow, and all the comforts of home, provided you live in Outer Dustbonia, not to mention companionship in the form of me, Professor Ez. Once or twice a day, I do stop talking."

A breakfast was set before her, and Kasia's objections were neatly derailed by saliva.

Ez continued, "On top of the rewarding glow of honest labor, you will receive fifty dollars a day for six days each week, provided you stay the course and finish out the field trip. At the end of six weeks, or until the weather turns, whichever comes first, you will accompany me back to BYU where I will draft you a check for eighteen hundred dollars and put you on a Greyhound bus to the city of your choice. I'll need a W-2 and all that, of course. Everything fair and above board." Solicitation spent, Ez dropped both hands to the countertop and folded them neatly, watching her eat and awaiting her reply.

"I don't wander off into the desert with people I don't know," she said, eyeing him suspiciously over a biscuit.

"What do you want to know? My middle name's Tyler, if that's a help to you. Let's see…I'm a Virgo, which means I'm restrained, shy, and very serious, but I try to come out of my shell with there's company around." Ez pushed out his jaw and nibbled so that the tip of his straw bobbed up and down as he contemplated himself. "I was an eggplant in my third-grade class play on the subject of nutrition and I blew my only line in front of at least fifty people when I announced to an audience of innocent and unsuspecting parents that, through the aid of modern science, many vegetables have adapted themselves to an omnivorous diet."

"All right, all right, enough!" Kasia fought her way through the mental image of a snarling eggplant and got back to the salient issue. "You can say anything you want, but what it all boils down to is that you're still a total stranger!"

"Yeah, well, there's not a whole lot I can do about that, but Pops here has seen you talking to me, so if you're really afraid I'm going to drag you off and murder you, at least you'd have the satisfaction of knowing I'd be caught right away." He rolled his eyes at her expression and threw out his arms as though to display his inherent ineffableness. "I'm not going to drag you off and murder you, for pete's sake! I'm a paleontologist!"

"You're a what?"

"Dinosaur bones," Ez said, picking up the other half of his sandwich and setting to with a vigor. "I dig up dinosaur bones for Brigham Young University, and as it happens, the season is over, my students went home, my assistant had to bail on me, and I'm in a real bind. Now what do you say? Six weeks, hard work, decent pay, no funny stuff."

"But...."

"I don't think Pops has any tasers or pepper spray on the shelves," Ez added, giving the store's goods a dubious eyeing-over. "But I suppose I could pick you up a can of lemon Endust. That wouldn't do me any good if I caught a dose between the eyes."

"Well...." She was weakening and her plate was almost empty.

"We'll have to take turns cooking, but apart from that and the backbreaking labor in a dark pit, the work-load's light. I make a mean pot of chili mac and I'm no good at any of the board games I brought." Ez peered a little closer at her, drumming his nails on the counter, and then snapped his fingers and said, "Pops here has a washer-dryer and a set of showers in the shack out back for paleontologists to use, but I don't believe they're available to hitch-hikers, are they, Pops?"

The old man wiped his hands on his apron, looking from one to the other of them. "Guess not," he said at last.

"So what do you say?" Ez leaned back and watched her mop up the last of her yolk with the last of her biscuit. "Got a name?"

Kasia chewed her final bit of breakfast and looked out the window at the overpass. It sounded like a pretty good deal, actually. On the surface, anyway. Fifty bucks a day....

She wouldn't swear to the fact that this guy Ez was exactly harmless, but ostentatiousness was a good start. When you were on the road a lot, you learned to distrust anyone who acted really normal. She thought this guy was okay. Really good-looking though, and that could be a problem. But fifty bucks a day....

"Payne," she said slowly. "Kasia Payne."

"Welcome aboard, Kasia Payne!" Ez's hand swooped around and caught hers up in an exuberant clasp. "Oh, it's going to be a great time! Go get yourself a shower! It'll be a week before you get another one! What fun!"

* * * * *

Gosh, it was nice to have someone to talk to again.

The girl had cleaned up pretty good after she'd taken about ten pounds of red Utah dust off of her, and she'd evidently had a spare set of clothes in that beat-up pack she was guarding, and now, fresh-faced and riding shotgun in a climate-controlled pickup truck, she even looked a little cheerful. At least, she'd lost that edgy, suspicious squint and that had to count for something.

Ez left the skeletal remains of Starvation in the rearview mirror and aimed his fuzzy dice at the mountains, chattering comfortably about anything that popped into his mind and making occasional efforts to include his new assistant in the conversation. So far, she hadn't said much, but he didn't let that bother him. He was well-accustomed to having to do all the talking.

"--We've got a big can of funny spray that we use around the perimeter to kind of keep the snakes out," he was saying now. "It's non-toxic, but they don't like crawling through it. Or slithering, I should say. I guess you need knees to crawl, but snakes seem to have a pretty good outlook on life without knees. Never heard one complain, anyway. Scorpions, though, they can be a problem if they move in, so don't let them move in. Keep your shoes and your pack and pretty much all your stuff inside your tent with the zipper sealed at all times. Make sure everything that can be moved is inside the trailer at night with the door closed and check out the dig thoroughly with your flashlight before you go inside. They're not poisonous, not the ones I've seen out there anyway, but they still hurt and you'll swell up some if you're allergic."

"How do you know if you're allergic or not?" she asked, looking distracted and only peripherally interested.

"Well, first you get stung, I guess, and then you see whether or not you swell up. I've got a first aid kit with some stuff that'll help if you are allergic, incidentally, but it shouldn't be a problem either way. Just keep the site clean, tent closed, everything inside."

She nodded and turned back to the window.

"Seriously, say it back to me like you were paying attention."

"Tent closed, stuff inside, site clean, check the dig with a flashlight," she echoed obediently.

Funny. Out here in the field, Ez was used to dealing with only two kinds of people: the ones who knew exactly what they were doing and did it efficiently and well, and the ones who eagerly and apprehensively looked forward to learning. Kasia Payne and her weathered mode of surface acceptance was a whole new bird for Ez.

"Good." He stole a glance at her from the corner of his eyes and put on his Professor-face. "There aren't many rules out here, but the ones I have are hard and fast ones. I need you to listen up and say you understand them before we go any further."

"What happens if I break a few?" she asked, indicating she was teasing with a wan little smile.

"You get a spanking," he replied, grinning back at her.

She laughed. Cute kid, she probably thought he was joking.

"And neither of us want that," he went on, "so pay attention. First rule: Scorpion Preparedness. Second Rule: Buddy Up. You don't go any further than the Biffy Rock unless I'm with you. Seriously. You wouldn't think it's possible to get lost in all this flat, but it happens."

Actually, the flat had given way some time ago to craggy little thrusts of hill and plateaus, steadily climbing up the red bluffs that Utahans called 'mountains'. The girl looked out at the horizon and nodded again, looking solemnly thoughtful. "I believe it," she said. "Stay together. Check."

"Third Rule: No Cussin'. This is my dig and I am King, and I am not going to wade through an audial cesspool to work in it. Keep it clean, please."

"No swearing," she agreed, looking amused. "Got it."

"Last but not least: Never ever ever try to cover up a mistake. Ever. If you lose a bone or mix the plaster too thin or put a decimal in the wrong place in the books, all that's fine and forgivable, but don't try to sweep it under a rug without telling me. Anything that you slip by me in the field is going to make me look like a goober when we get back to civilization and I am just awfully protective of my reputation. Zero tolerance on this one. If you mess up, come clean."

"You break it, you buy it," she said. "Is that it?"

"That's it. I told you there weren't a lot of rules, and they're mostly for safety's sake." Ez glanced at her again, putting a point on his next words and taking delicate aim. "A person's safety is something that nobody should take lightly. Wouldn't you agree?"

There was a faint beetling between the girl's brows, evidence of a direct hit, but she only turned innocently to the window and said, "Absolutely."

He could have just let it go at that, he supposed, and maybe he should have. He hardly knew her, for one thing, and all of her prickly defensive barriers were probably up and at full strength. For another, she obviously wasn't some angst-ridden teenager indulging herself in mindless social rebellion, she was homeless. That wasn't something a girl could just wake up one day and fix, and she sure as heck wouldn't appreciate having him trot out anything sanctimonious-sounding when there was nothing she could do about it, but there were some things Ez just couldn't let sit.

"We only get one life," Ez said cautiously. "It's up to us to make the right decisions with it." He spared her another covert glance, but her face was a mask and it gave nothing away. "And failing that, it's up to us to make ourselves responsible for drawing a person's attention when that person may be making the wrong decision."

"Uh huh."

Flat. Stony. No opening of any kind in that hostile sound of agreement. Oh well. Nothing he could do now but hold his nose and take the plunge.

"So I'm going to say this once, just once, and never bring it up again, but if you were my daughter, I'd have things to say about you hitching rides across the country."

"I'm sure you would, if I were your daughter." Kasia kept her face pointed straight out the window, so he was spared having to endure the hot daggers of her eyes, but her anger came through despite all her obvious effort to keep her voice level and calm. "But if you were my father, you wouldn't have thing One to say because you'd have cut out on me when I was three to go live for keeps with the mommy you married. And if you were my mother, for that matter, you still wouldn't be saying much because you'd be too busy jumping from rehab to back alleys and back again to remember my name much less care about how I make it from one state to another. And if you were any of my foster parents--"

She cut off there, throwing the truck into stark silence, and faced the window without moving.

Well, he may not have known better than to bring it up, but he sure knew better than to dig himself in any deeper. Ez kept quiet and drove.

"Most girls who have been on their own as long as I have are hooking or doing drugs," she said finally. "I don't and I never have. What do I do? I hitch rides. What do you got to say to that, Dad?"

It had the sound of a rhetorical question, but Ez found he just couldn't not answer that one.

"I say that the worst of the world's problems happen not because of conflict, but because of people who turn a blind eye to that conflict," he said quietly. "And I say that if you're going to work for me, you need to get used to the idea that I have the right, if not the human obligation, to care about your welfare. I further say that no matter how street smart you are or how lucky you are, when you let yourself live a dangerous lifestyle, eventually, it will catch up to you."

She glanced at him, still tight-lipped, but with slightly less outright hostility smoldering in her eyes.

"I'm aware of the reality of certain situations," Ez said. "I know it's not as easy as just waving a magic wand and making a house and a car and a 401K appear."

"And yet, you feel compelled to ride my ass about it, anyway," she snapped, and turned back to the window.

"Yeah, okay, call it a compulsion. When you see someone doing something dangerous, haven't you ever tried to stop them?"

She sat there for a little while, enduring the swift, probing glances he sent her way, and finally tossed off a curt half-shrug.

"You're a pretty girl," Ez said. "I think of you hopping into cars with people you pick up at truck stops and my whole gut freezes over."

"Yeah." Kasia seemed to thaw just a smidgeon more. "Once in a while, you get a weirdo, but it's not as bad as all that. You learn the rules, you know. No vans. No pickups." She glanced at him with a faint, still-angry smile lurking at the edges of her mouth and then returned to scrutinizing the landscape. "Ride in the backseat by yourself. And most of the time, I do take the bus. I do. But this year, I fell off a ladder in the orange grove and busted my arm. No insurance, obviously, so that ate up my savings, bus money and all. So what was I supposed to do? Stay in California? Those are some scary streets. Go back up to Seattle? Man, it's cold up there!"

"Would you ever stop and just live someplace if the opportunity presented itself?"

"Sure I would! Are you kidding? Who wants to live like this for the rest of their life?" Kasia glanced at him and away again, hunching a little lower in her seat. "I actually lived there in Georgia for a whole year once. I like it there. Winters are warm, and the ocean is so pretty. But I could just never keep a job there. I know a guy in Seattle who's always got a spot for me on his crew, but the cost of living there is so high and I hate the city. I hate Utah, too," she added, giving him a meaningful look out of the corner of her eye.

"I can understand that. It only got settled because the pioneers thought it was the most inhospitable place on Earth. I wouldn't want to be here myself, but this is kind of where the bones are. Last year, I was up in Wyoming, though. Pretty country. Did some fishing. The year before that, I was in the Gobi Desert, though, and you want to talk inhospitable!"

"Is that in Africa?" she asked, and the final gust of icy awkwardness that had sat between them dissipated.

"Mongolia," he replied, his mood climbing back to its former pleasant high.

Kasia faced out the window for several seconds and finally said, a trifle ruefully, "It must be nice to travel when you don't have to."

"Must be. I'd like to try it someday." Ez grinned, distracted for a moment by memories of various digs around the globe and the adventures involved in trekking to and from them. "You know, there was this one time--I was fresh out of college, my first field assignment, you know--in Kazakhstan when a road crew there unearthed what appeared to be ribs and vertebrae of enormous size. The Kazakhstan scientists thought they'd found a T-Rex, and invited a team of American paleontologists to help them excavate it, so me and my team fly all the way out there and spend three weeks painstakingly--oh drat."

Ez had to stomp on the brakes rather suddenly to avoid hitting the lean, dark figure of a man skulking smack in the middle of the road, and Kasia, who had been listening with expectant pleasure to his story, was thrown against the dashboard with the violence of deceleration. Ez put out his arm automatically to keep her head from hitting anything, and she grabbed on to him with both hands, clutching him like the safety bar of a roller coaster, which was in itself not an entirely unpleasant sensation.

"You okay?" he asked. "Sorry about that. Did you hit your head?"

She started to say something, but whatever it was, it froze in her throat as soon as she lifted her head enough to see out the windshield.

Ez watched her stare for a few seconds, then followed her gaze to the place where the black-garbed man was still standing smack in the middle of the road (and now less than three feet from his front fender to boot) and said, mildly enough, "Did I mention we're not going to be alone out here in the desert? I didn't, did I?"

The man was dressed all in black--black shoes, black suit, even a black straw hat--which made him look more than a little like a Bizarro-world Colonel Sanders, and he was not just standing in the road but posing in it, legs well apart and shoulders back and both hands resting dramatically on the bronze head of a stout walking stick. His hair was slicked back and streaked with white in two precise lines, one on either side of his head, just above his ears, and he had grown a Snidley Whiplash mustache that fluttered playfully in the little breeze that had been stirred up by the braking of Ez's truck. Honestly, all he needed was a scarlet-lined opera cape and a limp little lady he could tie to the railroad tracks and he could have been set.

But instead of Miss Pureheart, Snidley of the Utah desert had hooked himself up with a matched set of minions: two enormous young men with bodies that looked like they'd been molded in the Bronze Age to honor the Greek gods and faces that looked like they'd been pounded together by two-year-olds out of playdoh. One was blond and the other brown, but they were otherwise interchangeable as near as Ez could see. The minions towered impressively over the man in black, cracking their knuckles and flexing and curling their lips when they thought about it.

You had to give the man points for dramatic presence, Ez thought. Those were some stirring new additions to the villain's side of the table.

"Who--" Kasia paused and took a quick look around, as if to see if there were any cameras rolling and finding none, continued. "Who in the hell is that?"

"Dr. Damien Brimstone," Ez said cheerfully, unbuckling his seat belt. "Antithesis of all that is decent and good in paleontology, along with two of his henchmen."

His fresh-faced young assistant sat perfectly still for a count of three, absorbing that, and finally exploded, "What?!"

"Stay in the car." Ez hopped out, shut the door behind him, took two steps and then came back, opened the door, and said, "I believe I told you the rule about not swearing. That's one spanking for you." He shut the door again on her expression of distracted discombobulation and went to go see what the good doctor wanted.