Side Squeeze (Jasper Falls 6)

Mrs. McCullough perused caulk guns in aisle two. “Were you looking for something in particular?”

She laughed. “My youth, but I’m sure I won’t find that here.” She curiously edged past him and he followed her toward the back. “Are the mowers marked down as well?”

“Everything’s on sale.”

“Oh, my.” She dug in her purse and withdrew a dated flip phone, bringing it to her ear. “Rosemarie, you better get down here. The hardware store, love. They’ve got everything marked down to eighty percent off! I’m looking at a four-hundred-dollar grill, and I’m about to buy for—Harrison, what’s the sale price of this?”

“Eighty dollars.”

“It’s eighty dollars, Rose! No, Frank already has a grill. But I have five sons with birthdays and it’s gettin’ damn expensive to find gifts they can actually use.” She covered the edge of the phone. “How many grills do you have in stock?”

“Six.”

“He has six. That leaves one for you. You’ll have to play favorites between Ryan and Patrick. Maybe a riding mower for the other. Or maybe we should save the last grill for Colleen. She only has Giovanni to think of—”

Her words cut off as her sister’s voice squawked through the phone. The dusting of cinnamon freckles covering Mrs. McCullough’s complexion darkened to a deep ruby and she frowned at the prattling phone.

“Well, then get your arse down here and get it! Christ, I’m the one who called you.” She snapped the phone shut and shoved it into the deep abyss that was her handbag. “Some thanks I get for trying to do her a favor.”

Within an hour, Mrs. McCullough made twenty-some calls and packed the store with frantic bargain hunters. She was louder than a siren and more effective than an ad in the Penny Saver.

As he rung up her order at the register, additional customers continued to walk through the door. Word of the sale traveled and there seemed a mad rush to get there before all the coveted items were gone.

Despite the great discounts, Mrs. McCullough spent well over two thousand dollars.

She swiped her credit card then tucked it neatly back into her bulging wallet and adjusted the battered leather bag over her shoulder. “Now I’ll need you to hold these items for me.”

Harrison’s attention jerked from the long receipt spewing out of the register. “Uh, we don’t typically—”

“Just for a day or two, dearie, until I figure out how to deliver them. You don’t deliver, do you?”

“No, ma’am.”

She took the long printout of her order and wadded it around her fingers, stuffing it deep into her purse. “Well then, I guess we’ll both live in suspense until a solution comes to me. Toodle-loo.”

“But…” Harrison stared after her, wondering how he just became a storage unit when his only goal had been to empty the store.

“Is this eighty percent off?” An older man asked, holding up a bottle of weed killer.

“Yes.”

“And this?” He lifted a packet of seeds.

“Yes.”

“And what about the shovels and spades.”

“It’s all eighty percent off.” Were the signs not bright enough?

He massaged his temples as more customers flooded in, each one pelting him with redundant questions. He tried to field each one with a smile, and even hung signs displaying the simple math of eighty percent off various ticket prices, but the questions kept coming.

“Is it cash only?”

“Do you have any more grills?”

“What’s your return policy?”

And then there were the rumors. “I heard he’ll store whatever you can’t transport.”

“We don’t hold items!” Harrison hadn’t meant to lose his temper, but how could he make it any clearer? He wanted everything gone so he could leave!

“Oh.” The woman with the gray curls looked back at her companion. “Well then, we’ll just have to pay for delivery, Ruth.”

“We don’t deliver,” he grumbled into his palms, giving up.

At the end of the day, the shelves were ransacked and—despite his consistent protests—large purchased items that needed to still be picked up—or delivered—congested the front half of the store.

He locked the door at five on the dot and closed out the register. Then he spent the next hour consolidating the inventory from four aisles into two.

Seeing the notable progress filled him with mixed emotions. He was closer to getting out of there, but he was also running out of reasons to stay.

He stared down at the stack of Ready Mix Spackle. There had been twenty buckets of the stuff that morning. Now, there were only three left.

Snatching one off the stack, he grabbed a putty knife, hit the lights and left through the back. Ten minutes later he was parking in front of his sister’s house.

Thinking of the house as Erin’s helped diffuse some of the anger linked to his childhood home, but nothing protected him from the surge of unwanted recollections. Too many memories survived his dad, and he hated that something as simple as the sight of their mailbox could trigger unwanted thoughts of his past.