by: Marty Chrisman

            Daisy pasted a smile on her face as she waited on her customers. Business was busy as usual at the Boars Nest. The main topic on everyone’s mind was the murder of Angie Baker. Everyone had their own opinion about what had happened. Most folks seem to think she was murdered by a drifter just passing through, no one wanted to consider the fact that it could have been a local who had done the killing. Parents were keeping their children close to home, especially the young girls, and more shotguns were showing up on the gun racks in the back of pickups.

There was a noticeable tension in the air that hadn’t been there before the murder. Things like this just didn’t happen in Hazzard. So far nobody knew that Luke had been there and may actually know something about the murder. When any of her customers asked about the boys and wanted to know why they hadn’t been around, Daisy simply told them that they were on a hunting trip for a few days.

Rusty Harrison, a local roughneck with a bad reputation, grabbed her wrist as she sat a beer down on the table in front of him. “Hey, Daisy….” He said “How about joining me and Jamie for a little drink?”

“Let go of me, Rusty…” Daisy said with a smile but a definite warning tone in her voice. She tried to pull her hand away but Rusty just tightened his grip and grinned at her suggestively. When he reached out with his other hand and tried to fondle her breast, she stomped her high heel down on his foot as hard as she could. With a howl of pain, he let her go, shoving her backwards. She hit her hip on the edge of the table behind her and would have lost her balance if Cooter hadn’t seen what happened and jumped up to come to her aide.

Grabbing her arm to help her regain her balance, he glared at Rusty and his brother, Jamie and said in a cold, threatening voice “I think you two best get out of here while you can still walk out on your own.”

Rusty looked at Cooter with a smirk on his face and slowly shoved himself to his feet. His brother Jamie did the same. For a moment, he seemed to be considering challenging Cooter, then he merely shrugged and threw some money on the table for their beers. Turning to his brother, he said “Come on, Jamie…let’s git out of this dump.” As he walked away, he muttered loudly enough for Daisy and Cooter to hear him “She’s probably not that good a piece anyway….”

Cooter’s eyes flashed with anger and he took a step towards the Harrison brothers, but Daisy put her hand on his arm stopping him “It’s okay, Coot.” She said quietly “Let ‘em go…”

“He had no right to talk about you like that, Daisy!” Cooter said angrily, still debating about going after Rusty and punching him out to teach him some manners.

“Just let ‘em go…..they don’t come in here that often…they won’t be back….”

“Somebody needs to teach them some manners.” Cooter growled, still angry but deciding to let the Harrisons leave without going after them.

“Come on” Daisy said with a smile “I’ll buy you a beer for defending my honor.”

Cooter walked over to the bar with Daisy and stood there while she poured him a mug of beer and sat it down in front of him. “Thanks, Daisy.” He said, taking a long swallow “Say, where’s Bo and Luke been keeping themselves lately? I ain’t seen ‘em for the last couple of days.”

“Oh, they went hunting up in the mountains.” Daisy told him, giving him the same cover story she and Jesse had agreed on to explain the boys absence.

“Well, I hope they catch something.”

“So do I, Cooter. So do I.”

“Too bad about the little Baker girl, huh?” Cooter said, not noticing the flash of pain that flickered in Daisy’s eyes.

“Yeah…..real bad….” Daisy said

“Makes ya wonder what kind of animal could do something like that to a little girl.” Cooter said grimly “Rosco better find whoever’s responsible before some of the daddies around here do…..or there’s gonna be some old fashioned justice carried out mountain style.”

Daisy lowered her eyes uneasily. Cooter was a close friend of the family and she hated not being able to tell him the truth about what she knew concerning the whole incident. But a slip of the tongue to anyone could put Luke and Bo both in danger. Anyone who was capable of murdering a 13 year old girl like that wouldn’t have any second thoughts about killing Luke if they found him, especially if Luke could identify them once he regained his memory. So Daisy knew that she had to keep silent, even to Cooter. She finished her shift without any further problems and then went home. Jesse was cooking supper when she arrived back at the farm.

“Figured we take supper with us and go see the boys.” Jesse told her as she came into the kitchen. “Make sure they don’t need nothing and see if Luke remembers anything else.”

“Did you tell Enos what Luke said about Angie flagging him down for help?”

“Yeah…..and Enos said he figures something like that must have happened and that’s how Luke got caught up in this whole mess. He said it looked like there’d been some kind of struggle down by the main road. He found a necklace in the ditch that Angie’s daddy identified as belonging to her.”

“So it sounds like somebody must have grabbed her and she got loose from them somehow.” Daisy said trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

“And Luke just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Jesse said “And tried to help her.”

Daisy got down a picnic basket from the shelf in the storage closet and started helping Jesse pack up the supper for themselves and the boys. Fifteen minutes, they climbed into Jesse’s truck and headed for the hideout where the boys were camping. Neither of them noticed the two men standing on the ridge behind the house watching them with a pair of binoculars.

“There goes the old man and Daisy.” One of the men said “Are we gonna follow ‘em?”

“Naw, we’ll never catch up with ‘em…but if we keep watching ‘em, sooner or later they lead us to Luke and then we can get rid of him before he identifies us.”

“What about Bo?”

“Wherever Luke is Bo is gonna be with him. You can count on it. So we’ll have to get rid of him too.”

“I don’t like this….of all the people to show up at the wrong time, why’d it have to be one the Duke boys?”

“Yeah, well if you hadn’t been stupid enough to let that little bitch get loose, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Hey, how was I suppose to know she’d make it to the road and that Luke would  be driving by right then and decide to stop.”

“We should’ve put a bullet in his head like I wanted to instead of just hitting him in the head with that rock.” The older man glanced at his partner “Come on, let’s get out of here.”