You might as well give up and buy a copy, ’cause I’m probably gonna keep harping on it until I come out with a new book.

In this sample from LONNIE, ME, AND…., Lonnie and Tiny are talking about Scrappy, the man who owns Scrappy’s junkyard. Lonnie is just full of inside info.

Scrappy’s a What?

excerpt from “Lonnie, Me, and the Junkyard of Forbidden Delights”
by Marian Allen

“He’s a whatchacallit,” Lonnie said.

“A junkman?”

“No, that thing Leona’s so down on.”

“Drinker? Dancer? Gambler? Unitarian Universalist?”

“Dang it, Tiny, be serious! Like Harry Potter.”

“Young? English? Wiseass?”

Lonnie’s scrawny chicken neck got red, so I knew he was about to lose his temper. That’s no fun, so I put half my coffee cake on his plate and said, “Give me another hint. I’m not a very good guesser today.”

“You know: a guy that does magic. And don’t say magician, ’cause that ain’t it.”

“Sorcerer? Warlock?”

“That’s it!” He slapped me on the shoulder with those long, bony fingers hard enough to raise welts. “He’s a warlock.”

“You sure you don’t mean, like, a Mason or something?”

“No, he’s a warlock. Leona said some of the kids in her church youth group come in and said they went to Scrappy’s to buy some parts for a car they’re fixing up together. Said he was picking something in this garden he has out back of his office shed. They asked him what it was and he told them that good church-going children didn’t need to know.”

“What makes you think it was warlockery? Maybe it was marijuana. Or opium. Or heroin. No, you don’t grow heroin.”

“Heroin comes from horses, don’t it?”

Sometimes all you can do with Lonnie is say yes and go on. “Yes,” I said. “So what makes you think he’s a warlock?”

“He told ’em! As good as, anyway. They said he said he had a garden of unearthly pleasures, and they could come back when they were older and he’d fix ’em up.”

“Aw, he was just jerking their chains ’cause he knew they were church kids.”

“How’d he know, eh?” Lonnie tapped his temple and narrowed his eyes. “Powers!”

I pointed to my eyeballs and said, “20/20 vision. Bet they were wearing their Teens For Jesus t-shirts, like they always do when they run in a pack.”

Lonnie got that astonished look he gets when I make sense.

~*~

Buy LONNIE, ME, AND….

at Amazon in print and for Kindle and Kindle apps. Soon to be available through independent book stores, and in multiple formats through Untreed Reads.

A WRITING PROMPT BASED ON MY POST: Write about a suspicious character.

MA