Page 55 of The B!tch is Bad

EPILOGUE

Creed

It was Galileo Taliwood’s turn to speak.

He stood on the expansive deck of Smoky Mountain High and raised an unopened bottle of wine. Was that my . . . “I want to say, nothing’s gone right for this poor guy Creed Trucks since he had the misfortune to come to Seeker Valley.”

Everyone sort of went Wait, what? Was Galileo going to say something depressing? “But he saw the break in the clouds, hung onto his awesome business, and built it ten times stronger, better.”

Everyone whooped and clapped at that.

“And needless to say, he somehow managed to hang onto this adorable, free-spirited girl.”

There was a round of a different sort of whoops. Next to me on the dais, Patience did a little curtsy, lifting the wide, full skirts of her ivory dress.

Galileo went on, brandishing the large format bottle. A former Navajo sheepherder with a colorful past, Galileo now ran Doggie Style Grooming in P and E. “I somehow got my hands on this bottle of Pictures of Lily ’84 library wine. Here you go, my man.”

I stepped down to meet Galileo halfway and took the bottle to a round of applause. The shrink-wrapped pallets of this vintage had been the first to collapse on itself during the fire and now—mind blown. So many guests were regifting my own bottles back to me. Bottles they’d purchased whenever, and kept in their own cellars. Tuzigoot had given me an entire case of my ’91 Cab franc. Galileo and I posed for photos, in the thumbs up attitude. To be honest, I did feel like crying. I wasn’t prepared for this at all.

“Rock on with your bad self!” yelled Sock Monkey, his phrase of the moment.

Wolf—Wolfdieter, as he’d recently informed us—returned to me several bottles of the 1875 vintage. He never did tell me where he got them, and he scuffled his boot, looked sheepishly at the ground, and played with the arrow puller and Allen wrench dangling from his formal belt.

Bob Redford and Chris Pratt gave me back the wine they’d won at the auction the other week. They now sat clapping heartily, my new best friends of the day. I noted that barely anyone had heard the shooting in the vineyard the day Oliver Klozov went missing. He was now happily composting some white zin grapevines. Of course there was no news released about him. He’d just vanished, and I put some Jalisco wives to work cleaning that house the fuck up.

There was abundant evidence Klozov was set to kill more people. Slushy was convinced he was next, and Lytton so no one would mention candles ever again. The Jalisco women found many rolls of duct tape, flex cuffs, books on how to disappear, tarps, gloves, and ammo, more than 750 rounds. They handed me a magnetic gun holder that goes on a car, just as we’d found on his American truck crashed in my vineyard. So many people could’ve been Klozov’s next victim, and my Patience saved them all.

She was bad. She was a bad bitch.

I wasn’t ashamed my own wife had to save me. I was proud I’d finally given her a chance to show her mettle.

The warehouse fire had burned more than eight hours. I didn’t see it for a few days ‘til Gudrun and Maddy cleared me after removing the bullet in my shoulder. The building was a horrific dripping messy sight. The electricity had gone, leaving the warehouse dim, light entering through gaps where windows used to be. Mounds of wine cases had collapsed in the firestorm, spilling millions of bottles in shattered piles. The air had the bouquet of wine, wood burn, and soggy cardboard.

I slopped around in my desert boots, shining a flashlight on this carnage. Elektra told me that all told, ninety-five winemakers has been affected by the burn. Names on the labels were some of the most respected in the world of wine. California growers would commit hari-kari to see the amount of destruction, much of the wine cooked as the concrete structure heated up like an oven. As of my wedding date, the estimate of the value of destroyed wine was $277 million.

And many of the vintners stored wine there because they didn’t have their own storage, mom and pop sort of places who could ill afford any loss. Klozov committed a crime against families, business owners and average working men and women making irreplaceable wines. To us, it was a crime against humanity.

Everyone, cops included, knew Oliver Klozov had done it and had fled the state. Grace, Patience, and some warehouse workers attested to that.

Patience leaped off the dais to join Galileo and me for the photo op. Lytton and his wife June took the dais in our place. Lytton said into the mic, “They say in a good marriage the husband is the head, and the wife is the heart. So let’s drink to the fact that our couple did not know in life either headaches or heartaches!”

Everyone was pleased to drink to that, and our magnificent ceremony sort of devolved into a general party, as it had been dying to do for awhile. I sidled up to Patience and dangled some keys in her face. She cried, “Wow!”

“Keys to Tim Woodstock’s cabin.”

We were at last able to take a real vacation, this time a honeymoon. I still wore an arm sling, so I wasn’t ready for skiing, ziplining, or whatever else I could do in honor of Sean Wildstar, but there were plenty of stunning canyons to explore near Woodstock’s cabin.

Patience whipped the keys out of my hand. “Oh, give those to me.” She cast me a sly look as she stuffed them in her cleavage. “No one will find them but you.”

“Everybody on their feet now! Great ready to move!” Slushy stood at the DJ console, today in a blush suit with a lime green tie. “This has the beat of the street.”

On the dance floor, Tobiah rocked it with his on-again off-again woman, Tracy. He wailed, “Diamond in the back, sunroof top, diggin’ the scene with the gasoline, uh-huh.”

“Yo, byte-boy!” yelled his rival, Wolf. “It’s gangsta lean, not gasoline!”

Tobiah fell for it, letting the heckling ruin his dance. He flailed his hands. “Oh, what the fuck is a gangsta lean? That’s not even a thing.”

“It is, too,” said Tracy, demonstrating by leaning far back, an invisible steering wheel in one hand. Soon dancers nearby—Bobo Segrist, Crybaby, Speed, Russ Gollywow, Elektra and Gray, all the glitterati of Mormon Mountain—began doing the Gangsta Lean too. It was impossible not to fall into it, and my wife and I swayed with the crowd.