On Channel 12

"Hey, you're Stan Monroe, right?" Richard Boudreaux asked, sounding very happy.

"Uh, yeah," Stan answered, wishing he had his service revolver on.

"Richard," Richard said. "Yeah, I know you don't remember me; my dad and Beth lived right down the street from you, oh my God, has it really been... Wow, anyway, here you go; you've been served."

Stan looked at the smiling man as Richard snapped a digital photograph of Stan holding the manila envelope.

Before Stan could react, before he could lash out, Richard was already getting into his Ford Taurus and driving away.

"Who was that, Honey?" Cheryl asked, coming up behind Stan.

"Process Server," Stan said and opened the envelope.

"And fucking quit calling me 'Honey' you fucking disgusting fat pig," he muttered to himself as he pulled the papers out.

Within minutes, Stan was sure he was going to kill Milt Duhon, Cheryl Duhon, and Sierra, Summer and Skye Duhon. And the still yapping Mr. Bill.

So intent was he on the papers in front of him, he failed to hear the 'beep beep' of the tow truck outside.

"What's that... God, I bet that Ray's doing something stupid in his garden again," Cheryl said, hearing the beeping from just outside.

She peered through the window then screamed as she watched her beautiful black SUV being dragged out of her driveway.

Stan ran outside but the driver gunned the motor and managed to get down the street and around the corner before Stan could catch up with him.

"My car!" Cheryl screamed. "They stole my car!"

Stan called it in and then had to deliver the bad news to Cheryl.

"Wasn't stolen," he said to the sobbing Cheryl and the upset children.

"What do you mean? We stood right here and watched..." Sierra argued, glaring hatefully at the man.

"I mean, it wasn't stolen," he snapped. "It was repossessed. Your wonderful ex-husband sold it back to the dealership."

"Ex?" Sierra screamed at her mother.

"What's that mean?" Summer asked, a sinking feeling in her stomach.

"You're getting a divorce?" Sierra screamed at their mother.

Chapter 8

Milt knew the papers had been delivered to Stan; he suddenly had a police cruiser following him as he drove to his new condominium.

Earlier, he'd had interesting conversation with his wife, his ex-wife. She was understandably quite upset about her car being repossessed.

"Man, Cheryl, what?" he laughed, even as he wanted to just lash out in anger. "Let Stan pay them bills huh?"

He hung up, and then blocked her cell phone number.

Now, as he drove toward his new condominium, Milt realized, he did not want Stan Monroe, or Cheryl Mouton to know where he now resided.

(Milt Duhon quit thinking of Cheryl as Cheryl Duhon the moment she'd admitted to her seventeen year affair with Stanley Monroe.)

Talking or texting on your cell phone while driving is illegal in Louisiana. St. Elizabeth Parish tacks on an additional penalty; your service is cancelled for ninety days and will not be reinstated unless you take and pass a Driving Safety class.

So Milt was very discrete as he slipped his cell phone out of his pocket and carefully dialed 911 and put his cell phone on speaker phone.

"Nine one one, what is your emergency please?" an operator intoned pleasantly.

"Hey, this is Milt Duhon," Milt cheerfully called out, making sure to use proper signals as he turned on to a side street.

"Yes sir?" the operator asked, then brightened. "Oh my God, the chef guy?"

"Yeah that's me," Milt laughed. "Listen, there a reason I'm being followed? Officer Stanley Monroe's been up my ass since I left the station and it ain't no coincidence no. I done turned three times and he's right there."

Milt looked into the rearview mirror and laughed again as he watched Stan suddenly look to his right.

"Thank you, ma'am, and thank you for watching my show," Milt said as he watched Stan speaking into his radio's handset.

"You mother fucker; you really think you're so fucking smart," Stan snarled hatefully at Milt as Captain Bob Chastaine's voice continued to question him about following Milt Duhon.

"Sir, no, sir; I don't have a clue what he's talking about," Stan denied. I'm just doing a routine patrol."

"Do it anywhere else; I do not need this shit on the Channel twelve news," Bob ordered.

Milt waved in a friendly manner as Stan suddenly passed him at a high rate of speed.

Then he pulled into a driveway, backed out, and drove back up the street again.

Then he drove to his brother's house, just to make one hundred percent sure he was not being followed.

"Man, you must have you a good smeller," DebbiAnn greeted him. "Them stuffed peppers just coming out the oven now."

"You eating?" Clark asked, playfully squeezing DebbiAnn's pudgy buttocks as she corralled their children to wash their hands for dinner.

"I ain't putting y'all out no," Milt protested.

"You putting us out, we'd turn off all the lights and pretend we not home," Clark assured him.

"Uncle Milt, you wash them hands?" Andrea asked.

"No, I done this," Milt said and licked his hands and rubbed them on his shirt. "That good, right?"

"Go wash them hands," DebbiAnn ordered, smiling as Andrea laughed.

Clark Jr. laughed too, even though he didn't know what he was laughing about.

"We seen you on TV," Andrea announced as she picked her way through her green peas and carrots.

"Yeah? What was I doing on TV?" Milt smiled at her.

"You was making some chicken toes," DebbiAnn said.

(Milt had taken to calling breaded chicken strips 'chicken toes' as a way to make his daughters laugh. Now, the viewers of the 'Cast Iron Stomach' knew his recipe as 'Chicken Toes' as well.)

"And them onion rings but we don't like onion rings," Andrea said.

"You don't like onion rings?" Milt feigned shock.

"How's your new place coming?" Clark asked.

"It's nice; ain't got no dogs under foot, no kids running around, no wife in the way," Milt teased his older brother.

"You about all moved in?" DebbiAnn asked.

"Yeah; I be back next Saturday get the bed out of the garage," Milt said and shrugged. "It be a good bed for the spare bedroom."

While Milt was enjoying his dinner with his family, Georgie Sanders was in Captain Bob Chastaine's office.

"Sir, you know me," she said seriously. "I'll work with anyone. Hell, I'll even work with Leeanne Pyle you want me to."

(Leeanne Pyle was a very sweet, very inefficient police officer with the DeGarde Police Department. The red head was often relegated the easiest assignments, and still she routinely fouled those up.)

"But..." Bob said, knowing Georgie wasn't in his office to sing her own praises.

"But I do not like working with Stan Monroe," Georgie confessed. "I'm sure he's a great officer, in Houston. But what's normal operating procedure there is not normal operating procedure here."

Bob mentally ran through the duty roster, and then looked at the leader board behind Georgie's head.

"Sergeant Sanders," he nodded, smiling tightly. "Putting you with Officer Poche. That all right?"

"Yes sir," Georgie smiled in relief.

"Which, of course, puts Monroe with Thaddeus Bell," Bob thought. "Those two ass holes deserve each other."

Officer Rydell Poche was grateful to be paired with anyone but Thaddeus. Both men were African-American, but Thaddeus seemed to have a gigantic chip on his shoulder against white people.

"Man, we put the uniform on, there ain't no black or white; there's just blue," Rydell claimed, but Thaddeus didn't see it that way.

While Stanley and Thaddeus were trying to pretend that their reassignment was no big deal, Cheryl was trying to explain, over Skye's crying, why she and their father was getting a divorce.

"He's not even your father anyway," Cheryl spat out, quickly tiring of Sierra's anger and Summer's refusal to accept Cheryl's explanations.

"He's what?" Sierra gasped, moth open in horror.

"Wait, then who our father is, huh?" Summer demanded.

"Oh my God, it's that ass hole, ain't it?" Sierra screamed.

Cheryl slapped her oldest child across the face.

"You watch your mouth and you treat your father with some respect, huh?" Cheryl snarled.

"Go to Hell," Sierra hissed, refusing to let her mother see her tears.

Cheryl moved to slap her daughter again but Sierra backed up and Cheryl slapped the door jamb of the kitchen instead.

"Then who our father is, huh?" Summer again demanded as Cheryl hopped around, clutching her hand.

"You go to your room," Cheryl ordered, but Sierra did not move.

"It's that Stan ass hole," Sierra snarled, glaring hatefully at her mother.

"Ew! Him?" Summer screeched.

"I want my Daddy!" Skye sobbed out.

While the four blonde haired, blue eyed women screamed and cried at each other, Milt Duhon was backing his truck into the garage of his condominium at Lambert Condominium Association.

The place was a fairly modest three bedroom unit; he hated the kitchen but liked everything else.

His own garage, where he didn't have all of Cheryl's, and Sierra's and Summer's and Skye's discards cluttering it up and making it impossible to park inside. There was a washing machine and dryer, brand new, that he didn't have to make a path to get to. There was a large television, brand new, in the living room that he could watch what he wanted to, not what Cheryl, or Sierra or Summer, or Skye wanted to watch. There was a brand new couch and a brand new recliner that did not smell of Mr. Bill's urine.

Upstairs, there was a bed that did not have a rut formed in it. There was a closet that had room for his clothes. There was a chest of drawers that had room for his work clothes, no matter how bad Cheryl claimed they smelled. There was room for his underwear and socks too.

And the top of the chest of drawers was not covered up with silly photographs, mostly of Cheryl and the girls, only one of him when he won the Oil Man's Chili Cook-off.

There was a bowl on top of the chest and he put his keys, his wallet, and his cell phone into the bowl.

Looking at the keys, Milt smirked. Cheryl was upset about the loss of her car. He wondered how she would feel when the gas and the electricity were disconnected.

His lawyer, Donald Pellichet, had advised against cessation of payment on the house note; why let Cheryl and Stan ruin Milt's credit? But the dealership was willing to take the car back; Milt had to pay a service fee, and the utilities company was willing to transfer his utilities to his new address.

PC Nation had charged him to discontinue Cheryl's Cell Phone service; Milt wasn't able to return her phone to them. The same with the land line; they only had that line for the girls anyway. Cheryl did not want Sierra to have a cell phone; she feared the girl would become engrossed in the telephone to the exclusion of family interaction and Milt was quick to agree.

At Channel 12, he saw several of the interns and the younger crew members walking around, phones firmly in their hands, not paying a bit of attention to their surroundings.

He'd asked one girl who she was so busily texting with and she'd pointed to another girl not even twenty feet away from her.

So Milt had been all too happy to agree; Sierra, no matter how loudly and long she whined and pleaded and bargained and cajoled, did not need a cell phone.

In the bathroom, which did not have Cheryl's bras hanging to dry over the towel rack, did not have the entire vanity covered by her cosmetics, Milt let out a monstrous belch. DebbiAnn, thanks to his brother's tutelage, was a great cook, managing to make a meal that both adults and children would eat.

His cell phone rang and he decided it could go to voice mail; he had three glasses of iced tea to rid himself of.

When he came out of his bathroom, after making himself lift the seat again, there was no Cheryl and no three little girls to complain about the toilet seat being up, he heard his phone chime, letting Milt know he had a message.

There were two messages, actually.

"I can't believe, you disconnected my cell phone?" Cheryl screamed on the voice mail.

Milt deleted that message and steeled himself to listen to the next message.

"Hey, went to your apartment, some cute blonde said you don't live there anymore," Kathy's voice purred into the phone.

Milt listened to the young lady's playful message and sighed.

"Hey, just left you a message!" she chirped cheerfully when Milt returned her call.

Twenty minutes later, Kathy parked in front of Milt's condominium.

Twenty one minutes later, Kathy was walking around his condominium, nude.

Fifty eight minutes later, she was leaving Milt's condominium, with Milt's real estate agent's business card in the pocket of her shorts.

While Milt was showering off Kathy's essences, Stan Monroe and Thaddeus Bell were patrolling the streets of DeGarde, Louisiana.

At first, the two officers resented the pairing; both had racist attitudes. Within moments, though, they found they were two peas in a pod.

"Hey, follow that Lexus!" Stan ordered, interrupting Thaddeus's narrative on why any Latin gang banger should be disposed of, rather than given a trial.

"Lights?" Thaddeus asked, noticing a very attractive red head behind the wheel.

"Naw, it's my bitch ex-wife," Stan groused. "Want to see where the cunt thinks she's going."

"Aw, no shit? Your ex?" Thaddeus asked, following the car.

"Yeah, fucking bitch. Waits until I'm about to get promoted to Detective then tells me her ass is leaving, going back to DeGarde," Stan snarled, still bitter.

"Bitches be cold like that," Thaddeus agreed. "Anything fuck a man up? They all about that. But we the heartless mother fuckers, huh?"

"Tell me about it," Stan spat.

Heidi pulled up at Schaub's Pharmacy and got out of her car. A light breeze blew up her business skirt and she quickly pushed the skirt down before anything beyond her shapely thighs were exposed.

"Bet she's got a nice ass," Thaddeus commented as they drove past.

"It is nice," Stan affirmed. "Used to tell her she must have had some black in her; got a nice ghetto booty."

"Carpet match the curtains?" Thaddeus asked. "Or she one of them nasty hos shave that cooch? Had this little blonde? Cooch so smooth you'd swear no hair ever grew there."

"No, no, nice red bush," Stan said. "Little cupcake titties, neat little triangle..."

"Ever grunge fuck her?" Thaddeus asked as they circled back to see the Lexus was still parked in front of the drug store.

"Grunge..." Stan wondered aloud.

"Stick it up her ass, go straight from her cooch to her turd cutter, no warning, just 'Pie-yow!'" Thaddeus laughed.

"Fuck no; I wish," Stan said. "Wouldn't even let me get a finger near her shit hole. Start getting all freaked..."

"Let you?" Thaddeus sneered. "LET YOU? Mother fucker, they don't 'Let you' grunge fuck them; you just do it and they give you any shit about it, slap the fuck out of them until they say okay."

They watched as Heidi came out of the store, small bag in hand. Thaddeus nodded in approval as Heidi smoothed her skirt under her before sitting in the automobile, displaying that she did indeed possess a very nice rear end.

Heidi frowned as the police cruiser followed her. Hannah, her middle daughter, had the flu, severe abdominal pains and diarrhea and a fever of a hundred and two. Thankfully, Dr. Farbacher had called in a prescription, which Schaub's Pharmacy was able to fill for her.

She just didn't need the harassment of Hannah's father right now.

"Some God damned father," Heidi spat to herself. "Supposed to have them every other weekend; hasn't had them one weekend yet."

Honey had actually said she was glad their father didn't seem to have time for them. Heidi agreed with the ten year old, almost eleven year old girl but it still angered her that their father had so easily discarded them.

"Keep it up, ass hole," Heidi said, thinking of their four year old Heloise. "Just keep it up; she won't even know who you are."

"Nice," Thaddeus said as Heidi pulled into the driveway of a modest two story home.

"Should be; much as she's bleeding off of me," Stan snarled.

"Shit ain't right," Thaddeus agreed. "Shit just ain't right; you the mother fucker busting your ass while she's just sitting there. Fucking bitches think, just 'cause they got the pussy they should get the money too."

Just as Stan and Thaddeus were discussing the ills of the world, Cheryl was fighting hard not to scream.

Sierra was glaring at her, and Summer and Skye were whining for their, for Milt. Neither child wanted Stan to be their father.

"So what's for supper, Mother?" Sierra spat contemptuously.

"I don't know, Sierra, what would you like for supper?" Cheryl did scream. "Huh? What would make you happy, Sierra?"

"Nothing you cook," Sierra snapped.

"Take a look, Sierra; guess what? There's no food. And you know why?" Cheryl snapped, flinging the freezer door open.

"Because your 'Daddy' had our car towed! Now I can't go to the grocery store!" Cheryl bellowed at the impertinent teenager.

Cheryl lumbered out of the kitchen and Sierra took it upon herself to pull out some eggs, vegetables, and cheese.

Within minutes, she had three omelets made, Summer helped by toasting bread and buttering the toast.

"Didn't make me one?" Cheryl demanded when the fact that the three girls weren't whining any longer came into her consciousness and she waddled into the kitchen to see why they were suddenly silent.

"Get the ass hole to make you one," Sierra spat. "You love him so much? See what he can do for you."

Chapter 9

Milt went off-shore, feeling weary, old. He did wonder briefly, since he was no longer working to support Cheryl and their, her three daughters if he might talk to Chris Dumas, his boss, about switching to seven on and seven off. The fourteen days on seemed to be an endless stretch of days ahead of him.

The boat churned through the choppy, shallow waters of the Gulf and Milt sat down and tried to make himself comfortable for the long trip.

He was tired, exhausted actually. Paula Lambert, his next door neighbor had asked him to cook a standing rib roast for a 'little get-together' and he had done so. Terry, Paula's attractive blonde roommate had helped him prepare the meal, and then helped him clean up. Then she'd helped him carry everything back to his condo.

It had surprised Milt; he'd assumed that Terry and Paula were lovers, but Terry helped him put his pots and pans away, then helped him out of his sweaty clothing.

Anal sex was now one of Milt's favorite things to do. He'd never had anal sex before, but Terry had greased his cock up with hand lotion and whispered to him to give it to her.

It was tight, it was hot, and it was nasty. Terry had such an angelic face, big blue eyes and long blonde hair. And kept whispering to him; he was so big, he was such a good lover, he was splitting her in half.

After he pumped a load into Terry's clutching bowels, she kissed him and cuddled up to him. Then, as soon as his cock was hard again, she asked him to fuck her ass again; she really liked the way he fucked her ass.

And Terry had still been there when he woke up and started to pack his duffel bag for his off-shore shift.

"Thank you; my ass is still so sore!" she smiled, gave him a soft kiss, then left his condominium.

He had smiled on the long drive from Bender, Louisiana, to the Industrial Canal. But then the fourteen days off-shore just seemed to stretch forever ahead of him.

While Milt was traveling from shore to rig in the dark morning, Stan was trying to think of something to do with his girls. Heidi had called and talked with him. But, she had wanted to talk about the girls, about his responsibilities, not about reconciliation as he had hoped.

"Stan, personally, I'd really like it if you'd just move back to Houston, become a Detective, whatever the hell it was you were whining about and never ever come around again," Heidi had snapped and Stan actually felt sick to his stomach.