Cold in July

Flyboy707 eBooks

No copyright
 2011 by
Flyboy707

No rights reserved. All
part of this book may be reproduced in any form and by any means without the
prior written consent of anyone.

Preface
.
5

Acknowledgments
7

Part
One
.
10

Part
Two
.
45

Part
Three
.
87

About
the Author
.
143

Also
by Joe R. Lansdale
.
144

Copyright
Information
.
145

This novel is dedicated
with great love and respect to the memory of my good friend and agent, Ray
Puechner.

He was one of a very special
kind, and he will be missed
.

This is one of my favorite novels, hands down.

It is also one of the most important ones I’ve written.

Important for me as a writer. Important for my career.

It was my entry into the hardboiled, or noir, or dark crime
field. I don’t know if any of those labels quite fit, but that’s as close as I
can define it, and frankly, all that label stuff is so much BS.

But I will say this. I grew as a great fan of the Gold Medal
crime novel, exemplified by such fine writers as John D. McDonald, Charles
Williams, and many others. I also read a lot of other crime novels by a variety
of writers from a variety of publishing houses, but Gold Medal was special. I
wanted to write something in that vein, long after its heyday had passed. A
contract with Bantam Books gave me that opportunity.

This novel was written quickly, in about two and half
months. I had just come off writing The Drive In in about the same time, but
though The Drive In came out to be what I like to think of as a good book, and
an influential one for many writers, it was at the time, no fun to write. This
one was a delight. It was the kind of book I had wanted to do for a while. It
came from a true-life experience that became a dream.

My wife and I were shopping for houses, and we were shown
one out by Lake Nacogdoches that had a bullet hole in the ceiling. No
explanation was offered by the realtor, and it wasn’t a house we liked enough
to buy, but by the time I got home that bullet hole seemed to be more in my
head than in the ceiling of that house. It was widening, and by the time I went
to bed that night, it was a chasm.

I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream, got up,
went to the bathroom and washed my face, went back to bed, dreamed some more,
got up, washed my face some more.

When I woke up the next morning I told the dream to my wife,
and she said, “That’s a story.”

I thought it might be. It was rare for me to have the plot
of a story before I started writing. Usually, the plot develops as I go, but
this time, it was laid out for me and the idea was a feverish one.

As circumstances were, a friend of mine, and an editor at
that time for Bantam, a very nice man named Greg Tobin, came to visit. My wife,
always one to push the opportunity for me to sell a story or book, said, “Tell
Greg about your dream.”

Reluctantly, I did. I told it from beginning to end.

Greg said, “I’ll buy that.”

And that’s how it came about that I wrote the novel. It was
at that time my largest advance. It got good reviews, got optioned for film,
and I wrote the screenplay. This gave our life an infusion of more money than
we had ever had before, and though I was already full-time, it shortly
solidified the situation so that my wife could quit her job and go to work for
me. I had been publishing for quite a while before that, and had been full-time
for several years, but from that point on neither my wife nor myself have
worked for anyone else, at least not in matters unrelated to my writing career.

The film wasn’t made, though it was under option for quite
some time. The book came back into print at Mysterious Press, and then, fell
out of print. It was picked up again for film, and right now, it looks as if it
just might happen.

That would be nice.

But the book is the book is the book, and I think it still
stands well on its own two feet, and is a kind of period piece of the early
nineties. It had, as much of my work does, ties to my own life. Not always
direct ties, but there were strings nonetheless.

I’m excited for it to be back out there for readers to
enjoy.

So, please do.

—Joe R. Lansdale

  July 2011

 I’d like to thank Gary L. Brittain, David G. Porter and Bob
LaBorde for their advice on certain technical matters in this novel.

Cold in July

Joe R. Lansdale

 
Whoever fights monsters, should see to it that in the
process he does not become a monster.

 
—Nietzsche

1

That night, Ann heard the noise first.

I was asleep. I hadn’t slept well in a while due to some
problems at work, and the fact that our four-year-old son, Jordan, had been
sick the previous two nights, coughing, vomiting, getting us up at all hours.
But tonight he was sleeping soundly and I was out cold.

I came awake with Ann’s elbow in my rib and her whisper,
“Did you hear that?” I hadn’t, but the tone of her voice assured me she had
certainly heard something, and it wasn’t just a night bird calling or a dog
working the trash cans out back; Ann wasn’t the frighty type, and she had
incredible hearing, perhaps to compensate for her bad eyesight.

Rolling onto my back, I listened. A moment later I heard a
noise. It was the glass door at the back of the house leading into the living
room; it was cautiously being slid back. Most likely, what Ann had heard
originally was the lock being jimmied. I thought about Jordan asleep in the
room across the hall and gooseflesh rolled across me in a cold tide that ebbed
at the top of my skull.

I put my lips to Ann’s ear and whispered, “Shhhh.” Easing
out of bed, I grabbed my robe off the bedpost and slipped it on out of habit.
Our night-light in the backyard was slicing through a split in the curtains,
and I could see well enough to go over to the closet, open the door and pull a
shoe box down from the top shelf. I put the shoe box on the bed and opened it.
Inside was a .38 snub-nose and a box of shells. I loaded the gun quickly by
feel. When I was finished, I felt light-headed and realized I had been holding
my breath.

Since Jordan had been sick, we had gotten in the habit of
leaving our bedroom door open so we could hear him should he call out in the
night. That made it easy for me to step into the hallway holding the .38
against my leg. In that moment, I wished we lived back in town, instead of here
off the lake road on our five-acre plot. We weren’t exactly isolated, but in a
situation like this, we might as well have been. Our nearest neighbor was a
quarter mile away and our house was surrounded by thick pine forest and squatty
brush that captured shadows.

It was strange, but stepping into the hall, I was very much
aware of the walls of the house, how narrow the hallway really was. Even the
ceiling seemed low and suffocating, and I could feel the nap of the carpet
between my toes, and it seemed sharp as needles. I wondered absently if it were
deep enough to hide in.