Cold in July (7 page)

“Come with us,” Ann said.

“Git.”

I closed the door and walked back toward the house. I
listened for the sound of the car’s engine behind me, hoping my hardheaded wife
would do as I asked, and finally I heard it crank and heard the familiar sound
of tires on the gravel drive, heading toward the road.

I didn’t go through the front door, but went around the side
of the house, trying to be quiet about it, though I figured that wasn’t
necessary. If he was in there, he had heard us drive up and probably knew I had
stayed and sent them away.

I knelt down and dug out of the sand an old two-by-four that
had been there for the longest time, since the carpenters expanded our garage,
and tested its strength against my palm. It was still solid enough to crack a
skull. I moved around to the rear of the house, expecting any moment that the
bastard would jump me. I wondered what in hell I was doing, and why I hadn’t
gone with Ann and Jordan, but in truth I knew the answer to that. The
sonofabitch had me mad and there was too much macho Texas culture in my blood
in spite of myself. The sonofabitch had offended me and my family and I wanted
to get hold of him and use the board on his head until my arm got tired and I
had to switch to the other hand.

A part of me knew there wasn’t much point to what I was doing.
It was stupid. Russel had already proved he could handle me, and I didn’t
imagine the board amounted to much in my favor. He might even have a gun, like
his son.

When I got around back I was going to use the key, but the
door was open here too. The grill and the alarm hadn’t done a damn thing to
stop him.

I cocked the board back and stepped inside. The
air-conditioning hit me like a blue norther, and the sunlight had been so harsh
outside, my vision was affected. Standing there, half-blind, I felt as if I had
put my balls in a vise and was waiting for someone to turn the crank.

But nothing happened. My eyes adjusted and I saw the living
room was empty and so was what I could see of the kitchen. I checked out the
rest of the kitchen and went out in the enclosed garage and found the shotgun.
I had remembered wrong. It was put together. The shells were with it. I loaded
it and went looking through the rest of the house. I looked Jordan’s room over
extra hard. No one was under the bed or in the closet or hiding behind a Mickey
Mouse curtain.

I tried the hall bathroom, half expecting, half hoping,
Russel would come out from behind the shower curtain after me. I wanted an
excuse to kill him. It wasn’t that I had acquired a taste for blood, but right
then I was a little crazy and I just wanted to end things between him and me,
and I wanted the end to be final.

Using the barrel of the shotgun, I swept the curtain back,
but he wasn’t waiting for me in the tub. I went on into the master bedroom.

On the bed was the shoe box that had been in the closet and
had held the gun the night of the burglary. Price still had the gun, but there
had been some shells in the box, and they had been poured onto the bed and the
shoe box had been ripped to shreds.

Jordan’s favorite teddy bear lay there among the pieces.

13

“It doesn’t take a fucking mental giant to know he’s been
here,” I said.

We were in the kitchen, at the table. The police had
escorted Ann and Jordan home. Jordan was in the living room watching a Casper
the Friendly Ghost videotape, and the uniform cops and detectives were going
over the house like starving mice looking for crumbs. So far all they had was a
torn shoe box and some .38 shells he might have touched. But I doubted he’d
been that stupid. The guy was a pro. You could tell that from the way he’d
handled the locks and alarms.

“We know someone has been here,” Price said. “We don’t know
it was Russel.”

Ann looked at Price. “Are you for real? I guess it was
Goldilocks. There’s a bear and a bed involved and if you guys can find a broken
chair and some spilled porridge, you can wrap this case right up.”

“Price,” I said, “you know as well as I do that it was
Russel. He found that shoe box with the cartridges and the gun oil stain and he
put two and two together. He tore that box up and put Jordan’s teddy bear on
our bed as a threat. He was just showing us he can get in and get to Jordan
anytime he wants.”

“You’re right, I think it’s Russel, but I can’t prove it.
Since I do suspect him, we can have tabs put on him and we can watch your
house. I can get official protection without any problem now. But he may be too
clever for anything that obvious and we might be able to surprise him.”

“Are you suggesting something?”

“We could put some obvious protection around the house for a
couple of days, then pretend to be satisfied that things are normal and
withdraw it—or seem to. Your son would have to start back to school then, and
you and Mrs. Dane would have to return to work. Then, when he makes his move,
we’ll be waiting.”

I looked at Ann. She got up and went over to the kitchen
sink and looked out the window. I followed and put my arm around her waist.

“What do we do, Ann?”

She continued to look out the window. Finally she said,
“Let’s nail the bastard.”

14

The uniform cop they left with us was built like an
industrial water heater and was a decorated Vietnam vet and a black belt in
jujitsu. He was ugly too. I don’t know why, but that kisser of his made me feel
better. He didn’t look like the sort to worry about his native good looks if it
came down to serious business, and I figured it would take someone like him to
handle Russel, even if Russel was in the ballpark of sixty years or so.

The cop’s name was Kevin and they put him in a chair in the
hallway, then the rest of them went outside to make their watch. The plan was
simple. They would do this obvious watch for a couple of days. Not laying in
the yard or anything, but staying in the woods behind the house, and patrolling
regularly, posting a man in the ditch that ran to the far right of our
property. They would not be overly sloppy about it, but they’d do things in
such a way that if an old pro like Russel were around, he’d spot them. Then,
when the couple of days were passed, they would leave. Except Kevin. He would
remain in the house, having never revealed himself to the outside; he would
remain and wait. Close surveillance would be maintained where we worked and
where Jordan went to school. Police officers in unmarked cars would be waiting
to follow us in the mornings at a safe distance and in the afternoons when we
returned. Weekends, police would be hidden in the woods surrounding the house,
only this time with the intent of not being seen. “Very organized, and very
safe,” Price said.

So we started that night. The police went away except for
the few who were supposed to be in the woods behind the house and the man in
the ditch. Inside, we turned on the alarms and pulled the grills in place.
Considering how easily Russel had gone through them before, I felt almost silly
bothering with them.

The cop had food and a coffee thermos next to his chair in
the hallway. Except to go to the bathroom, he didn’t plan to move. In fact, he
didn’t look like he could be moved; he looked as solid as a stone gargoyle.

Price called about ten. They hadn’t seen Russel, but they
had found his car. It was not far from our house, parked on a little dirt road
that wound into the woods and ended at a dead end of trees and garbage that
some of our less environmentally conscious citizens had tossed out. It seemed
likely that Russel was somewhere in the area. Maybe creeping up on the house at
the very moment. If Russel saw the cops and went away, more cops would be
waiting at his car. If he abandoned the car, we still had our old plan. Wait a
few days, make things look easy for him, then surprise him. We just had all
kinds of plans.

I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, but I was more tired
than I thought; worry had gnawed me down. As I was drifting off, I tried once
again to imagine Russel with little Freddy, but nothing came of it. I thought
then of my own father, Herman Dane. I missed him. I didn’t know exactly why. He
had never spent much time with me. He went hunting and fishing a lot and took
me only once. He worked the rest of the time just to put food on the table. My
mother called him names at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I think he
loved me, but he always looked at me with a kind of astonishment, as if I had
been landed in his house by aliens. I’ve been told I look just like him.

When I was twelve he took his beautiful Winchester rifle
from the closet and loaded it in his station wagon with his rods and reels, and
said he was going on a fishing trip. He let me walk him out to the car. He got
down on one knee and told me he loved me and held me. That’s the only time I
remember such a thing. He drove away and I never saw him again. They found him
in a fishing camp with the Winchester barrel in his mouth, his naked toe on the
trigger. The top of his head was gone. There was talk of too many bills and
another man my mother loved. I never knew for sure. I didn’t go to the funeral.

My Uncle Ned, dad’s brother, used to say, “He was a man of
honor and integrity.” I didn’t understand what he meant then, but as I grew
older and heard more about my dad from others, I came to understand what my
Uncle Ned meant. He lived by his word and had a simple code of justice. I
suppose it could have been called a Hemingway code, or some such thing. He
didn’t bother people and he didn’t allow himself to be bothered. He stood up
for himself and didn’t expect others to do it. And I guess he shot himself
because my mother’s infidelity was just too much. Maybe being an honorable man
living in a dishonorable situation was more than he could stand.

After the suicide, my mother went into a blue funk and went
away, leaving me to live with my grandfather and grandmother. Two years later
we heard she had died in what was then called a tourist court just outside of
Amarillo. Too many pills and too many men. I didn’t know how to feel about her.

But I never stopped thinking about my dad. The big hands
(like Russel’s) holding me, hugging me. The smell of King Edward cigars on his
breath as he told me he loved me. The hollow tubes of his eyes.

I doubt I really remember his eyes. That may be a thing I’ve
created to remember. An extra frame slipped into the motion picture of my past.
But his eyes must have been that way when he left that day. My mother was a
beautiful woman.

I thought of the baby Ann and I had lost, relived that
horrible scenario again. Then I thought of a few nights past when Ann’s elbow
brought me awake and our horror cycle had begun. I reviewed the entire
incident, ended it with me standing over the dead man who was sitting on our
couch, his eye gone, his blood on our painting and wall.

Finally I tumbled down into the deepest part of sleep where
the unremembered dreams live, and what happened next I’m not entirely sure of.
But it went something like this:

Russel was even smarter than we thought he was. Breaking
into the house earlier, leaving the doors open, had been a ploy. Instead of
leaving, he had found the opening in our closet that led to the crawl space
above, and he had pulled himself through the trap door and up there to wait
among the rafters, wiring, and insulation. Even with the central air cooling
the house, he would have been steaming up there. That was where all the heat
rose and became trapped. He would have been basted in his own juices, his
clothes clinging to him as damp and tight and hot as a thin swathe of tar. But
he lay up there, not moving, silent, waiting. The day wore on and cooled near
evening, and finally, when we were asleep, he opened the sliding trap in the
closet and eased himself down, gently opened the door. That would have put him
in a position to look right at Ann and me, helpless while we slept. But it
wasn’t us he wanted.

He stepped out of the closet and went to the bedroom door,
closed this night due to our visitor in the hall, and he cracked it open. Our
cop, thinking it was either Ann or me said, “Mr. Dane?”

I heard that down there in the deep part of sleep, and
loaded with fear as I was, I came out of that sleep quickly, like a polaris
missile pushing up from the depths of the sea, breaking the waves and nosing
the air.

But already Russel had jumped our cop, and there was a yell
from Kevin and the sound of something slamming against the wall in the hall,
and I was rolling out of bed, grabbing at the shotgun under it, rushing for the
bedroom door.

I got out in the hall just in time to see our Vietnam vet,
black belt policeman take a marvelous left hook on the chin that bounced him
over his chair even as his hand was in mid-draw for his revolver. The sound of
the punch and the way Kevin went down like a broken manikin told me he wouldn’t
be getting up for a while.

It was me and Russel. He turned just as I put the shotgun on
him and tried to pull the trigger, but found it was on safety. As I thumbed at
the switch, Russel moved across the hall and knocked up the barrel of the gun,
and as it was in action now, and my finger was firm against the trigger, it
went off and a shot went into the ceiling, raining plaster on us like snow.

Through no great technique of my own, I went back and my
feet got tangled with Russel’s and we fell halfway into the bedroom. The
shotgun went sliding away, under the bed, I think, and Russel didn’t pursue it.
He hit me a hard right on the forehead and my mind filled with blackness and
glitter.

When the glitter fell away, I came awake to Ann yelling,
“He’s in Jordan’s room!” And we were both up and running, me wobbling as I
went.

I heard Jordan yell, “Daddy,” and a weakness went through me
like the worst disease you can imagine. I felt like the slowest, stupidest,
most mortal person on earth. I had allowed Russel to hornswoggle me, whip me,
and now he had my son.