by Bill Crider
He hadn’t sounded sure, Sally thought, sitting at her desk and staring at the disarray that covered it. Well, in a situation like this, there was only one thing to do.
She’d go home and get her pistol.
* * *
Hughes Community College was located at the intersection of Texas Highways 6 and 288, just a few miles from downtown Houston. The town of Hughes stretched up and down both highways in all four directions from the intersection, and most of the faculty lived near the campus. When Sally reached her red Acura Integra in the parking lot, she was only five minutes from her front door. Four if she was in a hurry.
One reason for the college’s financial difficulties was that Houston had not grown in the direction everyone had anticipated. Highway 288 had seemed like a natural corridor for growth, especially after it had been widened in the late 1980s. But Houston had expanded in every direction except toward Hughes. Some in the town regarded this as a blessing, but not those involved with the college, which desperately needed to expand its tax base to keep up with its ever-increasing costs.
And, of course, one reason why Fieldstone wanted to avoid a lawsuit was that a juicy scandal, especially one involving improper conduct with a student, would cause many of Hughes’s conservative parents to see to it that their sons and daughters went to some other school, causing an immediate drop in enrollment at Hughes.
To Sally’s way of thinking, there were all too many other schools in the area, making it too easy for students to get an education elsewhere. Community-college extension campuses were springing up everywhere in the schools’ attempts to increase their enrollment and, by doing so, to get more state funding. Just a short drive from Hughes would take students to college classes in Alvin, Brazosport, Sugar Land, Houston, Galveston, or Texas City.
So Sally understood Fieldstone’s desire to get Val’s case settled. Even something like the painting of the goat, as ridiculous as the idea of its Satanic implications seemed to Sally, could cause trouble.
She turned the Integra into her driveway and punched the garage-door opener. The door slid up with an annoying metallic squeal, which Sally was sure meant that the foundation of her house was shifting, a common problem in the area and one that sometimes resulted in the need for expensive repairs.
She hoped that she could avoid both the repairs and the expense because she had other expenses to worry about. The house needed a new roof, and a fresh coat of paint wouldn’t hurt it, either. And new carpet would be nice.
She got out of the car and went inside the house, where she was greeted by Lola, the meanest cat west of the Mississippi—and possibly east of the Mississippi as well. Lola was a large calico, three years old, and possessed of all the charm of Attila the Hun.
Most cats liked to be rubbed and petted. Not Lola. She seemed to resent any attempt to touch her and would snarl and snap at anyone who tried, except Sally, and even Sally could get close only on rare occasions.
This wasn’t one of them. As soon as Lola saw Sally come through the door, she hissed and ran through the breakfast area into the den, where she scooted under a lamp table and hid.
Sally opened a cabinet and took out a box of kitty treats. When Sally shook the box, Lola slipped out from beneath the table and zoomed back to Sally at something only slightly slower than the speed of light. While she didn’t relate well to people, Lola had never met a kitty treat she didn’t like.
Sally tossed a treat into the air. Lola caught it on the fly, and then settled to the floor to crunch on it.
“I hope you enjoy it,” Sally said. “It’s your limit for the day.”
Another thing about Lola was that she was, in Sally’s words, “slightly overweight.” The vet had put it differently at Lola’s last checkup and had given Sally a pamphlet about the dangers facing overweight pets.
“You have to put your cat on a diet,” the vet told Sally. “It’s for her own good.”
Sally had tried her best, but Lola could be very demanding where food was concerned. In six weeks, she had lost perhaps a pound, which was good news. But her disposition had not improved.
Sally went into her bedroom and opened the top middle drawer of her dresser. Where other women might have kept nightgowns or slinky underwear, she kept a burgundy carrying case that held a Smith & Wesson Model 36, the Ladysmith. It had a three-inch barrel and rosewood grips.
Lola, having devoured her treat and for once deciding to be sociable, followed Sally into the room. She stood on her hind legs and put her front legs on the drawer, stretching her neck as she tried to see inside.
“Get down,” Sally said. “This is none of your business.”
She slid the drawer closed, and Lola lowered her front legs to the floor, gave Sally a disgusted look, and left the room, probably to shred the furniture or claw a hole in the already worn carpeting.
Sally put the gun case on top of the dresser and opened it. The pistol was there, looking rigidly lethal and smelling of gun oil. Sally closed the case and went into the kitchen, where she opened a can of tuna. It was dolphin-free, according to the label, though she supposed you could never be sure.
The sound of the can opener brought Lola running, and the smell of the tuna excited her so much that she actually rubbed against Sally’s ankles and purred.
“All right,” Sally said, “but just a little.”
She gave Lola some of the tuna in a blue plastic bowl, and ate some herself, on lettuce.
She rinsed off her plate and put it in the dishwasher; then she went and got the pistol.
“See you later, Lo,” she said as she left.
Lola, who was stretched out on a throw rug by the table, didn’t bother to answer.
9
Sally parked in one of the faculty spaces by the Law Enforcement Building and went through a heavy steel door in the side of the building away from the classrooms. The door led into the firing range.
Several years earlier, Sally had taken a handgun safety course, more or less on a whim, and had discovered that not only was she a naturally good shot but she also liked guns.
She had never owned a gun, and she had not come from a family of gun owners. In fact, before taking the course, she had never fired a pistol or a rifle in her life. She still hadn’t fired a rifle, but she had become skilled with a pistol.
At first, she had simply rented one of the pistols available at the range, but after a while she had decided that she wanted to own her own gun. The Ladysmith, which was supposedly small and light and built for a woman, actually weighed only about half an ounce less than the Chief’s Special, but the grips seemed to fit her hand better and she liked the rosewood. So she bought the Ladysmith.
With the three-inch barrel, it was a little more accurate at a distance than the same gun with the two-inch barrel was, but it still wasn’t exactly a target pistol. That didn’t bother Sally, who wasn’t interested in competition shooting. Not yet, at any rate. She was perfectly happy to be blasting away at the sinister outline on the paper targets controlled by the rangemaster. It was a wonderful way to relieve the frustrations of a hard day, even better than her aerobics class.
The only other person on the range when Sally arrived was the rangemaster for the day, Sergeant Tom Clancey. That was one reason she liked going in right after lunch. There was usually no one there at that time.
Clancey was one of the young officers employed by Campus Security. He greeted Sally with a wave and a smile.
Sally got her shooting glasses and ear protection from a small locker, put on the glasses, and fitted the earmufflike plastic coverings over her head. Then she got her pistol out of its case and took up her position on the firing line. Clancey put the target through its paces, running it from the back of the range toward her, flipping it from side to front, running it backward, and stopping it at five, ten, fifteen, and twenty-five yards.
Sally blasted away, five shots at a time. Each time she reloaded, she was careful to observe range etiquette even though no one else was
around. She believed in the virtues of discipline.
When she was through shooting, a thin haze of smoke hung in the air, and Sally could smell the sharp odor of cordite. She took off her ear protection, and Sergeant Clancey ran the target up for her to examine. He came out of the booth for a look as well.
All the holes were in the black, most of them clustered in the area of the chest, though a few of them strayed toward the head and stomach.
“You should hang that on your garage door,” Sergeant Clancey said. “The burglars would give your place a wide berth.”
“I don’t think I could shoot a burglar if one ever showed up,” Sally said.
“That’s why you hang up the target. Discourage them so you won’t have to shoot them.”
“I don’t think so,” Sally said. “Just put it in the recycling box.”
She went to the booth to put her pistol back in the case.
“You might be surprised what you could do if you did have someone break into your house,” Sergeant Clancey said. “You’re a really good shot.”
“At a target. You never know what you’ll do in a life-or-death situation until you face it.”
Sally and Clancey both knew she was simply repeating what she had heard in her firearms class. She had also heard that if you ever fired a pistol at an intruder, you should shoot to kill. Wounding wasn’t an option. She hoped never to find herself in that situation.
“You sure you don’t want the target for a souvenir?” Sergeant Clancey asked as she was leaving.
“No, thanks,” she said.
* * *
Back in her office, Sally called the number Fieldstone had given her for the Thompsons. She got an answering machine with a supposedly humorous tape that Sally didn’t find at all funny. She wondered why people didn’t just record their own announcements, and she thought about not leaving a message at all. In the end, however, she left both her office and home numbers and asked the Thompsons to call.
She spent the rest of the afternoon grading compositions, and she was proud of herself for finishing all those for her Friday class. She could return them the next day and spend the class period analyzing them with the students. She went to the workroom to make transparencies of several papers that she wanted to use for illustrative purposes.
The workroom was almost as deserted as the firing range. After all, it was nearly four o’clock. Few of the faculty stayed around much past three or three-thirty unless they had evening classes. Today, the only other person around was Merle Menton, the chair of the Division of Social Sciences, who was reading a newspaper in the lounge, which adjoined the workroom.
Though Merle was nearing retirement age, he still had a full head of very black hair, hair that was the object of much speculation by the rest of the Hughes faculty. Did he dye it or not?
Troy Beauchamp’s answer was a definite yes. He swore that he had talked to someone who had seen Menton buying a package of Just for Men at the local Wal-Mart, but there were several who weren’t convinced by his story.
Sally was one of them. Menton’s hair just didn’t look dyed, and what difference did it make if it was? What bothered her about Menton was his personality, which bordered on the terminally dull. He could talk endlessly in his bland, monotonous baritone about almost any subject that popped into his head, and he would continue for as long he could get anyone to listen. Or force them to listen. His favorite technique was to back the reluctant listener into a corner and stand so that there was no escape short of death.
When Sally saw him, she was careful to stand on the side of the transparency maker that was farthest from the corner, which was a good thing. When he heard the machine begin to operate, Menton stood up and began to sidle toward her.
“I’m waiting for my wife to come pick me up,” he said as he approached. “My car is in the shop.”
There was a faculty legend that Menton had once trapped a part-time instructor in the lounge and talked nonstop for six hours about the time the timing chain went out on his 1983 Buick. Sally didn’t want something like that to happen, so she grabbed the last transparency as it fed from the machine and started toward the door.
“I have a student waiting in the office,” she lied brazenly and unashamedly. “Otherwise, I’d love to hear about your car. What seems to be the trouble?”
“It’s the transmission,” Menton droned. “I had the fluid checked last week, but it seems to have all run out in the road as I drove to school yesterday. I hope the transmission’s not burned up. I’ve heard—”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Sally said, not sure at all. She didn’t know a thing about transmissions. “You can tell me about it sometime when I don’t have a student waiting.”
She made her escape, feeling slightly guilty about the disappointment on Menton’s face as she’d gone through the door. Thank goodness he hadn’t gotten her into a corner. She might have missed her aerobics class.
On her way back to her office, she passed Jack Neville’s door. It was closed, but there was a light showing underneath it. She wondered if he were still working or if he had left the light on by accident. She knocked on the door.
There was no answer. It didn’t matter that the light was on. One of the cleaning crew would turn it off later. Then she thought she heard something that sounded like the squeak of an office chair. She knocked again.
Jack Neville opened the door.
“Oh,” he said. He seemed surprised to see her. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she said. “Working late?”
Jack looked over his shoulder at the computer, which was turned on. Nothing was visible on the screen except the main menu, however.
“Just doing a little work on an article,” he said.
“For that record magazine?”
“That’s the one.”
“What’s the article about?”
“Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley,” Jack said. “I guess you’re a little young to have been a fan when you were growing up.”
“I’m more of a Creedence Clearwater Revival fan.”
“They were good, all right,” Jack said. “Uh, would you like to come in and sit down?”
Jack’s office was much smaller than Sally’s and not a lot neater, but he had a chair for visitors beside his desk.
“I wish I could,” Sally said. “But I have an aerobics class in just a few minutes. I have to go change and get ready.”
“Oh,” Jack said, his ears reddening.
Sally wondered why, but didn’t mention it. “I hope you get the article done. I’d like to read it.”
“I’ll give you a copy when it’s finished.”
“See you tomorrow, then,” Sally said, and went on down the hall.
When she turned the corner to her own office, she wondered why she always seemed to feel awkward when she talked to Jack. He was certainly nice enough, and an excellent instructor. And he was good-looking in a sort of rumpled manner. Not as overtly macho as Jorge, but just as attractive in his own shy way.
But she shouldn’t be thinking of either of them in this way, she told herself. She’d promised herself when she came to Hughes that there would be no involvements with men at the school. Involvement could lead to complications—just look at Val Hurley.
Of course, Val’s involvement was with a student, and that always led to complications. She wondered what had come over Val that would lead him to do a painting of a student. She didn’t really know him very well; their relationship, like all her relationships with school personnel, was strictly professional.
She’d heard, mainly from Troy Beauchamp, that Val was quite a romantic sort. He wasn’t Sally’s type, but he was apparently considered attractive by a number of the single women on the faculty. He should never have allowed himself to get into his current situation.
But he had allowed himself, and now it was her problem almost as much as his. She went back to her office to see if there was a message from the Thompsons on her machine.
10
>
Jack Neville sat in his squeaky chair and stared at his computer screen. He wished he hadn’t been so ill at ease when Sally had come to his door, but it was too late to worry about that now. At least he’d exited the game before he’d answered the door.
The game, something called Minesweeper, had come packaged with his computer software, and his secret shame was that he was addicted to it.
It was infuriatingly simple, not to mention simpleminded, and it bothered Jack that he couldn’t seem to stop playing it. He’d never thought of himself as having an addictive personality before.
After all, he’d quit smoking fifteen years previously without so much as a single day’s withdrawal symptoms. Sure, he occasionally still dreamed about smoking, but he hadn’t had a cigarette in all that time.
And when he’d started getting jittery every day about three o’clock and decided the cause might just be the dozen cups of coffee he’d drunk by that time of day, he’d cut back to a single cup a day, in the morning, without thinking twice. Well, he might have thought twice, but he’d done it without agonizing about it.
So why couldn’t he quit playing the blasted game?
That was the main reason why he was working on his manuscript in longhand. He didn’t dare turn on the computer for fear that he’d never get a single word written. He’d spend all his time trying to put the little flags in the right squares.
He’d turned on the computer at about one o’clock to start entering his article, but he hadn’t entered a word. He’d played the stupid game for three hours instead. Now it was past time to go home, and he hadn’t accomplished a thing all afternoon. Well, he’d do better tomorrow.
He turned off the computer and left his handwritten article on the desk. Maybe he could get Wynona Reed, the division’s secretary, to type it for him. It was a legitimate request, he thought, even if it couldn’t exactly be considered an academic publication.