by Nick Petrie
He spiraled closer, now just a block out. He’d have liked to slip through people’s backyards, but most were enclosed by tall fences. Some houses had dogs, too, he could hear them barking as he made his way along. He wasn’t going to hurt somebody’s dog, no matter how big or mean. He wasn’t in the mood to climb any more damn fences, either.
He was definitely in the mood for what he thought was coming, though.
He could feel it, filling him up as he walked.
The smell of the dense, living greenery in the warm night air was intoxicating.
Finally he stood in the shadows on the far corner of the block behind Wanda’s house. He pictured how it lay, with the Dumpster in front and the lumber pile angled toward the driveway. Her leaning garage in the back. A wood-sided bungalow on one side of her, a flat, grassy vacant lot on the other.
Peter wondered if Gantry had delivered on the police cruiser.
He hoped not.
He looked down the street. Behind Wanda’s neighboring vacant lot, he saw a small brick Cape Cod with a neat white fence in front and a yard bursting with flowerbeds. Flanking it were two wide lots filled with tall, spreading trees and low bushes. Not cleared, exactly, but tended, like small parks. The farthest one was directly behind Wanda’s house.
Peter thought he’d like the people in the brick Cape.
Maybe they’d be good for Wanda, too.
In front of the farthest tended lot, silent at the curb, sat a long, low sedan. It was a newer model, all angles and planes, and painted matte black, even the rims and trim.
It reminded Peter of a stealth bomber.
He knew it didn’t belong to the neat little Cape with the colorful flowerbeds. Style aside, the Cape had a big old Buick in the driveway with plenty of room behind it.
Across the street, a leaning trio of small frame houses crouched, hunkering into their weedy dirt yards, with two cars on cinder blocks out front. He was pretty sure the stealth-bomber sedan didn’t belong to one of them, either.
Its engine was off. He couldn’t see anyone inside, although his sightline was poor.
He crossed the street at the closest parklike lot. He saw no silhouette through the sedan’s rear windshield.
If it were Peter, he wouldn’t be waiting in the car.
She wouldn’t be, either.
She’d be closer to her target.
He continued into the trees and slipped slowly and silently toward the back, allowing his eyes to adjust. He kept off the gravel path, grateful for the noise of the Cape Cod’s air conditioner.
The house behind, on the far side of Wanda’s neighboring mown lot, had no fence, but it was surrounded by a dense wall of high thorny bushes. He walked down the line of bushes, Chester’s 1911 in his hand.
He wished for the vest June had given him. And a helmet. And an M4 carbine with a thirty-round mag racked and ready, with spares in his pocket. Hell, as long as he was wishing, he’d take a micro-drone with an infrared camera flying above, and a voice in his ear feeding him directions.
And no nice neighbors who might end up as collateral damage.
He wondered where she’d be set up. Inside the house? In the shadow of the Dumpster?
How would Peter do it?
Then he knew.
* * *
• • •
There was a narrow space where someone had pruned back the thorny bushes to make room for the brick Cape’s tall plank fence. He could smell the preservative in the new wood.
As he slipped through the gap into the grassy vacant lot beside Wanda’s house, a soft rain began to fall. He stood there in the corner for a moment, silent and invisible, and listened to the patter of the raindrops on the trees behind him. It was a welcome sound.
It would hide the noise of his passage.
It would make her restless, uncomfortable, more likely to show herself.
Still, he didn’t like coming out of the trees. The mown lot was like Kansas. Too open, too exposed. If he was wrong, he’d make an easy target.
There was no helping it. He dropped into a belly crawl, working his slow way forward on his forearms and toes. Down low, it wasn’t so bad. Untrimmed weeds grew knee-high at the base of the fence, creating rounded shadows he could blend into. The grass hadn’t been cut recently, and was at least eight inches tall. The rain was cool as it soaked into his clothes.
It was better than bare, sandy desert. Almost anything was.
Soon he could see past the lumber pile to a police cruiser parked at the curb. Detective Gantry had come through, but Peter didn’t think it would make a difference. Not to her, not if he’d read her right.
It didn’t make a difference to Peter, either.
He found her in the backyard, out of sight from the cruiser with good visibility and multiple escape routes. The grassy vacant lot Peter had just crossed to her left, the neighbor’s yard to the right, and the stealth-bomber sedan a quick sprint through the tended trees behind her.
She was very good.
He watched for at least twenty minutes as she sat on the edge of a wooden chair in the deep shadow surrounding Wanda’s leaning, vine-strangled garage. She was hidden from the police car by the lumber pile. If she felt the rain, she didn’t show it. Every minute or so, she turned her head to scan her surroundings, from Wanda’s yard and house on her right to the vacant lot on her left where Peter lay flat beside the untrimmed weeds along the fence. Then she turned to face the street again, where the police car sat. She had an opinion where he’d come from, but she wasn’t taking chances.
Behind Peter, the brick Cape’s air conditioner rattled and hummed. It had an odd rhythm, cycling louder and softer, either low on coolant or the compressor starting to go. He used that rhythm and her shifting gaze to get closer, bit by bit. Behind her on his belly by the weeds in the thick wet grass, the taste of copper in his mouth. The rain fell harder.
Forty feet away, then twenty. Then ten. He slowly gathered his feet under him, dug his toes into the dirt.
Then launched himself at her and knocked her off balance against the side of the garage into the tangled vines, Chester’s 1911 jammed into the soft flesh beneath her jaw.
He said, “Hello, Charlene.”
She still wore her red seersucker jacket.
* * *
• • •
In that final rush, she’d felt him coming and had made it halfway off the chair. She held a new gun in her fist, some utilitarian automatic. She tried to bring it up but Peter pushed Chester’s 1911 hard into her neck with one hand while he wrapped the other around her pistol.
Unyielding, heedless of the gun to her skin, she fought him hard for her weapon until he finally twisted it away. She was surprisingly strong, but Peter outweighed her by at least sixty pounds. Not exactly a fair fight.
He’d have felt bad about it if she hadn’t been waiting to kill him.
“I owe you a gun. This isn’t it.” He kept his voice calm and quiet as he shoved her deeper into the vines. “I behaved disrespectfully in King Robbie’s car this morning, and I apologize for that. A friend of mine was in trouble, and I didn’t have time to ask nicely. I don’t know if you’ll understand that or not.”
She was shaking, but not with fear. To survive in the life she’d made, she’d likely have drained her fear away, and replaced it with something cold and hard. Contained until she needed it. An anger so deeply embedded she wouldn’t know it as something separate from herself. If any fear remained, it would come in the dark of night while she slept.
“If you’re going to kill me, shut the fuck up and do it already.”
“I’m not going to kill you unless I have to. I told you I’d replace that pistol, and I will. But right now I’m going to walk you back to your car and let you drive away. That’s my trade for the disrespect this morning. Your life.”
She jam
med an elbow into his ribs. “Then get your fucking body off me.” Her voice was sharp. He thought she might bite him.
He pitched her gun into the weeds and pushed himself off the garage. He stepped back to a safer distance with Chester’s 1911 still trained at her chest while she extracted herself from the vines and resettled the damp jacket on her shoulders. Her hair remained twisted into spikes, even with the rain.
“Maybe you don’t consider it a fair trade,” he said. “That’s up to you. But if I see you again, I’ll believe you mean me harm and kill you without a second thought.”
Even in the shadow of the garage, he could see her scowl, her hands still shaking with fury. He hadn’t convinced this hard woman. He’d beaten her twice and hurt only her pride. It was an insult. A challenge.
At that moment, he knew that she wanted to kill Peter more than she wanted anything else in the world.
But he couldn’t shoot her in cold blood. Maybe, like Chester, she thought that made him weak. He knew Lewis would say that Peter was dumb to live by these rules of engagement. Unwilling to put a bullet into her, just because he’d disarmed her.
Charlene seemed to agree. Her scowl turned into a sneer.
“You’d have died young in this town,” she said. “We’d have eaten you as a child.”
“Let’s go.” He nodded toward the parklike lot behind Wanda’s. “Hands where I can see them. I’m right behind you.”
He followed her through the trees to the stealth-bomber sedan. In the street, she caught his eye and waggled the fingers of her raised right hand. “Keys.”
He nodded. She dipped two fingers into the front pocket of her jeans, extracted an electronic fob, and did something to it. The windows slid down silently and the engine began to purr.
Peter glanced inside and saw no weapon on the seats or the floor. If there was something under the seat or in the center console, he’d know soon enough. She looked at him and he nodded again. She opened the door and slipped into the black leather seat.
She put both hands on the wheel where he could see them. “That’s twice you got the jump on me,” she said through the open window. “You know this ain’t over.”
Peter smiled pleasantly. “You want to try a duel, like fine Southern gentlemen? Pistols by the river at dawn?”
She showed him her teeth. “Fuck no.”
He dropped the smile. “If I see you again, I’ll put two in your chest and one in your head.”
She put the car into drive. “Not if I see you first.”
As she ghosted down the street, he told himself he’d made the right choice, not killing her.
He tried to believe it.
35
After supper, Albert washed down a handful of pain pills with a beer and sat on the porch rocker, waiting for the ache in his leg to fade away. But it never did. Not enough to give him rest. Seemed like he hurt all the time, now.
So he made a pot of coffee, poured it into his thermos, and climbed into his old Ford Fiesta.
Past midnight and Albert was back on the road.
The trip from Benton County into Memphis took him about an hour and a half. Driving felt like he was doing something.
He wasn’t sure what.
He told himself that he hadn’t gotten a good look at it, before. After that machine gun, he wanted to see it. He wanted to know if what Judah Lee had done—what Albert helped him do—had done the job. Gotten that woman out of their house.
When he got off the freeway, even in the middle of the night, the city was loud. He could hear the racket of people all around him, on the street and seeping through open doors and windows, noise from radios and televisions, kids crying. People yelling.
He could never live like this. Just driving through it made all his muscles go tight. If it were up to Albert, he’d never leave the farm, deep in the peace of the woods.
He came to the street. Not too fast, not too slow, he went down the block like he belonged there, although he didn’t. He was glad he’d replaced the noisy exhaust on the Fiesta.
He saw a police car parked at the curb, engine running, a black elbow angled out the open window. The cop’s black face lit up in Albert’s headlights, looking at him. Albert didn’t make eye contact, just raised a casual hand to the man and took his foot off the gas to take a look at the place, like anyone might have done.
At first he didn’t even recognize the house. He’d seen it in the daylight with the dump truck stuck in the living room because he’d driven past later that day, one of a hundred sightseers trying to catch a glimpse of someone else’s disaster. He’d seen the woman standing on the porch. She’d stared back like she was memorizing each face in the long line of cars. It was unnerving, that stare.
He’d seen the house again from the Country Squire while Judah Lee pounded it with that big gun. It looked different with a blue tarp hanging down to keep the rain out. Albert hadn’t liked that tarp, so neatly placed to keep the rain out. Only one reason to put in the time for that.
Now the house had changed again. Somebody had parked a Dumpster right beside the truck’s rear end. That wall of steel looked like some kind of fortress, protecting the place. Beside the Dumpster was a tall stack of lumber.
It didn’t look like the woman was leaving.
To Albert, it looked like she was getting ready to rebuild.
* * *
• • •
Back home, he drove directly to the new barn, the one their granddad built back in the late forties, flush with money from the mule-trading business. It was framed with timbers that came out of their woodlot, and walled with stones from their fields.
The new barn was where the Farmall tractor lived, along with the harrow and plow and harvester and all the other equipment needed to run the place. Each piece was old enough to belong in a museum somewhere, but they still did the job, if Albert put in the time to keep them working. It seemed like he was always trying to break the rust on some bolts so he could sharpen the blades or replace a broken drive chain. He flipped on the light and saw the heavy workbench and the welder and the pegboard with his daddy’s tools. The man door stood open to the night. Judah Lee’s red pickup stood silently by, its crumpled-up passenger side a reminder of Judah’s ruthlessness.
But there was no sign of Judah Lee or the station wagon.
He limped across the grass-grown gravel and down the hill past the clump of oaks to the old barn.
It might have been older than the farmhouse. Albert didn’t store anything of value there. Moss grew thick on the windblown roof. Rain and sun and starlight came through in equal measures. The siding planks were falling away, and the whole building had a sort of diagonal lean, like Albert’s daddy when he was drunk, at the exact moment before he’d either fall over or lash out with a fist hard as a pine knot. Even at eighty, the old man had still hit plenty hard.
Could a man be sorry his daddy was dead, but glad at the same time?
Albert had reinforced or repaired the old barn’s log frame more than a few times. When he was a younger man, before the accident, he’d even rigged a tow chain around the top of the building and tried to pull it back upright with the Farmall. But the barn hadn’t stopped at upright. It had just kept going, and now it sagged in the other direction, farther than ever. The best Albert could do now was prop it up with timbers.
After his daddy died, Albert had thought he might take that barn apart piece by piece. He knew rich people would buy old wood to make their houses look rustic. Maybe he could pay the taxes, or even some of the note on the farm. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
The old barn would never be right again, but it was his dang barn.
Now he saw light seeping through the cracks.
The heavy sliding door was as hard to open as ever, its rollers still needing to be cleaned and greased. He’d rather things worked the way they should, but t
hey rarely did. Not without a whole lot more time and effort than Albert had to give.
The Country Squire sat just inside, still stinking of scorched plastic and beer. On the far side of it, Judah Lee stood at some kind of table under the cone of a single light. He was looking at Albert.
“Stop right there, big brother.”
Albert stopped in the doorway. “What are you up to?”
Judah walked toward him, a massive shadow lit from behind.
“You sure you want to know? Otherwise you best turn around and walk right out of here.”
“I just come from Memphis,” Albert said. “I took a look at the house.”
That caught Judah’s interest. “Yeah? What’d you see?”
“A Dumpster set like a rampart right in front. And a stack of lumber. She’s fixing to rebuild. There was a cop parked out front. We’re not getting in there anytime soon.”
Judah shrugged. In one hand, he held a half-empty liquor bottle, glass cloudy with age, label long gone, and stoppered with an ill-fitting cork. His voice was soft but it carried in the humid night air.
“So we kill the bitch. What’s one more dead nigger? Won’t be my first.” He unstoppered the bottle and held it out. “Drink?”
Albert stared at his brother. “What is wrong with you? When did you get like this?”
“Which part,” said Judah. “The killing part or the nigger part?”
“The whole thing,” said Albert.
Judah Lee flashed that pointed smile, the tattoo on his face just a deeper shadow in the darkness.
“You know Daddy and Granddad never tolerated anybody wasn’t like us,” he said. “But it was prison made everything clear to me. We’re a minority in there. Get yourself murdered in the yard just for being white. It’s only natural to look after your own kind. I met some men who helped me understand. Great men. They asked me to kill a nigger to prove myself.”