The Scent of Rain and Lightning

by Nancy Pickard

  “Are you hungry, girl?”

  It wasn’t like Red to neglect to feed animals, whether cattle or dogs, and it appeared to Jody that he had committed several of those sins today—neglecting horses, cattle, and his own pet.

  On the far side of the garage—where any woman watching from the house couldn’t see her—Jody found an old bucket and put it under the window frame. She stepped up and looked inside a dirty window.

  Red’s visitor drove a red Ford Taurus that looked familiar to Jody.

  Where had she seen that car before and who was driving it?

  She stepped down and walked to the back door this time.

  Beyond the illumination cast by the lights inside the house, Red’s yard was totally dark, so she turned on her flashlight and trod carefully, watching where she placed her feet so she wouldn’t stumble over a garden hose or anything else in her way. As she neared the back stoop, she realized Mangy Beast was with her, keeping silent pace with her. The dog’s hackles were raised on the back of her neck, as if she didn’t approve of Red’s visitor inside, and she was growling low and deep in her throat.

  Jody noticed the screen door was closed but the door behind it was ajar.

  She pulled at the screen, expecting it to be locked, but it wasn’t.

  Never before had she found it unsecured. In a town where hardly anybody locked anything, Red locked up out of respect for the fact that he lived in a house owned by his employers.

  Getting more annoyed by the second at his obliviousness to responsibility, Jody knocked loudly and then pulled open the door and shouted, “Red! Are you home?”

  When he didn’t answer, she stepped inside the kitchen.

  The dog came with her. Jody closed the door.

  She looked down at the bristly mottled coat at her side and said, “Go find him, girl.”

  Beast went straight through the kitchen and on into the living room, where she paused to look and sniff around. The television was so loud Jody worried it would hurt the dog’s ears, but it didn’t stop Beast from aggressively hurrying toward the noise. Jody followed as the dog ran into the little hallway where the bedrooms were and then into the room where Red slept.

  She heard Beast bark and then the dog started to howl.

  Jody ran after her into Red’s room and screamed when she saw what the dog had found: Red Bosch lay on his stomach on his bed, alone, his back a bloody mess, ripped apart by the bullet that killed him. In the same instant that Jody realized he was dead, she also remembered where she had seen the old Ford Taurus before and who owned it.

  It was Valentine Crosby’s car, which Billy had stolen last night.

  She looked up then at the big gun case that stood against a wall of Red’s bedroom and saw that the glass front was shattered. If Billy Crosby hadn’t had a gun when his wife was killed, he did now.

  JODY DIDN’T STOP to think or weep, but simply followed a knee-jerk, basic instinct for self–preservation, because it was all she had left of her emotional and physical reserves at that moment. Her first instinct wasn’t to call the sheriff or to call her grandparents up at the ranch house. Instead, her fingers punched into the face of her cell phone the number she had only recently memorized. As she walked like a zombie out of the awful, noisy bedroom, through the living room, and toward Red’s front door, she heard the number at the other end ring once before he answered with her name.

  “Collin, I’m at Red Bosch’s house. He’s been shot dead.”

  Before he could say anything else, as she opened the front door, she said, “I think your father has a gun now, or more than one, and since your mother’s car is in Red’s garage and Red’s truck is still parked here, that probably means your dad is somewhere around here, too.”

  She heard Collin say her name again just as she stepped outside, closing the front door behind her.

  Out of the darkness, a strong hand grasped her arm, the one that held the phone.

  Jody screamed as the cell phone fell from her hand and the hand that held her whirled her around so that she was looking into Billy Crosby’s face. She screamed again when she saw that his other hand held a pistol. “Shut up,” he told her. He pulled at her so she had to go with him or fall down. Struggling to keep up, trying to avoid the gun he held on her, Jody half walked and was half dragged back to Red’s truck and shoved into the passenger front seat before Billy pushed himself in behind the wheel. He had been drinking—she could smell it—but she didn’t know if Billy was drunk.

  She heard Red’s dog crashing against the back door and barking furiously.

  Gasping with the pain of being violently shoved into the passenger’s seat, grief burst out of her.

  “Red! You killed Red! He believed in you. He went to see you—”

  “Once. He came one time. Where was he all the rest of those years?”

  “But Red.” Her cry, her protest, was anguished. “He was a good man, a good man!”

  “He wouldn’t let me have his guns.”

  “So you killed him?”

  “I needed those guns!”

  Horrified by the brutal banality of it, she fell back against the truck seat, breathless with shock, fear, and sorrow. It struck her with terrifying force again that even if this man had not harmed her parents, that did not make him a good man. A person could be not-guilty without being innocent, Collin had said. Now, with Red’s murder, his father was neither.

  “Red,” she whispered, in dull shock.

  “Shut up.”

  “You’ve really done it now, haven’t you?”

  He turned to look at her in the dark cab of the truck. “Why not? After a while you get tired of being accused and punished for what you didn’t do, so why not do it? You know? Why the fuck not just do it. When I was young I was just a dumb fuck punk. You know what I mean? I did stuff like drunk driving, cut a few fence lines, big deal. You get ninety days for that shit. But what do I get? Forty years! I was a punk serving a murderer’s sentence. Is that fair? I been serving some other guy’s sentence! Some guy who was smarter and meaner than me. That was his jail cell I was in, that was his slop I ate, that was his life they gave me and they took away my own. And where is he? Living my life? Married, maybe? Has kids? Has a job? If I could kill him, that’s what I’d do.”

  He had Red’s truck keys. They shone in the dashboard lights when he switched on the ignition. As he stepped on the gas and started up the long gravel drive with the headlights off, he said, “They took everything away from me. Let’s see how they like it when I take everything away from them.”

  IT WAS ALL she could do to keep breathing and not do anything to make him pull the trigger. She couldn’t tell how sober he was or how much control he had—or didn’t have—over his mind and muscle. But judging by how overconfidently and fast he drove and how he had to zigzag repeatedly to keep from going over into the shallow drainage ditches that ran alongside the driveway, she thought he must be drunk. Red kept a supply of beer and whiskey in his house, and she had no doubt now that Billy had been heavily into it.

  He began to talk nonstop, turning his head frequently to stare at her.

  “I was a young guy and they took that away from me. They took all those years away from me. I had a wife and a kid and they took me away from Val and Collin. I had a job, and your granddad was going to fire me and take all the money I earned away and leave me with nothing.”

  He shouted some words, uttered others with ominous quiet.

  “They made me look guilty of stuff I never did. I never killed your father! I never did nothin’ to your mother! Your dad was okay, but she was a bitch. Why would I want anything to do with her? I never did any of that stuff. And now they’ve killed Valentine and made it look like I did it. Why did they do all this to me?” He glared at her across the darkened front seat, taking his eyes off the road so the truck veered too far left, and then Billy corrected it too sharply, sending Jody rocking against the door frame, moving her away from the gun barrel for an instant and then slammin
g her back against it so that she cried out from the sharp pain of metal against bone.

  “Why, why’d they do that? They ruined my life. They took my whole life away. Now I got nothin’ left. So what if I’m out? My wife’s dead. My boy hates me. I can’t go home. They want to put me back in prison. They’ll do it, too, if I let ’em. I’m not goin’ back. I’m not. They’ll have to kill me first, and I don’t give a shit if they do. Life is shit. My life is shit. So I’m gonna make their life shit, too. They took everything away from me? Well, their time has finally come, and now I’m takin’ everything away from your bastard grandfather.”

  She hated herself for believing him. She didn’t want to feel even a sliver of sympathy, didn’t want to understand his fury, didn’t want to have to think, In his place, how would I feel? What would I do? And she kept thinking, He’s Collin’s father. His father. Collin might not like or respect this man any more than she did, but he had devoted his life to giving Billy another chance. Part of her wanted to attack Billy, disable him, hurt him, kill him if she had to. Another part of her wanted to tell him she was sorry. My God. She didn’t want to be sorry, not for him. “Remember who’s the victim here,” Uncle Chase had told her, but there wasn’t just one victim, and what she had reminded him was even truer: She wasn’t brought up to be a victim and she didn’t feel like one, inside.

  “They thought you did it,” she said.

  “Don’t matter what they thought. Matters what they did. And anyway, somebody knew it wasn’t me, didn’t he?”

  He slowed as they neared the house, not only slowing the truck but also his slurred speech. Finally, in near silence, they rolled to a stop about twenty yards from the front door and he threw the truck into park. Grabbing Jody’s left arm, Billy pulled her after him, over the bench seat, banging her against the steering wheel, dragging her out into the grass violently so that her body hit the steering wheel, the side of the truck, the door, the ground. She gritted her teeth to keep from crying out and lay stunned at his feet until he dragged her to a standing position again.

  This time he stood behind her with the gun between her shoulders.

  He shoved her forward in the darkness, closer to the house.

  Jody saw lights on inside, both upstairs and downstairs.

  Where are the dogs? This time of night they sometimes liked to wander, hunt, roam the pastures looking for coyotes, nudging calves closer to their mothers if they found any awake and standing. In her mind she begged them, Come home! Here was a predator worse than any coyote, closer to a rabid wolf, and he was closing in on their home and hers.

  “Stop,” he ordered her.

  She heard Billy digging in one of his pockets and then he shoved something in front of her face with his free hand and she smelled tobacco.

  “Get me out a cigarette.”

  Jody reached for the pack of Camels and dug out a cigarette with her shaking fingers. She held it over her shoulder and he took it.

  “Now light it,” he said, and handed her a matchbook.

  She lit his smoke for him and breathed what he blew out.

  For several silent minutes they stood like that while he smoked. Jody had the sense that Billy didn’t have a plan. He was making it up as he went along, just as he had grabbed her when the opportunity presented itself. The fact that he didn’t know what he was doing didn’t make her feel any better, it only made him seem more unpredictable and dangerous.

  Billy flicked the still burning cigarette onto the grass.

  It was dry, and not more than a few seconds passed before it caught a few blades of the tinder-dry growth on fire.

  Jody instinctively moved to stamp it out.

  He grasped her shoulder and pushed the gun in deeper.

  “Hold the fuck still.” And then he said with pleasure in his voice, like a boy discovering a new toy, “Well, look at that. Caught the damn grass on fire, didn’t it? Don’t that make a pretty light?”

  He pushed the matchbook into her hands again.

  “Start moving. And light another one.”

  She walked, and tossed the next lit match onto a different spot in the dry grass when he told her to. He nudged her with the gun again and she repeated the arson. They moved slowly closer to the house, each time starting little fires while the older fires built behind them. Jody prayed the blazes wouldn’t join and get out of control, while at the same time she prayed that they would get large enough to attract her grandparents’ attention from inside the house. In her mind she saw Annabelle looking out the window, her forehead creasing as she noticed an orange glow that wasn’t supposed to be there. She imagined her grandmother calling out in a worried tone, “Hugh? Hugh!” If they saw it, they could call for help. They could escape out the back.

  Please don’t come out the front to check on it.

  But of course that would be the natural thing for them to do.

  They would walk out their front door and put themselves directly in Billy’s line of fire.

  If that happened, Jody resolved, she’d throw herself at him, even if it meant he shot her. She just had to hope it didn’t kill her right away. She would do whatever it took to keep him from harming the two people to whom she owed everything.

  She didn’t let herself think about what life would be like for her grandparents if they lost her, too. They were smart, she told herself, they would do something to save themselves.

  Finally, she spoke to him again.

  “I know you didn’t kill my father.”

  “Hell no, I didn’t.”

  It wasn’t the surprised and gratified response she hoped for, but she tried again. “And I know you didn’t do anything to my mom and I know you didn’t kill your wife.” She wasn’t even sure she believed these things, but she said them anyway, borrowing Collin’s conviction that his father wasn’t guilty. She didn’t mention Red. If Billy had not been guilty of any murders before, he was guilty of one now. Her immediate goal was to keep him from becoming guilty of any more of them.

  “Collin got you out of prison once and he’ll do it again.”

  “Too late now.”

  Her heart sank. Billy knew he’d cast his own lot by killing Red. Just as he’d told her, he had nothing to lose.

  Hearing a crackle and feeling heat, she turned her head just enough to check on the fires behind her without angering Billy. What she saw terrified her. It was her worst fear about them coming true. The separate fires were combining, devouring the dry tinder of grass as they rushed toward each other and then merged and got bigger, hotter, higher.

  Soon it would be on their heels.

  Had he thought of that? Did he know they might be caught by the fire before the house was?

  She was just about to turn back and shout at him when she saw something else terrifying that was marching toward them through an opening in the waist-high flames. Grandpa! Tall, broad-shouldered, grim-faced with hatred and determination, his white hair shining in the light of the fire, he appeared to her like a vision, an Old Testament figure, but one who bore a shotgun in his big hands.

  How had he got there? How could he be here?

  Quickly, heart pounding, she turned around and kept walking next to Billy.

  She listened hard, wanting desperately to help her grandfather, waiting for the right moment to do it.

  When she heard what she thought was his step on gravel, she stumbled to distract Billy. It slowed them down and so he jabbed at her again with Red’s pistol. The push gave her a reason to stumble again, which gave her an excuse to drop to the ground as fast as she could, getting herself out of two lines of gunfire, Billy’s and her grandfather’s. Crumpled onto the grass that might soon be burning, she gulped for air and prayed for deliverance.

  “What the—” Billy got out before her grandfather’s shotgun barrel slammed into his gun hand, sending the pistol flying and shoving Billy aside. He screamed with pain and stumbled, and then fell to one knee.

  On the ground, Jody lunged for the pistol just as he
did, too.

  She had her right hand near it when she heard her grandfather say, “Lay still, Billy, or I’ll shoot your head off.”

  In that moment, she wondered if Billy really would rather die than go back to prison. We’ll find out now. Collin, I’m sorry. Billy’s left hand was only inches away from the gun that she was reaching for, too. Jody shot her hand forward the small distance, but Billy didn’t move to compete for it. She got her answer as she wrapped her hand around Red’s gun and watched Billy pull his own hand back and lie still. With Red’s firearm in hand and her finger on its trigger, Jody got to her feet, and joined her grandfather in holding Billy Crosby at bay.

  “I’ve got this,” he told her as he pressed the shotgun barrel into the side of the other man’s face. “You’ll find your grandmother near the barn. We’ve been waiting there for you. Tell her it’s over. The two of you can put the fires out while I wait here with Billy for the sheriff. And this time there won’t be any problem with the evidence.”

  “How did you know?” she asked him before she ran to do it.

  Her grandfather never took his eyes off the man on the ground. “We got a call from Billy’s son.”

  TWO NIGHTS LATER Jody walked up to where Collin stood beside his car in front of the Testament Rocks. His father was in jail, charged with so many crimes that once he was convicted of any of them, the question of his guilt or innocence in the death of Jody’s father would no longer matter. One way or another, Billy Crosby was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

  “Let’s walk,” she said. “Okay with you?”

  He nodded, and took her hand to hold.

  “Is the ranch okay?” he asked her.

  “Yes. Grandma and I hauled a couple of big tarps out of the barn and laid them on top of the fires and pretty much stamped it all out. That, plus a garden hose, took care of it. There are some burnt spots, but that just means new grass will grow there.”

  Collin stopped and pulled her around so he could look at her.

  “What about you? How bad did he hurt you?”