by Tami Hoag
He thought now about Carver’s threat earlier tonight to have this dog hauled off or shot as a dangerous animal, and his anger rose and swirled around with the rage from all those years ago.
What a dick, threatening a dog. Mr. Deputy Sheriff. I’m gonna be the closest thing you’ve got to a friend here.
John shook his head at the memory. What kind of friend had Tim Carver ever been to him? The kind who slapped him on the back after a touchdown and forgot who he was when the shit hit the fan. He had turned into worse than a stranger that summer Casey went missing, distancing himself and his sterling West Point reputation as far from John as possible.
Anxious from the memories, John dug his hand down into the deepest recesses of his most hidden coat pocket and pulled out a joint. Weed was about the only thing that took the edge off without making him feel like his brain was surrounded by a thick layer of wet cotton wool. The meds the VA docs had put him on had left him feeling like a zombie, struggling to function. This was better so long as he was careful about his intake. Too much and he could tip over the fine line and trigger his paranoia. Just enough and he could chill out and fall asleep on his own.
The act of smoking relaxed him. The intake of breath, the slow exhale, the rhythmic repetition. The tension left his muscles as the familiar sensation seeped through him. He looked at the dog. The dog looked at him, sighed, and laid its head on its outstretched paws.
They had a lot in common, John thought, him and this dog. Motherless strays with no real place in the world, with no one giving a shit what happened to either of them.
Starting to feel the chill of the night, he wadded up the burger bag, stuffed it in his coat pocket, and climbed out of the truck. He would leave the tailgate down. The dog could stay or go, its choice. At least now the animal had a full belly, a bowl of water, and a blanket to curl up on if it wanted to.
“Stay if you like,” John said. “But no barking. The old man will come out here and shoot you.”
The dog sighed and burrowed into the blanket.
John went in the house through the back door and into the kitchen. It was past eleven. If he was lucky, the old man would be passed out in his recliner by now, and he could slip down the hall unnoticed. He wanted a hot shower and a couple of pulls on the bottle of whiskey he kept hidden in his room. If all went well and nothing disrupted the sense of calm he was nurturing, he might drift off and sleep without nightmares—at least for a little while.
He assumed the voices coming from the living room were on television, some sports network talk show or redneck reality program. He assumed wrong. He had already stepped into the tiny dining room when he realized the voices were live. Three men were standing in the living room dead ahead of him: his father, Tim Carver, and a third man in a dark trench coat, medium height, heavyset, with a drooping mustache. They all turned and looked at John.
“Speak of the devil,” his old man said.
“Hey, John,” Carver said. “This is Detective Tubman. I told you he might be stopping by.”
That wasn’t what he’d said, John thought. He had said the detective wanted him to come into the sheriff’s office. He hadn’t said anything about invading his home, but here they were, standing in his living room, talking to his father. God only knew what the old man might have told them already. And why did Carver have to be here anyway? If all the detective wanted was to talk to him, why did he need a uniform backing him up?
Eyes narrowed, John looked from Carver to the detective to the old man. He could feel himself tipping over that delicate line the weed had put him on. He could feel the paranoia rising like a cold tide inside him. He wanted to bolt and run out the back door and just keep running. But he held himself in place like he was a dog on a leash. Running from cops was never a wise choice.
“I have a few questions for you, John,” the detective said, coming toward him. He waddled like a pregnant woman, his belly preceding him into the room.
Carver came forward as well, maybe six feet to the right of the detective, effectively blocking the route to the front door. He had his hands on his hips, close to his service weapon, close to his baton.
John’s pulse kicked up faster and faster. He was hot and sweating inside his jacket. He could feel his blood pressure rise. Inside his wounded brain, fight-or-flight hormones were running like water from a wide-open faucet.
“Some girl from the Grindstone got raped,” his old man said, hanging a fresh cigarette from his lip and lighting up. “So, naturally, they come looking for you,” he said sarcastically.
John could hear the Maker’s Mark in his voice. He was more than half in the bag. He took a drag on the cigarette and started laughing and coughing.
“Maybe your next stop should be St. Theresa’s rectory,” he said to the detective, laughing. “The priest is a better suspect than this one. He only ever had the one girlfriend all through school. Of course,” he conceded, smiling like a wolf, “she was a hot little tamale.”
Tim Carver frowned at the comment. “Maybe we should all have a seat,” he suggested.
“I’ll stand, thank you,” John said.
“Suit yourself,” Tubman said, pulling a chair out from the table. “I’m taking a load off. It’s been a long damn day.”
“Then why are you here?” John asked. “It’s the middle of the night. This can’t wait until tomorrow?”
“Crime doesn’t run on a time clock, Mr. Villante,” Tubman said, settling in. “I’ve got a rape victim lying in the hospital. I need to find out who put her there.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“Where’ve you been all evening, John?” Carver asked.
“Nowhere special. Why? Did something else happen that you want to try to hang on me?”
“Nobody’s trying to hang anything on you, son,” Tubman said.
John laughed under his breath and looked away, down the hall. If they decided to press him, tried to put hands on him, he could be down the hall and out his bedroom window in a matter of seconds. He’d done it enough times over the years to avoid a beating at the hands of his old man. Down the hall, out the window, run for the woods . . .
“So,” the detective began, “how well do you know April Johnson?”
“I don’t.”
“Sure you do,” his father said. He pulled a chair out, turned it around, and straddled it, leaning over the table to tap the ash off his cigarette into a beer can. “She works the evening shift. Mousey hair, cute ass, perky little tits.”
“Maybe they should be talking to you,” John said pointedly.
His father’s eyes went cold and flat, like a shark’s eyes. “Don’t get smart with me, boy. I don’t need to force myself on women.”
“Neither do I.”
“I understand you got fired from your job at Anthony’s last night,” Tubman said, sending John’s father into gales of laughter. The detective ignored him. “What did you do after that?”
“I came home,” John said. He shot his father a glare. “If he wasn’t too drunk to remember, he saw me.”
“Yeah, I saw him come home,” his father said. He took another long pull on his cigarette and fired the smoke at the grimy yellow ceiling. “And I saw him leave again after that.”
“The hell you did!” John shouted. “You were passed out in your chair!”
“So you did leave again?” Tubman said.
Fuck.
“I went for a run,” John said.
“And where did you run to?”
“Nowhere. I just ran.”
“Unless you were on a treadmill, you ran somewhere.”
“Down the road. I just ran. But I sure as hell didn’t run all the way to the Grindstone.”
Tubman looked at Carver. “How far is that from here?”
Carver shrugged. “Three or four miles.”
The detective looked at
John with a critical eye. “You look to be pretty damn fit to me, soldier. Three or four miles isn’t so much.”
“Unless you’re built like Detective Tubman,” Carver said, trying to lighten the mood.
John just stared at him.
“Did anybody see you running?” Tubman asked.
“It was the middle of the night. No. No one saw me.”
“What time did you get home?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t look at a clock.”
Tubman looked at his father. “Did you see him come home?”
“No, sir,” the elder Villante said, giving John a cold look. “I must have been passed out. Too drunk to notice anybody coming into my house in the dead of night.”
“What did you wear to run in?” Tubman asked.
John shrugged. “A sweatshirt, sweatpants, shoes.”
“What color?”
“Black.”
Tubman raised an eyebrow. “You went running at night in black clothes? Why would you do that?”
“Those are the clothes I have.”
“Running in black at night,” Tubman said. “In your experience, who does that, Deputy Carver?”
Carver sighed. “People who don’t want to be seen.”
“Burglars, thieves, rapists—”
“I’m no rapist,” John said angrily. His head was starting to throb now. Boom, boom, boom, with the beat of his pulse. It felt like his brain was swelling, pressing against the inside of his skull.
“Could we have a look at those clothes?” Tubman asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because fuck you; that’s why not!” John snapped, the anxiety winding inside him like a spring.
Carver moved a couple of slow steps toward him around the end of the dining room table, hands out in front of him at waist level, palms down. “No need to get all jacked up here, John,” he said. “If you haven’t done anything wrong—”
“I haven’t done anything wrong!”
“Then let us see those clothes and we’ll be on our way,” Tubman said.
His head was pounding like a drum. He was breathing too quickly but not getting enough oxygen. Carver came another step closer, an expression of phony concern on his face.
“Are you okay, John?” he asked. “You seem a little on edge.”
“You come in my house and accuse me of raping some girl. Yeah, I’m a little on edge about that.”
“Are you on something, John?”
“Me? Yeah. I’m high on life,” John said sarcastically.
“Your eyes look a little funny is all. Tony Tarantino mentioned you had a head injury in the war.”
“That could explain a lot,” Tubman said. “Do you black out, John? Do you have problems controlling your temper?”
“Are you taking any medication for it?” Carver asked.
“He always did have a hair trigger,” his father said, getting up from his chair. He dropped his cigarette butt in the beer can.
John glared at him. “Yeah, I always did have. I got that from you. Where were you last night when I was out running? Where were you when I got home—or after?”
The old man planted his big hands at the waist of his jeans. “I believe we established I was drunk.”
“Like that ever stopped you from anything.”
To John’s right, Carver took a step closer, sniffing the air. John turned his body to cut off the angle, weight on the balls of his feet, knees soft, ready to spring into action. His senses seemed hyperacute. Colors were brighter; sounds were louder; smells were stronger. The scent of fried onions and greasy burger coming from the crumpled bag in his coat pocket overrode his anxious sweat and the faintly sweet smell of what he had smoked.
“You’re an ungrateful little shit,” his father said, coming toward him from the other side.
John shifted positions, trying to keep an eye on each of the men coming toward him. He took a step backward.
“I let you live here in my house, rent free, and this is how you talk to me?” his father said, coming another step toward him. He was a couple of inches shorter than John, but thickset and heavily muscled. Even though he was near fifty, most people were afraid of him. The menacing energy that came off him was as strong as the smell of booze and sweat and cigarettes.
“You always did take after your mother,” he said.
A red haze washed over John’s vision. The roaring in his head was so loud now that Tim Carver’s voice seemed to come from the far end of a tunnel.
“Mr. Villante, could you please go back to your seat? There’s no need for this to get ugly.”
John’s attention was squarely on his father now as the old man took another step toward him, his face red and contorted, his white mustache twisting around his sour mouth.
“Pissy little bitch,” he said, and he reached out with both hands and shoved John hard in the chest, pushing him back into the wall.
In that instant John seemed to separate his thinking brain from his emotional brain, as if the two were housed in different bodies. His thinking brain stood away from what happened, watching, taking it in like a prizefight on television. His emotional brain simply reacted and acted. His body responded to commands his thinking brain couldn’t hear.
Springing forward like a big cat, he went after the old man with fists, connecting hard and lightning fast—right jab, right jab, left hook—instantly bloodying his father’s nose and mouth.
Swimming through a haze of alcohol, the old man pawed at him like a dog as he stumbled backward. John grabbed the front of his shirt as he hooked a leg out from under him and rode him down to the floor.
He couldn’t hear Carver or the detective shouting at him. He couldn’t feel Carver pulling on him. All he could feel was the white-hot rage his father had unleashed. Then suddenly a weight pressed down on his back and a pressure pulled back against his throat and he couldn’t breathe, and then blackness.
He came to on a big gasp, sucking air back into his lungs like a deep-sea diver just breaking the surface of the ocean. His surroundings reappeared through a black lacy spiderweb that cleared as he shook his head and rubbed his eyes. The raw wounds on his hands had begun to bleed again—or maybe the blood wasn’t his.
He pushed himself up from the floor to sit back against the wall. Carver was helping his father onto a chair. For the first time ever, the old man looked like just that—old. His face was pale against the contrast of the blood coming from his nose and mouth. He suddenly looked so much smaller and less fierce than he ever had. He wiped his bleeding mouth on the sleeve of his denim shirt and stared at John.
“Get the fuck out of my house.”
John said nothing.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” his father said again, louder.
John got to his feet. “I’ll get my stuff.”
“No, you won’t get your stuff,” the old man said, standing up, one hand on the table for support. He used his anger to generate energy, reinflating his ego. His voice got stronger and louder with every word. “You will get the fuck out of my house before I tell these assholes to throw you in jail! Get out! Get the fuck out!”
“You don’t want to press charges, Mr. Villante?” Carver asked. “It’s your call, although I will say you laid hands on him first.”
The old man made a face of disgust and waved the idea off.
Carver turned to John, shrugged, and spread his hands. “You heard the man, John. Go before he changes his mind.”
Tubman finally hoisted himself to his feet. “Don’t take any out-of-town trips. That’s some temper you have on you, young man.”
John looked from one to the other to the other. His father’s nose looked busted. The hate in his eyes was caustic. This wasn’t the first time in John’s life they had come to blows, but it was the first
time he’d ever done real damage to his father. No one deserved it more, but still there was a part of him that was a scared little boy afraid he had crossed a line he wouldn’t be allowed to cross back over.
Pathetic, he thought.
“Come on, John,” Tim Carver said, stepping toward him. “I’ll walk you out to your truck.”
John shrugged off the hand his old buddy tried to lay on his shoulder and headed for the back door.
“Wait a day or two, then come back when he’s at work and get your stuff,” Carver said as they walked around behind the garage. “Or maybe he’ll come around by then and let you back in.”
“Fuck him,” John said. “I hope he drinks himself to death. The sooner the better. I’d pour it down his throat myself if I could.”
“Not a good idea to suggest a manner of death in front of a deputy,” Carver said. “Just for future reference.”
John jammed his bruised, bleeding hands in the pockets of his coat and leaned back against the grill of his pickup.
“You shouldn’t stay here tonight—if you’re thinking of sleeping in your truck,” Carver said. “Get off the property. I don’t want to get called back here in an hour or two and find one of you shot the other. Do you have someplace you can go? A friend, a relative, a girlfriend?”
“I’m fine,” John said. He had none of the above. He had his truck and a stray dog. But he’d slept in worse places than a pickup, and with worse company than a dog.
“Stay out of trouble, for Christ’s sake,” Carver said. “I’m cutting you a big break here, John, not taking you in. Tubman’s going to ream my ass for it. So don’t make me regret it.”
“You think I’m a rapist and you’re cutting me loose?”
“I never said I think you’re a rapist. But even if you are, you’d have to be dumber than a sack of shit to go attack somebody now. Even with a head injury, you can’t be that stupid.”