by Ted Bell
“Good.”
“Night, darlin’.”
“G’night.”
Daisy had waited for his click and then reached over to put the receiver back in its cradle on her nightstand. The house was suddenly very empty.
“Shoot,” she said, staring up at the ceiling.
This wasn’t the first time somebody had threatened to harm her to get to Franklin. The last time this had happened, somebody trying to scare them like this, she’d had to tell Franklin every time the phone rang and nobody was there, every time a car she didn’t recognize slowed down going past the dirt road that led to their house, every time a letter or package came with handwriting she didn’t recognize, every time somebody looked at her cross-eyed buying aspirin in the drug store.
The phone rang again.
“Hello?” Daisy said, thinking it had to be Franklin again.
Silence. Then they hung up.
Another wrong number.
Third one tonight. She hadn’t told him about the first two. Didn’t want to get him more upset about nothing than he already was.
She swung her legs off the big empty bed and stuck her feet into her house slippers. She’d lock up and then she was ready for bed. Had her nightgown on and everything. She’d already locked up all the doors anyway. Now she went from room to room, checking, locking the windows in the kitchen, the small back bedroom, and Franklin’s study.
In the parlor, the two windows on either side of the front door were wide open with the thin curtains blowing in. She spread her hands on the windowsill and peered out into the dark night. Not too many stars out and it had turned cold. She heard the faint hum of tires out on the highway, somebody going past at a pretty good clip, on into the night. Then another car going in the opposite direction. Real slow.
She waited, listening for it to keep going past the little dirt road leading to their house.
It did.
The distant hum of a car going by on a lonely highway at night was a weird thing. She often lay in bed, waiting for sleep, and listened to them passing by out there. On a rainy night, especially, there was that sad hissing sound the tires made on the way to somewhere else. Who was it behind the wheel? Where were they going? What was going on in their minds as they watched that long yellow line disappearing in the rear view mirror? Was someone sitting next to them? Who?
Franklin had spooked her, all right.
No question about it. She pulled the damn front windows down, both of them, locked them, and went back into the bedroom. She got down on her knees beside the bed. Looked like she was fixing to pray, but she wasn’t. She was just doing the next best thing, getting her gun. She bent down to fetch the double-barreled Parker. It was a rare Sweet Sixteen shotgun that Franklin had rejiggered to fit her for her twenty-first birthday. Sawed a couple of inches off the stock and gave it to her on the big day itself.
A sawed-off gun for a grown-up girl, the card said. She still had it stuck in the mirror all these years later.
She lifted the worn chenille bedspread and felt around with her right hand until her fingertips brushed the smooth cold barrels. She pulled it out and lifted it to her nose. God help her, she loved how that damn gun smelled more than was natural in a woman.
Daisy kept half a dozen or so shells locked in the right hand drawer of the dresser. Double-ought buckshot. She unlocked the drawer and fished out a couple. Then she levered the gun open and loaded it. She snapped it shut, made sure the safety was on, and went back into the kitchen. After laying the gun across the table, she lit a wooden kitchen match and turned on the gas, lighting the burner under the teakettle.
Sitting there at the kitchen table, facing the bedroom, she knew she could easily swivel her head and see both the front door and the back door. Looking straight ahead, she’d see anybody who just happened to be peeking in her bedroom window.
She’d deliberately left the porch lights on, front and back. And now she decided she’d best turn all the lights in the house off and sit in the dark. That way she could see them before they saw her.
Not that there was any “them,” she told herself, moving from room to room and extinguishing lights, but she’d heard something catch in Franklin’s voice tonight when he told her how much he loved her.
You sit watching them in the dark, a kettle take an extra long time to whistle. And, a ticking kitchen clock sounds a whole lot slower and louder. She had the Parker in her lap now. Pretty soon the cruiser would show up, park out in front of the house. She’d walk around the house with Homer or Wyatt or whoever was on duty, see that there was nothing to see, and then she could maybe go on to bed and get a little sleep. Even though it was so hard with Franklin gone.
Any damn bed felt ten sizes too big without your man in it. All her friends who’d lost their husbands said so.
The thought, when it first came, hit her so hard she almost fell out of her chair.
A woman alone.
That’s what the Mexican guy in the restaurant had said to Franklin. You had to worry about a woman alone, he’d said. She was alone, sure. But so were a few other women here in Prairie.
June Weaver, for instance, was very much alone tonight. June had a son named Travis. Big strong football player. But he lived with his father.
June lived alone.
And it was June, she thought, getting nervous and excited all at once, not her, who had the videotape the man down in Key West wanted badly enough to threaten a man like Franklin over. If they knew about her tapes, they probably knew how to find June’s address as easy as they’d find—
She jumped up from the table and ran to the phone mounted on the wall beside the stove. June’s home number was among the ones scribbled in pencil just above the phone.
Line was busy.
She called the sheriff’s office and got a recording. June’s familiar drawl telling you what to do in case of an emergency. Which meant whoever was on duty was on the phone.
She took a deep breath and redialed both numbers.
Still busy.
52
D aisy grabbed the shotgun and ran into her bedroom flipping the light switch by the door. To hell with it. She shed her slippers and stuck her feet into her boots. No time to dress, she grabbed her terry robe off the hook on the bathroom door. She grabbed a handful of shells from the dresser and stuffed them in the pocket of her terry. Then she hurried back to the kitchen. The phone was ringing off the hook and she paused just long enough to grab it.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Who is this, damn it?”
Hearing only silence, she slammed down the receiver, picked it up again and redialed June’s house.
Busy. So was the sheriff’s line. Damnation.
Was that June trying to get through to the courthouse? Is that why Daisy couldn’t get through to either number? Had to be it.
She ran out the front door and jumped into the pickup, laying the gun on the seat beside her. She twisted the key in the ignition and for a few horrible seconds thought the damn thing wasn’t going to turn over. Then it did. She jammed it into gear and fishtailed onto the long dirt drive that led out to the highway. She didn’t hardly slow down when she hit the blacktop, just cranked the wheel over and mashed her foot to the floor.
It was freezing in the cab. She pulled the worn terry robe tight around her but it didn’t help much. She could be dead before that leaky heater under the dash started putting out anything significant enough to thaw her out.
June Weaver lived six miles further out from town than the Dixons did, in an old two-story farmhouse set back about a half-mile from the highway. The old house backed up onto a small creek that ran through the Weaver property. June had grown up on the place and then lived there by herself ever since the divorce. Her son was a gridiron star at Prairie High School. Going to college on a scholarship. He lived half the year with his dad and half with his mom. It was his dad’s turn, she knew, because it was football season and his dad had him on some kin
d of training regimen.
Daisy was going fast as she could push it, over a hundred, and still it took forever to reach June’s place. Her road wasn’t marked very well and she had to slow down real fast to find the wooden sign tacked to a fence-post that said Weaver in faded red letters. She saw it, braked hard, and swerved off the highway and onto the road leading to the house. Just because it seemed to make sense, she’d doused her headlights as soon as she’d seen the sign and turned off the highway.
A quarter of a mile from the house she saw a car pulled over to the side, two wheels half in the ditch. June drove a twenty-year-old Olds Cutlass Supreme station wagon. Faded gold color. This was not that. It looked new, a two-door, and black. A Ford or a Chevy, she couldn’t tell. All cars looked the same these days. Oklahoma plates. She slowed as she approached it, coming up on it from the rear, one hand on the Parker.
She eased up alongside, keeping her gun barrels just below the windowsill. The car was empty. She put the truck in park and climbed out into the frigid cold, taking her gun with her. She bent and looked into the driver’s side window and saw a Hertz map on the front seat and a crushed pack of cigarettes on the floor. She stood up and looked at the big old house, the big dark sky looming over the rooftops. June’s room was upstairs on the nearside corner. It was dark, too.
She reached her hand out and touched the hood of the rental car. It was still very warm and the engine was ticking softly.
Daisy decided she’d best walk the rest of the way. The sound of her truck pulling up in front of June’s house was not going to help anybody tonight. She yanked the keys out of the ignition, stuck them in her robe pocket, and started walking.
A few minutes later, she was standing at the front door listening and not hearing anything inside. Her hands were shaking, but, hell, her whole body was shivering in the cold night air. She tried the screen door and found it unlocked. Her heart thudding in her chest, she twisted the front door knob. The door swung inward without a sound and she stepped inside. She stood quiet a second and then moved on into the living room, the Parker out front, her finger on the forward trigger and the safety off.
“June?” she whispered in the dark. “It’s me—Daisy. Are you home, honey?”
Was she home? Maybe, maybe not. June normally parked the Olds in the garage around the back and she stupidly hadn’t checked to see if it was back there. How dumb can one person be?
“June, listen, I’m just here to see if you’re all right. Okay? I’ve got a gun. If you’re not all right but you can hear me, say something.”
The house was dead quiet.
Not a peep.
Nothing.
Daisy smelled something burnt in the kitchen. Like a pie that had been left in the oven too long. Make that chicken pot pie maybe. Daisy moved carefully toward the rear of the house, wishing she’d been smart enough to remove her damn cowboy boots. The wooden floors were creaky and a deaf man could have heard her coming a mile away.
She also wished she’d brought a flashlight. The house was at least a hundred years old, with heavy drapes covering the windows, and it was black as a crypt inside. Nothing looked the same in the dark anyway. She bumped into a little table with a porcelain lamp on it, grabbing the lamp just before it toppled over and hit the floor in a million tiny pieces.
She went through a wide arched door that led to a long narrow hall going back to the kitchen. At the kitchen door she paused and peeked inside. She could tell the room was empty and was tempted to go turn the damn oven off.
Knowing that this was a really bad idea, she turned around and crept to the foot of the stairs. There was a door on her right, behind it were the cellar steps if she remembered correctly. She tried the knob. Unlocked. She opened it six inches and got that musty, rotted basement smell up her nose. She felt something sticky on the bottom of her boot. She had no idea what it was but since she feared the worst, she was thinking it might be blood. She raised her right foot and swabbed her index finger across her boot heel. She held it under her nose. It didn’t smell like blood. It smelled like mud.
She shut the door quick.
There was a deadbolt on the outside of the basement door and she locked it. Then she headed up the stairs to the second floor, no longer caring that each step made a loud groan as she climbed.
“June? Are you up here?” she said, fingering the safety nervously. She was absolutely ready to squeeze the trigger if somebody suddenly appeared at the top of the steps.
Nobody did, but it didn’t help her heart rate.
At the top of the stairs she stopped to get her bearings. June’s room was at the far end of the hallway, all the way to the left. All the doors along the hall to the left were shut. Same thing to the right. Except there was a bathroom to her right, just across the hall, and she could see inside a little, shadows and shapes. The door was halfway open and she had to stifle the temptation to rush in and rip back the shower curtain just to see what she’d find there. All the shower rings flying and hiding in there was a—
Boo.
Having scared herself silly, she turned left and started toward the door to June’s room.
“June? June-bug, are you up here, honey?”
She’d taken about three more steps along the worn carpeting when she heard a muffled noise behind the door. She raised the Parker to her shoulder, aiming it dead center on the door about four feet from the floor. Her hands were shaking badly again, even though it was a tad warmer in the old house. She was sorely tempted to just blow whoever was waiting for her behind that door to kingdom come and ask questions later.
But she moved toward it instead, dropped her left hand and placed it on the crystal knob. She twisted it, felt it give a half turn, then stop. It was locked. It was an old door with an old lock. All she had to do was put her shoulder into it, force the damn door open and put herself out of her misery one way or the other.
Something made her step back away from it. A noise. Movement inside. She took one, two steps back. She mounted the gun to her shoulder again and planted her left foot square in the center of the door. It slammed inward, splintering to jagged pieces.
She saw a figure silhouetted, standing in the center of the room by the big four-poster bed. Big shoulders. Small head.
“I’ll shoot,” she said. “I swear on a stack of bibles I will.”
Her finger tightened on the trigger.
“Daisy?” the person said, so soft she almost missed it.
“June?”
“Jesus wept! It’s you, Daisy!” June sobbed and took a few small steps toward her.
Daisy lowered the gun and embraced her friend. She was heaving sobs and shaking worse than Daisy was. June was wearing a thickly insulated stadium jacket which accounted for the big shoulders she’d seen.
“June, what happened? I tried to call you but—”
“I-I came up here to get my medicine. Not ten minutes ago. I heard somebody downstairs. Heard a window break sure as I’m standing here. Down in the kitchen. I didn’t know what to do. I locked the door and called the office but I couldn’t get through. I tried to call you, too, but first it was busy and then no answer. I didn’t know what else to—”
“June, listen. We don’t have time. There may be someone down in the basement.”
“What?”
“I saw mud on the floor. He must have tracked it in from the creek bed out back. That’s the only mud around here I know of. The mud was tracked through the kitchen and stopped outside that door. He’s still down there, I guess. I locked the door from this side.”
“What do we do?”
“Is there another way out of the cellar?”
“The old coal chute in the back of the house. Don’t use it anymore but it still works.”
“We have to move. Now. Where’s that videotape you’re supposed to send Franklin?”
“Right there on top of the dresser in that FedEx envelope. I was just fixing to take it into town.”
“Grab it and let’s ge
t out of here.”
“What about the basement?”
“He’s either already outside and coming around the house to kill us both or he’s still locked inside down there and really pissed off.”
“Daisy. You must be freezing. Take this coat.”
She did. They descended the steps as quietly as they could. The door at the bottom of the steps was still locked shut. They tiptoed past it and then ran for the front door.
“C’mon, let’s run. My truck’s halfway down the drive.”
They left the old house in a hurry.
When they reached the two cars, Daisy went over to the black rental car and peeked inside. Nothing on the seat had been moved. The driver had to be still in the basement. She fired both barrels of the shotgun, blowing out the two front tires.
“I can’t shoot and drive at the same time,” she told June, holding out the shotgun.
“Give me some ammuntion,” June said, taking the Sweet Sixteen and a couple of shells. She quickly loaded the shotgun and snapped the barrels shut.
They jumped in her truck and Daisy turned on the headlights and stuck the key in the ignition. Just as she twisted it, three starburst patterns exploded on her windshield, covering the two women with chunks of safety glass.
“He’s over there!” Daisy cried, “See him? Coming around that mule stall. He’s got a rifle!”
The yellow beams picked up a large man in a dark coat, now racing toward them. He was trying to shoot on the run. Rounds were hitting the truck, but the gunman was too dumb to stop and take a stance before he tried to shoot anybody.
“Okay, okay, take it easy,” June said, “I’ve got this one.”
He was less than a hundred yards away. She leaned out the window with the shotgun, aimed, and pulled both triggers.
The gunman staggered a few more steps, went down hard.
“He didn’t think I’d shoot,” June said, collapsing against the seat. “I didn’t either.”
“You got him!” Daisy said, “Let’s get out of here!”
June leaned her head back on the seat said, “Oh my Lord.”
Daisy got the pickup turned around in a hurry, and they tore off down the bumpy dirt road back to the highway.
