The Red Scream

by Mary Willis Walker

  “Oh, Charlie, I’m so sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “Who knows this?”

  “Georgia knew. Frank knows. Other than my doctor, only them. Before I go public I want to get a real good second opinion. I’m going to Anderson in Houston next week. I’ll tell them then. At least the Bronk thing will be over by then. So you see, my kids will have enough to deal with—all this death—without you making it worse by digging up past pain.”

  His lips tightened. “People usually ask if there’s anything they can do when you tell ’em your bad news. If you was to ask me that, Molly, I’d say what I been saying all along: ‘Don’t upset my kids with all this.’ I think Alison is stretched to her breaking point. I’m trying to get her to come stay here. At least she’d be safe and away from that man she’s living with. Stuart doesn’t show the strain like she does, but he’s suffering, too.”

  He picked up the glass. “Sorry. I think that’s all I can take today.” His head fell back against the chair again. “I get so tired. Can you find your way to the door? Frank will let you out.”

  Molly turned off the tape recorder. “Thanks for talking to me, Charlie. I assure you that I will write what you’ve said and I’ll check with you before printing anything about your illness. All right?”

  Without opening his eyes, he said, “Fine.”

  Frank was waiting for her at the door. She wondered if he’d been there all along or if Charlie had signaled him in some way. He deactivated the alarm by punching a series of numbers into a keypad on the wall, used a key to unlock the two dead bolts, then opened the door and stepped out. He stared at Grady Traynor sitting in the truck, then stood aside for Molly to pass.

  As she approached the truck, Grady leaned across and opened the door. He looked at her face in the overhead light and said, “Shall I drive?”

  She shook her head as she climbed in. “No. Driving always makes me feel better.” She started the engine.

  They drove in silence for the first minute. “So?” he said finally. “Are you going to tell me?”

  “Huh? Oh, he’s mad. He thinks people like me who write about crime glamorize the criminals and cause other people to commit crimes.”

  “Bullshit,” Grady said.

  “I hope so,” she said fervently. “I hope you’re right.”

  Then she said, “Grady, I’ve been wondering. It’s possible that Louie set this all up—what happened in Fort Worth last night and today. I mean, when he told me about the car, he could have arranged for someone to steal a Mustang from that lot and burn down the auto body place, to make it seem like someone was trying to destroy the evidence that would exonerate him.” She took her eyes off the road for a minute to glance at him. “Pretty farfetched, I know. But do you think it’s possible?”

  “Sure, it’s possible. I’ve known guys in solitary confinement to plan bank robberies, kidnappings, even murders, and get other people to execute them. It’s possible, but I don’t think he did. Do you?”

  She was silent, thinking about it. Four minutes later when they pulled up to her garage she said, “No. I don’t think so either.” She pushed the button on the door opener clipped to her visor and drove into the garage.

  When she cut off the engine, Grady reached over and turned up the radio which had been playing low, tuning it to K-VET, the country music station. As if by some master plan of fate, the song playing was Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” a song they had danced to at the Broken Spoke in 1968. “Mmm, that’s just right for us, isn’t it, Molly?”

  He pushed the button on her visor, and as the garage door rumbled down, he walked around to her side. He held his arms up in their old slow-dance position, inviting her, waiting for her. She stepped into it as easily as if twenty-five years had not gone by. Together they began to sway to the mellow strains of the song. He bent his head down to press his cheek against hers.

  “It’s like riding a bicycle,” Molly murmured.

  “This is the sort of thing your body never forgets how to do. Oh, Molly.”

  It was as if one might really have a second chance at the things that mattered. She knew it wasn’t true, but for this moment she chose to believe it anyway, because it felt so good.

  The automatic timer switched off the overhead light, leaving them in total darkness.

  Dancing with Grady Traynor had always been somewhere between dancing and making love in rhythm. And now, in the dark garage, to the smell of grease and old lawn mowers, they fell back into that familiar mating dance, the one that started so dreamy-slow you were caught up in it before you had a chance to escape, even if you wanted to. It started with the feel of another body, separate at first, and strange, different in its hollows and fullnesses. But gradually, with the music and the movement, the bodies softened, the outlines blurred, and one body began to flow right into the other as the dance went on.

  She remembered the very first time she had danced with him, wanting to pull his shirt out and run her hands up his bare back right there on the dance floor. She hadn’t done it then; she had waited until later. But she did it now, untucked his shirt and very slowly moved her hands up his back, feeling the smooth skin and the knobs of his spine underneath. When she moved her hands along his sides up under his arms, he sucked in his breath. She remembered back then being aroused by his arousal, and, amazingly, it was no different now.

  Molly had always loved this stage of the dance, stretching it out, prolonging it until the tension forced the next stage. The song changed to Jennifer Warnes’s “Right Time of the Night” and then Willie’s “Always on My Mind.” Grady wrapped both arms around her, resting his hands on the swell of her hips. She began unbuttoning his shirt, slowly. She rested her palms against his bare chest, moving them down the abdomen, pausing to feel an unfamiliar scar that ran under his belt.

  “Appendix,” he murmured, as she ran her fingers the smooth length of it, “at the damnedest time, right in the middle of the Westerman investigation.”

  Slowly, as they danced, they undressed one another, one button, one zipper, one hook at a time. Then, music and all pretense of dancing forgotten, it was no longer slow or languid. To Molly’s surprise, it felt even more desperate to her now than when they were young. Maybe because now they both knew something that they hadn’t known then: that they were mortal and that time was running down. In this world you never knew which dance was the last one.

  “Want to go upstairs where it’s comfortable?” she said, barely able to get her breath.

  “Remember San Antonio?” he asked.

  She laughed. She did remember. They had gone to a party in San Antonio, where they had danced, just like this. On the way home, unable to wait, they stopped in a cornfield and made love for the first time in the back of his old pickup under the light of a full moon. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I remember.”

  “So do I.” He picked up his shirt and jacket and spread them out in the back of her pickup. “This isn’t called the truck bed for nothing,” he said, lying down on his back and pulling her in on top of him.

  Later, upstairs in bed, Molly could have drifted off to sleep, except that she was ravenously hungry. She lifted her leg, which had been resting on top of his, and rolled on to her back. He propped himself up on an elbow and looked down at her in the pale glow of the night-light she always kept burning.

  “It’s a little like going to a twenty-fifth high school reunion,” Molly said. “You can’t help but worry how you’ll look to people who have a mental image of you at eighteen.”

  He laughed, picked up her hand, and pressed the palm against his stomach. “I know what you mean. The last time we did this, this area was concave.”

  She turned her head on the pillow to look down at him. “It looks good to me, Grady, and after all, it is fifty years old.”

  “Fifty?” he said, slowly pressing her hand downward. “Really? But who’s counting?”

  She withdrew her hand. “How about that dinner you promised me? All I’ve had to ea
t since breakfast was two bitty little bags of almonds on the plane.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am, dinner.” He looked down at her, his pale eyes predatory in the gloom, as he moved them along her body. Foolish to let all this happen again, she knew. But, after all, life was short, and she was certainly old enough to take care of herself.

  He leaned down and kissed her, his tongue flicking along the insides of her lips as lightly as a feather.

  He slid a hand under her back and raised her on to her side, brushing his chest against her breasts and slipping his leg between hers, trying to rekindle her interest. “Dinner now or later?” he asked.

  But she couldn’t answer because he’d pressed his mouth against hers.

  He brought his leg up higher and rubbed. She found herself getting less interested in dinner.

  A shrill electronic buzz made her pull away and sit up. It sounded as if it were coming from inside her head, but Grady sighed and pulled a tiny pager from under the pillow. “Damn,” he said, looking at the digital readout that glowed in the dark. “I better check on this.”

  Molly collapsed on the bed and pointed to the phone on the night table.

  Grady reached over to it and punched out the number. After a few seconds, he said, “What, Caleb?” He listened for several minutes and Molly could hear the low voice droning on through the receiver. “No shit,” Grady said. Then again, louder, sitting up, “No shit.” He listened some more and said, “Well done. Thanks for buzzing me. I’ll get back to you.” He hung up and sat there leaning against the headboard with his legs stretched out straight.

  Molly looked up at him in the dim light. “Well, why do you have that look on your face?” she asked.

  “What look?”

  “Like a traffic cop seeing a Rolls-Royce zoom by at ninety miles an hour.”

  He glanced over at her. “That was Caleb. Fort Worth PD called to say that their check on Marcus Gandy, whom you will recall from your close encounter today, was as recently as one month ago employed by none other than the Fort Worth Division of McFarland Construction.”

  Molly was stunned. “Could it be a coincidence?”

  He shifted his foot so it rested against her hip. “Molly, Molly,” he scolded in a low voice, shaking his head.

  “Well, could it?”

  “Is it so hard to accept that Charlie McFarland finds you such a pain in the ass that he arranged to have you beaten up, maybe killed?”

  “Yes,” she said firmly.

  “Well,” he said, drawing his foot along the side of her thigh, “I think you might have a problem there.” He lifted his foot and very lightly ran his toes from her knee up the inside of her thigh. “Now where were we?”

  “Mmm, prehensile toes.”

  “I love it when you talk like that. Big words.” He moved down so he was lying next to her.

  She looked into his pale eyes, now only inches from hers. “Oh, I didn’t tell you the rest of what Charlie told me tonight.”

  “Charlie who?” he murmured, kissing her throat.

  “He’s dying,” she said. “Of cancer. That’s what’s wrong with his back—all these tumors. You better make your case quick. In six months he’ll be dead.”

  He stopped what he was doing. “You believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who else knows?” he demanded.

  “Georgia knew, and his doctor, and Frank Purcell. He hasn’t told anyone else yet. He just found out a week ago. He wants to get another opinion.”

  “Who’s his doctor?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll find out and check on it,” he said.

  “Can you get that sort of information from a doctor?”

  He pushed himself up to his knees and looked down at her. “I can do anything. Just watch,” he said, leaning over her to begin a slow exploration with his mouth. Grady Traynor—a man who was never in a hurry; she had always liked that about him.

  “This police protection isn’t such a bad thing,” she murmured, abandoning all thoughts of dinner.

  It was ten o’clock before Molly’s hunger pangs returned. “If we don’t eat, I’ll perish,” she announced.

  He sighed and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “We’d have eaten hours ago if you hadn’t waylaid me. Can I use your shower before we go out?”

  Molly leaned over the edge of the bed to gather up her clothes, which lay in heaps on the floor. “Sure. I’m going to get some ice water from the kitchen. Want some?”

  “If you’ll bring it to me in the shower.”

  In the glow of the night-light, she pulled her T-shirt on over her head and started down the dark stairs. Suddenly the front door swung open and the click of a light switch downstairs flooded the hall and stairs with light. Jo Beth gave a start when she saw Molly on the stairs.

  “Mom, you’re home! There were no lights on, so I thought—”

  Jo Beth stopped in midsentence when Grady stepped out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.

  “Dad!” she said. Her face, looking up at them, was frozen in shock.

  He stopped in his tracks and put a hand down to secure the towel. Molly had never seen him blush before, but his cheeks and neck had turned crimson under his tan. The man who was never at a loss was at a loss. “Oh, Jo Beth. Uh—”

  “Sorry,” Jo Beth said, putting a hand in front of her mouth. “I didn’t know anyone was—uh, sorry. I’ll come back later.”

  She stepped backward and let a giggle escape. “I’ll ring the bell next time.” As she closed the door, Molly thought she heard her daughter say “Wow.”

  chapter 19

  I got me a few.

  The dragon is blue

  The dagger is too.

  Jail-house tattoo—

  Something to do.

  Skeleton’s grin,

  The mark of sin,

  Death and its twin—

  Dreams from within

  Inked on my skin.

  LOUIE BRONK

  Death Row, Ellis I Unit,

  Huntsville, Texas

  After a very late dinner and far too much wine, Molly had fallen into hard slumber. But she woke with a gasp, mouth dry as sand, skin prickling, heart hammering, eyes wide open. She knew what time it was even before she turned her head to look at the glowing green numerals of her digital clock: three o’clock. Always three o’clock—her witching hour, when the fears and anxieties she managed to keep in the closet during daylight hours broke out, reared up on their hind legs, and howled.

  For twenty-six years she had suffered from these early morning terrors, ever since that humid summer night, when she was sixteen. She had awakened in a sweat. Her daddy hadn’t come home and she was certain that he was in mortal danger. She had gotten out of bed and sat at the kitchen table, keeping vigil at the black window until sunrise, when she went out looking for him. For five days she searched. For five days she didn’t go to school, didn’t eat, or sleep, or cry. On the fifth day his body floated to the surface of Lake Travis, where it was found by three early morning fishermen.

  After that night, the image she often woke from was a face barely glimpsed through dark rippled water, a face glowing green like the clock numerals, with streamers of decomposing flesh trailing behind like seaweed. She always tried to get closer, to see the face so she might comfort it. She’d reach out her hand, but as her fingers brushed the surface of the water, she woke, gasping for breath as if she had been the one under the water.

  But this time it wasn’t her daddy that woke her up.

  No. This time it was Tiny McFarland.

  Molly took several ragged breaths, closed her eyes, and on the backs of her lids, she conjured her up—not the pale, rigid body on the steel autopsy table, but the living woman. Though she had never seen the woman in life, she had her clearly in mind when she wrote that scene in Sweating Blood. The chic blond woman with the prepubescent body. Wearing a white linen dress and carrying an armload of red flowers from her garden.
There she stood in the open door of the garage, looking at Molly.

  Molly moved her lips, speaking to her with no sound: There you are. Looking good in your white dress, a size four, if I’m remembering right. But why are you taking those flowers into the garage? You want to get cut flowers in water right away. Why don’t you take them to the house? There’s no water in the garage. And it’s greasy in there. You, a woman meticulous about your appearance, you in an expensive white linen dress that you plan to wear to a luncheon, why the garage? To do some chore, maybe? But you have a man living right above the garage who does things like that for you.

  Mmmm. Yes. You have a man. Living above the garage. A handsome man. Young. And you have difficulty resisting men. I understand that. I have had that kind of trouble myself.

  Are you taking him the flowers? Or did he call out to you? Now I know your secret as surely as if we two had sat down over a glass of wine and confided our sex lives. The two of you have been getting it on. You and David Serrano. Lady Chatterley and the gardener. A handsome couple, you so blond, he smooth and swarthy. Oh, yes. He was upstairs in his hot apartment, wearing only shorts, and he saw you out the window cutting flowers and he wanted you. You’d been away for three weeks and he was wild for you. He saw you in your white dress and he wanted you.

  One of your children was home, true, but she was napping and you were eager for him, too, because you’d been away. Maybe he came running down the stairs and took you in his arms. Maybe you danced. Maybe you were both so eager you couldn’t wait, just like Grady and I were tonight. Maybe it got out of hand, got too rough, or you fought. Maybe someone surprised you. Maybe your husband came home. What a shock to be making love in the dark and suddenly the light goes on and the garage door starts to lift, and there you are … or maybe someone else came. Molly’s eyes flew open and the image vanished.

  Molly lifted her head and looked down at Grady Traynor asleep next to her, cocooned up to his chin in her Aunt Harriet’s old patchwork quilt. His face was relaxed and peaceful, his breathing deep and even. He slept as he always had, as if the years on the force and in homicide, as if all the horrors he had witnessed, had never touched him where it mattered—a man with no nightmares. She envied that.