Cold Cold Heart

by Tami Hoag

  He had been shot. He had been beaten. Who . . . ?

  His father.

  The dog barked in the distance.

  Years in war zones had trained him to sleep lightly, to never totally give himself over to the deepest, most restful phases of slumber. To sleep deeply in enemy territory was to die. The ability to be attuned to his surroundings at all times was paramount to survival.

  He set aside the jar of peanut butter, which had fallen in his lap, and eased his body off the bed. It would be his luck that the old man had checked himself out of the hospital and come home.

  And here I am, trapped in the one room where the only window is nailed shut.

  In his bare feet he padded silently across the room to stand, back up against the wall, next to the door to the hall. His head was still hurting, but the incessant pounding had subsided to a dull throb that at least allowed him to hear. He tried to listen without imagining sounds. He fought to clear his mind of the memories of other situations in other countries in other wars.

  He thought he could hear someone moving around in the vicinity of the kitchen. Possibilities ticked through his mind. If it wasn’t the old man, then who? A deputy? A vandal? A thief? It made the most sense to think the sheriff’s office would send a deputy by to check on their crime scene.

  John had left the back door ajar in case the dog wanted to come in—the dog that wasn’t his dog. That would have prompted a deputy to cross the crime scene barrier. Now he was going to be found out because he had left that door open when it should have been shut.

  He thought about escape routes. The house was small, and the common areas opened into one another, affording no cover. The room next to his was the only bathroom. The window was high on the wall and too small to get through easily. Across the hall was his father’s bedroom, with the only window looking out on the street in front of the house.

  He didn’t like the idea of going through that window or making a dash for the living room and going out the front door. If there was a deputy coming in the back door, there should be one out front waiting for any quarry to be flushed out.

  If he wanted to exit via the back door, then he would have to wait until whoever it was made it to the living room before he could make a move to get past. Another bad option. In his current condition, he didn’t want to test his ability to outrun anyone.

  He was trapped.

  37

  No one would question the Liddell County sheriff’s cruiser in the Villante yard. The place was a crime scene. Tim was the deputy on patrol in this area tonight. He belonged here. He would be the one to discover the terrible scene. Having stopped by the property to make sure no one had disturbed anything, he found the door ajar and broke the seal to investigate . . .

  As he pulled the car in behind the house he could see he wasn’t going to have to lie. The back door was ajar.

  John.

  With little more than a glance in the backseat, he got out of the car and drew his gun. The phrase killing two birds with one stone was about to take on real significance.

  Hyperalert to his surroundings, he made his way from the car to the house, eyes scanning back and forth from the house to the garage to the junker cars in the yard to John’s truck to the shed where Mack Villante had shot his own son and a skeleton had been languishing in a barrel for God knew how long.

  He could hear that damned stray dog barking, but he couldn’t see it. He had to hope the thing wouldn’t come running. He didn’t want to have to discharge his weapon any sooner than necessary. The Villantes didn’t have many neighbors, but he didn’t want to risk one of them calling in a report of shots fired.

  He pulled the yellow tape down and slipped into the house through the open door. The kitchen was clear. The refrigerator humming was the only sound.

  From the doorway into the dining room he could see the front door and most of the living room. He worked his way around both rooms, noting nothing but the acrid stench of thirty years of cigarette smoke.

  A narrow hall led down to the bedrooms and bathroom. His senses were heightened to the point that his eardrums hurt and his eyes burned. He could hear a faucet dripping slowly like a hammer banging on a lead pipe. His heart was racing, his pulse whooshing over his eardrums. He could hear himself breathing in and out like he was fucking Darth Vader. Adrenaline. Nerves.

  The first bedroom had been made into a home office and was so messy, so crowded with shelves and boxes and stacks of papers and magazines and whatever other crap Mack Villante thought worth keeping, that no one could have been hiding in the room.

  Across the hall, he pushed open the door to the bathroom. Empty.

  The next room on the right had to be the old man’s, judging by the smell—cigarettes and stale sweat and musk. Tim stepped into the room and made his way around the piles of dirty laundry and dirty magazines and the unmade bed. The small closet was knee-deep in an avalanche of clothing beneath the rod of shirts and jackets Mack Villante had bothered to hang.

  The last room, he knew, was John’s. He had been in it just that afternoon to find absolutely nothing but bare furniture. Every dresser drawer was empty. There was not one hanger with one shirt in the closet. The bed didn’t even have sheets. It was as Spartan as a monk’s cell. More so.

  But somebody had opened that back door, Tim thought as he pressed his back to the wall and inched his way toward the bedroom door. He gulped a big lungful of air and went into the room, gun first, to find . . . no one.

  * * *

  DANA LAY STILL on the backseat of the cop car. A cage separated the front seat from any unwilling passengers in the back. The doors could be opened from the outside only. She was trapped.

  She had no idea where they were. A dog was barking in the distance. There was no other sound but the occasional crackling of the radio. No traffic noise. She couldn’t decide if it would be better to sit up and try to get her bearings or continue to play dead. Even if she knew where they were, her feet were bound. She couldn’t run.

  This must have been what it had been like in the back of Doc Holiday’s van, she thought. Forced to lie motionless, helpless, waiting for a sadist to determine her fate.

  She had somehow gotten free of her bonds that night. Now plastic zip ties bound her hands, digging into her wrists, which were already scarred with ligature marks. She brought her hands up to her mouth and pulled the duct tape loose on one side, then tried to chew at the ties around her wrists, an exercise in frustration and futility.

  He hadn’t taken as much care binding her feet together, looping one long tie around both ankles. When she realized she had room to maneuver, she began to wiggle and wriggle and twist and turn her feet, trying to work her way free.

  At least the action gave her some hope.

  Where there’s life, there’s hope. Where there’s life, there’s hope . . .

  38

  John lay on top of the trapdoor in the attic. Anyone pushing up at it from the closet below would likely think it was sealed or somehow locked. If they even bothered to look up at the ceiling inside the dark closet.

  He could hear the intruder moving around in his room, and he hoped the person wouldn’t have a look inside the doors of his nightstand, where he had hastily stashed the peanut butter jar and the water jug. But he heard only footsteps, no drawers or doors being opened, not so much as the click of the light switch.

  That struck him as odd. A thief would search the drawers. A cop would turn the lights on. His old man would have been muttering to himself.

  Who the hell did that leave?

  No matter, he thought, so long as they weren’t moving in. Let them look and let them leave. He wanted to clear out of here before dawn. He wasn’t under arrest. They didn’t have any cause to hold him—unless his father could somehow manage to convince the sheriff’s office that he was the victim, in which case John wanted to be long gone from Shelby M
ills and Liddell County. He would take his truck and go as far as he dared, then abandon it somewhere it wouldn’t be easily found and start hitching rides south and west. If he was going to be homeless, he was going to be homeless on a beach in California.

  For now, he had to wait. He could still hear his visitor moving through the house, going back toward the kitchen.

  The air ducts served as a kind of sound system. As a boy, he had spent many hours up here in this dusty, stifling space, avoiding the wrath of his father. The old man never had figured out this hiding place. There was too much effort involved in considering it. He would never bother to go get an actual ladder and investigate. Climbing a ladder was not high on the list of things to do for drunks. He knew nothing of the rope ladder John had devised to get up and down.

  The climb had been awkward tonight. He had been forced to use his right arm, setting off explosions of pain in his damaged shoulder. But he had made it up into the attic and got the hatch closed, then collapsed in agony on top of the door, panting and sweating until the barrage faded.

  The drawback of the attic as a hiding place was the lack of light and the lack of visual vantage points. He had a flashlight with an age-old battery and weak beam to see his way around the low, cramped space. A small louvered vent at either end of the house afforded little in the way of a view outside. Still, as he heard the intruder exit the kitchen, he made his way carefully, bent uncomfortably in half, moving joist to joist to the garage end of the house, to the space over the living room and dining room, and tried to see out.

  The security lights illuminated the swatch of ground below. What he could see was mud and dead grass. Somewhere to the right, on the back side of the house, he could hear the crunch of gravel under boots and a car door opening.

  He could imagine kids thinking it would be a kick to sneak into a crime scene and have a party. But what he heard next disabused him of that idea.

  What he heard next made his blood run cold. He’d heard it all the time in one war and then another—the abject terror of someone about to face death.

  39

  Dana heard his boots on the gravel as he came back to the car. She felt sick with panic, choking on tears. The storm of emotions coursing through her threatened to overwhelm any rational thought she had.

  She had to get hold of herself. She had to be able to think or she was going to die in very short order. She had managed to work one foot free of the zip-tie loop around her ankles. If she got half a chance, she would try to run.

  He pulled her out of the car still wrapped in the tarp, then stood her on her feet and peeled the tarp away.

  Dana had no idea where they were. The house and its surroundings were unfamiliar. Coming out of the darkness of being covered, she felt assaulted by the security lights situated over the back door of the house. As she blinked and turned away, she was vaguely aware of wooded surroundings, a run-down garage, a dog barking somewhere nearby.

  She didn’t know if they were in town or in the country. She didn’t know if there were neighbors to run to or if the barking dog might run her down. But she knew if she didn’t do something, Tim Carver was going to finish the job Doc Holiday had started nearly a year ago. If he got her inside that house, he was free to do whatever he wanted to her. She knew all too well what that could mean.

  The duct tape hung loose, stuck to only one side of her mouth. If she could talk to him . . . If she could reason with him . . . If she could keep him aware that she was a person and not just a problem to be disposed of . . .

  “Don’t do this, Tim,” she said. “There’s no need.”

  His expression was cold. “What? You’re going to pretend none of this happened? I should trust you never to speak of it?”

  Dana’s eyes filled. “I loved you, Tim. Don’t do this. If you ever cared for me—”

  “You dropped me like a hot rock when I needed you. Do you know how that made me feel?”

  “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” she said, hating the sound of desperation in her own voice. “But we were kids. We made mistakes. You said yourself we shouldn’t have to pay for all eternity.”

  “Too late for that,” he said, his mouth twisting on some sour amusement. “Let’s go.”

  As soon as he put his hands on her and leaned in close to move her, Dana brought a knee up as hard as she could, catching him square in the crotch. He doubled over with a hard grunt, and she bolted.

  She had no idea where to run. She only knew she had to.

  She bolted, screaming, her voice shrill with absolute terror. “Help me! Help me!”

  She hadn’t taken three strides when she caught her foot in the loop of the zip tie that had bound her ankles together. She went down hard, barely able to break the fall with her arms, an animal sound of panic escaping her with her breath.

  Tim was on her in seconds, turning her over and straddling her hips.

  “You fucking bitch!”

  He gritted the words out between his teeth and punched her full in the face, his knuckles smashing her lips against her teeth. The copper taste of blood filled her mouth and she turned her head to the side to spit it out as she tried to bring her arms up to protect her face.

  He struck her again and again, swinging his fist like a hammer, banging her head off the ground, striking her left ear so hard she lost hearing.

  Her consciousness dimming, Dana went limp. He slapped her across the face with an open hand.

  “Look at me. Look at me!” His voice was a harsh rasp.

  Dana opened her eyes and saw three of him. He looked like a stranger. There was nothing in his face that related to the Tim she had known growing up or the man she had known for these last few days, the man with the easy charm and the aw-shucks country-boy grin. She didn’t know this animal that lived inside him. It was a thing with a feral grimace and black eyes. A creature bent on hurting her.

  “You’ll pay for that,” he said, leaning over her. “You’ll pay for that. I could have made this easy for you. You just made it hard. You did this to yourself.”

  He had come into her bedroom and choked her unconscious. He had brought her to this place for the express purpose of killing her. And somehow he twisted the intentions around to make it her fault. It was her fault he was punching her in the face. It was her fault he would now make her death as painful as possible.

  He hauled her up off the ground and pushed her ahead of him toward the house, shoving her so hard she stumbled and fell.

  He kicked her hard in the side. “Get up!”

  Dana’s breath left her and she pulled herself into a ball on the ground like a turtle pulling inside of its shell. Tim dragged her up to her feet, his hand clamped like a vise around the back of her neck. He pushed her up the step and shoved her through the door, banging her forehead on the door’s frame so hard she saw stars. Blood instantly flowed from the fresh gash above her right eyebrow.

  She heard the word no over and over and over, only dimly realizing it was coming from her own mouth as he manhandled her through the dark kitchen and a dining room. He grabbed her with both hands by the back of her hoodie, lifted her off the ground, and chucked her into the next room like a bag of garbage.

  Dana hit the floor with a thud, landing on her stomach, landing on something hard and rectangular in the pouch of her hoodie.

  Her phone.

  Her heart sank. If she had remembered she had it when she was alone in the car, she could have somehow managed to call 911. She wouldn’t get that chance again.

  * * *

  THE NOISE COMING THROUGH the air ducts sounded like a barroom brawl—knuckles pounding flesh, bodies crashing into furniture. The fear in the woman’s voice told a different story.

  John listened, flinching at every sound, emotions from childhood stirring in a corner of his mind he had shut away long ago—memories of his mother’s voice begging, pleading, crying. His sto
mach turned as the images flashed like explosions in his mind—his father’s face twisted with rage, his mother’s tears, the physical force of violence.

  As a child he had no choice but to hide. As a man, he couldn’t listen and do nothing. Not even if it meant risking himself.

  * * *

  MOANING, IN PAIN, DANA struggled to turn over and propped herself up with her back against the side of a recliner that reeked of smoke. Her left eye was swollen nearly shut. Her lips were split and bleeding. She couldn’t breathe through her nose. She pressed her tongue against her teeth and felt several of them move.

  Tim stalked her, his hands on his hips. The filtered light coming in through the sheer curtains was cold and blue, making him look like a monster from science fiction.

  “Is this what you did to Casey?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, looking down at her. “Casey made it easy. All I had to do was hold that choke a little while longer. She never knew what happened. She thought I loved her. She thought I would marry her. She died thinking that. She died happy, I guess.”

  Dana wanted to cry as she thought of her friend. Sweet Casey, always the first one to offer comfort. That was how it would have started between her and Tim. Poor Tim, cast aside by his college-bound girlfriend, Miss Ambition. Casey had always cared more about having a family, settling down. She would have offered him a shoulder to cry on. He would have taken advantage of that. He had always been an opportunist.

  “She would have ruined everything for me,” he said. “She did it on purpose, too. She had to have. Or the kid was John’s and I was just the better catch. I couldn’t have it. I had plans. I was going to West Point.”

  And his plans had been more important than the life of a girl who had been his friend for years, and more important than the life that had only just taken root inside her.

  “I couldn’t have a wife,” he said with disgust. “I didn’t want a kid. She wouldn’t get rid of it.”