LOW PRESSURE

by BROWN SANDRA

  He took a draw on his cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “I questioned them separately. Allen’s brother—Ray was his name—told me that he knew what Allen had in mind when he left the pavilion with Susan. Wink, wink. Ray stayed behind, drank some more beer, flirted and tried to get lucky himself. But when the weather turned bad, he got worried. He was reluctant to interrupt anything that Allen had going, but . . .”

  “Being his brother’s keeper,” Dent said.

  Moody raised his glass as though saluting him. “Ray told us detectives that he went into the woods, but met Allen on the hiking path, making his way back.” He gestured to the file. “Notes on several interviews with him are in there. But in one, he told me that Allen was ‘fuckin’ furious.’”

  “He admitted that?”

  “He did. But he also said he didn’t blame his brother for being angry, because he could hear your sister’s laughter. She even called out, ‘Don’t go away mad, Allen.’ And then she told him to go home and jack off while thinking about her. Words to that effect.”

  Bellamy felt Dent’s eyes on her, watching to see how she would respond. She tried to keep her expression schooled.

  “Anyhow, both the brothers, during individual interviews, told me the same thing. That Allen had left Susan in the woods, laughing at him.”

  “Why didn’t this testimony come out during the trial?” she asked. “Since the case was built on circumstantial evidence, it would have provided strong reasonable doubt.”

  “It would have, yes. Allen’s court-appointed attorney was relying heavily on Ray’s testimony,” Dale said. “That’s why he was fit to be tied when Ray didn’t show up the morning he was scheduled to be on the stand. The lawyer couldn’t account for his witness’s whereabouts or provide a reason for his failure to appear.

  “He threw himself on the mercy of the court and asked for a postponement in the proceedings, just until after lunch, so he could track down his witness. Rupe hit the ceiling. He put on a dog-and-pony show about the defense attorney’s attempt to annoy the jury into an acquittal.” Moody made a sound of derision. “It was one of his best performances.”

  “I must not have been in court that day,” Bellamy said. “I don’t remember that scene.”

  Dent said, “Let me guess. The judge denied the request.”

  Moody nodded. “And Ray never got to testify.”

  “Why wasn’t he in court that day?”

  “Because he was in the hospital. He’d been seriously injured in a car wreck on his way to the courthouse. It was several days before he was stable enough to be deposed, and his deposition was read aloud in court, but it didn’t have quite the same punch as a live testimony would have had. By the time Ray was well enough to leave the hospital, it was too late. Allen had been convicted and transferred to Huntsville.”

  “Jesus,” Dent whispered. “No wonder he’s gone mental.”

  Moody sat forward. “What?”

  “Ray Strickland hasn’t forgiven or forgotten.”

  Moody was quick to catch his drift. He motioned toward Dent’s face. “He did that?”

  “Show him your back,” Bellamy said.

  Dent stood and raised his shirt. They told Moody about the events of the past few days that had led up to last night’s attack. “He doesn’t have the mustache anymore,” Dent said. “He looks like your basic skinhead.”

  “Then how do you know it’s Ray?”

  “We don’t. But whoever he is, he’s got a death wish for Bellamy and me, and the only thing she and I have in common is that Memorial Day.”

  “And her book,” Moody said, not kindly.

  “If it is Ray, maybe his grievance began when he was unable to testify at Allen’s trial,” she said. “He let his brother down. To this day, he must be haunted by that auto accident.”

  “Wasn’t an accident.”

  Moody spoke in such a low rumble that at first she wasn’t sure if she’d heard him correctly. She looked at Dent, but his focus was on the former detective and what he’d just said.

  Moody lifted his bloodshot gaze to them and cleared his throat. “It wasn’t an accident. Rupe arranged for a guy to T-bone Ray at an intersection. This guy took his job seriously and rammed into him at a high rate of speed. I recall Rupe saying that it was not only a miracle that the crash hadn’t killed them both . . . it was also a damn shame.”

  Ray spat a pulverized, half-masticated sunflower-seed shell out the open driver’s window of his pickup. On the seat beside him was a pair of binoculars, through which he’d watched Dent and Bellamy climb into the shiny blue and white plane with the unfurled Texas flag painted on its nose, and take off into the wild blue yonder.

  He hated like heck that he hadn’t killed Dent when he’d had the chance last night. Not only was he still an obstacle to getting to Bellamy, but without her personal pilot, she couldn’t be flying off to God knew where, leaving Ray to wonder when they’d be back and he’d get another run at them.

  But if he’d taken the time to finish Dent off last night, there was a good chance he’d have been caught, and that would have meant no vengeance for Allen. He needed to keep reminding himself of that and stop second-guessing his snap decision to run.

  He’d gone home, gotten some shut-eye, and, over his morning cereal, had decided to keep watch on the airfield, where Dent eventually came to roost. He’d been staking it out for less than an hour, when, sure enough, they’d shown up. In her car, he noted.

  Even viewed through the binoculars, last night’s handiwork on Dent had shown up bright and bloody. It did his heart good to see the damage he’d inflicted on the flyboy’s pretty face. He chuckled at the thought of how much that slice across his back must hurt.

  But neither the injury or the scare he’d given them was enough. They had to die like Allen had.

  He tossed the bag of sunflower seeds onto the dash and got out of the truck to stretch his legs and get the blood flowing again into his butt, which had gone numb hours ago. But he was gonna stick it out and stay here till they came back, no matter how boring it got.

  Since they’d left, smaller planes had come and gone from the airfield. Through the binoculars, Ray had watched the old man going about his work, filling fuel tanks, situating chocks when a plane taxied in, chewing the fat with the pilots before waving them off. Then he would disappear into the hangar. Ray figured he was repairing the damage done to Dent’s plane, and the thought of that never failed to make him smile.

  His boss continued to call periodically. His voice-mail messages had gotten nastier. Screw him, Ray thought. He was beyond answering to somebody, to anybody. He was a man with a mission, a man to be reckoned with, like the heroes in his favorite movies.

  His hand absently strayed to his left biceps, where he kneaded the tissue that still caused him occasional pain. Beneath the dripping fangs of the tattooed snake the skin was ropy with scars. His whole left side, from shoulder to ankle, had been severely injured in the car wreck.

  The worst of the damage had been done to his left arm. It had been pulverized in the accident, and then further disfigured by all the surgeries required to make it useable. It probably would have been cut off if not for a vascular surgeon who’d wanted to use Ray as a guinea pig.

  As soon as the last skin graft had healed well enough to endure the tattooing needle, Ray had covered the scars with the snake. It had taken several sessions because the scarring was extensive and the snake was an elaborate and intricate pattern, each detailed scale a thing of beauty unto itself.

  But the agony he’d suffered in the hospital, and during all the months of physical therapy, and the pain of getting the tattoo, had been nothing compared to the mental anguish he’d suffered over missing his brother’s trial. He hadn’t been there for Allen when Allen had needed him most.

  His older brother had been the only person in his life Ray had ever loved, because, remarkably, Allen had loved him. Ray was ugly, and he didn’t have a very winning personality, but
Allen had seen past his faults.

  They hadn’t known their father. Their mother had been meaner than sin, and when she died, the two brothers had stayed drunk for a week, not out of grief, but in celebration. After putting her in the ground, it was just the two of them, but Allen hadn’t seemed to mind taking over the parental role.

  He’d been a constant source of encouragement, telling Ray that he was okay, that there were a lot of people uglier than him, that he might not be book smart, but he was street smart, and that, in Allen’s estimation, was the better kind of smarts to have.

  Allen made him feel good about himself.

  After repeating twelfth grade, Ray finally earned a high school diploma, and Allen helped him get a job doing the same thing he did: driving a delivery truck for Lyston Electronics. Things had been going great for them. They had actually looked forward to the Memorial Day barbecue.

  It had started out being the blowout party they’d anticipated and had only turned tragic when Allen began messing around with that Lyston skank. Her pansy of a stepbrother had delivered her invitation to dance, and fatefully Allen had accepted. Up to that point in her book, Bellamy Price had described the day to a T.

  But she’d made out like Allen had approached Susan first, not the other way around. She’d led thousands of readers to believe that he’d taken her into the woods, tried to rape her, and then killed her when she resisted.

  But Allen had told him he’d left her very much alive and laughing at him, and if Allen had said it, then that was what had happened.

  If it hadn’t been for the car wreck, Ray would have testified in court that he’d met Allen as he was making his way through the woods back to the pavilion. He would have sworn it on the Bible. But it would’ve been a lie.

  It wasn’t until after the tornado had ripped through the state park that the two of them had reunited. Ray had staggered back to their car and had fallen to his knees in relief when he saw that Allen, too, had survived by taking cover under the Mustang they’d worked on together to restore. Other vehicles had been sucked up into the funnel and dropped great distances away. Others had been twisted and mangled so they’d looked like wads of tinfoil. But their car had survived, and so had Allen.

  He’d had tears on his face when he pulled Ray into a hug tight enough to squeeze the breath out of him. He was so glad to see him alive and whole he’d pounded him on the back till it hurt. Ray hadn’t minded.

  “Where the hell have you been, little brother?”

  “L-looking for you.”

  That’s the way it had gone down, but when Moody showed up and alleged that Ray had killed that girl, Ray told him, steadfastly, that when they left the woods, together, they’d left with her laughter ringing in their ears.

  The jury never heard that from him. Allen was convicted.

  No one had cared when he got killed except for Ray, who’d blubbered like a baby when he was told. At his brother’s grave, he’d sworn vengeance. Not, however, on the unidentified prisoner who’d shoved that shiv into Allen’s back, but on the people who’d put Allen in that place.

  However, Ray soon learned that vengeance wasn’t that easily achieved.

  The Lystons were seemingly untouchable. They were wealthy and well protected, and after a few clumsy attempts to get close to them, Ray got scared off.

  He had the same problem with Rupe Collier. The guy was a media magnet, always standing in the spotlight.

  Dale Moody disappeared.

  Over time, as years went by, to Ray’s everlasting shame, his resolve had weakened.

  Then Susan’s sister had written that book, and Ray’s hatred had crystallized, becoming pure and diamond-hard again. He focused it on her. She was the worst of the lot. She hadn’t even had the decency to include in her book how badly and unjustly Allen had died.

  Ray wouldn’t stand for it. An eye for an eye. She had to die.

  He was up to the task of taking her life. He’d been making himself ready since the day he got word of Allen’s death. Defying the odds the doctors had given him, he’d done everything humanly possible to restore his arm to full capacity. Ignoring the pain, he’d worked long hours with weights and stretching bands, doing everything and anything that would recondition and strengthen the muscles and tendons. And, by God, those years of training and patience had paid off. He was older, smarter, and better conditioned than he’d been before that car wreck.

  He glanced at the western horizon. It would be sunset soon. Then dark. The airstrip was an isolated place, where something terrible could befall a person alone after the sun went down.

  Bellamy and Dent were skipping off anytime they took a mind to, making it hard for Ray to plan.

  No problem. He had come up with an idea that would get them to stay put for a coupla days. Which would be more than enough time.

  Bellamy was astonished to learn the extent of Rupert Collier’s treachery. “He arranged for a car wreck that almost killed two people? I thought he was nothing except an egotistical buffoon, a laughable caricature of the used-car salesman.”

  “That’s what he wants everybody to think,” Moody said. “He’s so obnoxious he’s disarming.”

  “It won’t work with me,” Dent said. “I can’t wait to talk to this asshole who wanted to plant a pair of panties in my house.”

  “You won’t get anywhere,” Moody said. “He’s laid his groundwork. Underground work, more like it. For every one of his schemes, he’s got a steel safety net. He’s protected himself so well the CIA couldn’t get to him.”

  Reluctantly Bellamy acknowledged that the man wielded some kind of power. “How does he get people to go along with him?”

  “He finds where a person is vulnerable and pushes that button.”

  Dent nodded toward the bottle of whiskey. “Was that your button?”

  “Ambition,” Moody mumbled into his glass as he raised it to his mouth.

  Bellamy didn’t believe him, and she could tell Dent didn’t, either. An ambitious detective would have distinguished himself by exposing a crooked prosecutor, not covering for him.

  Moody lowered his glass and divided a look between them, then expelled a gurgling sigh. “I was having a thing with a woman who worked in the department. I was married. She was young. She got pregnant. Rupe promised to make the mess go away. She resigned, and I never saw her again.”

  “What did he do to her?” Dent asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t want to.”

  Under his breath Dent muttered deprecations.

  Bellamy refocused on the file and asked Moody, “If I read every single thing in here, would I know who killed Susan? Do you know?”

  “No. And I have read every single word in there many times over. I’ve memorized most of it, and the person who killed her is as much a mystery as he was when I left the morgue and took my first drive to the crime scene.”

  “So for all you really know,” Dent said, “it could’ve been Allen. Ray could have been lying to protect his brother when he told you about Susan’s laughter, all that.”

  “Could have been, I suppose. Everybody lies,” he said, looking hard at Dent. Then his gaze moved back to Bellamy. “Except maybe you. You didn’t have much to say about anything.”

  “I didn’t remember anything.”

  Moody squinted at her. “What do you mean?”

  Beneath his breath, Dent said, “Bellamy.”

  But she ignored the subtle warning. “I lost time,” she said to Moody.

  He didn’t take a drink or a draw on his cigarette the whole while she was explaining her memory loss. When she finished, he ground out the cigarette, which had burned down to the filter, and lit another.

  “You testified at trial.”

  “Answering truthfully all the questions put to me. I testified to seeing Susan and Allen leaving the pavilion together. Rupe Collier asked if that was the last time I saw my sister alive, and I told him yes, because it was. The defense attorney didn’t cross-examine. He must have
thought I had nothing else to contribute, and I didn’t.”

  Moody aimed another plume of smoke toward the ceiling, which was so thick with cobwebs they formed a ghostly canopy. “That’s an awfully convenient time period to be erased.”

  “It’s not convenient to me. I want to remember.”

  “Maybe you don’t,” he said.

  “I do.” She left the bed and walked over to an aged map of the state that was tacked to the cheaply paneled wall. With her index finger, she touched the circled star representing Austin, then moved her finger over to the darker green patch denoting the state park. “For eighteen years, this has been the epicenter of my life. I want to move out of it.”

  Coming back around, she said, “Maybe I would have moved past it if Daddy and Olivia had permitted me to go to the spot where Susan was found. I begged them to take me. They refused. They said it would only upset me. So I never saw the place where my sister died.

  “It wasn’t like I wanted to consecrate the ground or anything. She wasn’t a very admirable person.” Homing in on Moody, she said, “I’m sure you deduced that from what people told you about her. I looked up to her because she was pretty and popular and self-confident. All the things I wasn’t. But I can’t honestly tell you that I loved her.”

  She glanced at Dent, who was biting the inside of his cheek and looking as tightly wound as a spring. Obviously he wished she hadn’t told Moody about her memory loss. His fuming gaze telegraphed a warning that she should shut up.

  But she wasn’t finished. “I want to know who killed her, Mr. Moody. Because, regardless of her personality or promiscuity, she didn’t deserve to die that way, with her skirt bunched up around her waist, her bottom bared, lying facedown on the ground, holding on to that dainty little purse she carried that day.” She lowered her head and took a deep, shuddering breath. “She was robbed of all dignity and grace.”

  She stared at a spot on the grimy vinyl floor, her head coming up only when Moody said, “Well you’re wrong about one thing.” He sloshed the last of the whiskey into his glass and swirled it as he talked. “That dainty little purse was found the following day in the top of a tree, fifty yards from where her body was discovered. It had her name stitched inside, so it was brought to me. I took prints off it, but there were only hers. So I returned it to your parents, and they cried, happy to get it back.”