SIX YEARS AGO, KENNY Whitney had married one of the most beautiful girls in the valley, and set her up inside the huge Tudor-style home he’d built for her, and expected her to stay happy while he went right on with his single style of life. Lots of whiskey. Lots of poker. Lots of fights. Lots of girls.
The house was eight miles southeast of town. Some of the rural mailboxes still wore their Christmas decorations. The cows in the barnyards exhaled steamy breath that joined with the vapor that rose from their cow pies. The chimneys of the farmhouses all had snakes of gray smoke uncoiling into the blue sky, and here and there yellow school buses were picking up shivering little kids hugging books and lunch pails. My own personal pride and joy had been a Roy Rogers lunch pail, with Roy’s arm slung around Trigger’s neck and a six-gun dangling from his fingers. That was until Hopalong Cassidy appeared on the TV screen in 1948. Kids are fickle. I went all out for Hoppy. Hat, shirt, jeans, socks, boots, six-shooters and, if I’m not mistaken, underwear. Who’d be crazy enough to go anywhere without his Hoppy underwear?
Nothing remarkable about the Tudor. No cars visible on the long drive or on the apron of the three-stall garage. No tire tracks in the light snow that had dusted the town last night, nobody in or out for some time. Then I noticed the chimney, the only chimney I’d seen this morning without smoke.
I swung into the drive. Nothing moved. I sat in the rag-top scouting out this side of the house. I didn’t notice the frost at first. I did notice the downstairs window that was missing a pane, jagged edges of glass rimming the interior of the frame, the kind of damage caused by something hurled through the window.
A sweet-faced border collie came around the far side of the garage. She looked hungry and scared and lost, sniffing the ground. She came over to the car and I opened the door. Even in the cold, she smelled sweetly canine. I got out of the ragtop and rubbed the collie’s face lightly, trying to get her warm. The temperature was somewhere around ten degrees above zero.
My new friend stayed right with me all the way across the back drive, right up until somebody poked a rifle out of an upstairs window and fired at me.
The collie jerked away to the right and I threw myself on the snow and started rolling to the left.
Then the second shot exploded.
The criminology and police courses I took at the University of Iowa weren’t all held in the classrooms. We’d spent a week at the police academy in Des Moines and had learned a number of things about facing down an armed opponent. I even did pretty well in boxing, which was an elective you could take at night.
I had my .45 out and had rolled flat against the house, over some prickly bushes. He’d have a hard time getting me in range from the upstairs window now.
In town, the rifle shots would attract instant attention. Out here they’d simply be attributed to a hunter.
“Get the hell off my land,” he shouted. No mistaking the voice. Kenny Whitney. King of the World. Just ask him.
“Your aunt sent me.”
“I don’t care who sent you. You don’t get off my land, I’ve got the right to shoot you.”
“I hate to tell you this, but that isn’t how the law works, Kenny.”
“Yeah, well, then maybe it’s how the law should work.”
I stood up and brushed myself off. Unless I stepped away from the house, I was safe. “I want to talk to you, Kenny.”
“You go to hell.”
Then something strange happened. There was a silence, a long one, and then I heard a man sobbing. Kenny was crying. Out here in the boonies, a beautiful if cold sunny day, the chink of tire chains in the distance, a big United plane coming in low, preparing to land in Cedar Rapids—and Kenny “Black-Eye” Whitney was crying. I probably should have enjoyed the sound, hearing him as vulnerable as the rest of us humans. But it cut into me, that sound, the grief and horror in it. And then the shot came and I didn’t have any doubt who the target was. The target was Kenny himself.