We arrived in our nation’s capital as it was turning midnight. The hotel had been notified that we were getting there pretty late, so they were ready for us. I know my place in this world, and I know God wouldn’t give me anything more than I can handle, but I figured He and I were gonna have to have a little talk about my hotel roommate. Yes, you guessed it: Rachael Donley, the separated alto who made googly eyes at Brother Joe. Since my friend and supposed roommate Gladys was down with the flu, and since Rachael didn’t have a roommate assigned, I got her.
The room was real nice, with two queen-sized beds, a kitchenette, a table and four chairs, and a large, flat-screen TV. Willis and E.J. bought me one of them last year for Christmas, and I gotta say, going back to one of them regular TVs woulda been a burden. Not that I was gonna sit around our nation’s capital and watch TV. No way. I had a few things to say to the president, and I was gonna get in to see him if it hare-lipped Texas.
So me and Rachael Donley got in our room and looked around. I wasn’t sure I could look at her because, well, I didn’t want to judge.
‘This is nice,’ she said.
‘Uh huh,’ I said.
‘Which bed do you want?’ she asked.
‘You choose,’ I said.
‘Do you want to be near the window? Or do you think it would be too cold?’ she asked.
‘What part of “you choose” do you not understand?’ I said, finally looking at her. She seemed a little taken aback by the question, and I felt a little bad. ‘You take the window,’ I said. ‘I do get cold at night.’
‘OK,’ she said, and threw her suitcase on the bed closest to the window. Then she turned to me, smiled, and said, ‘Let me help you with that,’ and picked up my suitcase and put it on my bed.
Hum, I thought. This could work out to my advantage. She thinks I’m some ditsy old bat, too weak to lift a suitcase. Maybe she’ll bring me my coffee in bed in the morning. And the newspaper. There are some things about getting ready to turn eighty that might not be all that bad.
Things had not gone well the night before for Mr Smith and Mr Jones. The cab did take them to Merleville and let them out at the service station there, but took off before Mr Smith realized that the service station, a rundown Texaco, was the only establishment in Merleville. There were a few buildings, but after a second glance they all appeared to be abandoned. The Texaco seemed to be still functioning, but not at nine o’clock at night. It was closed for business. After an hour of standing around, the taxi cab remained the only vehicle they’d seen in Merleville. Mr Smith assumed there were houses somewhere, probably hidden in the trees, but he didn’t feel up to a walk that could end up being miles long. And besides, he wasn’t sure what he would say to anyone who opened a door. The thought did occur to him that he could use his gun and insist on a bed, but he thought he’d get very little sleep in that case. These country people usually had a lot of weapons. He thought seriously about calling Mr Brown, but decided to keep him out of the loop; he needed to prove he could handle these things himself, in case Mr Brown had any better-paid jobs in the future. Besides, when he tried calling earlier, Merleville appeared to be a dead zone. No cell phone service.
So he and Mr Jones sat on the cement drive of the gas station, their backs to one of the bay doors, and tried to sleep. Mr Jones appeared to have no problem, and fell asleep quite readily, his head lolling onto Mr Smith’s shoulder. Mr Smith removed it at once and scooted further away.
Mr Smith finally fell asleep around midnight, but was haunted by unfriendly dreams. He awoke around two a.m. to a voice singing the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ very nicely.
There was a man walking down the road singing that song, with gestures and a bottle of something Mr Smith could only assume was alcohol in his right hand. Mr Smith stood up and yelled, ‘Hey!’ to the man.
The man turned, saw him and stopped, losing his balance for a second, then stood fairly steady, although weaving just a bit. ‘Well, hey, yourself, fella! You know this song?’
‘Of course—’
‘Well, then, let’s sing it together!’ And the man began again, his voice a beautiful, lilting tenor one could imagine doing a wonderful job on ‘Danny Boy.’
‘Can you help us?’ Mr Smith called out.
‘Probably not,’ the man said and smiled. He waved at Mr Smith. Mr Smith waved back.
‘We need to get to La Grange,’ Mr Smith said.
The singer shook his head sadly. ‘We all need to get somewhere, don’t we? La Grange would be a nice place to need to get to.’ His face brightened with a big smile. ‘Hey! Ya know they used to have a big ol’ whorehouse there? The Chicken Ranch! Made a Broadway show out of it! “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” was the name of it. Made a movie, too, with Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton!’ The smile faded and his sad face was again present. ‘She has really beautiful breasts, donja think?’
‘Can you take us to La Grange?’ Mr Smith begged.
‘Don’t have a car,’ the singer said. ‘If I had a car, I couldn’t drive it. Don’t have a driver’s license. See ya!’ he said, and started his sloppy march up the road, breaking into ‘Do a Little Side Step’ from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
Mr Smith sat back down and eventually awoke again at four a.m. when it began to rain. This also awakened Mr Jones and the two hustled to the tiny alcove of the front door of the office of the station, with an overhang of less than three feet, and bundled up as best they could to keep out of the rain.
When Mr Smith awoke next around five a.m., he noticed two things: one, it had stopped raining, and two, a dog was peeing on him. But he didn’t bat an eye. He just closed them both and went back to sleep.
Well, she did bring me a cup of coffee the next morning, made with a Mr Coffee machine in the kitchenette, but I’m thinking she just passed the coffee over the filter without actually putting any in, it was that weak. Just as well I’m not one to complain.
She was walking around OK, so I had to ask, ‘You get them contacts in OK?’
Rachael laughed, and it was a nice laugh, I’ll give her that. ‘Yes, thank you! All’s well in that department.’
She’d told me the night before about her contacts. I’d remarked upon the fact that she’d put a bunch of stuff in the bedside table drawer.
‘You’re gonna go off and forget that stuff,’ I’d said. ‘Sure as shooting.’
‘No, not this stuff! I’m blind as a bat, and these are my glasses,’ she said, holding up a pair of glasses that really didn’t need to be introduced, for goodness’ sake, ‘and this is my contact stuff. My eyes are weird and I can’t wear the soft contacts. Mine are glass and I can only wear them like eight hours without taking them out.’
‘That must have been hard on the bus!’ I said, more sympathetic than I should have been, under the circumstances.
‘It was difficult,’ she said, ‘but with the stop at the Wal-Mart it worked out OK.’
I patted her on the back as we headed down to breakfast.
According to Sister Edith’s itinerary, Monday was travel day, Tuesday was sightseeing day, and the meeting started on Wednesday. Very important business took place during the Southern Baptist National Meeting every year. Like voting on whether or not women could be preachers, and whether or not to baptize homosexuals, or allow them in church at all. Real important stuff like that. But also there was a lot of fun, I’d heard. I’d never been to one and I was pretty much excited, I can tell you.
But today was sightseeing, and I knew we’d be heading to the White House and I had to work on getting me an invite to see the president. I’d contacted my congressman, Avery Mapleton, and told him I’d be visiting, but he didn’t reply, which p.o.’d me some since I called people to vote for him during his last campaign. I figured he owed me. I was gonna handle him first. Then the president. I had some words for him about social security and Medicare. A lot of my friends shunned me for a while because I’d voted for a black man, but personally, I don’t care what color he is as long as he doesn’t mess with my social security and Medicare, know what I mean? So now we had to talk. I needed to keep him on the straight and narrow.
But it was gonna take a while to get there. The itinerary showed us going to Monticello in the morning, and the Smithsonian in the afternoon. She hadn’t even put in a time for the White House. But I figured, the Smithsonian’s a museum, right? How long could we hang around a museum?
‘So what do you want to do today?’ Alicia asked Bess.
Bess shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should wake up Megan.’
They were sitting on the sofa in the family room, watching MTV. E.J. was in her under-the-staircase office, writing about somebody ripping somebody else’s clothes off.
Alicia leaned her head back and screamed toward the stairs, ‘Megan!’
Bess laughed. ‘Oh, that’s gonna work!’
Alicia’s feet were in Bess’s lap. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you by getting up.’
‘Excuse me? Taking your feet off me would not disturb me! Putting your feet on me disturbed me!’
Alicia swung her long legs off Bess’s lap and the sofa, and made it to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Megan!’ she screamed. ‘Get up!’
‘Gawd! You people!’ Megan said, coming to the head of the stairs, a pillow in one hand while the other dragged her comforter. She plodded down the stairs barefoot, came into the family room and, upon seeing Bess on the sofa, said, ‘Get up!’
‘No-oo!’ Bess said, stretching the tiny negative into a two-syllable word.
Alicia had wisely chosen the comfy chair, leaving the loveseat open.
‘Take the loveseat!’ Megan told Bess. ‘My legs are too long for that. I need the sofa!’
‘So cut off your legs,’ Bess said, staring intently at the TV. ‘Ha! Did you see that?’ she squealed, turning her head toward Alicia.
Megan took that opportunity to continue Bess’s momentum to the left and pushed her off the sofa. Megan got on the sofa, bed pillow under her head, comforter covering her body.
‘You bitch!’ Bess shouted from the floor.
‘Bite me,’ Megan said calmly from the comfort of the sofa.
Getting to her feet, Bess said, ‘Mom said I couldn’t bite you anymore, even when you ask for it, but she said nothing about pulling your hair out!’ Which she proceeded to do from the head of the sofa.
‘Get your hands off me!’ Megan yelled. ‘Mom! Help!’
‘Jeez, Megan, leave Mom alone, she’s trying to work!’ Alicia said.
‘Then you help me!’ Megan pleaded, now her back was balanced like a seesaw on the arm of the sofa, her hands on Bess’s hands as they pulled her hair. ‘She’s trying to kill me!’
‘That would be fine, too,’ Bess said through gritted teeth.
‘What the hell is going on in here?’ E.J. asked, coming in. ‘Bess, let go of Megan’s hair!’
Grinning like the Cheshire cat, Bess let go, and Megan’s tentative balance on the seesaw sofa arm was skewed a little to the upper body, and she fell on her head on the hardwood floor of the family room.
When she landed, Bess laughed out loud. Megan jumped up and Bess ran, Megan not that far behind.
‘Girls! Stop it right this minute!’ E.J. shouted.
They didn’t stop.
‘I’m gonna kill you!’ Megan shouted.
‘You’re so fat you’ll never be able to catch me!’ Bess shouted back.
‘Mom! She called me fat!’
E.J. sighed. ‘Bess, don’t call your sister fat.’
‘Fatty, fatty two by four, couldn’t get through the kitchen door! So she starved to death!’ Bess called out, laughing as she made yet another circle around the family room.
‘I’ve got five dollars,’ Alicia said lazily. ‘Y’all got any money? We could go to the movies.’
The other two stopped, mid-run. Bess fell onto the loveseat and stuck her hand in her pocket. ‘Ooo, a ten!’
‘Let me go check my purse,’ Megan said, and headed out to the foyer where all the purses hung on the coat rack. She came back in, her purse under her arm, her wallet in her hands. ‘Three, four, ooo, a five, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. I have twelve dollars.’
‘Bring in my purse, wouldja?’ Bess asked.
‘Mine, too,’ Alicia said.
‘Get ’em yourselves,’ Megan said, ‘I have to go change.’
The girls dug through their purses and came up with a total of thirty-eight dollars. Bess had her original ten, Megan twelve, and Alicia, who’d had a five in her pocket, found six more in her purse. All together it was enough to get the three of them into the seven-dollar matinee and buy a large popcorn to share. Megan came down dressed for the movies in skin-tight jeans, a tank top and sweaters over her arm. She handed one to each of her sisters and kept one for herself.
‘It gets cold in the theater,’ she explained to her mom.
‘I understand,’ her mom said.
They then proceeded to pull sodas out of the refrigerator and stick them in the bottom of their purses.
‘OK, Mom, we’re off,’ Bess said.
‘Do you know what’s showing and what time it’s showing?’ E.J. asked.
‘No,’ all three girls said in unison. Megan said, ‘It doesn’t really matter, Mom. We’ll find something once we get there.’
‘Well, don’t get caught with those sodas. And remember to cough when you open them.’
‘Yes, ma’am, we’ve only been doing this since we were like five!’ Bess said.
And they were out the door.
The next morning had gone better for Mr Smith and Mr Jones. A trucker pulled into the Texaco station fairly early and agreed to take them as far as La Grange. From there it was a piece of cake finding a rental car agency (a different company than the last one, of course), and heading back to Black Cat Ridge.
They’d parked three doors down on the same side of the street as the Pugh home, hopeful that the cop on the other side of the Pughs wouldn’t see them. They’d been there almost half an hour when Mr Smith sat up in the new rental. ‘It’s them!’ he said excitedly. ‘They’re getting in the minivan!’
‘The one in the middle,’ Mr Jones said, ‘she’s the one that’s got the satchel thing.’
‘Yes, that’s right, Mr Jones,’ Mr Smith said.
Mr Jones looked excitedly at Mr Smith. ‘Now we can get the satchel!’
Mr Smith shook his head and gritted his teeth. ‘The satchel is in the school, remember? We can’t get it from them today. Maybe tomorrow.’
‘But what if they go to the school? What if that’s where they’re headed right now?’
Mr Smith thought about it for a moment, then pulled out after the minivan as it left the driveway. ‘OK, so we’ll follow them for a little while.’
It was Bess’s turn to drive the minivan. She pulled the seat up as far as it would go and started the engine. As they pulled into the Metroplex’s parking lot, she asked her sisters, ‘What color was that car Mrs Luna said was parked across the street from the house?’
‘Blue?’ Alicia said.
‘Yeah, I think so,’ Megan agreed.
‘Hum,’ Bess said, pulling into a parking spot only four city blocks from the theater.
‘What “hum”?’ Megan said, turning around in her shotgun seat to look behind them. ‘I don’t see a blue car!’
‘Me neither,’ Bess said, ‘but that white one has been following us since our street.’
She turned off the ignition and all three girls watched the white car slowly drive by.
‘Two dark-haired men,’ Alicia said. ‘One is taller – at least, he sits taller than the other.’
‘Is that what Mrs Luna described?’ Megan asked.
‘You really just don’t listen, do you?’ Bess said in disgust.
‘Get off my back!’ Megan shouted.
‘Hey, guys! Give it a rest! Is that them or not?’ Alicia said.
‘I dunno,’ Bess said. She sighed. ‘Let’s just go see what’s playing, OK?’
After the girls left, I fixed myself some lunch – a small salad and some fruit – and sat down in the family room to watch the noon news. After finding out we were in for at least seven more days of sunny weather, with highs of one hundred degrees for the third day in a row, and that one of the U.T. coaches had passed out during practice the day before from the heat (and he was just sitting on the sidelines), the real news came on.
‘A couple of days ago we reported that a man fell or jumped from the parking garage at the Driscoll Hotel in downtown Austin. The police released a statement today, saying that from information gleaned from the medical examiner and the crime scene investigators, they are declaring the death of James Unger from Houston a homicide.’
‘Shit!’ I said.
‘The report states that it appears Mr Unger was pushed. His wife, Elizabeth Unger, vice president of Pharmacopia, the pharmaceutical company owned by the Ungers, is still unavailable for comment. In other news …’
I muted the TV, picked up my iPhone and dialed Willis’s number at work. ‘Guess what?’ I said when he answered.
‘The kids have all run away and we are allowed to use their college money to retire and move to the South Pacific,’ he said.
I sighed. ‘Ah, if only. No. That guy – James Unger?’
‘What guy?’
‘The guy at the parking garage at the Driscoll!’ I said. How could he not know what guy?
‘Oh, yeah, the guy who jumped or fell—’
‘Neither!’ I said with an ‘ah ha’ to my voice. ‘He was pushed!’
There was a silence on the other end of the line. ‘Oh, come on, Willis! I’m not going to go rushing back to Austin to solve the case! Give me a break!’
‘Every time I give you a break, you take a mile,’ he said.
‘That’s an inch, idiot. And besides, who the hell are you to give me anything? I am woman!’
‘Don’t roar,’ he said. ‘Please don’t roar.’
‘Then don’t start that sexist crap on me now!’ I said. ‘I called you because we were following the story, and this is a new development! That’s all. Now I’m hanging up.’
‘Please, don’t hang up on my accou—’
I think he was going to say account, but I really didn’t want to hear it. The issue of me getting involved in murder cases had not been resolved. We just didn’t talk about it. Since the upheaval of the summer there hadn’t been another murder so everything had been hunky-dory up until now. Now there was a murder. But we were very, very peripherally involved. So peripherally involved as to be totally uninvolved. So what was his problem? Did he really think I was going to jump in my Audi and rush off to Austin to SOLVE THE CASE? Jeez, was I Nancy Drew?
But jumping in my Audi and rushing off to anywhere wasn’t out of the question. That would be fun. I sat a while, the TV on mute, contemplating places I could rush off to in my Audi. Some would include Willis rushing with me, some not. As was so often the case, I wished I had a close girlfriend I could rush off with, but since the death of Terry Lester, Bess’s birth mom, there hadn’t really been any to speak of. Elena Luna, the Codderville cop who lived next door, was the closest thing I had, but we spent most of our time sniping at each other, like an old married couple. Hell, Willis and I have been married for close to twenty-five years, and we don’t snipe at each other as much as Luna and I do. Over the summer I’d got sort of tight with the woman who lived across the street, but the family had moved.
So basically I had no girlfriend to jump in the shotgun side of my Audi and rush off to have an adventure with somewhere. I suppose I could take one of my daughters, or even my mother-in-law … I got up and took my lunch dishes back into the kitchen. For obvious reasons, neither of those two ideas would work. I couldn’t take just one daughter, I’d have to take all three; and my mother-in-law? Really? Where had that thought come from? I mean, yeah, we’ve gotten along better over the past few years, but still and all. Why would I even think that? Luckily she was either in D.C. or on her way for some Baptist thing, so I couldn’t even be tempted. Getting up, I thought again about cultivating a friendship with Lacy Kent, who I’d bonded with at the school yesterday. She seemed like fun.
I headed back into my office under the stairs to have my heroine, Naomi, the passionate and exotic Jewess, seduce young Daniel, the heir to the throne of Maldovia.
It was a couple of hours later when all three girls came running in the back door screaming, ‘Mom!’
It was so loud and so forceful that the phrase I was typing, ‘width and breadth’ came out ‘width and brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.’ I jumped up and ran into the family room.
‘What?’ I yelled back.
But they were already through the family room and into the living room at the front of the house. When I got there, they were standing to the side of the front window, peaking out at the street one at a time through a crack in the wooden Venetian blinds.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Shhhhh!’ Bess said, index finger to mouth. She hit the floor and crawled below the windowsill to the other side of the window, where she stood up and peeked through a crack in the blinds on that side.
Alicia, who was the odd girl out at the moment, ran up to me, took my hands and forcibly lowered me to the sectional sofa.
‘Mom, listen!’ she said in an excitable stage whisper. ‘Those men in the blue car?’
I started to stand up but she said, ‘Listen! They changed cars! They followed us to the movies and when we got out they followed us home! And they’re out there right now!’
I grabbed my hands back, went to the window, and yanked the cord that pulled the blinds all the way up. A white car was parked across the street, in front of the McClures’ house with its ‘for sale’ sign, and the guys in it favored Luna’s description. With my girls flanking me, we stared out at the white car, which started up immediately and drove off, as I wrote down the license plate number.
‘Uh oh,’ Mr Jones said.
‘Shut up!’ Mr Smith said.
‘But now they know we’re watching ’em,’ Mr Jones said.
‘Shut up!’ Mr Smith repeated.
‘Mr Brown’s gonna be all kinds of mad,’ Mr Jones said.
‘Shut the fuck up!’ Mr Smith screamed.
‘Jeez, ya don’t have to get pissy about it,’ Mr Jones said.
Mr Smith gritted his teeth for the umpteenth time and drove out of the neighborhood.
I called Luna at her office at the police station in Codderville.
‘Lieutenant Luna,’ she said upon answering. She used to just say ‘Luna,’ but with the promotion, she’s all about rank. I’m embarrassed for her.
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘The blue car is now white. They were parked in front of the McClures’ house.’ I read off the license plate number. ‘They followed the girls to the movies, waited for them, then followed them back! What are you going to do about this?’ I demanded.
‘Not my jurisdiction. Call the Black Cat Ridge police,’ she said, and hung up.
I said some words I shouldn’t say in front of my children, even though they’re old enough now to teach me some new ones, hung up, and redialed the Black Cat Ridge police – the 311 number, not the 911.
I explained the situation, told the lady on the other end of the phone that Luna had witnessed these men sitting in their car outside my house and then attempting to break in. And that the same men had followed my girls to and from the movies today and had been sitting outside the house in another car just now. I gave her the license plate number of the white car they were driving.
‘Did they actually break into your home?’ she asked.
‘Well, no—’
‘Did they park their vehicle in your driveway?’ she asked.
‘Ah, no, but—’
‘Did they speak to your daughters?’ she asked.
‘No, but listen—’
‘Ma’am, I don’t see that there’s anything we can do about this at the moment. If they break a law, we’ll be happy to—’
‘But they trespassed!’
‘Ma’am?’
‘They walked up my driveway!’ I said.
‘Is your driveway posted?’
‘Posted?’
‘Is there a “no trespassing” sign posted at the front of your driveway?’ she asked.
‘No, of course not—’
‘Then they did not trespass, ma’am. Please call us back if—’
‘If what?’ I shouted. ‘They attack one of my children? Break into my home? Kill us all in our sleep?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said. ‘Any of the above.’
And the line went dead in my hands.
Boy, was I pissed!
‘Go steal that license plate,’ Mr Smith said to Mr Jones. ‘Front and back.’
‘Huh?’ Mr Jones said.
‘Go get those fucking license plates, moron! Are you deaf as well as stupid?’ Mr Smith shouted.
Mr Jones squared his broad shoulders. He’d had just about enough of Mr Smith and his attitude. ‘That was really uncalled for, Mr Smith,’ he said. ‘And if you want those “fucking” license plates stolen, I suggest you do it yourself!’ Mr Jones crossed his arms over his chest and looked out the passenger-side window.
‘You are fucking kidding me, right?’ Mr Smith said between his gritted teeth. ‘Tell me I didn’t hurt your goddam feelings!’
Mr Jones said nothing, just continued to stare out his window, his body language speaking volumes.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Mr Smith said and got out of the white rental.
They were in the parking lot of the new Wal-Mart that had just opened in Codderville. The place was packed and they had their pick of vehicles. Mr Smith had picked a fairly late-model white Ford – a Focus, not a Taurus like their rental, but close enough. Using the screwdriver setting on his Swiss Army knife, he unscrewed the front plate, threw it in the back seat of the car, got in, and drove off down the row of parked cars. Mr Jones did not ask what he was doing. Mr Jones was still not looking at him.
Mr Smith circled the row and came back to the white Ford Focus. Stopping the white Taurus two cars down, he walked up to the Focus, then went round the back and unscrewed that license plate, thinking how much easier this kind of thing was in states that didn’t require a front license plate. Mr Smith threw the back plate in the back seat of the Taurus with the front plate, and took off.
Several miles later, Mr Smith pulled into the parking lot of an office building, and proceeded to change the Taurus’s plates to those of the Focus. Let it be noted that Mr Jones did not help.
‘I’m coming home,’ Willis said.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘The girls are pretty nervous.’ That was not exactly true. The girls were climbing the walls, but more from the excitement of it all than fear.
I’d called Willis to let him know what had happened, and informed him about the response from the Black Cat Ridge police.
‘That’s because I won that contract!’ Willis had said.
‘What contract?’ I’d asked.
‘The Chemco deal,’ he said. ‘Barry’s son-in-law was also bidding, but Dave always bids way too high. Meanwhile, Barry and his wife are supporting their daughter and Dave and it’s all my fault? I don’t THINK so!’
Barry Donaldson was the chief-of-police for the small Black Cat Ridge police department.
‘Well, just come home,’ I’d said. ‘We’ll sort it out together.’
And he did. Come home, that is. And he’d stewed in it all the way home. By the time he walked in the door, if Barry Donaldson had been in the room, it’s a possibility he wouldn’t have made it out alive.
‘I’m calling that son-of-a-bitch! He can’t ignore you—’
‘Honey, I didn’t even talk to Barry! I talked to a dispatcher.’
He stopped, turned and looked at me. ‘Why didn’t you call Barry directly?’ he asked.
‘He’s your friend, not mine,’ I said.
‘He’s not my friend – we just shoot hoops once a week.’
‘That’s certainly more of a relationship than I have with him.’
‘So why didn’t you call me so I could call him?’ Willis demanded.
I sighed. ‘Because I didn’t think about it! I called Luna first, and she said it wasn’t her jurisdiction, that I should call Black Cat Ridge police, so I just dialed their three-one-one number.’
Willis pulled out his iPhone and looked at it, then put it back in his pocket and went into my office, coming out seconds later with the tiny Black Cat Ridge phone directory. He sat on the sofa, pulled out his phone yet again, and dialed the number.
‘Chief Donaldson, please. Willis Pugh calling.’
I sat down in an easy chair opposite him. We waited.
Maybe I should take this waiting period to explain the existence of Black Cat Ridge, the town in which we lived on the north side of the Texas Colorado River. It is what they call a ‘planned community.’ Codderville, on the south side of the Colorado River, was more haphazard. It came about as a cattle-drive stop back in the 1800s, then got bypassed by the railroad and almost died out, only to have a highway come through in the 1930s, which perked it up again, only to be bypassed once more by the freeway system in the 1960s. But by the 1960s, people had dug themselves in: there were some businesses, lots of churches, retail, etc. Codderville, although sleepy, remained.
Then came a developer who saw an expanse of wooded acreage on the other side of the Colorado, and thought: trees! Must destroy now! But, of course, being a smart developer/tree killer, he opted to keep enough trees to make the homes costly. And not only homes: churches and grammar schools, and retail. Lots and lots of retail. From the beginning we had a fire substation, manned by two firemen from the Codderville station and one junior fire truck. The real fire truck would come over the river and through the former woods if needed. Which would only take like twenty minutes or so. Not enough time for the entire subdivision to burn down, but close. Luckily, the few fires the substation dealt with were small. They mostly tended boo-boos, rescued the occasional loose-riding lawnmower, and drove people to the emergency room at the Codder Memorial Hospital.
That was at the beginning. We now had a middle and a high school, a full fire station that employed four full-time firefighters and a list of eighteen volunteer firefighters (of which, I’m proud to say, Willis and I are two), and a full-time police department with a police chief and five police officers, backed up, when necessary, by the Codder County sheriff’s department. And the fire station has an ambulance and two ENTs to drive people to the emergency room at Codder Memorial Hospital. We don’t have our own hospital. Yet.
I perked up when Willis perked up. I told him to put his iPhone on speaker and he did. He said, ‘Barry? Hey, got a problem here and I’m hoping you can help out.’
‘Yeah, you backing out of tomorrow’s scrimmage? I wouldn’t be surprised the way we beat your asses last week.’
‘Yeah, good game. But tomorrow’s gonna be a totally different story, my friend.’
‘Ah, you fire guys got no balls,’ the police chief said.
‘Hey, drive by sometime – you can hear our balls clanging all the way out in the street.’
‘Sheee-it!’ Barry said. ‘You calling just to harass me, or you wanna gloat about taking the food out of my daughter’s mouth?’
‘Sorry, Barry. I’m just a better engineer, what can I say?’ Willis said.
‘No, son, you’re a better negotiator. Dave’s an asshole when it comes to bidding. Ah, hell, let’s face it: Dave’s an asshole all the time.’
‘True,’ Willis said, and I gave him the move it along signal. ‘Reason I’m calling, Barry, is that we got a problem here.’ And he went on to explain about Luna seeing the guys parked across the street two days straight and them coming up the driveway to our back door on the second day. And how, today, the same two guys were seen by our daughters in a different car following them to the movies and then following them home.
‘What the fuck’d you do, Pugh?’ Barry said.
‘Me? I didn’t do squat!’ Willis said, his voice rising in tenor as well as volume.
‘You get the license number on the new car? I know Luna got the one on the blue car.’
I handed Willis the slip of paper I’d written the plate number down on. He read it off to Barry.
‘OK, great,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna call Luna, see what she says, just to confirm everything, then I’m gonna come out and talk to the girls. That OK?’
‘Yeah, that’s fine.’
And they rang off.
‘He doesn’t trust you?’ I asked my husband.
‘What?’ he said.
‘He has to call Luna to verify?’
‘Let it go, babe,’ he said.
‘What? He thinks we’d lie about this?’ Now my voice was rising in tenor as well as volume.
‘Of course not,’ Willis said in that condescending tone he gets when he thinks I’m being unreasonable. God, I hate that. Then he put his arm on my shoulder, which is condescending squared. ‘I think he just wants to get it all first hand, that’s all.’
‘First hand this!’ I said, removing his hand from my shoulder and showing him a well-known hand gesture most of us learn as kids.