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  HOT IN DECEMBER

  © 2013 Joe R. Lansdale

  Dark Regions Digital edition

  Cover design © 2013 by Keri Knutson

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  "Hot in December is classic Lansdale: A rough, violent tale of blood and revenge told in his own self’s one-of-a-kind voice. Highly recommended." - Horror World

  "(Hot in December) is written and sized to be read briskly, with little stop – perfect for long road trips or waits – and Lansdale is brutal in shoving the reader deeper and deeper into Tom’s troubles. By the time you hit page 3, you will keep turning until the final page." - Bloody Disgusting

  For Karen and Keith

  “I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in

  a tight place is taking considerable many risks …”

  —HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Mark Twain

  One

  Life-and-death issues sometimes start as simple things.

  We were out in the backyard, me and my wife, and I was standing at the barbecue grill with a spatula in my hand, wearing a faded apron with KISS THE COOK written across it. I had managed to get a few burger patties off the grill, catching only one of them on fire and turning it black as a lump of coal. I like to grill now and again, but I’m no good at it, and I was thinking about that when I heard a car squeal around the corner.

  Leaning around the edge of the house, I looked over the fence and out at the street just in time to see the car make the corner with a scream of tires and a grind of gears, and that’s when I saw the car hit the woman crossing the street with her dog. Hit her with a sound that made me sick to my stomach.

  From where I was standing I had a good look at the car and the driver, and I saw the woman try to jump back, jerking the dog on the leash as she did, but it was too late. The car hit her and knocked her flying out of my sight.

  I threw down the spatula, pushed my wife Kelly aside, jumped over a Big Wheel, charged through the back door and through the house and out the front. The car was gone, but the woman was knocked up in our yard and her arm was twisted in a funny way behind her head and one leg was thrown up high and over her shoulder. Her jeans were halfway torn off and she had lost a shoe. I hadn’t realized it when I saw the accident, my eyes being locked on the driver for some reason, but I knew her. We all knew each other on that block. It was Madeline Roan; Maddy, we all called her, a vivacious redhead, what in the old days they used to call a looker, and about as nice a person as you could want to meet.

  It didn’t take a doctor to know at first sight that she was dead. Thirty-five years old and crossing the little street that parted our subdivision, and she was dead as a brick.

  I saw the dog had been missed and was cowering across the way, lying down with its belly against the grass in the yard that belonged to the Roans. The dog was a white miniature poodle named Yip, and I have no idea how it avoided being run over and killed as well.

  It was December, but in East Texas the weather was hot as fresh-poured asphalt. In contrast, the streets and yards and houses were decorated with Christmas lights, snowmen, Santas in sleighs, the usual holiday riggings. People were coming out of their air-conditioned houses to see what had happened. I had moved over close to Maddy, hoping to be wrong, that she would just have a broken arm and leg.

  I wasn’t wrong. Her eyes were already going glassy. Her mouth was open slightly and there was blood in one corner and saliva in the other. There were grass stains along the side of one cheek. There wasn’t a wound that I could see, but my guess was the inside of her body was in the condition of a glass shop after a tornado had blown through it. In her left hand was a plastic bag. It took me a moment to put that together, but then I realized she had it there so she could pick up her dog’s poop with it, turn it outside in and have it ready for the trash.

  Her husband, Ross, came out of their house then, came running across the street, screaming so high-pitched it was as if he were a panther. By that time Kelly had come out of our home, seen what had happened and gone back inside to dial 911. I was glad our little daughter, Sue, was away visiting her grandmother. It was traumatic enough for a grown person, but a child …

  The car that had killed Maddy wasn’t present. It was long gone.

  It seemed like forever and a day before the ambulance got there and the cops came moseying up to our yard. There were several of them, and they went this way and that, looking for her shoe, photographing the street to see if there were tire marks, I suppose. There weren’t any. The driver hadn’t made any kind of attempt to slow down. He had been gearing up as he made the corner, not gearing down.

  They loaded poor Maddy in an ambulance, though the emergency was long past, and then two of the cops in plain clothes came over to see me. Behind them, across the way, I could see Ross near-collapsed on the curb in front of his house, crying savagely. The poor guy sounded like a torture victim, and I guess in a way, he was. Yip was in his lap, shaking like he had some kind of vibrator up his ass. There were two cops with Ross. One standing, one sitting by his side on the curb, about halfway holding him up.

  I invited the cops in the house and without really thinking about it offered them coffee. Kelly offered them something else, juice, water. We didn’t seem to know how to talk to them about seeing our neighbor killed, didn’t know how to act. Death I had seen, but this kind of thing, a neighbor and her dog crossing the street, getting hit by a car for no good reason other than whoever was in the car was driving too fast, that was different.

  I wondered if the cops were used to that kind of thing, stunned people. Maybe they were just as shocked as we were. Laborde was a good-sized town, a small city, so it’s possible they had seen a lot more than I thought.

  Kelly offered them a spot on the couch, and when we were all sitting, one of the cops, who was wearing a dark, loose shirt with a square-cut bottom, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, said his name was Lt. Ernest and asked us our names and asked if we saw what happened.

  Kelly said she hadn’t, but I had, and I told them what I saw.

  “Do you know what she was doing?” Ernest asked.

  “Walking her dog,” I said. “Far as I could tell.”

  They nodded.

  “Can you identify the car, Mr. Chan?”

  “I can,” I said. “It was a blue Cadillac. I don’t know what year. I don’t know cars that well.”

  The other man, who was fat and wearing a Hawaiian shirt and looked like his feet hurt and so did his job, said, “What about the driver, you get a look at him?”

  “I did,” I said. “I saw him really well. It seemed like his face was close to me. It wasn’t, but it seemed that way. Adrenaline, I guess. But I got a look. A man, in his twenties, kind of dark-looking.”

  “Hispanic?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

  “So you can identify him if you saw him again?” the dark shirt cop said.

  “I can … I did
n’t catch your name.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t give it. Sergeant Allen. You knew the victim?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “She was our next door neighbor,” Kelly said. “Jesus, no one’s supposed to drive like that, that fast. Not here in the subdivision, there are signs everywhere.”

  I looked down. My hands were trembling.

  “She has a daughter, our daughter’s age,” Kelly said. “It’s not fair.”

  “No,” said Allen, “it isn’t.”

  Two

  They asked us to come downtown, give an official on-record statement, and we did. I drove, but I don’t recall the drive. I faintly remember the Christmas banners and lights that hung over the streets in preparation for the holidays, but considering what had just happened, they seemed surreal, out of place, like some kind of cruel cosmic joke. Next thing I remember we were walking past the dispatcher, a little man with a bald head. He looked up at us, and then Lieutenant Ernest was there, beckoning to us, and a moment later we were in a small room that was a little too warm. There was a large window that looked out at the hall in the police station, and there was a table and some folding chairs. There was a little counter and some cabinets above it. There was a pot of coffee on the counter, and I could smell how stale the coffee was from across the room. The odor made my stomach feel sick. I looked down at the table. Some wiseass, probably being interrogated, had carved his name in the table with something sharp. It read Leonard.

  Sergeant Allen brought in some thick books, said, “He may not be in here. Good chance our guy is just some idiot who chose to drive too fast for whatever reason and fate caught up with him today, not to mention your poor neighbor. But it might be someone that’s been in trouble. Seems someone starts out in trouble, they tend to stay in trouble. We could set you in front of the computer, let you scan that, but I still think the books are best.”

  He put the books down in front of me. Kelly, who was sitting by me, reached out and took hold of my arm. I patted it. The books were stacked on top of each other. I pushed them aside and took one off the top and started looking.

  There were some scary-looking people in there. Kind that look like they did just what you think they did. There were others who looked like their high-school yearbook pictures had been put in there by mistake. But mostly they all looked startled, like they had been caught with their hands in their pants.

  Lieutenant Ernest came in and sat down at the table, then got up and got some coffee and sat back down. He suddenly seemed to remember his manners, asked if we wanted coffee. We didn’t. I kept looking through the books, but didn’t recognize anybody.

  Then, I swear, on the last page of the last book, there he was. He looked a little younger, but it was him. The dark-skinned guy, Italian-looking, or maybe just richly tanned. Dark hair, dark eyes. I said, “This one.”

  I turned the book around and the two cops looked at it.

  “Well,” said Ernest. “Well, well.”

  “You know him?” I said.

  “Oh yeah. He’s part of what you might call a crime family. We’re not talking mafia, well, maybe Dixie Mafia, the redneck equivalent, but they’re bad enough. What’s left of them around here. They used to have a slick boy named Cox ran it all, but his son got him in some shit over a girl, and so on. Couple of tough boys from here, private investigators of a sort, caught up with him. They helped put him away and they aren’t even cops.”

  “They’re meddlers,” said Allen.

  “Yeah, but that’s neither here nor there,” Ernest said. “Thing is, the organization got taken over by a fellow named Pye Anthony.”

  “They don’t need to know all that,” Allen said.

  “Yeah,” Ernest said. “They do. Here’s the thing, you identify this fellow, then you got to do it in court.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Just listen,” Ernest said. “So, you do that. Eyewitness identifications aren’t taken as seriously as they once were. All those doubts about how people say they saw someone for sure, and then DNA proves it wasn’t them.”

  “It was him,” I said.

  “I believe you,” Ernest said. “I believe he ran over that woman because he was out joyriding where he shouldn’t have been, drunk would be my guess, or just didn’t give a damn, or a combination of both. He ran over her and kept right on going. You identify him, we might be able then to connect the car. We see if it’s got a dent or two, maybe some DNA from the dead lady in the grillwork, caught up the tires. Maybe with that we can make a case. I think we can. It’s not like he’s going to look good on the stand, all the things he’s been into. He’s already got a past, some of it dealing with cars, stolen ones, ones he wrecked drunk driving. So he’s got a history, a dark one. That works in our favor.”

  “You’re talking a lot,” Allen said.

  “I’m talking more than I normally should,” Ernest said, “but I want Mr. and Mrs. Chan to know where I’m coming from, why I’m telling them this. You see, these people are bad people. I mean really bad people. I don’t mean they talk bad language or spit on the sidewalk or pee in someone’s soup when they aren’t looking. You testify against them, they’re not going to like it. Pye Anthony isn’t going to like it especially, because the man you identified is Will Anthony, and he’s Pye’s son.”

  “Are you saying we’re in danger?” Kelly asked.

  “Pye is not a nice man, but I’m thinking we can put some police on your house, some protection. You won’t need it until we arrest him, maybe not even then, but when it’s clear who’s going to come forward and point a finger at him, well, maybe then. You see what I’m talking about?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I see.”

  “You’ll still testify?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “All right,” Ernest said, nodding like he was trying to shake his head off his neck. “We’ll see if we can set up a line-up, and you come in and see if you can still identify him. I just want you to know what you’re doing.”

  “Christmas holidays are coming up,” Allen said. “Your little girl, you could put her somewhere safe, maybe keep her with the grandmother, and we could put some guards on the house, that kind of thing, and once we got him nailed, we’ll push for a speedy trial, telling the judge the situation, and we can maybe get the guy nailed quick.”

  “Does it ever work like that?” Kelly said. “Swift justice?”

  “Now and again,” Ernest said. “I’ll ask you again. You still want to testify?”

  I thought about Maddy, the way she had been knocked through the air, the wreck of her body. The face of that driver, not so much concerned or frightened, but more like some kid with a video game, knocking down the last warrior, heading for home.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll identify him. I’ll testify.”

  Three

  We went past the bald dispatcher again, out to our car, and then home, and by the next day they had hauled Will Anthony in for a lineup. It was all just a formality, really. I had already identified him on the page, but they wanted to see if I was sure, so they’d have all their ducks in a row. I was asked to drive over, and then I went in and sat in darkness, looked through a one-way glass and it was easy. The others were kind of the same build and look, but it was him, Will Anthony, the guy in the photo.

  Later, back in the coffee room, with just me and Lieutenant Ernest and a cup of bad coffee apiece, he said, “They don’t know who you are, but you ought to watch yourself, and if it gets down to it, you can change your mind and back out, you feel you should.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “You work for the law or not?”

  “I do,” he said. “But I’m a father first.”

  “Wouldn’t Pye be after you too? You’re one helping send Will to jail. I mean, more you than me, actually.”

  “They know we’re their adversaries. Kill me, another cop steps up and takes my place. They get rid of you, well, no testifying, no saying in court ‘that’s the man,’ a
nd if we don’t have that, we have a car he repaired, a bad rap sheet and no eyewitness. So you could be putting your nuts in the blender. See what I’m saying.”

  “But you are offering me protection?”

  “I am, but we’re cops, and there’s a limit to what we can do and how long we can do it. We’re not the National Guard.”

  Something in that made me more than a little concerned, but I said, “I’ll still testify.”

  “Then it’s done,” Ernest said.

  Four

  Kelly and I were at the sink. I was rinsing the dinner dishes and she was putting them in the dishwasher.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Kelly said. She was talking to me like I was one of her kindergarten students. “Lieutenant Ernest sounded less than certain about protecting us.”

  “What about Maddy? What about her child?”

  “What about us?” Kelly said, pausing with a dish in her hand. “What about our child?”

  My stomach boiled a little.

  “We’ll be all right,” I said.

  “Would you bet your life on that?” Kelly said.

  “Mine, not yours or Sue’s.”

  “Betting yours means you’re betting ours,” she said, put the dish in the washer, closed it up, and went upstairs. I stood there with dishes still in the sink. I rinsed them and opened up the washer, put them in, poured myself a cup of coffee, sat at the table and thought about things. The coffee went cold in the cup.

  Will Anthony did it. Ran over Maddy like she was a chicken crossing the road. Accident, on purpose, whatever, he did it and didn’t care, didn’t stop. I didn’t testify, he’d get away. I had protection promised, but what was their protection worth? One man in a car sleeping out front? Maybe sleeping on the couch. Another cop in the backyard, if the budget allowed?