Cold in July Page 17

  I sang “Home on the Range” and went downstairs.

  The phone rang.

  It was a siding salesman. I told him no and hung up. I looked at the phone a little while. But not long. I had learned my lesson. I had another beer and went to the bathroom.

  The phone rang, of course.

  I got my pants snapped and zipped without tearing off any important parts of my person, and answered it on the third ring.

  “We’d like one of them pepperoni pizzas, all the goddamn fixings, only cut them little fishes off of it. They make me want to throw up.”

  “That’s funny, Jim Bob.”

  “Ain’t it. Well, we’re over here across from The Caravan Video Store, and from the looks of things, Freddy owns it. Maybe the feds set him up with it.”

  “Would they do that?”

  “Oh yeah. They owe him. Don’t that take the rag off the bush, though? They take this scumbag and set him up in business and he pretty well does what he wants so the feds don’t have to look stupid. You don’t see them sonofabitches doing stuff like that for the honest man, do you?”

  “He been there all day?”

  “Mex came by and got him about six-thirty this morning, drove him to work, and even drove him to the Pizza Hut for lunch. You know, they done got the dents out of that Chevy Nova.”

  “That’s all you found out?”

  “He likes pepperoni pizza.”

  “Great.”

  “What’s to find out in one day? I doubt there’s going to be that many astounding revelations anyway. Best we can hope for is just get his pattern down and know when to hit him. If we can do it without the Mex around, all the better. Right now it looks like the sonofabitch shares the same pair of shoes with him.”

  “Yeah, well… Guess I’m just bored.”

  “Jack off. That’s what I do when I’m bored. It can liven up the dullest of days. Go upstairs and read some of them fuckbooks on my dresser.”

  “I did.”

  “They’ll put a tire tool in your pants, won’t they?”

  “I don’t want a tire tool in my pants.”

  “You sound a little bit on the cranky side, Dane. Maybe you ought to have you some milk and cookies, crank the living room air conditioner to high, stretch out on the couch there and take you a nap. We probably won’t need you at all today, so unwind.”

  “Easier said than done. You’re about out of beer by the way. You want some more, you better bring some home.”

  “What about bread and milk, honey? Do we need that?”

  “Ha, ha.”

  I hung up and went into the kitchen to look for the milk and cookies. I found the milk, but no cookies. I drank the milk, turned the air conditioner on high and stretched out on the couch for a nap. But it didn’t seem right without the cookies.

  38

  Next day Jim Bob and I went in the Rambler and Russel stayed home. I pitied him. I hoped he enjoyed reading about ear mites more than I did.

  Freddy’s schedule was pretty much like it was the day before. We got into Houston and over to the residential area where he lived about six-ten. We parked in the lot of a Safeway store across from where the highway met the street that led out from the subdivision.

  At exactly six-thirty-five, the Nova with the Mexican driving came up the street and turned right on the highway. We followed discreetly in the Rambler. There was no air-conditioning in the Rambler, and by seven it was already a little warm. We followed the Nova through some heavy traffic, but Jim Bob never lost sight of it. I noticed that the Nova had all its windows rolled up. Air-conditioning. I liked that. Here we were, the good guys, and we had a hot Rambler. Worse than that, the bad guy had his own driver and a video store somehow provided him by the FBI. It helped with his hobby, which was taking videos of women being fucked and murdered by himself and the Mexican. He probably had all the major credit cards.

  The Nova went out of the main of Houston and onto Highway 59 North, and finally came to a section that had once been thick with tits-and-ass joints, but was now only a few topless lounges and cheap eateries, mobile homes and used car lots. And a video store called The Caravan.

  The Nova turned right off of 59 and went around back of the video place. The store was tucked neatly between an outdoor motor sales and a garage that had a sign that said it specialized in foreign cars and transmission work. It was seven-thirty sharp.

  We drove on past a ways, then Jim Bob turned around and we pulled off an annex road and found a little truck stop and had breakfast. When that was finished, we went to a used car lot that was cater-corner and across the highway from The Caravan and walked around the lot looking at cars and kicking tires and keeping a sideways view on the video store. A plump salesman with white hair slicked back, wearing a plaid sports coat, maroon tie, lime green slacks and white shoes, tried to tell us why a used car was ten times better than a new one.

  Jim Bob had him show us all the cars on the highway side of the lot, and we looked at them real slow and asked technical questions and took turns sitting behind the wheel of each and every one of them. The salesman’s smile had almost fallen down his throat and he was beginning to look a little woozy from the heat. His cheap plaid sports coat had wells of sweat under the arms and there was a ring of it around his neck and a splotch under the knot of his tie.

  “Confidentially, Horace,” Jim Bob said, having latched onto the man’s name, “I don’t think I could buy a car I hadn’t driven.”

  “Course not,” said Horace.

  “We’d like to test-drive a few of these babies. See how they respond. We’ll start with this Skylark, if that’s all right.”

  “By all means,” Horace said producing a monogrammed, green hanky and wiping his face. “We here at Horace Williams’s Motors aim to please. That’s our motto, and we live by it.”

  “And it’s a good motto,” Jim Bob said. “A business that don’t care about its customers is no business at all. That’s what I always say, don’t I?”

  “Yes,” I said, “you always say that.”

  “I’ll get the keys,” Horace said.

  We drove the air-conditioned Skylark around a bit, going by the video store now and then, never getting too far away from it.

  We swapped that car for a red ‘68 Chevy, with air-conditioning, and drove it around, this time actually crossing over to the video store and driving back between the outdoor motor place and going around back. We saw the Nova parked there next to a gray Vette.

  Jim Bob turned us around and we went back to the used car dealer. After about five cars, Horace didn’t look nearly so ready to please. He even told us he thought old Ramblers were pretty good cars, and how if he had one, he might hang onto it.

  “Guess you’re right,” Jim Bob said. “But we’ll be back tomorrow to look at the rest of them. I think if you’d had that Skylark in metal flake blue we’d have had a deal.”

  There was a filling station almost directly across from The Caravan, and that was our next stop. Jim Bob shook hands with the owner of the station. He knew him from the day before.

  “This is Phil,” Jim Bob said introducing the station owner to me. He didn’t bother to give my name to Phil. “New man, Phil. I’m supposed to break him in today.”

  “Well, I don’t envy you men any,” Phil said. “Hot work sitting out there in a car.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Jim Bob said, and gave him a smile.

  “Come on,” he said to me. “Let’s get to work.”

  The car was parked next to a telephone booth and it was pointing in the direction of the video store. We got in it and I said, “Exactly what is our work, Jim Bob?”

  “Highway Department. We’re supposed to count how many tractor-trailer trucks come by here in a given hour.”

  “Any reason?”

  “Road damage. Gives some clue to the wear and tear on the road. Big trucks like that are hard on the concrete. You count about three hours a day, for a few y, for a days, and you can get some kind of
idea as to what kind of beating the highway’s taking. You can average that out and make plans for when to have the road repaired. That way you don’t wait until it’s in awful shape and there’s craters out there big enough to lose a Volkswagen in, though it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if all them foreign sonofabitches fell off in a hole. I think you should buy American.”

  “Where did you learn all that, Jim Bob?”

  “I made it up yesterday.”

  We stayed there a couple of hours, and it got bloody hot. I felt as if my brain was boiling and about to run out my ears. Jim Bob told some jokes that weren’t any good and we sang “The Great Speckled Bird” together. We weren’t half-bad. We did every television theme song we knew and we even hummed some hymns.

  Finally I didn’t want to sing anymore. Jim Bob got a magazine out of the backseat and read it and eyeballed the video store over it from time to time. It was one of those hog-raising magazines. I wondered if it had an article on ear mites too.

  The Caravan did a brisk trade. People went in and out all day, renting and perhaps buying videos. A couple of times I wondered if maybe someone had gone in there to buy a snuff film, but ruled that out. That was too easy. Those things would be sold to special people in special places, for big money.

  And maybe not. Maybe if the right person had the money, they could get it across the counter. One Porky’s, a Bugs Bunny Cartoon, and oh yeah, your latest snuff film.

  Jim Bob gave me the magazine. I thumbed through it. There were some good photographs of hogs.

  “Here’s one I bet you don’t know,” Jim Bob said, and he began to hum the theme to “Secret Agent Man.”

  “Secret Agent Man, and shut up.”

  About eleven-fifteen the Nova came around the corner with the Mex driving and Freddy on the front passenger side.

  “Lunchtime,” Jim Bob said, and started the Rambler. We followed them to the Pizza Hut and cruised on by.

  “Creatures of habit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “Let’s go down here and get a burger and see if we can pick them back up at the store. I have a feeling they keep a pretty regular schedule. Man, how would you like to eat pizza every day?”

  “Thing that gets me,” I said, “is they’re so normal acting. They go to work and eat pizza, and murder women. Do you think they’ll do it again?”

  “I think they’ll do it until we put a stop to it. If they’d done it only once, that would be enough for me. I’d as soon the law come down on them, but since they, won’t, it’s up to me and Russel.”

  We got a greasy burger and a Coke and took our time. When we were finished, we went back to the station and bought a couple of Cokes from the machine inside and sat out in the Rambler, our home away from home, and sipped them. My Coke turned hot before I was halfway finished with it, and I opened the door and poured it out. I got bored enough to actually count the tractor-trailer trucks that went by; Jim Bob’s theory had come to make a certain type of sense to me. It was that hot.

  About three I opened the door and threw up my hot Coke. Jim Bob went in the station and bought me some peanut butter crackers and a Sprite. “Here,” he said, “this will go well with an upset stomach.”

  I doubted it, but I nibbled on a cracker and sipped the Sprite. I began to envy Russel at home in the air-conditioning. Nothing to do but watch monster movies and look at girly magazines and read about ear mites.

  “It’s the glamour that keeps me in this kind of work,” Jim Bob said. “Good hours and scenery. Chance to meet fascinating people, and of course there’s the retirement plan.”

  At four o’clock, the Nova came out from behind The Caravan. The Mexican was the only one on board. Jim Bob cranked up the Rambler and we found a lull in traffic and drove on across to the video store parking lot.

  “Just the Mex has seen us, so you go in and have a look around. Get the lay of the land. This may be where we do it.”

  “Here?”

  “It’s either here or the house,” Jim Bob said. “If the Mex comes back, I’ll start honking my horn like I’m out here waiting on you and I’m impatient. Note the back door, anything like that.”

  Inside there were rows and rows of videos. There was a little thin guy behind the counter. He was wearing a white suit that looked ten years old. It had gone slightly yellow, and was more yellow still under the arms. He had on a white shirt with it and no tie. He needed a shave.

  There wasn’t much to see. The usual videos. No section for snuff films. I was about to leave, when a door opened at the back behind the counter, and Freddy came out. I felt tension beating its wings in my stomach.

  He had on a very expensive gray suit and it was cut to hide his belly and it did the job well. He had on a gray tie with little blue stripes in it and there was some kind of gold designed tie tac stuck through it and into his dark shirt. I bet his shoes were shiny. He and Price could have competed for best dressed.

  I couldn’t help myself. I went over to the counter and looked right at Freddy. I said, “Have you got Murmur of the Heart? It’s a French film.”

  “We don’t carry nothing foreign but the Jap and Mex stuff,” the skinny guy answered for him. “People go for the Jap stuff. Lots of action, all that swords and kicking and jumping stuff.”

  Freddy smiled at me, and damned if it wasn’t a nice smile. He was a nice looking guy when he wasn’t raping and killing someone. It gave me a chill. He looked so normal. The kind of guy that might coach your kid in football or teach social studies. “That’s right, mister,” he said. “Only Japanese and Mexican films. The rest are American and maybe some British.”

  “We got Limey films?” the thin guy said.

  Freddy looked at him and smiled. It was, as I said, a nice smile, but I could recall seeing it on his face the moment before he shot that girl and licked her blood from the wound. “These are modern times,” Freddy said to the thin guy. “I’d prefer you not use offensive terms like Jap and Limey if you’re going to work for me. Okay?”

  “Sure,” the thin man said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it, really.” He seemed desperate to convince.

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” Freddy said, “but I’d prefer not to hear those kind of racist remarks in my presence, customers or no customers.”

  Freddy smiled at me, and I found I couldn’t quit staring. I was looking for some sign of the beast, something that would alert me to his madness or meanness, or whatever you call the bile in a man like Freddy, but all I saw was a regular human being. He wasn’t the sort of guy the movies would pick to play the kind of guy he was; he was more the kind to be typecast as a film hero’s best buddy.

  “Well, thanks anyway,” I said.

  “Maybe next time,” Freddy said. “We intend to expand our line.”

  I nodded and started out, and even though the air-conditioning in there worked quite well, before I could get outside, sweat beads had formed on my forehead and my palms had turned sticky.

  · · ·

  We got our place back at the station, and about fifteen minutes later the Mexican returned and parked behind the video store again. He’d probably gone out for a 7-Eleven Slurpee.

  At exactly seven o’clock, the video store closed and the Nova drove out, and behind it came the gray Vette with the thin, white-suited man driving it. I could see now that the Vette needed lots of body work. They turned the same direction onto the highway, with the Nova leading, and we fell in behind them, and on the other side of town the Vette honked at the Nova and veered off. The Nova didn’t honk back.

  We followed the Nova across town and back to Freddy’s place. The Mexican was great with traffic. He handled the Chevy like a golf cart, weaving in and out of cars expertly.

  They reached the subdivision where Freddy lived at five minutes to eight. We didn’t follow them in. We drove on past and turned around and drove home.

  39

  When we got back to Jim Bob’s place late that evening, Russel met me at the door with, “Your wife called.”


  “Oh,” I said. “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t want to talk to me, as you can imagine. Wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t had to. She asked you to call her after five.”

  It was, of course, well after five then. I said, “Jim Bob, can I drive the Rambler to the store? I’d prefer to use the pay phone.”

  Take the truck and use the goddamn air-conditioning. This heat has damn near made me sick. Hell, take the Red Bitch if you want.”

  “The truck is fine.”

  I drove over to the store and got some change and called Ann. She answered on the first ring.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Come home.”

  “I can’t. Not quite yet.”

  “You’ve got to.”

  “Is Jordan okay?”

  “He’s fine. It’s me that isn’t okay. Come home. Quit playing cops and robbers and come home.”

  “This is serious, Ann.”

  “All the more reason to come home. Haven’t you played this out enough? Who cares who you shot? He had it coming. As for it not being Freddy, that’s Russel’s problem.”

  “We’ve been through this.”

  “And you’ve had your fun. Come home.”

  “Things have changed. It’s a lot worse than we thought.”

  Silence.

  “It’s seems that Freddy is into some really bad stuff.”

  “What do you expect from an organized crime informer?”

  “Really bad stuff, Ann.” And I told her all that we had found out and what Russel and Jim Bob were planning. “And I’m going to help them do it. I thought at first I was just going to go along for part of the ride, but I can’t. When I saw Freddy today, I knew I had to go all the way.”

  “It’s not your place to do anything about it.”