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  “You go there, sleep, and then come back home tomorrow by yourself,” he said. “Leave your family there. There will be a car for them; a pickup, actually. Also, the house is stocked with basic food, and the water works and so does the electricity. There’s no phone. It’s best your family doesn’t go anywhere. It’s unlikely those assholes can find the place, but it’s best if they stay out of sight.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “You come back tomorrow, go to the police and tell them about the threat. Get it on record. I don’t care what they told you, you do that.”

  “I think the cops might be involved. I told you that.”

  “Could be,” he said. “But if they know you aren’t afraid of the guy, that you’re going to put him on record, then that actually makes the case against the kid stronger.”

  “It’s all hearsay,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you still want it on record.”

  “It is on record,” I said.

  “Yeah, but this way you find out what they plan to do a whole lot quicker. If the cops are in on it, we push them to make a move, and we’ll be waiting.”

  “I feel like I’m walking into the lion’s jaws.”

  “You’re showing the lion you’re not afraid of it.”

  “But I am. Didn’t you say it was good to be scared?”

  “Did I? Yeah, I probably did. Sounds like me. You know what, that’s still good advice. But you should go to the cops for the reason I said. It makes it a little harder for whoever there is spilling to Anthony to make things hard for you without exposing themselves.”

  “What if it’s not just one cop, and they’re all on the take?”

  “That would be a major problem,” he said. “I think we’d all be fucked. But I got a little more faith in the law than that; just not a whole lot more.”

  “Great,” I said.

  Fourteen

  The cabin was in the deep Arkansas woods, and it was late morning when we got there. It was pretty big. A white pickup was parked out front. It was old but had good tires, and according to Cason it ran just fine. The cabin had seen better days as well, but the roof was sturdy, the walls were made of treated logs, and the keys for the cabin and truck were hidden where Cason said they would be.

  We were all exhausted. There were two small bedrooms. Kelly and I took one, Mom and Sue the other. As soon as my head hit the pillow I was out like a light.

  I woke up about eleven the next morning and was grateful Sue kept sleeping well into the day. I didn’t want to try and explain anything to her. I kept slipping into the room where she and Mom were, looking at her, assuring myself she was all right. I had dreamed about her being taken out of the window at night, taken out of there by Pye Anthony and his son Will. It was a horrible dream, but I was so deep down into it I couldn’t wake myself up, couldn’t get up to check on Sue, and now I was doing it in broad daylight without any reason to do so, other than self-satisfaction.

  Kelly slept on as well. And that was good. I needed time to myself, to collect my thoughts and sort them, if that was possible.

  About noon I started some coffee, and then I went outside and broke up the burner phone on a brick cooking grill. I broke it and then stepped on it and tossed it away. I should have done it last night, though I didn’t know who it was that would be interested in tracking me, or even if they could.

  Back inside the house, I saw the coffee was ready, and about then Kelly drifted in rubbing her eyes. We had only brought a few things with us, and one of those was one of my old tee-shirts, and she was wearing it as a nightgown. It almost hung to her knees.

  “Coffee?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “I looked around,” I said. “They got some instant oatmeal, granola bars, nothing fresh. Breakfast or lunch is pretty much the same thing.”

  “Granola bar will be fine.”

  I got us both a granola bar and a cup of coffee. We sat at the kitchen table.

  “I love you,” Kelly said, “and I know I apologized last night, but I go from one moment to the other about what to do, so please don’t think I’m blaming you.”

  “It’s all right.”

  It wasn’t, but it was something to say.

  I poured her a cup of coffee. “No milk or sugar,” I said.

  “I need it straight and leaded,” she said. She sipped a little of it, said, “What’s this plan you were talking about?”

  “It might be best you don’t know,” I said.

  “It involves you getting hurt, I’m against it.”

  “I can’t promise one way or another about that,” I said. “That thing Pye Anthony said, last night, about how he and his bunch would leave us alone if we didn’t testify. Okay, maybe he meant for the time being. But say I don’t testify. His boy gets off, goes scot-free. We got to think they might decide they don’t want the situation to come up again, and when things calm down, they might arrange for us to have an accident, or disappear.”

  “I didn’t think about that.”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t want us looking over our shoulders the rest of our lives, and we have Sue to think about. When she gets older, she wants to play soccer, baseball, go on a band trip, we got to wonder who’s watching her, waiting for her to be alone, to punish us just for me thinking about testifying. Lieutenant Ernest said they lived by the feud, that they were petty. They could wait quite a while before exacting revenge.”

  “So you’re thinking there is no safety net?”

  “Not the way Pye’s laying it out.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “I think: what would my father have done? What would have been his approach?”

  “And what did you decide he would have done?” she asked.

  “He’d testify.”

  “And what about his family?”

  “He would have made sure they were safe. Whatever it took. He was old-school on that matter. Law-abiding American citizen, but if you decided to bypass the law, I think he would have made the same choice. He’d have put their asses down and told god they fell off a bicycle.”

  “Look, I get it,” she said. “You want to protect your family at all costs, but if you go to prison doing it, that won’t help us any. And killing. Can you do that?”

  “I have,” I said.

  “That was the war,” she said.

  “This is war. But don’t misunderstand me. That’s the last thing I want to do, that I want to happen. And if the cops are in on it, well … It’s like I said, baby. I don’t want to spend every night in a cold sweat, every trip to town looking in my rear-view mirror. There’s some guys I know from the sand pit that maybe can help me.”

  “The Army?”

  I nodded.

  “This Cason fellow?” she asked.

  “Yes. And someone far less nice.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “It’s not about how it sounds,” I said. “It’s about not dying.”

  I stayed in the cabin until Sue and Mom woke up. Sue and I went out and walked down to the creek on the property. We watched minnows swim in a shallow part of it. We tossed some rocks together and talked about silly stuff. When we walked back to the cabin an hour or so later, me holding her little hand, I told her I loved her and how I had to go back on business, but how she would be fine with Mom and Grandma. I went inside and joined my mother and Kelly. They were staring at me anxiously.

  I gave Kelly the keys to the truck, most of the money from my wallet. “Don’t use your credit cards, in case these guys can trace them.”

  “How would they do that?”

  “If they are in cahoots with the police, that’s how. Computers. They can link up and find out about anything. Shit, Kelly, I don’t know. But don’t do it. Cason seems to know about these things, and he wants us to stay away from telephones, land lines, or our cells. I trust him.”

  “All right,” she said. “Not t
hat there are any phones here, except my cell.”

  “Don’t use it,” I said.

  “I won’t,” Kelly said. “I promise.”

  “The money,” I said, “you shouldn’t need it for anything, but if there’s a worst-case scenario, and you have to leave, you might need to put more gas in the truck. Cason said it was full.”

  “What about the person who owns the cabin?” Mom asked.

  “No worries,” I said. “Cason has worked that out. He won’t be coming back for awhile. He owes Booger a favor, and if you owe him one, you want to do what you can to clear that ledger as quick as possible.”

  Mom said, “You do what you have to do, son. I know you will. We’ll be fine.”

  Kelly walked me out to our car. I said, “You may not have the best of provisions, but you’ve got food. Cason said the TV works, but there’s only DVDs. I hope you like action movies. I looked through them this morning. In this cabin Burt Reynolds is still king. I’ll get back in touch with you. If I don’t, a guy named Cason Statler will, or another guy named Booger. Or that friend of Booger’s owns this cabin.”

  “Booger? First name or last name?”

  “Booger is good enough.”

  I took her in my arms. She said, “I hate being such a scaredy cat.”

  “You take care of our baby,” I said. “You take care of her and tell her I love her.”

  “What if we’re here when school starts?”

  “You won’t be,” I said. I didn’t mention to her that I assumed if she was, I wouldn’t be coming home.

  We kissed for a long time. It was a good kiss. Not a sexual kiss, not a husband-and-wife peck on the lips. It was a possible kiss goodbye. There was a lot of apology in it, on both sides.

  By the time I had driven out of the woods and hit a major highway, it was late afternoon, near dark. I took the second burner phone out of the glove box.

  I called Cason. “I’m on my way back to Laborde.”

  “All right, here’s what you do,” he said. “You meet me and Booger at my place.”

  He gave me the address in Camp Rapture. I pulled over and tapped it in the GPS, then, leaving the motor running, I got out and put the phone under the front wheel of the car and drove over it and went on, trying desperately not to drive too fast, thinking about what it was I was going to do, what Cason and Booger were going to do. I thought about my family. I thought about our home. I thought about those weasels, breaking into our house, taking us out to that goddamn pit in the middle of the night and threatening our lives. I thought about what Cason had told me they had done to that man, cutting off his legs, and later coming back to finish him off, making home plate out of him, having his hand glued to his dick. I thought about all that so much, I’d find my foot shoving down hard on the gas. I finally set the cruise control and tried to keep my foot off the pedal.

  When I left Afghanistan I wanted to be through with violence. I believed it was the law’s job in a civilized world, but what if there was no law, and what if the world wasn’t all that civilized? What if you couldn’t trust the law? What if the law was on the side of those who were trying to harm you? What then? What was the answer?

  Fifteen

  It was pretty late when I got back to East Texas; early morning, actually, but still solid dark. I drove through Laborde, past my frame shop, kept on driving toward Camp Rapture.

  I drove to the address Cason had given me. He had a large apartment down on Main Street. It was above a sandwich shop next to a yoga studio. I coasted around back, the way he had told me. There was an alley, and off the alley was a driveway, and there was a bright light on a pole and it was easy to see how to go. I parked behind a big black truck that was so high off the ground it looked like you needed a hot-air balloon to get up to the door. In front of it was an elderly white car, a Ford. It looked like it had seen better days. There was another car there too, an old Volkswagen Beetle.

  When I was parked, Booger came out. He had been waiting on me. He was just the way I remembered him. Like Cason, he didn’t appear to have aged a bit. He had the kind of look that made you wonder what his ethnicity was. Black maybe, though more the color of coffee splashed with milk. Hispanic? A bit of Asian, like me? What he was mostly was broad-shouldered, shaved head, and all muscle. He was handsome in a stone-cold-killer kind of way. He had all the right features, but there was something off about him. Back in the sand pit I thought maybe it was his nose that was not being quite right, or his eyes not being even. But it wasn’t any of that. All of that fit okay if you studied him hard enough. It was something about the way he looked at you, about the way he smiled. How his lips and eyes moved, but the flesh on his face didn’t move all that much. He was like a living, walking, breathing, bloodthirsty automaton.

  “Hey, Tom, you old goat-fucker. How you been?”

  “Not that good.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, I knew that. Force of habit, asking like that, like maybe I really give a shit.”

  He stuck out his hand and we shook. He tried to crush my paw just like in the old days.

  When he let go of my hand he put his arm around my shoulders and started walking me toward the stairs that led up to the top apartment. “Heard you drive up, buddy. Cason is in the shower. We got a beer in here with your name on it, if you want it.”

  “Sure, Booger. Thanks for helping me out, man.”

  “Oh, shit, Tom. Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t give a flying shit about you really. You know that.”

  “I do?”

  “I’m doing this for Cason. Hell, he wanted me to kill you, right now, I would. And there’s another reason I’m doing it.”

  We were up the stairs and going inside by this time. He removed his arm from my shoulders. He looked at me and his mouth opened in a thin smile, his eyes were as cold as if he were dead and the morning frost were resting on them. “I like killing.”

  On that note he slapped me on the shoulder, motioned me toward the couch, and got me a beer. I sat there nervously, wondering if he might get bored and go off his nut and murder me for entertainment. I wasn’t any pushover when I had the chance, but Booger? Well, he wasn’t entirely human.

  He sat in a chair and looked at me. It was a strange look, like a snake studying the rat it was about to bite. “You’re the same as you were over there,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And how is that?”

  “You don’t like the work.”

  “No,” I said. “If you mean killing. No. I don’t like the work.”

  “I’d still be killing those bastards over there, any bastards, I don’t give a damn. I’d be killing them, I wasn’t put out of the service. They said they wanted people dead, but they didn’t want them as dead as I did.”

  “I think they had certain people in mind under certain circumstances,” I said. “Not just anyone.”

  “And therein lay the problem,” he said. “What you got to understand is we’re put here to compete with one another, to make room for ourselves. It’s all just one big fucking rat-fuck game, partner. It’s a game played during a storm, and all you can do is play it out until the storm blows your ass away.”

  Cason came into the room then. He was wearing gray sweatpants and rubbing his damp hair with a towel. He was one of those guys who actually spent a lot of time at the gym, had that six-pack. That gave me another reason to envy him. Good looks and the will to keep his body in tip-top shape. I had a hard time walking on my treadmill three times a week.

  “Hey, Tom,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “You giving him the ‘life is a chaotic game in the midst of a storm’ speech?” Cason asked Booger.

  “You bet,” Booger said. “I was just about to wax poetic on it, and in you came, fucking it up.”

  Cason said, “Let’s get right down to it. I want you to tell me everything that happened again, all the details, in case you left something out. Be thorough. It might be important. When you finish, you nap out here awhile, daylight ge
ts solid, you go to the cops, like I told you. Let’s see how you stand with them, see what they’re really about, if we can. It’s nice to know how many players are actually on the field.”

  I told him everything, more specific than before. I even mentioned that Kelly and I had been nude and had to dress in front of them. Just telling them that humiliated me all over again. Booger seemed to be enjoying the story. He probably didn’t understand the humiliation part.

  When I finished, Cason said, “Here’s how it is. I’ve been dealing with these kinds of assholes as a reporter for years. I’ve been threatened, and a couple of times I was on a hit list, but the way these guys operate, the ones we’re talking about, it’s not like there’s a true chain of command. It’s one or two guys that are running things, and everyone else works for them. They’re loyal as long as the paychecks come in. We get the old man, and send the kid downtown to the concrete box, or kill him too, then it’s over for you. The old man has the power and the money, not the kid. I’m not saying that Pye’s guys won’t make that hard for us to do, getting those two, but I am saying once they’re out of the picture, so are their worker’s paychecks. Maybe there’s some guy left that takes over, but it’s not in his best interest to pursue you, and in fact, with the two Anthonys out of the picture, the new guy has a shot at the organization, they’ll try and take over, and the hell with the Anthonys.”

  “Then maybe we don’t have to get too dirty,” I said, “if we just nip those two.”

  “Oh, we’ll get dirty all right.”

  I didn’t really want to remind Cason of the obvious, but I said it anyway. “You don’t have to do this, you know. I don’t want to pull you into something that might get you in deep shit. I mean, we’re old army buddies, you and I, but still.”

  “This guy, Pye, he’s like the one before him, and the one that’ll be after him. They’re all the same. They think they own the goddamn world, and the problem is they do own a piece of it, and part of that piece is a lot of the bad stuff goes on in my hometown and yours, all of East Texas. Guys like that, they got to be stepped on, and when a new one steps up, someone has to step on them, same as cockroaches.”