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Jody noticed the screen door was closed but the door behind it was ajar.
She pulled at the screen, expecting it to be locked, but it wasn’t.
Never before had she found it unsecured. In a town where hardly anybody locked anything, Red locked up out of respect for the fact that he lived in a house owned by his employers.
Getting more a
When he didn’t answer, she stepped inside the kitchen.
The dog came with her. Jody closed the door.
She looked down at the bristly mottled coat at her side and said, “Go find him, girl.”
Beast went straight through the kitchen and on into the living room, where she paused to look and sniff around. The television was so loud Jody worried it would hurt the dog’s ears, but it didn’t stop Beast from aggressively hurrying toward the noise. Jody followed as the dog ran into the little hallway where the bedrooms were and then into the room where Red slept.
She heard Beast bark and then the dog started to howl.
Jody ran after her into Red’s room and screamed when she saw what the dog had found: Red Bosch lay on his stomach on his bed, alone, his back a bloody mess, ripped apart by the bullet that killed him. In the same instant that Jody realized he was dead, she also remembered where she had seen the old Ford Taurus before and who owned it.
It was Valentine Crosby’s car, which Billy had stolen last night.
She looked up then at the big gun case that stood against a wall of Red’s bedroom and saw that the glass front was shattered. If Billy Crosby hadn’t had a gun when his wife was killed, he did now.
JODY DIDN’T STOP to think or weep, but simply followed a knee-jerk, basic instinct for self-preservation, because it was all she had left of her emotional and physical reserves at that moment. Her first instinct wasn’t to call the sheriff or to call her grandparents up at the ranch house. Instead, her fingers punched into the face of her cell phone the number she had only recently memorized. As she walked like a zombie out of the awful, noisy bedroom, through the living room, and toward Red’s front door, she heard the number at the other end ring once before he answered with her name.
“Collin, I’m at Red Bosch’s house. He’s been shot dead.”
Before he could say anything else, as she opened the front door, she said, “I think your father has a gun now, or more than one, and since your mother’s car is in Red’s garage and Red’s truck is still parked here, that probably means your dad is somewhere around here, too.”
She heard Collin say her name again just as she stepped outside, closing the front door behind her.
Out of the darkness, a strong hand grasped her arm, the one that held the phone.
Jody screamed as the cell phone fell from her hand and the hand that held her whirled her around so that she was looking into Billy Crosby’s face. She screamed again when she saw that his other hand held a pistol. “Shut up,” he told her. He pulled at her so she had to go with him or fall down. Struggling to keep up, trying to avoid the gun he held on her, Jody half walked and was half dragged back to Red’s truck and shoved into the passenger front seat before Billy pushed himself in behind the wheel. He had been drinking-she could smell it-but she didn’t know if Billy was drunk.
She heard Red’s dog crashing against the back door and barking furiously.
Gasping with the pain of being violently shoved into the passenger’s seat, grief burst out of her.
“Red! You killed Red! He believed in you. He went to see you-”
“Once. He came one time. Where was he all the rest of those years?”
“But Red.” Her cry, her protest, was anguished. “He was a good man, a good man!”
“He wouldn’t let me have his guns.”
“So you killed him?”
“I needed those guns!”
Horrified by the brutal banality of it, she fell back against the truck seat, breathless with shock, fear, and sorrow. It struck her with terrifying force again that even if this man had not harmed her parents, that did not make him a good man. A person could be not-guilty without being i
“Red,” she whispered, in dull shock.
“Shut up.”
“You’ve really done it now, haven’t you?”
He turned to look at her in the dark cab of the truck. “Why not? After a while you get tired of being accused and punished for what you didn’t do, so why not do it? You know? Why the fuck not just do it. When I was young I was just a dumb fuck punk. You know what I mean? I did stuff like drunk driving, cut a few fence lines, big deal. You get ninety days for that shit. But what do I get? Forty years! I was a punk serving a murderer’s sentence. Is that fair? I been serving some other guy’s sentence! Some guy who was smarter and meaner than me. That was his jail cell I was in, that was his slop I ate, that was his life they gave me and they took away my own. And where is he? Living my life? Married, maybe? Has kids? Has a job? If I could kill him, that’s what I’d do.”
He had Red’s truck keys. They shone in the dashboard lights when he switched on the ignition. As he stepped on the gas and started up the long gravel drive with the headlights off, he said, “They took everything away from me. Let’s see how they like it when I take everything away from them.”
36
IT WAS ALL she could do to keep breathing and not do anything to make him pull the trigger. She couldn’t tell how sober he was or how much control he had-or didn’t have-over his mind and muscle. But judging by how overconfidently and fast he drove and how he had to zigzag repeatedly to keep from going over into the shallow drainage ditches that ran alongside the driveway, she thought he must be drunk. Red kept a supply of beer and whiskey in his house, and she had no doubt now that Billy had been heavily into it.
He began to talk nonstop, turning his head frequently to stare at her.
“I was a young guy and they took that away from me. They took all those years away from me. I had a wife and a kid and they took me away from Val and Collin. I had a job, and your granddad was going to fire me and take all the money I earned away and leave me with nothing.”
He shouted some words, uttered others with ominous quiet.
“They made me look guilty of stuff I never did. I never killed your father! I never did nothin’ to your mother! Your dad was okay, but she was a bitch. Why would I want anything to do with her? I never did any of that stuff. And now they’ve killed Valentine and made it look like I did it. Why did they do all this to me?” He glared at her across the darkened front seat, taking his eyes off the road so the truck veered too far left, and then Billy corrected it too sharply, sending Jody rocking against the door frame, moving her away from the gun barrel for an instant and then slamming her back against it so that she cried out from the sharp pain of metal against bone.
“Why, why’d they do that? They ruined my life. They took my whole life away. Now I got nothin’ left. So what if I’m out? My wife’s dead. My boy hates me. I can’t go home. They want to put me back in prison. They’ll do it, too, if I let ’em. I’m not goin’ back. I’m not. They’ll have to kill me first, and I don’t give a shit if they do. Life is shit. My life is shit. So I’m go
She hated herself for believing him. She didn’t want to feel even a sliver of sympathy, didn’t want to understand his fury, didn’t want to have to think, In his place, how would I feel? What would I do? And she kept thinking, He’s Collin’s father. His father. Collin might not like or respect this man any more than she did, but he had devoted his life to giving Billy another chance. Part of her wanted to attack Billy, disable him, hurt him, kill him if she had to. Another part of her wanted to tell him she was sorry. My God. She didn’t want to be sorry, not for him. “Remember who’s the victim here,” Uncle Chase had told her, but there wasn’t just one victim, and what she had reminded him was even truer: She wasn’t brought up to be a victim and she didn’t feel like one, inside.