“That’s the reason he’s going out with her. The only reason he’s going out with her.”
“Seems like a damn good reason to me,” I chuckled. I felt a sudden pain, as the point of an elbow gouged my ribs. “Ow.”
“Beauty’s only skin deep,” she murmured. “Stupidity goes all the way to the bone.”
“You talking about the Dalmatian, or about me?”
Her only answer was a soft, sighing breath, which ruffled the hair on my chest, like breeze ruffling a Kansas wheat field.
* * *
The phone rang the next morning at seven thirty, just as I got back from my weekly trim at the barbershop. I snatched up the receiver, hoping to hear Sheriff Cotterell or Bubba Hardknot on the line; hoping that someone had ID’d the girl after seeing the sketches on WBIR or in this morning’s News Sentinel.
My hopes were quickly dashed. “Hi, Dad.”
“Jeff? Why aren’t you in school?”
“I am in school. I’m calling from the pay phone in the hall.” In the background, I heard the clamor of boisterous young voices.
“What’s wrong? Are you sick? Are you in trouble?”
“No, no, I’m fine. I just didn’t see you this morning. You’d gone to get a haircut when I came up for breakfast.”
“Did you need to see me this morning?”
“Mom said you told her about Jenny last night.”
“About Jenny? Yesssss,” I said slowly, turning to look at Kathleen. She was stirring her coffee with unusual attentiveness. “We did talk about Jenny. Why?” Stretching the phone cord to its limit, I leaned in Kathleen’s direction, into her field of view, and raised my eyebrows at her. She shrugged, as if she had no clue why Jeff was calling me. I took the gesture as proof positive that she’d put him up to it. To something.
“Quit beating around the bush, son. What’s on your mind?”
“I want to ask her out.”
“Go for it,” I said. “You don’t need my permission to ask a girl out.”
“I want to ask her out for this Saturday.”
“Fine by me. I wasn’t expecting to see much of you Saturday anyhow. Your mom and I’ll be at the UT-Florida game.”
“Thing is, I was hoping to take Jenny to the UT-Florida game.”
“Ha,” I said. “Good luck with that. That game’s been sold out for months. You couldn’t find a ticket…” A thought struck me — a thought so awful, I knew instantly that it was the truth. “You can’t be serious. Tell me you’re not calling to ask me what I think you’re calling to ask me.”
“Please, Dad.”
“You want my tickets to the UT-Florida game? You gotta be kidding. Wild alligators couldn’t keep me away from that game. You can have my tickets to the Arkansas game,” I said. “Or even the Alabama game. But Florida? You gotta be kidding.” Now Kathleen was desperately trying to catch my attention. Frowning, I mimicked her earlier shrug. “I love you a lot, son, but not that much.”
Kathleen sighed, shaking her head. Then she reached into the pocket of her bathrobe and fished out a cordless phone. “Jeff?”
“Hey, Mom.”
“Pay no attention to your father. Of course you can have our tickets to the game.”
“What? What the hell?” I squawked.
“Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. Late for class — gotta go,” he said, and the line went dead.
“What the hell?” I repeated. “I’ve been looking forward to that game for a year.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Don’t be stingy. Look at it as an investment in Jeff’s happiness.”
“What about my happiness?”
“Doesn’t it make you happy to see him asking out that nice girl?”
“You don’t even know her,” I blustered. “Now that I think about it, she’s not so nice after all. In fact, I think she’s a very bad girl. A terrible girl. Dumb, too — she makes Dalmatian-brain look like a genius.”
“Oh, nonsense. Besides, maybe you can find happiness some other way on Saturday,” she said. She opened the front of her bathrobe and gave me a slow, suggestive smile, swaying her hips as she did.
“But sweetie,” I said. “Darling.” I felt a powerful surge of conflicting desires. “This is my only chance all year to see UT play Florida. You and I will have lots of chances to… you know… find happiness.”
Still smiling, she wrapped the bathrobe across herself, two layers deep. “If Jeff doesn’t get to take Jenny to that game Saturday,” she said sweetly, “football might be the only happiness you find for the rest of the season.” She puckered her lips, mimed a kiss in my direction, and then tied the bathrobe belt. In a knot.
CHAPTER 18
Satterfield
He backed the Mustang out of his garage and tucked it around back, behind the house and out of sight. Not that there was anything to see, and not that there was ever any traffic on his street anyhow. Still, the fewer tracks you left, the fewer tracks you had to cover. That was one of the survival-training lessons he’d learned during his brief stint in SEAL training. He’d forgotten that lesson once, with that first girl, and he’d paid a steep price. The disgrace of getting discharged—“under less than honorable conditions”—had cut deeply; it had cut to the bone, and it had left him scarred, as surely as his stepfather’s cigarettes had scarred him. But scars were like combat medals, etched in the skin and the soul: badges of honor, or at least of survival. Satterfield had survived, and he’d begun settling accounts.
He backed the van out, then eased it back in, centering it on the concrete slab. He’d start with a base coat of olive drab, then finish the camouflage by adding splotches of pale green and muddy brown. He found himself humming as he laid out the drop cloths and taped the glass and poured the viscous paint carefully into the sprayer. He hummed in part because he liked the preparations; liked transforming his meticulous plans into reality. Also, though, he hummed because he enjoyed the joke — found amusement in the ironic absurdity of dressing out a dweeby white work van in hunter’s camouflage.
The real joke was that it wasn’t really the van that he was camouflaging, though, it was himself: By disguising himself as the sort of dumb shit who believed that a bad camo paint job was cool—Don’t forget to do a shitty job, he reminded himself — he enabled himself to creep closer to his quarry, to coil around her before she realized that she was the prey.
CHAPTER 19
Tina
Tina awoke in semidarkness, groaning and groggy and disoriented. Naked and cold, too. Her
shoulders and hips and knees ached, but when she tried to stretch, she found that she could not move. Her wrists were bound behind her, her ankles tied to her wrists; Tina was hog-tied, she realized, and the realization caused a flood of memory and terror to surge in her. She’d climbed into the van on Magnolia sometime around midnight. It looked like a work van, with metal racks on the roof for ladders or pipes or lumber but with a bad paint job, a stupid paint job — camo paint on a work truck. It didn’t make her feel all that impressed with the john — what kind of idiot would try to camouflage a work van? — but business was slow and her hot pants were anything but warm in the chill of the late-September night. Just as the van had pulled away from the curb, she’d glanced down and seen a coil of rope on the floorboards. The guy had caught her looking at the rope, and then at him, and the glint in his eyes — the cold and predatory glint they took on in response to the fear in her own — had set off every alarm in her head. She’d tried to get out of the van then, even though it was moving, but the door was locked, and the lock knob had come off — had been taken off, she’d realized with a sudden sick feeling. She’d begun beating helplessly on the glass of the window, like a luna moth battering itself against a windowpane or a streetlight. He’d pulled over fast, and the last thing she remembered was a strong hand seizing the back of her neck, another strong hand clamping a cloth over her nose and mouth, and pungent, sickly-sweet vapors coursing through her nostrils and mouth, down into her lungs, deep into her darkening brain.