He cast an envious eye on Diana’s 12-gauge Italian-made Verona lying on the loveseat in the living room where she’d tossed it before calling 911. Over four thousand dollars’ worth of high-tensile steel and Turkish walnut, the shotgun had been a gift from her dad after she’d won a statewide women’s skeet competition.
“And,” the officer went on, “what kind of fool goes around in the middle of the night tapping on folks’ doors, all in black, stocking cap pulled down so you can barely see his face? I’d’a thought he was a burglar myself. Yep, burglar for sure.”
Rob had let himself in, as he did every time they’d played burglar. He’d come through the unlocked outside door of the sun porch, then stood jiggling the locked interior French doors.
Diana had entered from the kitchen, the black silk dressing gown he loved half-open. She was naked underneath.
The way the game went, he’d jiggle the door harder. She’d shrink, then shriek, “Oh no! Please go away!”
Her gown would fall open. He’d bang the door, bang it again, and just before he looked to be about to dash a pane of glass, reach in, and unlock the deadbolt from inside, she’d open it. He’d race through and grab her up, her robe falling to the hardwood.
Sometimes they’d make it up the stairs. Sometimes they wouldn’t.
This time, he’d jiggled the door hard. And harder yet. But Diana didn’t open the door.
“You bastard!” she screamed, reaching for the shotgun she’d propped against the china cabinet. She threw its beautiful steely length to her right shoulder. Such a sweet fit.
Rob’s eyes grew wide. What? Then he’d laughed. A new wrinkle in their game. A twist.
“Oh, baby,” he crooned. “You got a gun? I got a gun, too.” He winked. “Got a red-hot pistol for you, darling.” His face was pressed against the glass.
Louisiana is a right-to-bear-arms state, but there might be some gray area here, legally speaking, considering that Rob wasn’t actually all the way inside the house.
Shoot ‘em. Then drag ‘em through the window. Every schoolchild knew that.
She obviously couldn’t let him in from the sun porch, however. Why would she open her door to a burglar?
Luckily, she’d had plenty of time to make a plan, weigh the options, after Fred’s call. Before Rob’s first footstep on the porch.
A woman alone in a house. A college professor. Department chair. Sheriff’s daughter! Recent home invasions in the neighborhood. A rainy night. A man in black.
This was, after all, Louisiana, where a jury had taken only three hours to acquit a Baton Rouge homeowner of shooting and killing a Japanese student whose crime had been ringing his bell. The kid had been dazzling in his all-white Saturday Night Fever suit before it blossomed blood-red, he and his friend mistaking the house for one down the street where a Halloween party was being held.
Diana wanted Rob as close as possible.
You didn’t have to be a crack shot; any fool could hit someone with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, and many heedless fools did. The pellets covered a fairly wide pattern from a distance.
But if you wanted to kill someone, you stepped closer, closer, closer still. Then the pellets would rip a huge hole.
That was what Diana wanted, tit for tat, to tear her lover to pieces.
“Come on, sweetheart.” Rob had urged her closer with an upturned hand, fingers wiggling, a tough-guy gesture. In character. Playing a role.
She’d racked the shotgun, loving that sound. Loving the well-oiled smell of it. Loving to shoot.
She’d pulled the trigger, racked again, firing twice through the French doors. The first blast had ripped Rob’s heart loose and flung it against his chest wall. The second took out his guts.
Fred stayed until everyone was gone. “Just a formality,” Officer Jackson had assured them of the crime-scene crew. “Want to follow procedure here. Dot all our i’s and cross all our t’s. I’m sure you appreciate that, being a lawman’s daughter. No question but this has every appearance of a home invasion.”
After the EMS vehicle carried Rob’s body away and the last cruiser departed, Fred urged Diana to come home with him, to spend the night with his family.
“No. No, thanks, Fred,” she assured him. “You’ve been a brick. I couldn’t ask for a better friend. But really, I’ll be okay.”
And she would be, Diana thought later, lying in the stillness of her bedroom, the lilac-papered boudoir where she and Rob had shared so many delicious romps.
She had her prestigious job. Her ever-so-terrific house. A raft of good friends. And she lived in the Big Easy.
Then, over the rain on the rooftop, she could hear Rob crooning Brother Ray’s words just as surely as if his head were on the pillow next to hers.
Well it don’t make no difference if you’re young or old...
no matter whether, rainy weather...
you got to get yourself together...
and let the good times roll...
With that, Diana’s heart convulsed once more with loss. Dear God, she’d miss him so. Rob, the last of her lovers, she was sure of it. She could never, ever again expose herself to such grief.
Her final scream of anguish ripped through the sweet-scented room, and then quiet blanketed it once more. After that, there was nothing, nothing but her own breathing and the falling rain.
Just before tipping over into darkness, Diana thought, First thing. First thing, bright and early, she’d call Gloria and tell her about the awful accident.
Gloria would understand. Gloria would get it. And Gloria would keep her mouth shut, or...
And Amber?
Well, she was young, with the recklessness of a true beauty. What was one boyfriend, more or less, to such a girl? Besides, Amber was smart and clever enough to protect herself.
And Chloe? Chloe had already tasted the fruit of revenge and found it sweet.
With that, Diana turned over and dove headlong into the blissful sleep of the avenged.
She dreamed it rained so hard and rained so long that the pumping stations failed. The water rose and rose until all the streets flooded. She saw herself floating in her darling little Mercedes roadster, its top down, past Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, then hanging a right into the middle of St. Charles. She was waving like a homecoming queen, smiling and waving and flirting to beat the band, floating, floating, floating down the neutral ground.
Copyright © 2006 Sarah Shankman
The Jury Box
by Jon L. Breen
According to the epigraph of O. Henry’s “A Municipal Report,” Frank Norris believed only three major American cities were “story cities”: New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. O. Henry took the implied challenge by setting his classic story in Nashville, but few then or now would argue with the inclusion of New Orleans as a great fictional locale. Certainly the city currently coming back from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina has attracted many mystery writers, from Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning in the 1930s, Brett Halliday in the ‘40s, and John Dickson Carr in the ‘60s to such contemporaries as James Sallis, Dick Lochte, Julie Smith, Barbara Hambly, Tony Fennelly, Chris Wiltz, and those considered below.