The back of the house was covered in flames, but the fire hadn’t reached the living room yet. Flames were licking their way down a hallway, advancing like an invincible army. In seconds the living room would be engulfed, the heat already intense, and the more Jim struggled with the binding rope, the closer the fire came.
He stopped struggling with the knots. He wasn’t going to get the rope untied in time. There had to be another way. He looked around the room for something sharp and found nothing. His eyes settled on his wife’s body and again he felt a pang of grief, but it was replaced with a shot of hope. The straight razor that had been used to kill her lay by her side, bright, bloody and evil.
Staying low, he slithered along the plush carpet back to Julia. He had to reach over her body to get the razor. He did it quickly, his hand brushing against her breasts. She was still warm. His hand locked on the open razor and he felt her blood on the blade, hot, alive. He jerked his hand away and cut himself. His blood mingled with hers on the sharp silver blade and he turned away from her body, his eyes squeezed closed, and fought down the bile that raged to come up.
“ Hurry!” A voice screamed through the heat.
Jim opened his eyes and stared into the deep brown eyes of Hugh Washington, laying on the opposite end of the room.
“ If you don’t pick it up, we’re both gonna be toast,” Washington said, not so loud now that he had Monday’s attention.
Jim snaked his arm over Julia’s body again, picked up the razor and started to slide back toward the bound police officer, when he heard a booming explosion, and something slapped the floor near his face. He looked up frantic, pulse racing and saw the little man standing in the hallway, shirt on fire, feet slightly apart, both arms extended, right hand firmly holding a pistol, left hand around the right wrist. There was nothing he could do. In seconds he would be dead, but as the man started to pull the trigger the flames leapt to his scraggly hair and face. He screamed as they danced over his body. In his death throes the man pulled the trigger again and again and again, but he was firing blind, his shots going wild.
Covered in flames, the man screamed louder, chilling the night with his wild death yell. For an instant it looked like he was going to make a flaming dash through the living room to the front door and the cool night beyond. But he spun around, a burning ballerina, and dashed back down the hallway, into the flames, his screams spurring Jim into action.
He crawled toward Washington and sliced through the ropes that bound him to the chair. Once free, Washington pointed toward the door.
“ Let’s get out of here.”
Jim nodded and together they crawled toward safety.
“ Dad,” Glenna shouted, when they came through the door. She jumped onto the front porch, started pulling her father away from the flames.
“ Easy, daughter, I can do it.” Washington stood and together, father and daughter, they helped Jim Monday get to his feet. Then to Jim, Washington said. “Police?” It was more question than statement.
“ No,” Jim answered.
“ Want them?” Washington asked.
“ No.”
“ Then we gotta go.” He stopped, pointing. “What’s that?” He was looking at Bobby Markham, dead on the ground next to his car. “Did you do that?” He was asking his daughter with his eye on the forty-five tucked into the waist band of her jeans.
She nodded.
“ Give me the gun.”
She obeyed, handing it to him, butt first the way he had taught her. He wiped her prints off with his shirt, then he tossed it through the front door into the blazing house.
“ Hopefully when they sift through all this, they’ll think these two shot each other. Now we really gotta go.” He looked at Jim, “You got a car?”
“ Down the road.” Jim pointed.
“ Okay, we go.” Washington looked in the car, checking to see if the keys were in the ignition, they were.
Five minutes later Jim Monday drove into the parking lot of the Tampico Motor Inn behind Washington, two and a half hours before dawn. Another ten minutes and Washington had secured two more rooms, one upstairs for Monday and one downstairs, next to his, for his daughter. It was another five minutes, as they were entering the all night diner across from the motel, before they heard the sirens.
“ Feel the earthquake?” Susan Spencer greeted him.
“ Saved my life,” Hugh said.
“ How so?”
“ Someone had their hands around my throat and the earthquake frightened them into letting go.” He paused. “What are you still doing here?” He asked.
“ Two girls called in sick. One of the drawbacks of being the owner.”
Washington laughed and said, “I’d like you to meet my daughter, Glenna.”
“ Any daughter of Hugh’s is a friend of mine.” Susan shook Glenna’s hand like a man. “And I know who you are,” she said. “Your picture has been all over the news.”
“ It’s not true,” Jim said, “none of it.”
“ I know that, otherwise I would have called the sheriff the second you walked through the door.” She wore her smile wide and she winked at him. “Hugh wouldn’t be bringing you in here if you were guilty.”
“ I appreciate your trust,” he said.
“ I’m not trusting you. I’m trusting Hugh. We go back a long way.”
“ Thanks Susan,” Washington said. “We’d like some coffee, quiet conversation and a poor memory.”
“ How poor?”
“ If anybody ever asks, Glenna and I came in alone and we got here an hour ago.”
She looked up at a Felix the Cat shaped wall clock, with a swinging tail, counting the seconds.
“ Yeah, I remember now, you came in at 3:00, I remember because that’s the time I was supposed to get off, but Clara and Ellie didn’t come in and I had to stay. You were here from then till whenever you leave.” She smiled at Hugh and asked. “Will you be leaving town in the morning?”
“ Yes.”
“ Well, I wish you all the luck.” Then she took their order.
They sat in silence, tired, tense and hungry. When the order came they wolfed it down quickly and quietly.
“ Why did you need to establish an alibi?” Monday asked when they were finished and drinking coffee. “It would have been easier and less risky to say nothing. Nobody need ever know we were up there.”
“ Ah, my felon friend,” Washington said, “once it comes out that I was up there talking to Kohler, then I might need an alibi.”
“ Why tell anyone?”
“ Because while I was up there he confessed to being behind Askew’s murder. Of course, I can’t tell anyone that, because the next logical question would be, why didn’t I arrest him, and I’d have to tell the whole story. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want Glenna involved in any of this. But what I can do is say that I was up there earlier this evening, say around 10:00, and your wife told me she found out Kohler was behind Askew’s death. I’ll say I planned to inform the police when I got more proof. It’s believable. I’m known for running an investigation close to the vest. After I left Kohler’s I went over to Palma where I had too much to drink. I came back to the motel sloshed and Glenna dragged me over here and started pouring coffee down my throat.”
“ That way,” Glenna interrupted, looking Jim directly in the eyes, “you’re off the hook for David Askew’s death and once Kohler’s name is brought up, Dad should have no trouble connecting the phony lawyers at the jail to him and-”
“ And the two I killed at Edna Lambert’s,” Jim finished the thought for her.
“ You got it,” Washington said. “Once I say that Mrs. Monday told me Kohler was behind Askew’s murder, it gives me a valid reason to investigate the doctor. It might take a week or two, but I’ll prove your innocence. You can count on it.”
Jim lay in bed, staring at the ceiling as sunlight danced in through the top of the curtains. The swaying shapes of shadows on the ceiling, caused by sunlight filtered through a shade tree outside the window, reminded him of the black and red ant wars he used to watch when he was a child. He always cheered for the black ants, the red ants always won. Life wasn’t fair then, it wasn’t fair now.