35
IT WAS ONLY a couple of hundred yards to Red’s place, down an incline that put him out of sight of the ranch house and gave both Red and the Linders some privacy from each other. When Jody was small, now and then her grandmother had sent her down to the mailbox at the front gate near the hired hand’s house just to let her run off some energy. Now she walked, not ran, in that direction, mentally working through a list of single women she knew in the county to try to predict who it was going to be. Thinking about Red’s new romance was easier than thinking about Collin’s phone call and all the things it might mean to her, to him, to her family, to a whole lot of people.
It was a beautiful evening on the ranch, fragrant and fresh.
The time was past twilight, with full night closing in.
She’d brought a flashlight with her to show her the way home, but she didn’t turn it on yet.
Red’s house came into view and she halted at the sight of it.
His truck was there and the garage door was still down.
She would just walk up, ring the bell like a proper visitor, and if his woman friend opened the door, she would ask with an innocent air, “Hi. Is Red home? May I speak to him, please?”
At the front door, she rang the doorbell and then knocked.
Nobody answered, though she could hear the television blaring from the bedroom. She rang again and knocked harder, giving them time to get dressed, if that was the problem. After waiting several more minutes with no results, Jody walked around the bushes at the side of Red’s house and went over to the garage. Red’s dog was pacing in front of the closed garage door.
She didn’t try to pet the stray that Red called Mangy Beast.
She looked like a blue heeler with a touch of husky in her, a gray and tan dog that he’d found by the side of the highway near the front gate. Red considered it a major miracle of his life that an actual hunting dog had materialized there, needing a home. She had acted liked a whipped cur for a long time before her curved, bushy tail began to wag when Red went out to feed her.
Mangy Beast wasn’t mean, but she wasn’t friendly, either.
The sturdy, muscular creature with the strange light eyes stood in front of the garage door, staring at her.
“Are you hungry, girl?”
It wasn’t like Red to neglect to feed animals, whether cattle or dogs, and it appeared to Jody that he had committed several of those sins today-neglecting horses, cattle, and his own pet.
On the far side of the garage-where any woman watching from the house couldn’t see her-Jody found an old bucket and put it under the window frame. She stepped up and looked inside a dirty window.
Red’s visitor drove a red Ford Taurus that looked familiar to Jody.
Where had she seen that car before and who was driving it?
She stepped down and walked to the back door this time.
Beyond the illumination cast by the lights inside the house, Red’s yard was totally dark, so she turned on her flashlight and trod carefully, watching where she placed her feet so she wouldn’t stumble over a garden hose or anything else in her way. As she neared the back stoop, she realized Mangy Beast was with her, keeping silent pace with her. The dog’s hackles were raised on the back of her neck, as if she didn’t approve of Red’s visitor inside, and she was growling low and deep in her throat.
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 annoyed by the second at his obliviousness to responsibility, Jody knocked loudly and then pulled open the door and shouted, “Red! Are you home?”
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 innocent, Collin had said. Now, with Red’s murder, his father was neither.