“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 gonna make their life shit, too. They took everything away from me? Well, their time has finally come, and now I’m takin’ everything away from your bastard grandfather.”
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.
“They thought you did it,” she said.
“Don’t matter what they thought. Matters what they did. And anyway, somebody knew it wasn’t me, didn’t he?”
He slowed as they neared the house, not only slowing the truck but also his slurred speech. Finally, in near silence, they rolled to a stop about twenty yards from the front door and he threw the truck into park. Grabbing Jody’s left arm, Billy pulled her after him, over the bench seat, banging her against the steering wheel, dragging her out into the grass violently so that her body hit the steering wheel, the side of the truck, the door, the ground. She gritted her teeth to keep from crying out and lay stunned at his feet until he dragged her to a standing position again.
This time he stood behind her with the gun between her shoulders.
He shoved her forward in the darkness, closer to the house.
Jody saw lights on inside, both upstairs and downstairs.
Where are the dogs? This time of night they sometimes liked to wander, hunt, roam the pastures looking for coyotes, nudging calves closer to their mothers if they found any awake and standing. In her mind she begged them, Come home! Here was a predator worse than any coyote, closer to a rabid wolf, and he was closing in on their home and hers.
“Stop,” he ordered her.
She heard Billy digging in one of his pockets and then he shoved something in front of her face with his free hand and she smelled tobacco.
“Get me out a cigarette.”
Jody reached for the pack of Camels and dug out a cigarette with her shaking fingers. She held it over her shoulder and he took it.
“Now light it,” he said, and handed her a matchbook.
She lit his smoke for him and breathed what he blew out.
For several silent minutes they stood like that while he smoked. Jody had the sense that Billy didn’t have a plan. He was making it up as he went along, just as he had grabbed her when the opportunity presented itself. The fact that he didn’t know what he was doing didn’t make her feel any better, it only made him seem more unpredictable and dangerous.
Billy flicked the still burning cigarette onto the grass.
It was dry, and not more than a few seconds passed before it caught a few blades of the tinder-dry growth on fire.
Jody instinctively moved to stamp it out.
He grasped her shoulder and pushed the gun in deeper.
“Hold the fuck still.” And then he said with pleasure in his voice, like a boy discovering a new toy, “Well, look at that. Caught the damn grass on fire, didn’t it? Don’t that make a pretty light?”
He pushed the matchbook into her hands again.
“Start moving. And light another one.”
She walked, and tossed the next lit match onto a different spot in the dry grass when he told her to. He nudged her with the gun again and she repeated the arson. They moved slowly closer to the house, each time starting little fires while the older fires built behind them. Jody prayed the blazes wouldn’t join and get out of control, while at the same time she prayed that they would get large enough to attract her grandparents’ attention from inside the house. In her mind she saw Annabelle looking out the window, her forehead creasing as she noticed an orange glow that wasn’t supposed to be there. She imagined her grandmother calling out in a worried tone, “Hugh? Hugh!” If they saw it, they could call for help. They could escape out the back.
Please don’t come out the front to check on it.
But of course that would be the natural thing for them to do.
They would walk out their front door and put themselves directly in Billy’s line of fire.
If that happened, Jody resolved, she’d throw herself at him, even if it meant he shot her. She just had to hope it didn’t kill her right away. She would do whatever it took to keep him from harming the two people to whom she owed everything.