Cold in July (22 page)

I went over and sat by the phone and looked at it.

It wasn’t intimidated. It didn’t ring. I stopped looking at
it. I picked up a magazine about hog raising and read about ear mites in the
South; they seemed to be a problem, but nothing that couldn’t be defeated. I
wondered if Jim Bob’s hogs had ear mites. I wondered what the hogs thought
about it if they did. I even tried to see the ear mite’s side of it. The phone
still didn’t ring. It knew I was really watching it out of the corner of my
eye. A watched phone never boils, or something like that.

I went upstairs, not to snoop, but because I had to do
something. I was about ready to crawl along the wall like Spider Man. The door
to Jim Bob’s room was open and I went in there. There was a big table with a
computer on it and some computer manuals. There was a row of books next to his
bed. The books were all Westerns, Louis L’Amour and T.V. Olsen. There was a
shotgun on a deer-antler gun rack over the bed. I went over and tested the tips
of the antlers with my finger. Not that sharp. That was all right. I wasn’t
that sharp either. I was involved in a plot to kill a man I didn’t know and had
never so much as spoken to. There was already one man dead by my hand, and I didn’t
even know his name.

On top of the chest of drawers I found a Trojan rubber in
its wrapper, some keys, change and a stack of magazines. Playboy, Penthouse,
Gallery, and some real sleazoid types. I looked through them. I looked through
the sleazoid types a couple of times. Maybe it was three times.

I sang “Home on the Range” and went downstairs.

The phone rang.

It was a siding salesman. I told him no and hung up. I
looked at the phone a little while. But not long. I had learned my lesson. I
had another beer and went to the bathroom.

The phone rang, of course.

I got my pants snapped and zipped without tearing off any
important parts of my person, and answered it on the third ring.

“We’d like one of them pepperoni pizzas, all the goddamn
fixings, only cut them little fishes off of it. They make me want to throw up.”

“That’s funny, Jim Bob.”

“Ain’t it. Well, we’re over here across from The Caravan
Video Store, and from the looks of things, Freddy owns it. Maybe the feds set
him up with it.”

“Would they do that?”

“Oh yeah. They owe him. Don’t that take the rag off the
bush, though? They take this scumbag and set him up in business and he pretty
well does what he wants so the feds don’t have to look stupid. You don’t see
them sonofabitches doing stuff like that for the honest man, do you?”

“He been there all day?”

“Mex came by and got him about six-thirty this morning,
drove him to work, and even drove him to the Pizza Hut for lunch. You know,
they done got the dents out of that Chevy Nova.”

“That’s all you found out?”

“He likes pepperoni pizza.”

“Great.”

“What’s to find out in one day? I doubt there’s going to be
that many astounding revelations anyway. Best we can hope for is just get his
pattern down and know when to hit him. If we can do it without the Mex around,
all the better. Right now it looks like the sonofabitch shares the same pair of
shoes with him.”

“Yeah, well… Guess I’m just bored.”

“Jack off. That’s what I do when I’m bored. It can liven up
the dullest of days. Go upstairs and read some of them fuckbooks on my dresser.”

“I did.”

“They’ll put a tire tool in your pants, won’t they?”

“I don’t want a tire tool in my pants.”

“You sound a little bit on the cranky side, Dane. Maybe you
ought to have you some milk and cookies, crank the living room air conditioner
to high, stretch out on the couch there and take you a nap. We probably won’t
need you at all today, so unwind.”

“Easier said than done. You’re about out of beer by the way.
You want some more, you better bring some home.”

“What about bread and milk, honey? Do we need that?”

“Ha, ha.”

I hung up and went into the kitchen to look for the milk and
cookies. I found the milk, but no cookies. I drank the milk, turned the air
conditioner on high and stretched out on the couch for a nap. But it didn’t
seem right without the cookies.

38

Next day Jim Bob and I went in the Rambler and Russel stayed
home. I pitied him. I hoped he enjoyed reading about ear mites more than I did.

Freddy’s schedule was pretty much like it was the day
before. We got into Houston and over to the residential area where he lived
about six-ten. We parked in the lot of a Safeway store across from where the
highway met the street that led out from the subdivision.

At exactly six-thirty-five, the Nova with the Mexican
driving came up the street and turned right on the highway. We followed
discreetly in the Rambler. There was no air-conditioning in the Rambler, and by
seven it was already a little warm. We followed the Nova through some heavy
traffic, but Jim Bob never lost sight of it. I noticed that the Nova had all
its windows rolled up. Air-conditioning. I liked that. Here we were, the good
guys, and we had a hot Rambler. Worse than that, the bad guy had his own driver
and a video store somehow provided him by the FBI. It helped with his hobby,
which was taking videos of women being fucked and murdered by himself and the
Mexican. He probably had all the major credit cards.

The Nova went out of the main of Houston and onto Highway 59
North, and finally came to a section that had once been thick with tits-and-ass
joints, but was now only a few topless lounges and cheap eateries, mobile homes
and used car lots. And a video store called The Caravan.

The Nova turned right off of 59 and went around back of the
video place. The store was tucked neatly between an outdoor motor sales and a
garage that had a sign that said it specialized in foreign cars and
transmission work. It was seven-thirty sharp.

We drove on past a ways, then Jim Bob turned around and we
pulled off an annex road and found a little truck stop and had breakfast. When
that was finished, we went to a used car lot that was cater-corner and across
the highway from The Caravan and walked around the lot looking at cars and
kicking tires and keeping a sideways view on the video store. A plump salesman
with white hair slicked back, wearing a plaid sports coat, maroon tie, lime
green slacks and white shoes, tried to tell us why a used car was ten times
better than a new one.

Jim Bob had him show us all the cars on the highway side of
the lot, and we looked at them real slow and asked technical questions and took
turns sitting behind the wheel of each and every one of them. The salesman’s
smile had almost fallen down his throat and he was beginning to look a little
woozy from the heat. His cheap plaid sports coat had wells of sweat under the
arms and there was a ring of it around his neck and a splotch under the knot of
his tie.

“Confidentially, Horace,” Jim Bob said, having latched onto
the man’s name, “I don’t think I could buy a car I hadn’t driven.”

“Course not,” said Horace.

“We’d like to test-drive a few of these babies. See how they
respond. We’ll start with this Skylark, if that’s all right.”

“By all means,” Horace said producing a monogrammed, green
hanky and wiping his face. “We here at Horace Williams’s Motors aim to please.
That’s our motto, and we live by it.”

“And it’s a good motto,” Jim Bob said. “A business that
don’t care about its customers is no business at all. That’s what I always say,
don’t I?”

“Yes,” I said, “you always say that.”

“I’ll get the keys,” Horace said.

We drove the air-conditioned Skylark around a bit, going by
the video store now and then, never getting too far away from it.

We swapped that car for a red ‘68 Chevy, with
air-conditioning, and drove it around, this time actually crossing over to the
video store and driving back between the outdoor motor place and going around
back. We saw the Nova parked there next to a gray Vette.

Jim Bob turned us around and we went back to the used car
dealer. After about five cars, Horace didn’t look nearly so ready to please. He
even told us he thought old Ramblers were pretty good cars, and how if he had
one, he might hang onto it.

“Guess you’re right,” Jim Bob said. “But we’ll be back
tomorrow to look at the rest of them. I think if you’d had that Skylark in
metal flake blue we’d have had a deal.”

There was a filling station almost directly across from The
Caravan, and that was our next stop. Jim Bob shook hands with the owner of the
station. He knew him from the day before.

“This is Phil,” Jim Bob said introducing the station owner
to me. He didn’t bother to give my name to Phil. “New man, Phil. I’m supposed
to break him in today.”

“Well, I don’t envy you men any,” Phil said. “Hot work
sitting out there in a car.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Jim Bob said, and gave him a smile.

“Come on,” he said to me. “Let’s get to work.”

The car was parked next to a telephone booth and it was
pointing in the direction of the video store. We got in it and I said, “Exactly
what is our work, Jim Bob?”

“Highway Department. We’re supposed to count how many
tractor-trailer trucks come by here in a given hour.”

“Any reason?”

“Road damage. Gives some clue to the wear and tear on the
road. Big trucks like that are hard on the concrete. You count about three hours
a day, for a few y, for a days, and you can get some kind of idea as to what
kind of beating the highway’s taking. You can average that out and make plans
for when to have the road repaired. That way you don’t wait until it’s in awful
shape and there’s craters out there big enough to lose a Volkswagen in, though
it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if all them foreign sonofabitches fell off in a
hole. I think you should buy American.”

“Where did you learn all that, Jim Bob?”

“I made it up yesterday.”

We stayed there a couple of hours, and it got bloody hot. I
felt as if my brain was boiling and about to run out my ears. Jim Bob told some
jokes that weren’t any good and we sang “The Great Speckled Bird” together. We
weren’t half-bad. We did every television theme song we knew and we even hummed
some hymns.

Finally I didn’t want to sing anymore. Jim Bob got a
magazine out of the backseat and read it and eyeballed the video store over it
from time to time. It was one of those hog-raising magazines. I wondered if it had
an article on ear mites too.

The Caravan did a brisk trade. People went in and out all
day, renting and perhaps buying videos. A couple of times I wondered if maybe
someone had gone in there to buy a snuff film, but ruled that out. That was too
easy. Those things would be sold to special people in special places, for big
money.

And maybe not. Maybe if the right person had the money, they
could get it across the counter. One Porky’s, a Bugs Bunny Cartoon, and oh
yeah, your latest snuff film.

Jim Bob gave me the magazine. I thumbed through it. There
were some good photographs of hogs.

“Here’s one I bet you don’t know,” Jim Bob said, and he
began to hum the theme to “Secret Agent Man.”

“Secret Agent Man, and shut up.”

About eleven-fifteen the Nova came around the corner with
the Mex driving and Freddy on the front passenger side.

“Lunchtime,” Jim Bob said, and started the Rambler. We
followed them to the Pizza Hut and cruised on by.

“Creatures of habit,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “Let’s go down here and get a burger
and see if we can pick them back up at the store. I have a feeling they keep a
pretty regular schedule. Man, how would you like to eat pizza every day?”

“Thing that gets me,” I said, “is they’re so normal acting.
They go to work and eat pizza, and murder women. Do you think they’ll do it
again?”

“I think they’ll do it until we put a stop to it. If they’d
done it only once, that would be enough for me. I’d as soon the law come down
on them, but since they, won’t, it’s up to me and Russel.”

We got a greasy burger and a Coke and took our time. When we
were finished, we went back to the station and bought a couple of Cokes from
the machine inside and sat out in the Rambler, our home away from home, and
sipped them. My Coke turned hot before I was halfway finished with it, and I
opened the door and poured it out. I got bored enough to actually count the
tractor-trailer trucks that went by; Jim Bob’s theory had come to make a
certain type of sense to me. It was that hot.

About three I opened the door and threw up my hot Coke. Jim
Bob went in the station and bought me some peanut butter crackers and a Sprite.
“Here,” he said, “this will go well with an upset stomach.”

I doubted it, but I nibbled on a cracker and sipped the
Sprite. I began to envy Russel at home in the air-conditioning. Nothing to do
but watch monster movies and look at girly magazines and read about ear mites.

“It’s the glamour that keeps me in this kind of work,” Jim
Bob said. “Good hours and scenery. Chance to meet fascinating people, and of
course there’s the retirement plan.”

At four o’clock, the Nova came out from behind The Caravan.
The Mexican was the only one on board. Jim Bob cranked up the Rambler and we
found a lull in traffic and drove on across to the video store parking lot.

“Just the Mex has seen us, so you go in and have a look
around. Get the lay of the land. This may be where we do it.”

“Here?”

“It’s either here or the house,” Jim Bob said. “If the Mex
comes back, I’ll start honking my horn like I’m out here waiting on you and I’m
impatient. Note the back door, anything like that.”

Inside there were rows and rows of videos. There was a
little thin guy behind the counter. He was wearing a white suit that looked ten
years old. It had gone slightly yellow, and was more yellow still under the
arms. He had on a white shirt with it and no tie. He needed a shave.