Malevolent (13 page)

The tip of her tongue lolled at a corner of her mouth as she inserted the nail file into his tire’s exposed valve stem. He heard the ghostly hiss of escaping air and watched the tire soften.

She delicately patted her hands free of tire grime, stood to the accompaniment of more popping joints and said, “See what I’m getting at? If I only exist within the narrow confines of your mind—and trust me, I know how narrow those confines are—that tire can’t really be soft. Can it? Here’s an interesting thought. Say tomorrow morning you drive out of here with an imaginary soft tire and have an imaginary accident that kills pedestrians, do those folks really die or simply discontinue ever having existed in the first place?”

Her eyes lit. “Wow! You see how the existential dilemmas stack up when you ignore them?”

He closed his eyes. His main problem was that he wasn’t getting enough sleep. She was wearing him down with her nightly appearances. Always the same—the taunts, the mind games. He knew exactly what she was doing to him. If he had just a single night of uninterrupted sleep, he could figure it out, some way of fighting back.

The
skritch, skritch
of metal on metal worked its way under his lids to pry them open. He’d drifted off. Now he watched Laney going to work on the passenger-side door panel. In moments, half a heart took shape, then the mirror image other side, the figure encompassing two sets of initials gouged into his high-gloss, multicoat yellow finish.

“Our love,” she told him pleasantly, “is eternal. And so is my proclamation of said love. Check it out tomorrow morning. It’ll still be there. I promise.”

His eyes remained fixed on the three-inch-high scarring of his auto finish, but he wasn’t really seeing it. He said, “It was the church that sent you, wasn’t it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You know what I mean. If I’m not imagining you, it’s the church drawing you back here. It’s starting things up again just like before, isn’t it?”

Her laughter was a musical note that rang off of the cement floor. “That church never gave you what you didn’t want, honey. Not before and not now. That’s why you can’t stay away from the place.”

He wiped a hand across his face and stared at her.

“Contrary to what you might think, honey, the church has never changed you,” she told him. “It’s not making you do what you eventually will do. Deep down, the idea excites you. Just like before.”

“That’s not true,” he whispered.

He turned his head so he wouldn’t have to look at the ghost in his garage. The truth, the possibility that he was, at his core, a heartless, evil man was crushing. It was a possibility that had to be fought, staved off, held at arm’s length.

The s
kritch, skritch
picked up again, but he refused to watch her complete her declaration of love. Anyway, it didn’t matter if he looked or not.

He finally accepted that it, and his soft tire, would still be there for him when dawn finally came.

Chapter Twenty

What had he done?
Not the first time he’d asked the question of himself that night. He pictured a police car, siren wailing, screeching to a halt in front of Griffin’s store, chasing away the solitary customer or two. Griffin would immediately know who’d placed the call.

Tim’s imagination pushed the scene further. Now he was in a witness chair, surrounded by polished wood and stern jurors and a scared defendant. The scowling judge brings down his thunderous gavel and—

“Who were you talking to?”

Tim jumped. “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.” He sat shirtless at a kitchen chair, in the dark.

Patty switched on a lamp at the counter and Tim blinked. “Who were you talking to?” she asked again.

Tim assessed the situation quickly. She sounded fully awake, her voice clear and alert. He couldn’t snow her with the wrong-number routine, so he was left with a bare-bones version of the truth. “The police.”

She said nothing.

“It was a Detective Dillon,” he said.

“
A
Detective Dillon,” she said. “Like neither of us has ever heard the name before.”

Tim shoved out a kitchen chair with his foot and nodded at her to take it. She remained standing.

“I want to know what’s going on and why you’re calling her, your cute little Detective Dillon, in the middle of the night.”

Tim let out a rush of breath and hoped it contained all the righteous anger he had a right to. “What now, Patty? You think I raped some neighborhood woman so I could score with a cop?”

She wheeled to lean the palms of both hands against the sink and stare at the black night outside the window. She was wearing one of his T-shirts and it had hiked up into her panties in back. The sight should have gotten him going, but it just made him vaguely pity her. She drummed her fingers on the countertop.

He said, “I called her because Griffin had a very odd DVD playing tonight.” Making it sound almost whimsical.

“You went to that video store after work? That’s how anxious you were to stay away from home as long as possible?”

He hadn’t seen that particular line of attack until her troops were already over the hill. “I told you I was going to try to get closer to Griffin. Like Detective Dillon asked me to do.”

She turned to face him. “You also told me you stopped in that church last night.”

Now he was really crossed up. He rocked his chair back until his shoulder blades met the wall and thoughtfully sipped at what remained of his beer. “I told you that because it’s what I did.”

“Late at night. With no one else on the premises.”

He could tell by the way she was locking him in to a response that whatever he said was going to be the wrong thing, so he said nothing.

“So why does that minister tell me that they lock up the church at night? Pretty much like every church in America. You think they’d just happen to leave it open in case Tim Brentwood decided to pay a visit in the wee hours?”

“You
went
there?” This surprised him more than he thought it might. It seemed that the little church was looming disproportionately large in their lives, and he couldn’t begin to explain why.

Maybe Patty saw the cloud passing over his face, or maybe she just got too tired to argue further. “It doesn’t matter, Tim,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

He didn’t know how long he sat there. He turned off the lamp. Opened another beer. Watched shadows collect and shift and scatter as clouds rolled over the face of the moon. He thought about Patty and the way her nightshirt—his shirt—had rode high to reveal more of her than he remembered seeing, or at least noticing, in quite some time.

His cell phone rumbled against the tabletop and he dropped it in his haste to answer it before it switched to ring mode.

“The son of a bitch hid it.”

He held the phone so close to his face that it seemed welded on. His voice pitched almost obscenely low, he said, “He didn’t hide it, Melinda. I don’t know what’s going on, but I think Griffin’s as much in the dark as we are.”

There
. He said it. Gave voice to the vague thought his mind had been turning over without even his conscious knowledge.

She said, “He showed us a DVD disk and claimed it was the one you saw.
No Country for Old Men
. Right?”

“Right.”

“Problem is, that’s exactly what’s on it.”

“You viewed it all the way through?”

“I’ve got a rookie with me whose job right now is to watch a movie, but I forwarded and stopped my way through it and it looks clean.”

“Uh huh,” Tim said. Not sure what else to say.

“Naturally we only have his word that it’s even the same disk. There’s no label on it and, if you believe him, it came out of a gray display case with no identifying features. Course, it’s a store full of DVDs. Who knows what he’s handing over.”

“Sure, he could have switched it,” Tim admitted after a second. “But that’s the easy part. You’ve also got to assume that he not only attacked the woman on a crowded street, but that he videotaped the whole thing while doing it, disappeared in seconds, and no one saw a thing. Did the victim even notice a camera?”

The phone lime hummed, her silence answering his question.

“Griffin couldn’t have done it,” he said quietly.

He got no argument on that point. But after a few more seconds of the line humming in his ear, she said, “You didn’t get a good look at the woman in the tape, right? Maybe it was a different victim, one he
did
get to shoot. It follows the same MO. He attacks her from behind and pushes her facedown on the sidewalk. What do you want to bet there’s not another case like this, sometime, somewhere.”

“Pretty vague,” he said.

“I’m looking into it. If something like this was reported, I’ll find out. It’ll stick out because the victim would have seen a camera.” She paused. “If he let her live, that is.”

She was breathing heavily now, all of her pent-up anger and frustration whistling through her like a slow leak from a slashed tire. Tim wondered at first why she was telling him all of this, but he knew the answer. She couldn’t go to a DA with this bizarre case. Not at this point, at least, but she had to talk it through with someone. He was her listening post.

“How’d Griffin explain things when you confronted him?” he asked.

“Said he’s watching the opening scene of
No Country for Old Men
, he gets distracted and next thing he knows, it’s what you saw.”

“He admitted it?”

“He described the scene pretty much as you did, but what else is he going to do?”

“Lie.”

“He knows what you’re going to report.”

“My word against his,” says Tim. “I mean, assuming he’s going to switch the disk anyway.”

“Maybe he’s just not too bright.”

Tim shook his head though there was no one in his dark kitchen to see it. “I just don’t think he’s guilty.”

“Then why’d you turn him in?”

He winced at the direct hit. He was still trying to stay on the sidelines, that’s why. Cheer both teams on, pull for everyone’s point of view.

That strategy, he admitted to himself, just wasn’t working.

Chapter Twenty-One

On Monday morning, Griffin Solloway came to take his revenge on his traitorous friend.

Tim’s grip on the doorknob tightened. He’d swung it open without a thought when the knocking came. Now he’d have to shove the other man down a full flight of stairs, slam the door, slap the chain in place, key the dead bolt, call the cops.

“Hi. Thought I’d stop by and see if we could talk.”

Tim blinked. Back to reality, where you don’t pitch others down full flights of stairs, no matter what they’re about to do. “Okay.”

So now he was in Tim’s house. His bristly beard and Oakland Raiders ball cap framing his head in black. Griffin scanned the living room, rubbed his nose and said, “Seen any good movies lately?”

Tim stood there, speechless.

“It’s a joke, okay? Sorry. Some weekend, huh? I think we need to get our heads together, maybe figure this thing out between us. What about you?”

“How can you eat that fiber crap without sugar? Please tell me you got some in the house ’cuz it’s a bowl of horse feed without it.”

Tim shook his head. “I was getting headaches. Patty told me it was the refined sugar. Or unrefined. Whichever it is.”

Griffin stared at the bowl between his fists. “That’s what makes the breakfast. Gets you going, you know?”

Tim had attempted to use his unfinished meal as an excuse to cut short the surprise visit, but the plan had misfired miserably when Griffin invited himself to the table.

“Those were the days,” the dude mumbled around a mouthful of cereal that he’d seemed to have decided was better than expected. “Remember having your best friend stay for breakfast? He’d sleep over and the two of you would be at the table the next morning, trading lists of favorite cereals and the ones that sucked the most.”

“You’re not staying over,” Tim muttered.

“You mind?” Griffin asked, lifting the cereal box and cocking it toward his bowl. “Once you get started…”

Tim nodded his permission and soon the snap of dry oats meeting skim milk filled the space.

Griffin said, “If you had real, honest-to-God homogenized milk rather than this gray, healthy shit, we might actually have something here.”

“Patty says the real stuff blocks arteries.”

Griffin nodded solemnly. “Sounds like she takes good care of you.”

They sat and munched in silence, Tim’s jaws finding and subconsciously matching the bovine chewing rhythms of his friend.

Friend?
Maybe. Or a sadistic rapist. Or maybe both. Friend
and
sadistic rapist. Was that possible? How fucked up was his life becoming?

And what about Detective Dillon? Melinda. What did he owe her? When he shared breakfast in his kitchen with the man with the milk-stained beard, was he doing it on her behalf? He had, after all, promised to stay in touch with the odd store owner. Could he do so, but in good faith to both of them? How was that possible?