Sandra Brown - Low Pressure

“Not really,” he said wryly. “I usually don’t watch men dance.”

“Then take my word for it. He was good. Susan, too. One song segued into another, and Allen Strickland stayed her partner. The way they moved together was in-your-face sexy, and everybody noticed. His hands were all over her, and she wasn’t doing anything to discourage him. The opposite, in fact.”

She paused for a length of time, lost in the memory.

Then, speaking softly, she said, “Considering how the two of them had been grinding against each other on the dance floor, it wasn’t at all surprising that Allen Strickland was the first man the police questioned.”

“You’re wrong there, A.k.a.,” he said bitterly. “ I was the first.”

Several hundred miles away, former Austin PD homicide detective Dale Moody was also remembering his first interview with Denton Carter. All these years later, he remembered it like it had happened yesterday. It played like a recording inside his head.

“Son, you’d just as well tell us what we know to be the truth, ’cause we’re gonna find out anyway, sooner or later. It would save you some trouble and earn our good graces if you came clean now. How ’bout it?”

“I had nothing to do with it.”

“You and Susan snuck off into the woods so you could be alone, am I right? Things got hot. Then, like girls sometimes do, she called a halt to it. Hell, I understand how mad that must’ve made you, Dent. I myself hate when that happens.”

“I’ll bet you do. And I’ll bet it happens to you a lot. But it doesn’t happen to me. It sure as hell didn’t happen at the barbecue because I wasn’t even there.”

“You were, Dent, you were.”

“Not until after the tornado ripped through! Before that I was flying with Gall. Ask him.”

“I’ve got an officer out there now, talking to him.”

“Well, then that should be the end of it. I wasn’t at the barbecue, and I didn’t kill Susan. She was my girlfriend.”

“Who you’d had a fight with that morning.”

Silence.

“Her family has told me about that quarrel, Dent. They said the two of you really went at it. She slammed back into the house. You tore away from their place on your motorcycle in a huff. Right or wrong?”

“Right. So what?”

“What did you and Susan argue about?”

“About me not going to the barbecue with her. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I wasn’t fucking there.”

“Watch your language, boy. Do you know who you’re talking to?”

“Oh, sorry. Let me rephrase that. I wasn’t fucking there… asshole.”

Dale clicked his tongue as though switching off a playback machine. He knew the dialogue by heart. Like everything else relating to the Susan Lyston case, it had stayed with him. He was cursed with total recall. But, if he was rusty on a point, all he had to do was consult his well-thumbed copy of Low Pressure .

Which he did now, flipping through the pages until he found the scene where the character patterned after him was trying to squeeze a confession out of the victim’s boyfriend. Bellamy Lyston hadn’t been in that interrogation room, but she’d come pretty damn close to telling it just like it had been.

In fact, every scene in her book was eerily accurate. The lady had a talent for telling a story in a way that kept the reader glued to the pages. Dale just wished her captivating story hadn’t been this story. His story.

It was happenstance that he’d even learned about her book. His TV had been tuned to a morning news show. He’d been waiting for his coffee to brew and hadn’t really been paying much attention to what the guest and the host were talking about. But when he realized the pretty novelist was Bellamy Lyston Price, all grown up and dressed fit to kill, he’d stopped what he was doing and gave a listen.

She was saying that her novel was about the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl at a Memorial Day barbecue. That was when Dale’s stomach had begun to roil, and, by the time the interview had concluded, he was swallowing hard to keep down the whiskey he’d drunk the night before. It had come up anyway, scalding and sour, searing the back of his throat.

He pulled himself together and drove to the nearest Walmart, bought a copy of the book, and started reading it as soon as he got home. It wasn’t as bad as he was afraid it would be.

It was worse.

He’d felt like his belly had been ripped open with one of those instruments of torture they’d used back in the Middle Ages and his guts were on display for anybody who wanted to dig around in them to see what they could find.

His hands shook now as he lit a cigarette, poured a glass of Jack, picked up his pistol, and carried it and the drink out onto his front porch, which wasn’t a befitting name for the sad-looking, warped wood platform. It matched the rest of his cabin: old, neglected, and deteriorating a noticeable degree each day.

Which also described Dale Moody himself. It would be interesting to see which would give out first: the porch, his lungs, or his liver.

If he got lucky and the porch collapsed beneath him, the fall might break his neck and kill him instantly. If he got lung cancer, he’d let it take him without putting up a fight. Same with cirrhosis. If none of that happened soon… Well, that was why the S&W .357 was always within easy reach.

One of these days he just might work up the nerve to put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. A few times, when he was really drunk, he’d played Russian roulette with it, but he’d always won. Or lost. Depending on how you looked at it.

It was a hot, breathless afternoon, the thick silence shattered only by the screech of cicadas. The shade found beneath the tin roof overhang on the porch provided little relief from the sweltering heat. Through the cypresses, the still surface of Caddo Lake looked like a brass plate.

The cabin in which he’d lived alone for fifteen years was situated on a densely wooded peninsula. The cove it formed looked dark and malevolent with its low canopy of moss-laden trees and viscous swamp waters. Few fishermen ventured into the uninviting inlet. Dale Moody liked it that way. Solitude had been what he was after when he’d bought the place, paying cash, filing the documents under a name he took off a hundred-year-old gravestone.

He sat down in his creaky rocker with the fraying cane seat, sipped the whiskey, drew on the cigarette, and enjoyed the reassuring weight of the loaded revolver resting on his thigh.

As he sat there, barely putting forth the effort to rock the chair, he asked himself, as he did most days, how his life might have been different if Susan Lyston hadn’t been killed that day. Would he have distinguished himself as a homicide detective, received commendations and handshakes from the mayor, stayed on with the Austin PD until he could draw full retirement? Would he still be married and have contact with his children? Would he know what his grandkids looked like?

But Susan Lyston had been killed on that dreadful Memorial Day eighteen years ago. The date not only marked her murder, it was also meteorologically significant. The first tornado to strike Austin in almost half a century had roared through the city and torn it all to hell, leaving destruction and death in its unforgiving path. One of the hardest-hit areas was the state park where the Lystons were hosting their annual company party.

The attendees had been having such a good time that few took notice of the threatening clouds beyond hoping that rain wouldn’t cancel the fireworks display scheduled for that night. Eventually, though, people became concerned about the premature dusk, the noticeable change in the barometric pressure, the supernatural stillness, and the greenish cast of the sky.