Sandra Brown - Low Pressure

“I guess no introductions are necessary.”

Haymaker snorted. “You I would’ve recognized anywhere. Even with your face messed up.” Then he shifted his gaze to Bellamy. “You? I wouldn’t have known, except that I’ve been seeing you on TV.”

“May we come in?” she asked politely.

He hesitated for only a moment, then stood aside. Beyond a small foyer was a cluttered living room that boasted a large flat-screen TV. Family pictures were lined up on the mantel. A mutt lay sleeping in the corner of the sofa. Taking up a lot of the floor space was a faux leather recliner with an oil stain matching the size and general shape of Haymaker’s head.

He motioned them toward the sofa, where Bellamy crowded in between Dent and the dog, who wasn’t instructed to vacate his spot in order to make room for them. Haymaker took the recliner and adjusted it to a comfortable angle with the footrest up. The bottoms of his white socks were gray.

He grinned puckishly. “What can I do for you folks?”

Dent got straight to the point. “Produce your buddy Dale Moody.”

The former cop laughed a little too loudly and loosely for it not to sound forced. “Old Dale,” he said, shaking his head and smiling fondly. “Wonder what became of him?”

“Well, for one thing he got drummed out of the Austin PD.”

Haymaker lunged upright in his lounger and stabbed the air with his index finger. “That’s a damn lie. Where’d you hear that? Dale left the department by choice. He wasn’t fired. He wasn’t even suspended.”

“So no one ever found out about what he did to me?”

Beside him Bellamy twitched with surprise, but she didn’t say anything. He’d asked her to let him loosen up Haymaker. He hadn’t told her how he intended to go about it.

Haymaker’s tongue darted out to wet his lips. “Okay, yeah, Dale was a tough cop. He wasn’t always politically correct. Sometimes he got a little carried away, especially with punks like you who thought they were smarter than him.”

“I was smarter than him. I called his bluff and didn’t confess, and he didn’t follow through on his threat. I still have both eyes in perfect working condition.”

He turned to Bellamy. “Moody showed up at my house when my dad was at work. He bent me backward over our kitchen table and pressed a Phillips screwdriver to my eyelid. He said if I didn’t confess to choking Susan, he was going to puncture my eyeball and destroy forever any chance I had of flying an airplane.

“I was alone. I didn’t have a lawyer. For over an hour, Moody tried to get a confession out of me by threatening to blind me.” He turned back to Haymaker. “And this son of a bitch held me down while he did it.”

Haymaker rolled his narrow shoulders. “No harm was done, was it? You made out okay.”

“Allen Strickland didn’t.”

Bellamy’s softly spoken words had a noticeable impact on Haymaker, who began fidgeting even more, making the faux leather beneath him squeak. “You can’t lay it at Dale’s door that Strickland was killed in prison. The boy was tried in a court of law. He was found guilty by a jury of his peers—”

“On nothing but circumstantial evidence.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said quickly. “I was present only a few of the times that Dale questioned him, then I was assigned to another case.”

“You didn’t help Moody and Rupe Collier cook up the case against Strickland?”

“No.” Then, realizing he’d walked into a trap, Haymaker began backpedaling. “What I mean is, they didn’t cook up anything. They had a solid enough case to get a conviction. The jury thought so.”

“What did Detective Moody think?”

In response to Dent’s question, his beady eyes blinked nervously. “What do you mean?”

“Was it sheer coincidence that Moody left the police department shortly after Allen Strickland died in Huntsville?”

Haymaker squirmed some more. “Dale didn’t confide in me why he quit. He… he had some problems with the bottle. Lots of cops do, you know,” he said defensively.

“Why did he?”

“Trouble at home. He was married to a real harpy. My wife wouldn’t win any prizes, but that one of Dale’s—”

“We’re not here to talk about his marital woes or his drinking habits.” Dent sat forward, propping his forearms on his thighs as he moved closer to the former detective and lowered his voice to a confidential pitch. “Bellamy and I think that maybe the reason Dale Moody quit being a cop, and seemingly dropped off the face of the earth, is because he couldn’t live with his guilty conscience.”

Haymaker was finding it hard to look either of them in the eye. “I wasn’t his priest or his shrink.”

“You were his friend, though. His one and only.” Dent gave Haymaker several moments to wonder how he knew that before enlightening him. “After that screwdriver incident, I wanted my pound of Moody’s flesh, so I started following him. You were the only person that he met after hours. You were his only drinking buddy. I trailed the two of you for weeks, night after night, from bar to bar.

“Then Gall, who I never could pull anything over on, demanded to know what I was up to. When I told him, he called me a numbskull and told me that if I wanted to assault a cop and ruin my life, fine, but that he wasn’t going to be a party to my ruination. He ordered me off his property and told me not to come back.”

He spread his hands. “I loved flying more than I hated Moody. I gave up my revenge plot, and the only thing that came from my amateur surveillance was the knowledge that Detective Moody had only one friend.” He tipped his head toward Haymaker. “If anybody knows where he is, it’s you.”

The man rubbed his palms up and down the legs of his baggy plaid shorts. “What do you want him for?” Looking at Bellamy, he said, “You already did a number on him in your book. You looking to drive the nails in his hands a little deeper?”

“I wanted to interview him for my book but couldn’t find him,” she said. “I was as accurate as I could be, based on the impressions of a preteen girl. It wasn’t my intention to cast aspersions on Detective Moody. Why would I? He captured and helped convict the man who killed my sister.”

“So there you have it,” Haymaker said, slapping the padded arms of his chair. “The end.”

“No, not the end,” she said. “Not if you think I ‘did a number on him.’ Is that how he perceives it, too?”

“I don’t know what he perceives.”

“You’re lying,” Dent said.

Bellamy placed a cautionary hand on his knee. In a gentler, less combative voice, she asked, “Does Moody see it that way, too, Mr. Haymaker? If so, wouldn’t he welcome the chance to set me straight?”

“Uh-uh. No way. He won’t talk to you.” Haymaker gave a decisive shake of his head.

“How do you know?”

“Because he won’t even talk to me about it, and I’m his best… only… friend. As wiseass here has pointed out.” He cast a sour glance at Dent. Dent didn’t respond. Bellamy was making headway where he hadn’t, so he yielded the floor to her.

She asked Haymaker, “Have you tried to get him to talk about it?”

“For eighteen friggin’ years. I don’t know what-all went on. But what I do know, Dale wasn’t ever the same after that boy got killed in prison. After it happened, he stayed drunk for a month, then just up and announced to me that he was leaving the department, leaving his family, leaving Austin, and that was that.”

“But you’re still in contact?”

He shifted his weight, scratched his head, and seemed to consider how much he should impart. When he looked at Dent, it was with hostility, but he responded to Bellamy’s calm gaze.