Sandra Brown - Low Pressure

Ray did as Rupe ordered and got a post office box, so that nothing was mailed to him at the duplex. He used a cell phone, no land line. Rupe’s comptroller paid all his utility bills, and the relatively insignificant sums were so well hidden in the books of corporate entities and limited liability companies that an auditor would never find the link between the two men.

The only thing Rupe had Ray personally register to himself was the pickup truck.

“If you break the law while driving this truck, I don’t want them coming after me.” Rupe had said it with a smile, a wink, and a slap on the back, which had made Ray think that they were buddies.

They weren’t. While the arrangement was indisputably beneficial to Ray, it served to keep him on a short leash, which Rupe held in a tight grip. It also provided Rupe with a facilitator who was as dumb as he was strong, and both traits had proved useful many times over. In a dispute, Rupe had often relied on Ray’s violent streak to bring the other party around to his way of thinking.

Ray was dull-witted, obedient, uncurious, and malleable. For as long as their arrangement had been in place, he’d never once questioned Rupe’s instructions or balked when told to do something.

Until this week. Which was why Rupe was now standing in a filthy kitchen, watching with disgust as Ray folded a slice of cold bologna into his mouth. Chewing it, he asked, “What happened to your face?”

“We’ll get to that. First I want to know where you’ve been and why you’ve ignored my calls.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Not at work. Your foreman tells me you haven’t shown up for several days.”

“I’ve been following Bellamy Price. I thought you’d want me to keep doing that.”

“Do me a favor, Ray. Don’t do my thinking for me, all right?”

Her publicity blitzkrieg had annoyed and concerned Rupe. By happy circumstance, one of his most reliable repo men had an acquaintance, who had a cousin in Brooklyn, who knew of a guy, who, for a nifty fee, could send “messages with impact.” Rupe had contacted him by telephone, and, after being given a menu of options, he’d selected the rat trick, which had actually sent chills down his own spine.

Soon after that, when he learned that Bellamy Price had returned to Austin, he feared that she hadn’t been scared silent, only scared into moving her media carnival right into his backyard. That was when he’d instructed Ray to follow her for a few days and see what she was up to.

Apparently nothing. She’d spent time with her parents in their mansion, then she’d rented her own place, but she’d kept a low profile. No interviews, no lectures, no book-signing events. Relieved, he’d called Ray off. But Ray must have developed ideas of his own.

“It’s a good thing I kept following her. You want to know why? Guess who she’s hanging out with?”

“Denton Carter. And the reason I know that is because they came calling at my house around sundown tonight.”

“Huh?”

“That’s right.”

The wind had been taken out of Ray’s sails, but he retaliated with querulousness and a transparent indifference. “So what’d they want?”

“No, I get to go first with the questions. Tell me what you’ve been doing the last several days.”

“I told you.”

“What else?”

“Nothin’.”

“I know better, Ray. One thing you did, you beat up Dent Carter.”

He jutted out his lantern jaw. “What if I did?”

“Where?” Rupe asked only in order to compare Ray’s version to Dent’s. Ray’s mumbled account more or less correlated.

“But he didn’t recognize me. He didn’t say my name or nothin’.”

“Well, there you’re wrong. He told me himself that you had attacked him.”

Rupe could tell that worried him, but what Ray said was, “My word against his.”

“You’d better hope so. What did you do after you left the pancake house?”

“I got the hell out of there.” He told Rupe about tracking them, losing them, picking up their trail again at Dent’s place, at her house, until Rupe himself got confused. It was clear Ray couldn’t exactly remember the sequence.

“But he always goes back to that old landing strip sooner or later. They’ve took off from there several times the last coupla days.”

“In his airplane?”

“No. A bigger one. His is busted up. The old man was working—”

Suddenly Ray clamped his mouth shut and looked away from Rupe. He ran his large hand back and forth over that hideous tattoo on his left arm as though petting the snake.

Rupe tilted his head to one side. “ ‘The old man? Gall Halloway? He was working… .?” He ended on an implied question mark. “Ray? How do you know what he was doing?”

Ray remained silent. He looked around as though seeking the nearest way out.

Rupe sighed. Loath as he was to touch anything in the place, he propped himself against the counter, folded his arms, and crossed his ankles. “Just what have you been up to? And you’d fucking better not lie to me.”

Ray wrestled with indecision for several moments, but then he blurted out, “She’s got rich and famous. That’s not right.”

Then he talked for ten minutes, spraying bologna-flecked spit with every other word. Rupe listened without interrupting. He sifted out what he discerned were outright lies or half-truths, filled in what he guessed Ray was omitting, and began considering how he could turn Ray’s reckless actions to his advantage.

And when he determined a way, it was all he could do to keep from breaking into a wide smile. Instead, he pretended to be disappointed in his protege, angry over his independent actions, and deeply troubled by what the consequences of them might be.

As for Ray, over the course of his monologue he’d worked himself into a lather. He was perspiring profusely. Even his scalp was beaded with sweat, its sour stench contributing to his body odor. Reflexively he did curls with his left biceps and contracted and extended the fingers of that hand.

Through clenched teeth, he said, “She was only steps away from the closet. I could smell her. Then her phone rang.” He’d been pacing like a caged bear. Now he came to a sudden halt and slapped his palm several times against his forehead. “So close.”

Rupe made a tsking sound. “So close to getting justice for Allen.”

Ray swiped his bare arm across his sweaty forehead. “Damn straight. Eye for an eye.” He took another bottle of beer from the fridge, uncapped it with a hard twist, took a long drink, then faced Rupe and rolled his shoulders as though preparing for a fight. “Now you know what I’ve done, you gonna fire me? Kick me out of this place? Go ahead, see if I care.”

“I should. But the fact is, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Ray. I’m torn.”

“Torn?”

“Between duty and obligation. Between the law and justice.”

“I don’t get it.”

Rupe thoughtfully tugged on his lower lip. “Will you answer a few questions for me?”

Ray, pleased that he’d been given a choice, hooked his foot around the leg of a chair and dragged it from beneath the table, then flopped down into it. “Shoot.” He slurped from the bottle of beer.

“Before Gall switched out the hangar lights, did he see you?”

“He could’ve. But except for the work light under the airplane, it was dark in there. That’s how come I didn’t notice it wasn’t a real person.”

Reasonable doubt, Rupe thought. Even if Gall Halloway swore on the Bible that his attacker had been Ray Strickland, it could be argued that it was too dark inside the hangar for him to make a positive identification.

“You didn’t leave anything behind? Or take anything?”