Joe Lansdale - Lost Echoes

When she got to the den, which she had transformed into an office, she turned on the light. There was a clutch of darts sticking up in a block of wood on top of a large carved wooden bear. The bear had been her father’s. He bought it for her when she was ten. They had been driving along on their way to visit relatives in Houston, and there it was, along with a bunch of other chain saw–carved critters. She had squealed so loudly he had pulled over and bought her the bear, right there on the spot, had to rent a truck later to come back and get it.

The block of wood fit right between the bear’s ears.

Kayla picked up the block, pulled the six darts out of it, put the block back between Harry’s ears. That’s what she had named the bear. Harry.

After all these years she hadn’t forgotten Harry, and of course he remembered her too. A little. Had asked for her number. Just to be friendly, most likely. A sort of I’ll call, we’ll do lunch. That wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. It wasn’t the way she dreamed things would be. She thought she would grow up and see Harry again and he would fall madly in love with her and they would marry.

Two interlocking pieces of the same great puzzle. Hadn’t that been the way they talked that time so long ago?

Tonight hadn’t quite been the vision she had imagined.

Course, she had a lot of other things in mind, and nothing had come of any of those either. Like solving her father’s murder for one.

Suicide they called it, not murder.

Well, strictly speaking, no one back then thought it was a suicide. Autoerotic accidental death. That’s what was thought. But her dad had been a cop, and the police force didn’t want that out, the stuff about the autoerotic business, and they spared her and her mother from having that in the paper.

Suicide.

That’s how it read.

It wasn’t.

And it was no accident either. She didn’t care what the cops thought or what it had said in the paper.

It was murder. She was sure of it.

There was a target on the door across the way and she threw the darts one by one at it. Three of the darts stuck in the door. She was going to have to replace that door pretty soon. It was pocked with holes. The landlord found out, he’d be pissed. Maybe, she thought, I can get some cork board, cover the whole door, that way I miss, no damage.

She collected the darts, tried again from a closer distance. She hit the board five out of six times. A couple of them landed in the general vicinity of the bull’s-eye.

When she gathered them up a third time, she picked up the block of wood, stuck the darts in it, replaced it between Harry’s ears.

So much for sports.

She turned on some music, doo-wop, her favorite.

She fixed a cup of instant coffee, heating it in the microwave. It tasted dreadful. She sipped it, standing at the kitchen sink, thinking about the events of the night, about what Harry had said about a redheaded guy, thinking this while she listened to the Tokens sing about the lion in the jungle.

She sat down at her desk in the den with her cup and used a key under her chair cushion to unlock the central desk drawer.

She took files out of the drawer, placed them on the desktop, shuffled them open. She looked at the photocopies of the crime photos inside.

Her father. Hanging. Wearing lipstick, a bra, lace panties, and fishnet stockings with leg hair poking through.

You couldn’t tell it in the photos, but the panties were pink. They really didn’t go well with his skin color, and they certainly didn’t match the bra, which was white and rather loose-fitting.

Nope. Didn’t look good. Loose bra. Hair poking through the stockings. And those frilly pink panties. Just didn’t work. Especially in the bug-smeared light of his garage. Bad atmosphere.

It was an atmosphere she remembered very well.

She was the one who found him.

43

Harry found Tad’s door wide-open, and when he went cautiously into the house, turned on the light, he smelled something that he recognized immediately.

Liquor. Alcohol. A lot of it. You could have given about fifty fat people a full-fledged rubdown with just the smell alone.

Damn, thought Harry. Damn.

Tad’s feet were poking out from under the kitchen table, cans and bottles were spread all over. Two empty bags of honey-roasted peanuts lay ripped open nearby.

Harry got Tad by the feet and pulled him out from under the table. Tad groaned, threw an arm over his eyes. “Turn off the goddamn sun,” Tad said. His voice was so slurred, it took Harry a moment to understand what he meant.

“It’s a lightbulb, Tad.”

“Goddamn bright.”

Harry dragged Tad across the room, down the hall to the bathroom, by his feet. By the time Harry got him there, Tad was out cold again.

Harry hit the light, bent Tad over the tub, turned on the shower, gave Tad’s head a good dose of cold water. Tad came up sputtering. Harry had a hand on Tad’s shoulder, and before Harry could figure how it happened, he was in a wristlock that hurt all the way to his spine and caused his head to touch the floor.

“It’s me, Tad,” Harry said, his face against the tile. “Harry. You remember Harry.”

“Oh,” Tad said, letting him go, falling to a limp sitting position against the wall. He put his arm over his eyes to fend against the bathroom light. “Any more peanuts?”

“I think you ate them all. You fucked up, Tad. You fucked up big-time. We had a deal, and you blew it.”

Tad didn’t move his arm from over his eyes. He seemed suddenly sober. “On this day they died. Don’t seem that long ago to me, though, Harry. It’s like fucking yesterday. My boy, he’d be your age, I’d been on time. Shown up when I was supposed to.”

“It happened on this day?”

“Today, so many—but not so many—years ago,” Tad said, and began to cry.

“Damn,” Harry said, reaching out to gently touch Tad’s shoulder. “Damn. I should have been here. You should have said.”

After about ten pass-outs and two pots of coffee, and with morning near, Tad was sober, or at least something that passed for it. They positioned themselves in lawn chairs in the backyard with large cups of coffee. The only light in the yard was starlight, and there wasn’t much of that, but there was a glow from the next-door neighbor’s yard light as well. The wind was blowing gently and so were the leaves, dry now as mummy wrappings.

“My boy, he would have been your age, Harry.”

This was something Harry had heard a lot. Tad had repeated it both drunk and sober all night.

“I know, Tad. I’m so sorry.”

“Knew the day was coming. The anniversary of the event. Thought I had it by the balls. Really did. Then it came, and I got to thinking, and you weren’t around—”

“Sorry.”

“Not your fault. I was kind of glad you weren’t, because I wanted to feel miserable and sorry for myself. And I knew I was going to do it before I actually went to do it. About dark I drove down to the liquor store, bought all manner of knock-down juice, and well, you see the results. I’m not proud of myself. To put it simply, tonight has not been a good night for our hero.”

“Not on my end either.”

“Oh?”

Harry told him all about it, Talia, the shelter, Kayla, his own trip to the liquor store, his close call there, whole ball of wax.

“Damn,” Tad said. “Your day really did suck the big old donkey dick. I’m sorry about Talia.”

“Me too. Sort of. I should have known better. There was plenty there in the way of signs to tell me I was getting jerked around, and then…the shelter…what I saw there.”

“Hey, you got to cast your line in the water, try and drag something in from time to time. Now and again, you do that, you get a stinker. But what about this cop, Kayla? You know her, she gave you her number. Said you used to have a crush on her.”