Accustomed to the Dark (20 page)

“Fine. Thanks. After I hang up, give me a couple of minutes to set up the fax.”

“No sweat. Hang in there, buddy.”

“Right.”

I moved the binoculars and the Circle-K bag to the floor mat, tugged Leroy's briefcase from the back, arranged the computer and fax on the passenger seat. Five minutes later I had my second photograph of Thomas Thorogood.

A man in his late thirties wearing a tux and a big silly smile, he was sitting at a cloth-covered dinner table, raising a glass of champagne toward the camera. He had dark curly hair and a dark mustache. Sitting beside him, and trying to clamber into his lap, was an attractive woman with eager eyes and long insistent arms and a hairdo that looked like it had been carefully molded from blonde cement. The caption identified her as his fiancée, Miss Lee Ann Horsley, and said she'd won the Miss Wichita Falls title in 1990. Miss Congeniality, too, probably.

I folded the picture, slipped it into my jacket. I zipped up Leroy's case and returned it to the back of the Jeep.

Ten minutes later, I was on Hillside Avenue. If there was a hill anywhere nearby, I didn't see it. Maybe the hill had been razed, decades ago, to make room for the big frame houses. These weren't as upscale as the houses in Mr. Niederman's development outside Denver, but they weren't hovels either. It was a cozy, dozing neighborhood that had been here for a while, judging by the tall sycamores and magnolias that lined the paved driveways.

Like the houses on either side of it, 340 Hillside was a large white two-story building, taller than it was wide, with a steeply pitched roof, a covered porch, and an attached garage with what looked liked servants' quarters over it. I drove past the place for three blocks, turned around, and drove back. There weren't many cars parked in the street, but there were a few, and I parked on the side opposite Thorogood's house, and one house up.

Through the rain, I had a fairly good view across the lawn. The curtains were drawn at the large window to the left of the porch, probably the living room, and a light was on inside. Maybe someone was home. Or maybe Thorogood liked to leave his lights on.

I turned off the wipers, turned off the engine. The film of soap on the windows would stop them from fogging over, and keep the view clear. And prevent anyone who spotted the car from wondering why someone was breathing inside it. I moved over into the passenger seat, away from the driver's window, opened the thermos, poured myself a cup of coffee, and I sat back to wait.

When I came rushing down the steps of the house on Santa Fe Avenue, I heard the squeal of tires as a car roared off. I was too busy at the time to check it out.

Rita was lying facedown, unconscious but still breathing. She had been shot once, low in the back, just to the right of her spine. William had been shot twice, once in the stomach and once in the face. He lay on his back and there was a puddle beneath his head, shiny in the lamplight. He wasn't breathing.

Later, the cops worked out the way it must have happened. Back then, my name and address were listed in the phone book. Anyone could have learned where I lived. The people who rented the front of the house weren't at home that night. If it were Martinez who pulled the trigger—and I'd known, since the moment I heard the shots, that it was Martinez who pulled the trigger—he had seen the darkened front, had seen that my car wasn't in the driveway, and assumed I wasn't there.

He had waited in a car at the curb, probably parked just behind Rita's Mercedes. He had seen my Ford pull up and he had assumed that I was driving. As it turned into the driveway, he had left his own car to stalk up behind it. William was the same height as I was, and from the back he could easily have been mistaken for me. When he and Rita stepped out of the Ford, Martinez had fired.

Because Rita had been shot in the back, the police were fairly certain that she had been shot first. William had turned at the sound of the gunshots, and he had been facing his killer when he died.

No one ever knew why Martinez fired first at Rita. He never said. Maybe her presence surprised him. Maybe he simply wanted to hurt any woman he believed to be with me.

I had heard four shots. The police found the fourth slug in the wall of the house next door.

When I discovered that Rita was still alive, I raced back up the driveway and back into the house. I dialed 911.

From then on, things went very much as they were to go six years later. There were cops and paramedics, police cars and ambulances, there were questions and answers. But that time, the ambulance carried Rita away without me beside her.

After a while Hector was there. We went into my apartment. As manic lights twirled blue and red against the window, I told him about Ernie Martinez.

I spent four hours outside the house of Thomas Thorogood before anything happened. At nine o'clock, a light went on in an upstairs window.

The rain had stopped about an hour before. The night was dark, the moon a dull gray blur behind the clouds.

By that time I had emptied the thermos of coffee, eaten one of the sandwiches and half of the Fig Newtons, and used the Mason jar once.

A shadow moved in that upstairs room. Through the binoculars, all I could see was the paper on the far wall. It was printed in a floral pattern. A bedroom? Thomas was getting ready to hit the sack?

No, the lights were still on downstairs.

He and Lee Ann were together up there?

After fifteen minutes, the upstairs light went out. Two minutes later, the downstairs light went out. A minute after that, the garage door slowly swung up. The Lincoln backed out. As it came down the driveway, the white wooden door swung slowly shut. A remote.

The Lincoln backed into a turn, then headed toward me. I ducked below the dashboard before the headlights swept through the car.

Thorogood was alone. Maybe Lee Ann was back in Wichita Falls, doing her hair.

So. Follow Thomas or check out the house?

Follow Thomas. If it looks like he'll be busy for a while, come back to the house.

I started the Cherokee, pulled it into a U-turn. I could see, about seventy-five yards ahead, the bright red taillights of the Towncar. I kept my headlights off for a couple of blocks, and turned them on when he made a turn.

I followed him for about two miles through Clayton. Just at the outskirts of town, where the prairie began to stretch out into the endless empty night, he turned off the highway and pulled into the unpaved parking lot of a roadhouse. It was a long, low, cement block building, its flat roof topped with a huge red and yellow neon sign that said “Wrasslin' Randy's” in gaudy script. Standing beside that was a huge blue and yellow neon cowboy, complete with hat, hunkered down into a crouch as though about to leap forward and wreak some havoc.

The parking lot was only half full, so I drove past it, but slowly. The Towncar was parked by itself at one end of the lot, beside the pole of a solitary light, and Thomas Thorogood was getting out of it.

He was wearing a black shirt, black jeans, a pair of tan boots, and a pinto cowboy hat that curled upward along the sides of the brim.

I drove on for a quarter of a mile, made another U-turn, and drove back. I parked the Cherokee at the other end of the lot, concealing it behind the rest of the cars, and I climbed out and walked to the building.

The entrance door was metal. When I opened it I ran into a dense warm wall of sound. Garth Brooks.

The place was a large open rectangle with a low panelled ceiling. Apparently, there hadn't been much decorating money left after the neon sign had gone onto the roof. The bare block walls were painted a flat black. The floor was painted a flat burgundy, and the enamel was chipped here and there, showing gray cement.

In the center of the room was a small, scuffed wooden dance floor that held a few enthusiastic couples. You could tell that the men were genuine cowboys, because they wore hats, and they touched them often. The women had lots of hair and they all looked like Loretta Lynn. Except for one of them, who looked like Buck Owens. More couples sat at wooden tables in the corners.

I saw the pinto hat on the bar before I saw Thomas Thorogood. There were people scattered at stools along the length of the bar, but he was sitting at the far left end, alone.

I walked to the other end of the bar and slid onto a stool. The bar was curved at this end, so I had a good view of Thorogood. Which also meant that he had a good view of me. But I would've been still more conspicuous if I'd sat alone at one of the tables.

He was drinking something out of a rocks glass. Separating us along the bar were an older couple drinking Lone Star beer, two construction workers drinking Lone Star beer, a very old man drinking Lone Star beer, and a pair of women drinking Lone Star beer.

Unlike the rest, the women were drinking their beer from glasses. Both were blondes in their forties, very well preserved, who at some point had evidently taken styling tips from Lee Ann Horsley. Both were dressed hopefully in tight jeans and brightly colored Western shirts, embroidered at the yoke. So far, no one was circling. But the night was young.

The bartender waddled over to me. “What kin I getcha?”

Prematurely balding, he was an immensely fat young man in a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt, its sleeves rolled back above pale forearms the size of Virginia hams. The sweatshirt was a necessity, because he was sweating. It was probably always a necessity.

“A Lone Star,” I told him. When in Rome.

He waddled to the cooler, bent down with visible effort, opened it, plucked out the long-necked bottle, waddled back. He cracked the bottle open with a church key, set it down on the bar. No glass. Glasses were for sissy boys.

“Two dollars,” he said.

I put a five on the bar and he took it, wiped his forehead with the bunched-up sleeve of the sweatshirt, and then waddled away to make change.

I sipped at my beer and glanced at Thorogood. He held a cigarette in his right hand. He was staring down at his drink, using his left hand to revolve it slowly, aimlessly, in its place on the bar top.

The bartender brought me my change and waddled away again.

“Howdy!”

I turned to my right. Another cowboy, another hat, sliding onto the stool next to mine. A pressed white cotton shirt, Western-style, and a pair of brown knit pants. He was in his fifties, as lean and weathered as a strip of jerky, and almost as dark. His teeth seemed very white and very plentiful, and he was showing them in a broad grin.

“Billy Fetterman,” he said, and held out a gnarled brown hand.

I took it. “Jim Collins.”

“Pleasure, Jim.” He released the hand from a death grip and hollered to the bartender, “Randy?”

Randy lumbered over. Fetterman said, “Gimme a Heineken, you don't mind, and give old Jim here 'nother bottle of that horse piss.”

Randy lumbered away. Fetterman turned to me. With a stiff index finger he poked up the brim of his hat, the cowboy equivalent of taking it off. A widow's peak of wiry hair, black and white, showed just beneath the brim. “Where you from, Jim?”

“Phoenix,” I said.

“Been there,” he nodded. “Great little town. I'm outta Wichita Falls myself. Been there?”

“Not yet.” I glanced at Thorogood. He was blowing smoke from his nostrils as he eyed the two women. He stroked his black mustache.

“Helluva town, Jim.” Grinning, he shook his head. “Helluva town. Weather like you never witnessed in all your born days. I been through heat waves, ice storms, blizzards, and a coupla hellacious tornados. Course, Tuesday was a mite better.”

I smiled.

The bartender set down the beers. “I do thank you, Randy,” said Fetterman. Without asking the cowboy for money, Randy waddled off.

Fetterman raised his bottle. “Here's looking at ya, Jim.”

I raised mine and we clinked glass. We upended bottles, we drank beer. We were bonded for life.

I nodded toward the bartender. “He's the wrestler?” I asked Fetterman.

“Him?” Fetterman guffawed. “I reckon Little Randy couldn't wrestle himself outta that tent he's wearing without a derrick and a full crew. Shoot, he must weigh pretty near a ton, bareass naked. And that's a thought to scare the crows away, ain't it? Nah, it's his daddy was the wrestler. Built this place back in the seventies, is what I hear.” He took a hit from his bottle. “What kinda line you in, Jim?”

“Photography.”

“No shit,” he said. “Don't know a damn thing about photography. I'm in horses myself. Know anything about horses?”

“Not a whole lot.”

“Lotta people, now,” he said, leaning forward, into the subject, “they'll tell ya that horses are dumb. I got me a brother, Delbert. Pig farmer. He's big on pigs, Delbert is. Subscribes to the theory that they're smarter'n horses. I been tellin' him for years that horses ain't dumb, they're just pure ass ornery. And that's the truth of it. Most ornery damn creatures on God's green earth.” He took a hit of beer. “So what kinda photography is that, Jim? Is that like portraits?”

“Landscapes. I'm doing some work for National Geographic.”

Thorogood had gotten up. Now he walked toward the two women, holding his glass.

“You don't say,” said Fetterman. “Got me about a ton of those, up in the attic at home. Think they're worth anything?”

“Hard to say,” I told him. Thorogood and the women were talking. The women laughed. I asked Fetterman, “What brings you to Carlton?”

“Been here for pretty near a week now. Dickerin' with a fella ‘bout a string of Appaloosas.” He shook his head regretfully. “Real sweet animals, ever' one of 'em as pretty as a Paris runway model, but he's askin' more for 'em than any kinda horseflesh is worth.”

Thorogood signaled the bartender and ordered a round of drinks.

I glanced at my watch. Ten o'clock. I turned to Fetterman. “Sorry, Billy, I just remembered something. I've gotta run.”