The Red Scream (35 page)

Molly felt a clutch of dread in her chest. She didn’t believe it. But still the dread was there. “Charlie, I really don’t think—”

He raised a hand. “Hear me out. You asked for an interview and I’m giving it. I think this lunatic picked on my family because he was copying Bronk. I’m not saying it was just your book; there’s all the other publicity Bronk has gotten—I blame everyone who keeps this animal in the public attention by writing about him, making him into some sort of celebrity. Now I suppose people have a right to know the facts, the bare facts of a crime, but when you write this long book that goes into his childhood and past and what the shrinks say and, Christ, even his poetry, it just makes me sick.”

Molly took a deep breath. She was beginning to feel ragged; she shouldn’t have come. “Charlie, serial killers, like Louie, don’t read
books; the only printed material they’re likely to look at is pornography.”

“How would you know that?”

“From my experience with them, and from the things I’ve read—research that experts in the field have done.”

He took a long draw on his drink. “Hell, I’ve read some of that stuff, too. These serial killer fellows like Bronk often like to read about themselves in newspapers, right? And they all read pornography and detective magazines, right?”

“Yes,” Molly admitted.

“So why not your book?” He looked at her hard, his eyes set back deep in the layers of flesh his face had acquired over the years. “Why not? How do you know that they don’t get off on stuff like you write?”

“I have worried about that some in the past, but I really don’t—”

“You don’t think it’s an accident this happened right after your book came out, do you? Hell, it triggered some crazy to try it himself.” His face was darkening from its usual ruddy tan to a deep maroon.

“Charlie, I can see why you’d be angry, but—”

“Angry?” he boomed. “Angry does not even come close to how I feel. My wife was killed. My privacy is being invaded. My children are being tormented. The police are looking at my bank accounts, every aspect of my life. Here I am, a victim of crime, and the police come after me as if it’s my fault.” He turned his head away from her. “It’s sickening.”

He opened his mouth to speak again, but couldn’t catch his breath. He gulped for air and then breathed in and out with wheezy gasps. For a minute Molly feared he was going to choke. She started to stand, but he gestured her down with a movement of his hand.

“The reason I haven’t said anything public in the past is that I wanted to protect my family’s privacy. But the dam has broken. Also I didn’t want to do anything to give any more attention to this violent criminal. But what does it matter now? It’s hard to imagine it could get any worse. I know you’re not going to write this, but I just want my protest registered.”

“Of course, I’ll write it,” she said, looking down to make sure the recorder was moving. “Anything else?”

“Yes. The solution is to give these criminals fair trials and execute
them real fast, with a minimum of press coverage. It’s a crime—no, a
sin
—it’s a sin that Bronk is still alive eleven years after he slaughtered my wife and that he’s getting all this attention now. He should have been executed right after the trial or right after his first appeal was denied.” He lifted his hands from his knees and slowly leaned back in the chair, as if he’d totally exhausted himself.

Molly leaned back, too. She felt more beat-up and bruised than she had after the fight today. It had haunted her some, this idea that writing about crime in a dramatic way might encourage sick minds to try it, but she’d rejected it. Almost rejected it; there were still those 3
A.M.
awakenings when she worried about everything, including this. There could be some truth in what he was saying and it horrified her to contemplate it. The irony here would be if someone had copied Louie in a murder Louie didn’t even commit.

She looked down at the recorder in her lap. She wanted to get this over with, but she needed to ask one more thing. “What about David Serrano, Charlie?”

He shook his head. “He was always a nice boy, a good employee. I wanted to help him get started in life after what he’d been through. Now I’m getting blasted for it. I don’t know what he might have got mixed up in over the past years. I’m not convinced his death is related to Georgia’s.”

“It would be one hell of a coincidence,” Molly said. “Did you read about Louie recanting his confession?”

He lifted his head. “I can’t believe a responsible newspaper would print that garbage.”

Molly nodded. She was not about to give voice right now to her growing doubts about Louie Bronk; it might push this man into apoplexy. “Why have you decided to talk publicly now?” she asked.

He looked down at the backs of his hands. “I just needed to get it off my chest. Like I said, the dam has already broken and …” he hesitated. “And it’s my last chance.”

“Your last chance?”

“Yes.” His eyes still cast downward, he said, “Six months from now, I’m not going to be around.”

“Why not?”

He looked up. “If you use this in an article, please don’t do it for another week. Until I’ve had a chance to tell my family. I found out last week that this pain in my back that I thought was a ruptured
disk is really cancer. Had a scan and it showed tumors all over the spine, and in my lungs and liver. Everywhere. Doctor says I’ll be lucky to make it to Easter.”

“Oh, Charlie, I’m so sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Who knows this?”

“Georgia knew. Frank knows. Other than my doctor, only them. Before I go public I want to get a real good second opinion. I’m going to Anderson in Houston next week. I’ll tell them then. At least the Bronk thing will be over by then. So you see, my kids will have enough to deal with—all this death—without you making it worse by digging up past pain.”

His lips tightened. “People usually ask if there’s anything they can do when you tell ’em your bad news. If you was to ask me that, Molly, I’d say what I been saying all along: ‘Don’t upset my kids with all this.’ I think Alison is stretched to her breaking point. I’m trying to get her to come stay here. At least she’d be safe and away from that man she’s living with. Stuart doesn’t show the strain like she does, but he’s suffering, too.”

He picked up the glass. “Sorry. I think that’s all I can take today.” His head fell back against the chair again. “I get so tired. Can you find your way to the door? Frank will let you out.”

Molly turned off the tape recorder. “Thanks for talking to me, Charlie. I assure you that I will write what you’ve said and I’ll check with you before printing anything about your illness. All right?”

Without opening his eyes, he said, “Fine.”

Frank was waiting for her at the door. She wondered if he’d been there all along or if Charlie had signaled him in some way. He deactivated the alarm by punching a series of numbers into a keypad on the wall, used a key to unlock the two dead bolts, then opened the door and stepped out. He stared at Grady Traynor sitting in the truck, then stood aside for Molly to pass.

As she approached the truck, Grady leaned across and opened the door. He looked at her face in the overhead light and said, “Shall I drive?”

She shook her head as she climbed in. “No. Driving always makes me feel better.” She started the engine.

They drove in silence for the first minute. “So?” he said finally. “Are you going to tell me?”

“Huh? Oh, he’s mad. He thinks people like me who write about crime glamorize the criminals and cause other people to commit crimes.”

“Bullshit,” Grady said.

“I hope so,” she said fervently. “I hope you’re right.”

Then she said, “Grady, I’ve been wondering. It’s possible that Louie set this all up—what happened in Fort Worth last night and today. I mean, when he told me about the car, he could have arranged for someone to steal a Mustang from that lot and burn down the auto body place, to make it seem like someone was trying to destroy the evidence that would exonerate him.” She took her eyes off the road for a minute to glance at him. “Pretty farfetched, I know. But do you think it’s possible?”

“Sure, it’s possible. I’ve known guys in solitary confinement to plan bank robberies, kidnappings, even murders, and get other people to execute them. It’s possible, but I don’t think he did. Do you?”

She was silent, thinking about it. Four minutes later when they pulled up to her garage she said, “No. I don’t think so either.” She pushed the button on the door opener clipped to her visor and drove into the garage.

When she cut off the engine, Grady reached over and turned up the radio which had been playing low, tuning it to K-VET, the country music station. As if by some master plan of fate, the song playing was Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” a song they had danced to at the Broken Spoke in 1968. “Mmm, that’s just right for us, isn’t it, Molly?”

He pushed the button on her visor, and as the garage door rumbled down, he walked around to her side. He held his arms up in their old slow-dance position, inviting her, waiting for her. She stepped into it as easily as if twenty-five years had not gone by. Together they began to sway to the mellow strains of the song. He bent his head down to press his cheek against hers.

“It’s like riding a bicycle,” Molly murmured.

“This is the sort of thing your body never forgets how to do. Oh, Molly.”

It was as if one might really have a second chance at the things that mattered. She knew it wasn’t true, but for this moment she chose to believe it anyway, because it felt so good.

The automatic timer switched off the overhead light, leaving them in total darkness.

Dancing with Grady Traynor had always been somewhere between dancing and making love in rhythm. And now, in the dark garage, to the smell of grease and old lawn mowers, they fell back into that familiar mating dance, the one that started so dreamy-slow you were caught up in it before you had a chance to escape, even if you wanted to. It started with the feel of another body, separate at first, and strange, different in its hollows and fullnesses. But gradually, with the music and the movement, the bodies softened, the outlines blurred, and one body began to flow right into the other as the dance went on.

She remembered the very first time she had danced with him, wanting to pull his shirt out and run her hands up his bare back right there on the dance floor. She hadn’t done it then; she had waited until later. But she did it now, untucked his shirt and very slowly moved her hands up his back, feeling the smooth skin and the knobs of his spine underneath. When she moved her hands along his sides up under his arms, he sucked in his breath. She remembered back then being aroused by his arousal, and, amazingly, it was no different now.

Molly had always loved this stage of the dance, stretching it out, prolonging it until the tension forced the next stage. The song changed to Jennifer Warnes’s “Right Time of the Night” and then Willie’s “Always on My Mind.” Grady wrapped both arms around her, resting his hands on the swell of her hips. She began unbuttoning his shirt, slowly. She rested her palms against his bare chest, moving them down the abdomen, pausing to feel an unfamiliar scar that ran under his belt.

“Appendix,” he murmured, as she ran her fingers the smooth length of it, “at the damnedest time, right in the middle of the Westerman investigation.”

Slowly, as they danced, they undressed one another, one button, one zipper, one hook at a time. Then, music and all pretense of dancing forgotten, it was no longer slow or languid. To Molly’s surprise, it felt even more desperate to her now than when they were young. Maybe because now they both knew something that they hadn’t known then: that they were mortal and that time was running down. In this world you never knew which dance was the last one.

“Want to go upstairs where it’s comfortable?” she said, barely able to get her breath.

“Remember San Antonio?” he asked.

She laughed. She did remember. They had gone to a party in San Antonio, where they had danced, just like this. On the way home, unable to wait, they stopped in a cornfield and made love for the first time in the back of his old pickup under the light of a full moon. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I remember.”

“So do I.” He picked up his shirt and jacket and spread them out in the back of her pickup. “This isn’t called the truck bed for nothing,” he said, lying down on his back and pulling her in on top of him.

L
ater, upstairs in bed, Molly could have drifted off to sleep, except that she was ravenously hungry. She lifted her leg, which had been resting on top of his, and rolled on to her back. He propped himself up on an elbow and looked down at her in the pale glow of the night-light she always kept burning.

“It’s a little like going to a twenty-fifth high school reunion,” Molly said. “You can’t help but worry how you’ll look to people who have a mental image of you at eighteen.”

He laughed, picked up her hand, and pressed the palm against his stomach. “I know what you mean. The last time we did this, this area was concave.”

She turned her head on the pillow to look down at him. “It looks good to me, Grady, and after all, it is fifty years old.”

“Fifty?” he said, slowly pressing her hand downward. “Really? But who’s counting?”

She withdrew her hand. “How about that dinner you promised me? All I’ve had to eat since breakfast was two bitty little bags of almonds on the plane.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am, dinner.” He looked down at her, his pale eyes predatory in the gloom, as he moved them along her body. Foolish to let all this happen again, she knew. But, after all, life was short, and she was certainly old enough to take care of herself.

He leaned down and kissed her, his tongue flicking along the insides of her lips as lightly as a feather.

He slid a hand under her back and raised her on to her side, brushing his chest against her breasts and slipping his leg between
hers, trying to rekindle her interest. “Dinner now or later?” he asked.

But she couldn’t answer because he’d pressed his mouth against hers.

He brought his leg up higher and rubbed. She found herself getting less interested in dinner.