Crooked House (4 page)

“What did you do?” he said. “Did you call the cops?”

“No
,” she said. “I wanted to show you this first?” She handed him the letter. “That came yesterday. The postal lady brought it to the door personally.”

She didn’t say more, just sat there, looking at the letter, waiting for him to read it.

It was from a law firm in Ocala. It was short, but even for that he found it difficult to pull the sense out of it. Something about paternity and a hearing to decide custody.

“What’s this mean, ‘...documentary proof that the birth mother is morally unfit to raise a teenage girl?’  What the hell kind of statement is that?”

Sarah could only stammer and shrug.

Robert tried to read the letter through again, but it was all too much for him to process
. Christ, he didn’t need this right now. Not now.

He tossed the letter aside and rubbed his temples.

He had a monster headache, like some little bastard was standing on the bridge of his nose pounding on his forehead with a mallet. Wasn’t coming home supposed to be a man’s rest and comfort? Wasn’t his home supposed to be his refuge? He told himself he loved this, being home with his wife and his daughter. But it scared him a little that he could be pushed hard enough to question that.

“Robert,”
Sarah said, and put her arm around him. “I won’t let him take her. I won’t.”

He put his arm around her and squeezed
. He muttered something he hoped would be comforting. But in his mind he was miles away, thinking of how nice it would be when they were all finally at Crook House.

They could start over.

He couldn’t wait.

December 18

They left for San Antonio three days later, Robert and the girls and as many boxes as they could carry stuffed into the backseat and trunk of Robert’s six-year-old Mazda. It had been a busy last few days for all of them, and Angela especially was exhausted. Robert glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. She was still sleeping. Poor thing. In the last two days, she’d said good-bye to her school and all her friends, packed up a house, stayed up late, and been awoken before dawn to load up the car for this trip. Her breakfast had been McDonald’s drive-thru fare, eaten off of the top of the cardboard boxes that shared her seat. Looking back at her, he could tell she was wiped out, emotionally and physically. The sleep would do her good.

It was a pity she was still out
, though, because they were coming up on the Sabine River Bridge that connected Louisiana and Texas. As a college student, years ago, before he met Sarah and before Angela came into his life, he’d gone on a Spring Break road trip with some buddies, first to New Orleans and then down to South Padre Island before heading back home to Ohio State. He’d been driving a tired old Toyota Celica that belonged to his roommate, and as they approached the bridge and then headed up the rise on the Louisiana side, he’d had serious doubts that the little car was going to make it over the crest of the bridge. It was enormous, five hundred feet high at least, and between the woefully underpowered car with the four big guys inside and their luggage in the back, it’d been a hard climb. They made nervous jokes about getting out to push. But they made it over the crest and started down the other side, during which his doubts had renewed themselves. Now that they’d made it up, with Texas looming before them, would the brakes be up to the task of slowing them down?

But for as scary as the car ride had been, the view, he remembered, was spectacular
. They’d been so high up. The Sabine River had shone like molten copper in the evening sun. The big cargo ships that plied the waters down there were majestic, like rust-colored icebergs. He remembered the way the car smelled, four guys cooped up with a bunch of fried seafood and beer and no air conditioning; and yet, for all that, it had seemed so beautiful, so perfect. So long ago, he thought. Back when there were no worries, no reason to fear the future.

“What are you thinking about?”
Sarah asked him.

“Hmm?”

“You had that faraway look. I know that look. You’re daydreaming.”

“I was thinking of the last time I drove this stretch of highway
. Remember me telling you about that road trip I took down to South Padre my junior year at Ohio State?”

“Mmm,” she said, noncommittally.

“The view off this bridge coming up is absolutely incredible. You want to wake her up?”

“Do you?”

“Kinda, yeah. It’s an amazing view. And this’ll be her first look at Texas.”

Sarah
rubbed the .40 caliber shell casing that suspended from the chain around her neck. She looked back at Angela and studied her for a moment.

“No,” she said at last, “let her sleep.”

“You sure?”

“She’s tired, Robert
. It’s been a crazy last few days. What time do you think we’ll make it into San Antonio?”

“Hard to say
. I guess it depends on the traffic through Houston. Maybe around eight.”

“God, that long?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, it’s a long drive. Hey, it was nice of Thom to have Trinity’s bankers take care of the house, huh? That’s a big load off.”

“Mmm hmm,” she said.

Was that a touch of frost he heard in her tone? He hadn’t really expected a conversation to develop. He was really just testing her waters, anxious to see if she was still upset with him. Upon his return to Florida, Sarah had asked him how they possibly expected to sell their house in a crappy economy in just two days. She was furious about it, actually, even though she’d wanted out of that place pretty much since they moved in. God, how they had fought. It all came out. How pissed she was at him for quitting his job, for turning their lives upside down, for being so selfish. Robert gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, the knuckles on his right hand sending him a warning tingle. They were still bruised where, in his rage, he’d punched the wall. Sarah had watched him do it, no emotion whatsoever on her face, except for maybe exhaustion, and then walked away.

Not knowing what else to do, he called Thom Horner and asked what they could do about selling the house, and once again his old mentor
came through. Trinity’s bank could take over the sale of the house, Thom said. Their people would do everything. All Robert and Sarah needed to do was sign the appropriate forms when the time came.

Robert stole a glance at her
. She was dressed in little white shorts and a red camisole top with the white of her bra strap showing at her shoulders. She had one long leg up, her foot resting on the dash, her gaze fixed out the passenger window. He wondered what she was thinking about. The trouble with Jay Carroll, maybe. Or maybe everything else going on, their bills, his quitting his job, Angela’s braces, the move. Maybe all of it. Perhaps, like him, she had grown so used to a constant flood of trouble that she couldn’t let her guard down, even when good things happened. She’d even gotten upset with him when he told her what Thom had said about having a job for her.

She was rubbing the shell casing again
. He remembered it falling from her collar to the floor in the hospital. He and Sarah and Angela had stood there, watching it come to rest, waiting for someone in charge to pick it up, someone who was supposed to need it for evidence or whatever the hell the cops did.

But no one had.

It fell to the floor and stayed there.

Alone
, while a parade of cops and nurses and doctors walked by, profound in the silence.

After what seemed like a pai
nful forever, Sarah reached down and picked it up. “Do you think I can keep it?” she’d asked.

He’d look
ed around at all the hum of the emergency room swirling around them, everyone looking intense and impatient, and then back at the shell casing in her hand. With three cops dead, no one seemed much interested in them, uninjured as they were. He looked from her to the spent shell casing that had fallen from her collar, and then he’d nodded.

“Put it in your pocket,” he said.

“Robert!”

His thoughts snapped back to the moment
. They were drifting onto the shoulder and getting dangerously close to the Jersey wall. He shook himself and brought the car under control.

“Got it,” he said
. “No problem.”

He smiled at her, and she sort of smiled in return, but said nothing, and the next moment, she went back to looking at Louisiana speeding by outside her window
. Her fingers went back to the shell casing, and he readjusted his grip on the wheel, his eyes on the road. But soon his mind had wandered back to that hospital emergency room and the shell casing on the floor at their feet.

That first summer they were
in Florida, about eight years ago, he’d taken them to Disney World. After a day at the Magic Kingdom they were exhausted and hungry and down to their last few dollars, so they’d stopped at a little diner for some burgers and fries. But midway through their meal a couple a few tables away started arguing, and it got bad enough somebody called the cops. The first cop to show up started talking to the boyfriend, who looked like a steroid-fueled gym nut, and the next instant, before Robert had a chance to get Sarah and Angela out of there, the cop and the boyfriend started fighting. It got nasty real fast as the two men rolled around the floor, kicking and punching, knocking over chairs and tables. The rest of the diner’s patrons jumped to their feet, but were otherwise too stunned, and, like Robert, too scared to do anything.

Then, when two more cops came running in, it look
ed like things might actually get under control. But that was when the boyfriend came up with the first cop’s gun and fired at the approaching officers. The first one went down right away, dead, a bullet through his eye. The second one dropped to his knees, hit in the shoulder, and then crawled behind the cash register.

The boyfriend stood over the cop whose gun he now carried and shot him at point
-blank range. Robert and Angela had been less than three feet away when the bullet blasted out a good sized chunk of the cop’s face.

Angela screamed and scrambled behind Robert.

Robert was so scared he could barely process what was going on. He backed away from the dead cop with the blasted face and kept backing up until he could go no further.

When he looked up, the
steroid-raging boyfriend was staring at him over the sights of the dead cop’s gun. Robert’s eyes went wide. His vision tunneled around the huge open bore of the pistol. It looked big as a cave. He could hear himself whimpering. He could feel his blood pounding in his ears. His bowels turned to water, and he was pretty sure he’d pissed in his jeans.

And then there was
a shot.

The boyfriend
tumbled to the ground, gut punched.

But he didn’t stop fighting
. He turned and fired at the cop he’d wounded earlier.

From somewhere off to Robert’s right he heard a man scream in pain
. Then more shots. The two men must have fired half a dozen rounds each before both collapsed. And, as a horrified calm fell over the scene, Robert stared into the dying eyes of the boyfriend, unable to look away as the blind rage that had fueled the man gradually dimmed to the vacant stare of death.

He didn’t move until he heard crying behind him.

Stiff and drained from his body’s adrenaline, he turned to see Sarah and Angela behind him. Angela had her face buried in Sarah’s side, while Sarah was staring at him, her eyes lit with fear and wonder and something that could have only been love.

He shook his head, unable to formulate any words.

“You were going to take a bullet for us,” she said at last.

Before he could tell her he’d been too scared to realize he was about to do any such thing
, she threw herself into his arms, her face in his neck.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

It was from one of the last few shots that the enraged boyfriend fired that the shell casing that hung from Sarah’s neck had come. For her, and for him too, it had become a symbol of their marriage, a symbol of how lucky they were to find each other, and how it was the two of them against the world. The fact that she was rubbing it he took for a good thing. There was strength in that talisman. And hopefully, he thought, she’d be able to call upon some of that strength in the days ahead. It was going to be rough on her, getting settled into the new house, his new job, new friends, all of it. But at least they had each other.

Then he realized they were almost to the Sabine River Bridge
. He glanced off to his right and saw the river shrouded in gray, no cargo vessels down there, no dappled molten sunlight. The land had a washed out December look to it, and the river was smoky with fog. He frowned in his disappointment. Good thing they hadn’t woken Angela up for this. There really wasn’t all that much to see.

“You still mad at me?” he said.

She let the shell casing drop between her breasts before turning around in her seat to look at him. “I’m not mad at you,” she said.