by secret signal, the three of us began to cry.
15
That night Jordan went back to bed with us and I lay there thinking about Russel. After all that had happened, the thing that kept coming back to me was that he had hands like my father and he had had them around my neck. It was like my old man had come back from the grave to choke me for something I had done. I could never quite get it out of my mind-in spite of what I knew about my mother-that I had been in some way responsible for him eating the barrel of his Winchester.
I eventually gave up trying to sleep and went into the kitchen and put some strong coffee on. While that was brewing I went into Jordan’s room and turned on the light and looked around. The Little Sprout lamp, which had been beside his bed on the nightstand before Ann used it to hit Russel, lay on the floor where she had dropped it when the cops came in. There was a mark in the headboard of the bed where Russel had thrown the knife, but other than that, everything looked normal.
I walked around the room touching toys and books, assuring myself that things were as they had been and that they would coast along properly from here on out. It was a lie I very much wanted to believe.
I put the lamp where it belonged and sat down on Jordan’s bed, and while I was sitting there, I saw something dark sticking out from beneath Jordan’s battered toy box. Getting down on my hands and knees, I pulled it out and saw that it was a wallet. Without opening it, I knew it was Russel’s and that it had slid under there during the fight.
The thing to do was to give it to the cops, but I couldn’t resist a peek inside first. The first thing I saw was a photograph encased in one of those plastic windows. Russel was a young man in the picture and he looked handsome, strong and happy. He was down on his knee and he had his arm around a little blond-haired boy holding a BB gun. The boy looked about Jordan’s age. On the back of the photograph was written: Freddy and Dad.
There was a photograph behind that one, and it was of a young man in his early twenties. He was blond, blue-eyed, and handsome, if slightly thick in the chin. On the back of the photograph ed ine on out. in the same handwriting was Freddy.
I thought about Freddy the night I shot him, and tried to match his face with this one. The burglar had had brown hair sticking out from beneath his cap and the eye that wasn’t a wound had been brown. His chin had been narrow, and never in his life had he been handsome or even passably attractive.
If this was a photograph of Freddy Russel, then the man I shot wasn’t him.
Joe R. Lansdale
Cold in July
Part Two
16
I went to the bedroom and found some clothes in the dark and managed to get out of my pajamas and put them on without waking Ann or Jordan. In the kitchen I wrote Ann a note, then slipped out quietly and drove to town.
When I got to the police station I sat in the lot for a time and leaned on the steering wheel, trying to decide if I was making a mistake. I got Russel’s wallet out of my shirt pocket and opened the car door so I’d have the overhead light and looked at the photographs again and the writing on the backs of each. I must have looked at those wrinkled photographs a dozen times each, but no matter how I turned them or held them to the light, the face of the burglar I had killed was not to be found in them.
I put the wallet in the glove box of my car and got out.
Inside the station I told the dispatcher that I had come to see Price.
“He’s home, sir,” she said. “I can take a message.”
“I think you better call him at home,” I said. Then I told her who I was and what had happened and that something very important had come up. I told her I wouldn’t tell anyone about it but Price, and it was something he would want to know.
“Very well,” she said, and she called him, frowning at me all the while she was doing it. I found a chair and sat down and a few moments later she leaned her head out of the dispatcher’s office and called to me. “He’ll be here in a few minutes. He said for you to go to the assembly room and have a cup of coffee if you like.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Certainly,” she said, but she didn’t look like she meant it.
I went back through the door that led down the hallway to the assembly room and found the coffee machine. I didn’t really want the coffee, but it was something to do. I thought about backing out more than once, but that didn’t happen. I just sat there with my paper coffee cup warming my hands, staring off into space.
Two cops came in laughing and looked at me in that suspicious way they look at everyone. They got coffee and sat down at the far end of the table and talked quietly and looked at me and finally got up and went out, taking their coffee with them.
I was about finished with my coffee when Price showed up. As usual, he looked perfect. He looked as if he had already had a good night’s rest. His face was unlined and his black hair was combed neatly. His suit was tan and very fashionable. He had on a light blue shirt and a thin blue and tan tie and the shoes still had that blinding shoe shine.
“Problem?” he said.
“Sort of. I want you to let Russel go.”
He stared at me a moment, then went over to the coffee machine and got a cup and came to sit down near me. “Why?” he said.
“He didn’t really hurt anyone. He couldn’t kill my son, he just thought he could.”
He gave me the kind of smile nut ward attendants reserve for their patients who think they can fly. “He hurt an officer of mine. He hurt you. That wasn’t exactly a tumbling act you folks were doing in there before we came in.”
“No. He was trying to hurt me, all right, but he was out of his head. He wouldn’t do it again. He’s spent. He’s had his shot and he couldn’t do it and he didn’t want to do it.”
“So you’re saying you don’t want to press charges?”
“I am.”
“It doesn’t work like that, Mr. Dane. You don’t have to press charges. We caught him in the act. He hurt one of my men. We don’t need for you to press charges.”
“I think you do.”
“It would make it easier if you did, but we don’t need you.”
“The officer was hurt because he was in my house at your request.”
“And at your agreement.”
“Yes, but I was wrong about that.”
“Come on, what’s with you, Dane? Just a few hours ago you were wrestling this nut around your house, and just before that you were giving me hell for not going after him before he even tried anything.”
“I know.”
“Then what gives?”
I thought about the photographs in the glove box of my car, but I didn’t say anything. Not yet. Something was
