the bedroom and rushing through the unlit house, calling for her, it would tip him irrevocably toward panic. Also, the darkness and quiet of the bedroom appalled him, and he understood that he was afraid to go looking for her, afraid of what might be waiting beyond the door.
As he stood there, he became aware of a guttural rumble, the sound of an idling engine. He rolled his eyes back, looked at the ceiling. It was lit an icy white, someone’s headlights, pointing in from the driveway below. He could hear the dogs barking.
Jude crossed to the window and shifted aside the curtain.
The pickup parked out front had been blue once, but it was at least twenty years old and had not seen another coat in all that time, had faded to the color of smoke. It was a Chevy, a working truck. Jude had whiled away two years of his life twisting a wrench in an auto garage for $1.75 an hour, and he knew from the deep, ferocious mutter of the idling engine that it had a big block under the hood. The front end was all aggression and menace, with a wide silver bumper like a boxer’s mouthpiece and an iron brush guard bolted over the grill. What he had taken at first for headlights were a pair of floods attached to the brush guard, two round spots pouring their glare into the night. The pickup sat almost a full foot off the ground on four 35s, a truck built for running on washed-out swamp roads, banging through the ruts and choking brush of the Deep South, the bottoms. The engine was running. No one was in it.
The dogs flung themselves against the chain-link wall of the pen, a steady crash and clang, yapping at the empty pickup. Jude peered down the driveway, in the direction of the road. The gates were closed. You had to know a six-digit security code to get them open.
It was the dead man’s truck. Jude knew the moment he saw it, knew with a calm, utter certainty. His next thought was,
The phone by the bed chirped, and Jude half jumped in surprise, letting go of the curtain. He turned and stared. The clock beside the phone read 3:12. The phone rang again.
Jude moved toward it, tiptoeing quickly across cold floorboards. Stared down at it. It rang a third time. He didn’t want to answer. He had an idea it would be the dead man, and Jude didn’t want to talk to him. Jude didn’t want to hear Craddock’s voice.
“Fuck it,” he said, and he answered. “Who is it?”
“Hey, Chief. It’s Dan.”
“Danny? It’s three in the morning.”
“Oh. I didn’t know it was so late. Were you asleep?”
“No.” Jude fell silent, waited.
“I’m sorry I left like I did.”
“Are you drunk?” Jude asked. He looked at the window again, the blue-tinted glare of the floodlights shining around the edges of the curtains. “Are you calling drunk because you want your job back? Because if you are, this is the wrong fuckin’ time—”
“No. I can’t…I can’t come back, Jude. I was just calling to say I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry I said anything about the ghost for sale. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”
“Go to bed.”
“I can’t.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’m out walking in the dark. I don’t even know where I am.”
Jude felt the back of his arms prickling with goose bumps. The thought of Danny out on the streets somewhere, shuffling around in the dark, disturbed him more than it should’ve, more than made sense.
“How’d you get there?”
“I just went walking. I don’t even know why.”
“Jesus, you’re drunk. Take a look around for a street sign and call a fuckin’ cab,” Jude said, and hung up.
He was glad to let go of the phone. He hadn’t liked Danny’s tone of spaced-out, unhappy confusion.
It wasn’t that Danny had said anything so incredible or unlikely. It was just that they’d never had a conversation like it before. Danny had never called in the night, and he’d never called drunk. It was difficult to imagine him going for a walk at 3:00 A.M., or walking so far from his home as to get lost. And whatever his other flaws, Danny was a problem solver. That was why Jude had kept him on the payroll for eight years. Even shitfaced, Danny probably wouldn’t call Jude first if he didn’t know where he was. He’d walk to a 7-Eleven and get directions. He’d flag down a cop car.
No. It was all wrong. The phone call and the dead man’s truck in the driveway were two parts of the same thing. Jude knew. His nerves told him so. The empty bed told him so.
He glanced again at the curtain, lit from behind by those floods. The dogs were going crazy out there.
Georgia. What mattered now was finding Georgia. Then they could figure out about that truck. Together they could get a handle on the situation.
Jude looked at the door to the hallway. He flexed his fingers, his hands numb from the cold. He didn’t want to go out there, didn’t want to open the door and see Craddock sitting in that chair with his hat on his knee and that razor on a chain dangling from one hand.
But the thought of seeing the dead man again—of facing whatever was next—held him for only a moment more. Then he came unstuck, went to the door, and opened it.
“Let’s do it,” he said to the hallway before he had even seen if anyone was there.
No one was.
Jude paused, listening past his own just slightly haggard breathing to the quiet of the house. The long hall was draped in shadows, the Shaker chair against the wall empty. No. Not empty. A black fedora rested in the seat.
Noises—muffled and distant—caught his attention: the murmur of voices on a television, the distant crash of surf. He pulled his gaze away from the fedora and looked to the end of the hallway. Blue light flickered and raced at the edges of the door to the studio. Georgia was in there, then, watching TV after all.
Jude hesitated at the door, listening. He heard a voice shouting in Spanish, a TV voice. The sound of surf was louder. Jude meant to call her name then, Marybeth—not Georgia, Marybeth—but something bad happened when he tried: His breath gave out on him. He was able to produce only a wheeze in the faint sound of her name.
He opened the door.
Georgia was across the room in the recliner, in front of his flat-screen TV. From where he stood, he couldn’t see anything of her but the back of her head, the fluffy swirl of her black hair surrounded by a nimbus of unnatural blue light. Her head also largely blocked the view of whatever was on the TV, although he could see palm trees and tropical blue sky. It was dark, the lights in the room switched off.
She didn’t respond when he said, “Georgia,” and his next thought was that she was dead. When he got to her, her eyes would be rolled up in their sockets.
He started toward her, but had only gone a couple of steps when the phone rang on the desk.
Jude could view enough of the TV now to see a chubby Mex in sunglasses and a beige jogging suit, standing at the side of a dirt track in jungly hill country somewhere. Jude knew what she was watching then, although he hadn’t looked at it in several years. It was the snuff film.
At the sound of the phone, Georgia’s head seemed to move just slightly, and he thought he heard her exhale, a strained, effortful breath. Not dead, then. But she didn’t otherwise react, didn’t look around, didn’t get up to answer.
He took a step to the desk, caught the phone on the second ring.
“That you, Danny? Are you still lost?” Jude asked.
“Yeah,” Danny said with a weak laugh. “Still lost. I’m on this pay phone in the middle of nowhere. It’s funny, you almost never see pay phones anymore.”
Georgia did not glance around at the sound of Jude’s voice, did not shift her gaze from the TV.
“I hope you aren’t calling because you want me to come looking for you,” Jude said. “I’ve got my hands full at the moment. If I have to come looking for you, you better hope you stay lost.”
“I figured it out, Chief. How I got here. Out on this road in the dark.”
“How’s that?”
“I killed myself. I hung myself a few hours ago. This road in the dark…this is dead.”
Jude’s scalp crawled, a trickling, icy sensation, almost painful.
