Gone in a Flash (7 page)

But they were already through the family room and into the living room at the front of the house. When I got there, they were standing to the side of the front window, peaking out at the street one at a time through a crack in the wooden Venetian blinds.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Shhhhh!’ Bess said, index finger to mouth. She hit the floor and crawled below the windowsill to the other side of the window, where she stood up and peeked through a crack in the blinds on that side.

Alicia, who was the odd girl out at the moment, ran up to me, took my hands and forcibly lowered me to the sectional sofa.

‘Mom, listen!’ she said in an excitable stage whisper. ‘Those men in the blue car?’

I started to stand up but she said, ‘Listen! They changed cars! They followed us to the movies and when we got out they followed us home! And they’re out there right now!’

I grabbed my hands back, went to the window, and yanked the cord that pulled the blinds all the way up. A white car was parked across the street, in front of the McClures’ house with its ‘for sale’ sign, and the guys in it favored Luna’s description. With my girls flanking me, we stared out at the white car, which started up immediately and drove off, as I wrote down the license plate number.

‘Uh oh,’ Mr Jones said.

‘Shut up!’ Mr Smith said.

‘But now they know we’re watching ’em,’ Mr Jones said.

‘Shut up!’ Mr Smith repeated.

‘Mr Brown’s gonna be all kinds of mad,’ Mr Jones said.

‘Shut the fuck up!’ Mr Smith screamed.

‘Jeez, ya don’t have to get pissy about it,’ Mr Jones said.

Mr Smith gritted his teeth for the umpteenth time and drove out of the neighborhood.

I called Luna at her office at the police station in Codderville.

‘Lieutenant Luna,’ she said upon answering. She used to just say ‘Luna,’ but with the promotion, she’s all about rank. I’m embarrassed for her.

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘The blue car is now white. They were parked in front of the McClures’ house.’ I read off the license plate number. ‘They followed the girls to the movies, waited for them, then followed them back! What are you going to do about this?’ I demanded.

‘Not my jurisdiction. Call the Black Cat Ridge police,’ she said, and hung up.

I said some words I shouldn’t say in front of my children, even though they’re old enough now to teach me some new ones, hung up, and redialed the Black Cat Ridge police – the 311 number, not the 911.

I explained the situation, told the lady on the other end of the phone that Luna had witnessed these men sitting in their car outside my house and then attempting to break in. And that the same men had followed my girls to and from the movies today and had been sitting outside the house in another car just now. I gave her the license plate number of the white car they were driving.

‘Did they actually break into your home?’ she asked.

‘Well, no—’

‘Did they park their vehicle in your driveway?’ she asked.

‘Ah, no, but—’

‘Did they speak to your daughters?’ she asked.

‘No, but listen—’

‘Ma’am, I don’t see that there’s anything we can do about this at the moment. If they break a law, we’ll be happy to—’

‘But they trespassed!’

‘Ma’am?’

‘They walked up my driveway!’ I said.

‘Is your driveway posted?’

‘Posted?’

‘Is there a “no trespassing” sign posted at the front of your driveway?’ she asked.

‘No, of course not—’

‘Then they did not trespass, ma’am. Please call us back if—’

‘If what?’ I shouted. ‘They attack one of my children? Break into my home? Kill us all in our sleep?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said. ‘Any of the above.’

And the line went dead in my hands.

Boy, was I pissed!

‘Go steal that license plate,’ Mr Smith said to Mr Jones. ‘Front and back.’

‘Huh?’ Mr Jones said.

‘Go get those fucking license plates, moron! Are you deaf as well as stupid?’ Mr Smith shouted.

Mr Jones squared his broad shoulders. He’d had just about enough of Mr Smith and his attitude. ‘That was really uncalled for, Mr Smith,’ he said. ‘And if you want those “fucking” license plates stolen, I suggest you do it yourself!’ Mr Jones crossed his arms over his chest and looked out the passenger-side window.

‘You are fucking kidding me, right?’ Mr Smith said between his gritted teeth. ‘Tell me I didn’t hurt your goddam feelings!’

Mr Jones said nothing, just continued to stare out his window, his body language speaking volumes.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Mr Smith said and got out of the white rental.

They were in the parking lot of the new Wal-Mart that had just opened in Codderville. The place was packed and they had their pick of vehicles. Mr Smith had picked a fairly late-model white Ford – a Focus, not a Taurus like their rental, but close enough. Using the screwdriver setting on his Swiss Army knife, he unscrewed the front plate, threw it in the back seat of the car, got in, and drove off down the row of parked cars. Mr Jones did not ask what he was doing. Mr Jones was still not looking at him.

Mr Smith circled the row and came back to the white Ford Focus. Stopping the white Taurus two cars down, he walked up to the Focus, then went round the back and unscrewed that license plate, thinking how much easier this kind of thing was in states that didn’t require a front license plate. Mr Smith threw the back plate in the back seat of the Taurus with the front plate, and took off.

Several miles later, Mr Smith pulled into the parking lot of an office building, and proceeded to change the Taurus’s plates to those of the Focus. Let it be noted that Mr Jones did not help.

‘I’m coming home,’ Willis said.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘The girls are pretty nervous.’ That was not exactly true. The girls were climbing the walls, but more from the excitement of it all than fear.

I’d called Willis to let him know what had happened, and informed him about the response from the Black Cat Ridge police.

‘That’s because I won that contract!’ Willis had said.

‘What contract?’ I’d asked.

‘The Chemco deal,’ he said. ‘Barry’s son-in-law was also bidding, but Dave always bids way too high. Meanwhile, Barry and his wife are supporting their daughter and Dave and it’s all my fault? I don’t THINK so!’

Barry Donaldson was the chief-of-police for the small Black Cat Ridge police department.

‘Well, just come home,’ I’d said. ‘We’ll sort it out together.’

And he did. Come home, that is. And he’d stewed in it all the way home. By the time he walked in the door, if Barry Donaldson had been in the room, it’s a possibility he wouldn’t have made it out alive.

‘I’m calling that son-of-a-bitch! He can’t ignore you—’

‘Honey, I didn’t even talk to Barry! I talked to a dispatcher.’

He stopped, turned and looked at me. ‘Why didn’t you call Barry directly?’ he asked.

‘He’s your friend, not mine,’ I said.

‘He’s not my friend – we just shoot hoops once a week.’

‘That’s certainly more of a relationship than I have with him.’

‘So why didn’t you call me so I could call him?’ Willis demanded.

I sighed. ‘Because I didn’t think about it! I called Luna first, and she said it wasn’t her jurisdiction, that I should call Black Cat Ridge police, so I just dialed their three-one-one number.’

Willis pulled out his iPhone and looked at it, then put it back in his pocket and went into my office, coming out seconds later with the tiny Black Cat Ridge phone directory. He sat on the sofa, pulled out his phone yet again, and dialed the number.

‘Chief Donaldson, please. Willis Pugh calling.’

I sat down in an easy chair opposite him. We waited.

Maybe I should take this waiting period to explain the existence of Black Cat Ridge, the town in which we lived on the north side of the Texas Colorado River. It is what they call a ‘planned community.’ Codderville, on the south side of the Colorado River, was more haphazard. It came about as a cattle-drive stop back in the 1800s, then got bypassed by the railroad and almost died out, only to have a highway come through in the 1930s, which perked it up again, only to be bypassed once more by the freeway system in the 1960s. But by the 1960s, people had dug themselves in: there were some businesses, lots of churches, retail, etc. Codderville, although sleepy, remained.

Then came a developer who saw an expanse of wooded acreage on the other side of the Colorado, and thought: trees! Must destroy now! But, of course, being a smart developer/tree killer, he opted to keep enough trees to make the homes costly. And not only homes: churches and grammar schools, and retail. Lots and lots of retail. From the beginning we had a fire substation, manned by two firemen from the Codderville station and one junior fire truck. The real fire truck would come over the river and through the former woods if needed. Which would only take like twenty minutes or so. Not enough time for the entire subdivision to burn down, but close. Luckily, the few fires the substation dealt with were small. They mostly tended boo-boos, rescued the occasional loose-riding lawnmower, and drove people to the emergency room at the Codder Memorial Hospital.

That was at the beginning. We now had a middle and a high school, a full fire station that employed four full-time firefighters and a list of eighteen volunteer firefighters (of which, I’m proud to say, Willis and I are two), and a full-time police department with a police chief and five police officers, backed up, when necessary, by the Codder County sheriff’s department. And the fire station has an ambulance and two ENTs to drive people to the emergency room at Codder Memorial Hospital. We don’t have our own hospital. Yet.

I perked up when Willis perked up. I told him to put his iPhone on speaker and he did. He said, ‘Barry? Hey, got a problem here and I’m hoping you can help out.’

‘Yeah, you backing out of tomorrow’s scrimmage? I wouldn’t be surprised the way we beat your asses last week.’

‘Yeah, good game. But tomorrow’s gonna be a totally different story, my friend.’

‘Ah, you fire guys got no balls,’ the police chief said.

‘Hey, drive by sometime – you can hear our balls clanging all the way out in the street.’

‘Sheee-it!’ Barry said. ‘You calling just to harass me, or you wanna gloat about taking the food out of my daughter’s mouth?’

‘Sorry, Barry. I’m just a better engineer, what can I say?’ Willis said.

‘No, son, you’re a better negotiator. Dave’s an asshole when it comes to bidding. Ah, hell, let’s face it: Dave’s an asshole all the time.’

‘True,’ Willis said, and I gave him the move it along signal. ‘Reason I’m calling, Barry, is that we got a problem here.’ And he went on to explain about Luna seeing the guys parked across the street two days straight and them coming up the driveway to our back door on the second day. And how, today, the same two guys were seen by our daughters in a different car following them to the movies and then following them home.

‘What the fuck’d you do, Pugh?’ Barry said.

‘Me? I didn’t do squat!’ Willis said, his voice rising in tenor as well as volume.

‘You get the license number on the new car? I know Luna got the one on the blue car.’

I handed Willis the slip of paper I’d written the plate number down on. He read it off to Barry.

‘OK, great,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna call Luna, see what she says, just to confirm everything, then I’m gonna come out and talk to the girls. That OK?’

‘Yeah, that’s fine.’

And they rang off.

‘He doesn’t trust you?’ I asked my husband.

‘What?’ he said.

‘He has to call Luna to verify?’

‘Let it go, babe,’ he said.

‘What? He thinks we’d lie about this?’ Now my voice was rising in tenor as well as volume.

‘Of course not,’ Willis said in that condescending tone he gets when he thinks I’m being unreasonable. God, I hate that. Then he put his arm on my shoulder, which is condescending squared. ‘I think he just wants to get it all first hand, that’s all.’

‘First hand this!’ I said, removing his hand from my shoulder and showing him a well-known hand gesture most of us learn as kids.

‘O
h, shit!’ Megan said, coming in to Bess’s room. Bess and Alicia were sitting on the bed playing liar’s poker.

‘Ummmmm?’ Bess inquired, not looking up from her game.

‘Listen!’ Megan demanded. When neither sister looked up, she plopped herself down between them, thus stopping any gamesmanship that might have been going on.

‘Get your fat ass up!’ Bess said, shoving Megan.

‘Say what you want, but my ass ain’t moving!’

‘Why must you use improper grammar, Megan? You know it makes my ears bleed!’ Alicia said.

‘Do y’all want to hear what is going to happen to us in the very near future?’

‘What?’ Bess said, as she stopped shoving her sister.

‘The police chief of Black Cat Ridge is coming to interview us,’ Megan said in as dramatic a voice as she could conjure up.

‘Why?’ Bess demanded.

Alicia rolled her eyes. ‘About the white car, dumbass,’ she said.

‘I’m not sure, Alicia, dear, but is “dumbass” actually proper English?’ Megan said.

‘Bite me,’ Alicia said.

‘Oh, you mean because of those guys. Well, good,’ said Bess. ‘We need the police on this and there’s not much Mrs Luna can do since she works for the Codderville force.’

‘You would think her living in BCR, she’d take a job here,’ Megan said.

‘I’d venture a guess that BCR doesn’t pay nearly as much as she’s making in Codderville, especially now she’s been promoted to lieutenant,’ Alicia said.

Megan shrugged. ‘Yeah. That’s probably right.’

‘So when is this interview going to happen?’ Bess asked.

Megan shrugged. ‘All I heard was “he’s coming by later.” I have no idea what constitutes later.’ She turned to Alicia and grinned. ‘How’d you like that one? Constitutes. Good word usage, huh?’

‘Piss off,’ Alicia said. ‘Even better word usage.’ She hopped off the bed and headed for the door. ‘I hope he doesn’t come too late. We have school tomorrow, remember?’

‘Oh, Lord,’ Megan said. ‘I’ve been trying to forget. What are you wearing?’