up the morsels of news about JonJon, as she still thought of her son. As for Danielle’s unfortunate missteps? Abby tended to gloat a bit about those. She couldn’t help it.
Hank’s getting his just deserts, Abby thought. He’s stuck dealing with a dim-bulb angst-driven teenager with issues. All I have to worry about is having my Mark VIII repainted. Such a deal. Seems fair to me.
Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 6:00 A.M.
69º Fahrenheit
AS JONATHAN SOUTHARD sat in the car, watching and waiting, he was amazed at how cold it had been overnight out here in what was supposed to be the desert, and also at how much his arm hurt. It was feverish and throbbing. That was worrisome.
At the time, it hadn’t seemed like that big a deal. Only a little bite, not a big one. That worthless damn dog had never liked him. As far as he was concerned, the feeling was mutual. Major was Esther’s dog—the kids’ dog. It seemed to him that the beagle was beyond dim, but as stupid as the dog had always seemed, that night Major had somehow read his mind and known what was going to happen. How could that be? It seemed weird.
Esther wouldn’t have had a clue that he had come into the room behind her if the dog hadn’t warned her, springing at him from the back of the couch, growling and with his teeth bared. The ferocity of the unexpected attack had forced Jonathan to dodge away and take a step backward. Major had nailed his wrist before he got quite out of reach, drawing blood and knocking the gun from his hand.
When Esther turned around, she didn’t see the weapon. All she saw was her husband. “No!” she yelled at Major. “Come here!”
The dog listened to her and paused for a moment—a moment that allowed Jonathan to retrieve the gun. Naturally he had shot Major first. Then he shot Esther. Once he could hear again, once his ears stopped reverberating, he stood there with the gun still in his bleeding hand and listened, afraid the kids would wake up and come running to see what had happened.
In all honesty, that was the first time he even thought of the kids. What about them? He could call the cops and turn himself in, but what would happen to Timmy and Suzy then? He seemed to remember setting up a guardianship thing so that if something happened to Esther and him together, the kids would go first to Esther’s sister, Corrine. But what would their lives be like if their mother was dead and their father was in prison for killing her? That might even be worse than growing up as Abby Southard’s no-good, worthless son.
He had decided the next step in that instant. If Timmy and Suzy died in their sleep, he could spare them all that suffering—the suffering of living. And that’s what he did—he shot them while they slept, one bullet each. That way they would never have to wonder if their parents loved them. Then he closed their bedroom doors and left them there. As long as the doors were shut—as long as he didn’t venture back into the living room where Esther lay sprawled on the couch, he didn’t have to remember that they were dead. As far as Jonathan was concerned, they were just sleeping.
He went into the bathroom then and collected the whole set of medication bottles Esther kept there. Antidepressants, sleep aids; whatever bottles he could find that said “Do Not Use with Alcohol.” You name it; Esther had it. He took them down to his study along with a bottle of single-malt Scotch.
He poured a full glass, but sat there thinking before he swallowed that first pill. He remembered seeing a movie called The Bucket List, the one about making sure you did all the things you wanted to do before you died.
He decided right then and there that he would go out with a bang, not the way he had left the bank, slinking out after everyone else had left for the night, carrying the personal possessions from his office in a single disgraceful cardboard box.
Hoping to prove his mother’s dire predictions wrong, he had spent his adult life doing what he was supposed to do all this time, twenty-four/seven. Now he was going to do some of the things he wasn’t supposed to do. He closed the open pill bottles. Then he showered and dressed, packed a suitcase with a week’s worth of clothes, and tossed the collection of pill bottles into the mix. The last thing he did before he walked out the door was set the thermostat down to 65 degrees. Who cared if he ran up the electricity bill? He wouldn’t be the one paying it.
Now, five days later and over five hundred miles away, he sat waiting on a residential street in Tucson, Arizona. He’d been doing that for hours now, shifting periodically in the seat, trying to find a comfortable place to rest his throbbing arm. Then, just when he thought he’d maybe go back to the Circle K and pick up some coffee and take a leak, the garage door on the house he was watching slid open.
As the Lexus backed out into the driveway, Jonathan recognized the guy at the wheel as the man he assumed to be Jack Tennant, Abby’s husband. Jonathan never referred to her as Mother. He refused to give her that much credit. While he watched, Jack loaded a golf pullcart and a bag of clubs into the car. That was interesting. If Jack was going to go play golf, Jonathan wanted to know where he was going, how long he’d be gone, and when he’d be back. That’s what these recon trips were all about—getting the lay of the land.
When Jack headed down the street, Jonathan followed. It was as easy as that.
Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 12:00 P.M.
93º Fahrenheit
The dream came while Daniel James Pardee was sleeping. In it he was back in Iraq, riding in the Humvee with Bozo, the dog no one else would take, sitting between him and the driver. As in real life, the driver was none too happy when Bozo, panting and grinning that weird doggy grin of his, had scrambled his hundred-plus pounds of dusty German shepherd into the cab along with Dan.
“Oh, jeez!” the driver muttered. “Not him again. That stinking dog’s so stupid he’d rather chase birds than bad guys.”
That was the reason the dog, formerly known as King and now jeeringly referred to as Bozo the Clown, had been passed along to the newest guy in the unit, Corporal Dan Pardee. “Three’s the charm,” the CO in Mosul had told Dan. “Either Bozo wakes up and gets serious about his job, or he’s out of here.”
Dan understood at once that, in military parlance, “out of here” didn’t mean some nice doggy retirement program somewhere. It meant termination. Period. Bozo’s career with the U.S. Army would be over and so would he.
“Yeah, Justin,” Dan told Corporal Justin Clifford, the driver. “You don’t smell so good yourself, so leave Bozo the hell alone. Let’s get moving.”
In the dream Dan knew Justin’s name. In real life he hadn’t known his name until after “the incident” and until after the wounded driver had been shipped out of theater, first to Germany and then to Walter Reed, suffering from second-and third-degree burns over fifty percent of his body. Both in the dream and in real life, however, the Humvee ground into gear and moved to the head of the supply convoy.
The whole thing went to hell about forty-five minutes later when the world exploded just outside the driver’s window. Blinded by smoke and deafened by the concussion, Dan and Bozo had scrambled out through the door on the Humvee’s relatively undamaged passenger side. When Dan’s hearing returned, the only sound he heard were the agonized screams coming from Corporal Clifford, who was still trapped inside the burning vehicle.
