Murder Is Forever, Volume 1 Page 3

  Dustin eyed Lorence suspiciously. The man was a stranger in a bar where everyone always knew everyone else. But Lorence did not make eye contact.

  “Hey, partner,” Dustin said.

  The stranger did not respond. He kept his eyes on his matches, and Dustin let the matter drop.

  When Dustin looked the stranger’s way again, he saw that the man had gone, slipping quietly out of the bar.

  The Firebird Billie had bought for his daughter was parked outside, though she wouldn’t be driving it for a while. At least not until Billie paid to fix the windshield he’d smashed up with an old Louisville Slugger.

  Billie’s new bike was out there, too, but it was in even sorrier shape, since Billie, probably high on meth, had decided to drag the motorcycle around on a chain behind his new pickup truck.

  Billie didn’t know why he did these things. Long-term thinking and planning ahead had never been his strong suits. Meanness was what Billie brought to the family table.

  “Boy,” an uncle had said to him when he was young, “it’s like you’ve got all this poison inside you. Deep down, like oil buried underground, eating away at your guts. Soon as something breaks through the surface, that oil’s going to gush, and it’s going to be black, and not you or no one else is going to have the wherewithal to control it.”

  Billie’s uncle was wrong. Billie had all sorts of nasty stuff inside. But he also had perfect control. If he wanted to not bash up his bike, he wouldn’t have done it. If he wanted to not bash in his daughter’s windshield, he wouldn’t have done that either. What the people around him did not understand was that Billie wanted to do all the things that he did. And age hadn’t mellowed him out at all.

  “Heya!” he shouted as his nephew Michael Speck walked into the bar. “Grab a stool. This round and every round’s on Mr. John!”

  Michael ordered a Jack on the rocks and a Michelob chaser. Scanning the room, he saw Stacey and Dustin hunched over at one of the banquettes.

  “What’s going on with that now anyways?”

  “Same old,” said Billie. “Dude’s dumb as a goldfish but flush as a Saudi Arabian prince.”

  “And that thing he keeps talking about?”

  “We’ll talk about that, too, at some point,” said Billie. “For now, let’s have a toast!”

  Over at their banquette, Stacey and Dustin perked up. The bartender hit Mute on the TV, poured himself a shot, and held the glass up as Billie raised his own glass and said, “Here’s to the human ATM!”

  “To Mr. Johnny!” the others joined in.

  Chapter 10

  Frank

  Frank’s bookkeeper had been working for him for years now. She went to First Baptist, as the Howards did, and once in a while Frank and Nancy would have her over for dinner. Frank knew her to be an honest woman, and extremely efficient and detail-oriented. Still, he was startled when she came into his office unannounced a few days after Thanksgiving weekend.

  “Mr. Howard,” she said. “I’m not sure about this. But it seems to me there’s some sort of discrepancy?”

  Looking up, Frank made a quick calculation: Should he switch his computer screen to hide the spreadsheet he’d been working on and thereby risk raising her suspicions? Should he leave the spreadsheet up and risk her catching a glimpse of the numbers he’d been moving around?

  Turning toward her in his swivel chair, Frank switched the screen off entirely.

  “This company here—” the bookkeeper began, before Frank cut her off.

  “That’s the file I’ve been looking for!”

  Frank grabbed the file, flipped it open, and glanced at the printout inside—paperwork relating to one of several holding corporations he’d set up to skim money from Richard Raley’s company, American United Logistics. Raley’s contracts with the Department of Defense were staggering. Frank couldn’t believe how much ice Raley had shipped to the Middle East. He’d been even more surprised when he learned about the amounts that Raley had earned in return. At first, Frank had thought the sums involved wouldn’t be missed. Also, he happened to know that Raley himself had a habit of going off the rez. There was a drug conviction in Raley’s background. An arrest for drunk driving, which Raley had pleaded no contest to. How clued in could the businessman possibly be?

  Still, the numbers involved were significant. And with Frank funneling more and more money off to Suzanne, and to Billie Earl Johnson, the amounts had gotten out of hand. Frank had stolen millions of dollars already. He intended to skim millions more. So, at this particular moment, the fact that his bookkeeper was good at her job was beginning to look like a terrible thing.

  “Look at this, darlin’,” Frank said. “You’re absolutely right. The sums in this column don’t add up.”

  Clearly, Frank had been making mistakes. Keeping track of the holding corporations, along with all of the attendant transactions, had been taking up more and more of his time. And given his business with Billie Earl Johnson, Frank Howard couldn’t afford to draw attention to any of his secret dealings, especially now.

  The thought of some dumbass, backwater divorce court judge poring over his financial dealings gave Frank the shivers. And now, sitting here with his bookkeeper’s stack of folders, Frank felt a panic attack coming on. What looked like a windfall, when Richard Raley first appeared on his radar, was starting to feel more and more like a trap.

  “Mr. Howard,” the bookkeeper said. “Are you okay?”

  “This is excellent work,” he said after a moment. “Excellent, because this stuff’s such a maze, such a headache. I’m impressed you found these errors. Why don’t I take it home with me tonight to look it over and fix it up and put you onto this other account that’s been troubling us?”

  Chapter 11

  Frank, Suzanne, and Nancy

  That same weekend, Suzanne floated through her bedroom in Santa Cruz, gliding like a ghost across the thick, red carpet. She was dressed for a big night on the town. But Frank, lost in thought in front of his laptop at the edge of the bed, didn’t notice her dress or her hair, or even the perfume she’d put on to please him.

  Glasses halfway down his nose, he was lost in the same old spreadsheets, moving the same substantial number in and out of different columns, looking for a place to hide the millions of dollars he’d stolen in the elaborate shell game he’d been playing with Raley’s money.

  “Frank?” Suzanne said, softly at first. Then she said, “Frank?”

  It was no use when he was like this. Lost in thought, quick to erupt in anger. There was a side to the man, it turned out, that Suzanne hadn’t expected to see.

  Now that she had seen it, she didn’t like it. But before she could say anything else, Frank’s cell phone started to ring. Without a doubt, it was Nancy again with some kind of “crisis.” With that woman it was always one thing or another.

  This time, she was calling to tell Frank that the neighborhood kids had knocked over their mailbox. Did Nancy honestly think there was something Frank could do about that while he was away on “business”? There was nothing to do now but listen while Nancy talked and talked, moving from the mailbox to a litany of complaints about other things Frank couldn’t fix from afar. The woman was lonely for him, Frank supposed. But there was nothing he could do about that either. Not when he wanted to be with Suzanne and couldn’t stand his wife.

  “Sorry, babe,” Frank said in a whisper, cupping the phone in his hand. But Suzanne had already grown impatient. She whispered back, “End the call!”

  “Nothing, sweetie,” Frank said into the receiver. “That’s just the TV in the background.”

  Now Suzanne was truly incensed.

  “You’re never going to leave her, are you!” she said when Frank finally got off the phone. As far as Suzanne was concerned, Frank and Nancy had that much in common: With Frank, it was always one thing or another. If it wasn’t work, it was Nancy’s fibromyalgia. If it wasn’t Nancy’s illness, it was Ashley’s graduation. It was always something with Frank
, and for the first time, Suzanne was feeling close to the end of her rope.

  “Maybe I should tell Nancy myself,” she said. “Tell her what’s going on with her loving husband. I bet your precious children would be thrilled to hear all about it.”

  “Baby,” Frank told her. “What I’m sitting here doing is sorting things out. For you. For us. So that we can be together, truly.”

  Suzanne shrugged, even as part of her softened. She had to give Frank that much credit: The man could sweet-talk like nobody’s business. But as she sat down on his lap, Frank suddenly started and jerked away from her. Maybe he’d put a hit out on the wrong woman after all.

  That evening, after they’d gotten back from the restaurant, Frank turned on the shower, sat down on the toilet, and used his burner phone to call Billie Earl Johnson in Ben Wheeler, Texas.

  “Man,” he said, “you’ve got to get rid of her. Yes, yes. I sent you a wire last week.”

  Frank paused for a moment. The bathroom had filled up with steam and he took his glasses off to wipe them down as he listened to what Billie Earl had to say.

  “Aw, Jesus,” he said when the hit man had finished. “Okay, okay. You’ll have more by the end of the day. But I need your word, man, ’cause this has got to get done already.”

  PART THREE

  JANUARY 2011

  Chapter 12

  Billie

  “Jesus,” Mr. John was saying. “Okay, okay. You’ll have more by the end of the day. But I need your word, man, ’cause this has got to get done already!”

  Billie and Stacey had spent the morning getting as high as hot-air balloons and the afternoon flipping through brochures for a new four-door truck. At this late stage in Billie’s long relationship with four-wheeled vehicles, it had become easier to just buy new ones than fix up the ones that he’d crashed—which was something that he did quite often, and with no small degree of satisfaction.

  “You don’t understand,” he’d been saying to Stacey. “I didn’t have an accident. I crashed that sucker on purpose; nothing accidental about it.”

  Then Mr. John had burst in with his phone call, interrupting the lecture that Billie was about to give.

  “Yes,” Billie said, once the man had finally stopped his talking. “Yes, it’s got to happen soon. And, for the hundredth time, yes—I got the address.”

  At first, Mr. John had wanted to make Nancy’s death look like an accident. Billie would run her car off the road or push her off the balcony of the hotel rooms she booked for getaway weekends with friends from the church. But Billie had had his excuses for every occasion: He’d followed Nancy for days, but the perfect occasion had never presented itself.

  He’d booked the hotel room next to Nancy’s several times, only to find that, each time, Nancy would invite one of her friends to share the room.

  Then there were Billie’s medical excuses: seizures he suffered from. Dizzy spells. Blackouts. What it all led up to, Billie had said, was brain tumors.

  Mr. John had swallowed all of those excuses—swallowed them down like syrup. But as time went by, his ideas about what to do with Nancy Howard got more fantastic, violent, and wild:

  —Have her beaten to death with a baseball bat while scrapbooking with neighbors.

  —Have her beaten to death with a tire iron at her book club.

  —Have her shot with an assault rifle while having lunch with her church friends. (To cover his tracks, Mr. John had told him, Billie could spray the whole restaurant with gunfire.)

  Christ, Billie had thought. What did this woman ever do to him?

  But here Billie was, swearing yet again that he would take care of the whole sorry business.

  If all went well, Mr. John told him in parting, there might be another target in the works. A job that would be even easier to pull off and would pay even more.

  Chapter 13

  Suzanne

  A few weeks later, a shabby old van pulled into the driveway at Suzanne’s house in Santa Cruz. It was the rainy season in California’s South Bay, drizzling for days now with no sign of stopping, and the rain muffled the sound of the van’s rattling engine.

  Suzanne wouldn’t have heard the van anyway. She was lost in thought, as she had been ever since the rain had started. Cooped up indoors, she’d been running her love affair with Frank Howard over and over again in her head. She loved the man; that much was a given. But it was becoming increasingly clear she did not understand him. His moods and promises. The way he’d snap at her one moment, then want to make love the next. It had been a few weeks since she’d seen him and with each phone call he seemed to have grown more and more distant.

  Out in the driveway the van’s engine shut off. The door opened slowly. The man paused for a moment and leaned on the door.

  In his left hand he held a cardboard box, about the length of a rifle.

  Upstairs in her bedroom, Suzanne picked up the phone, then put it down again in its cradle. She needed to tell Frank that she needed him—here in California, where their future life would be. She felt that Nancy had lost him already. There were no reasons she could think of to drag things out.

  She knew that she could be handling her love affair better. The guilt trips she’d taken to laying on Frank had all been counterproductive. She hoped that Frank knew she hadn’t meant her threats. She would never tell Nancy about the affair. She just didn’t know how else to push him. One way or another, Frank would have to pull the trigger on his divorce. All she’d been trying to do was help. But now she wondered if what she’d been doing had been pushing Frank further away.

  She’d call him now and apologize for the way she’d been acting. If she had been pushing him, she’d take responsibility for it—own her actions while making Frank see how worn out she was from all this time spent apart from her lover.

  “I love you, baby,” she’d say, and tell him about the things she’d do to him the next time they met. But before she could do that, she heard the doorbell ringing downstairs.

  “One moment!” she called out, and peeked out the window. The driver was there, rain drizzling off his baseball cap, holding the cardboard box, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  Downstairs, she opened the door.

  “From Mr. Frank Howard,” the driver said.

  “Yes?” said Suzanne.

  The driver shifted his weight again, looked down at the ground, and back up at Suzanne. He seemed to be stoned or hungover, in which case it must have been a party for the ages.

  “You’ll have to sign here,” the man said finally.

  He took out a pocket-sized clipboard and handed Suzanne a pen.

  Suzanne watched the van drive away, holding the cardboard box close to her chest. For a moment she had the strange sensation that something inside the package was ticking, but, no, it was only the beating of her own heart. Inside the house, she opened the box and read the card it contained:

  “Babe,” Frank had written. “You have to know I love you and that I’m doing everything I can as fast as I can to be with my California girl always.”

  It was just what Suzanne had been needing to hear. The fact that Frank had known it had to be proof that he really did love her. And, of course, the expensive bouquet of flowers that the box contained was beautiful.

  Chapter 14

  Nancy and Frank

  Back in Carrollton, Texas, Nancy had finally talked Frank into going to therapy. From the get-go, she’d understood his resistance. Locally, the Howards had always been the family that others looked to for help. Admitting their own need for help did not come easily or naturally to them. But there was nothing easy or natural about the distance that had sprung up between them, either. Nancy had run out of ideas. And Frank would just glare and clam up when she brought up the state of their relationship.

  Thankfully, their minister understood all of this and guided them with a firm, kindly hand as Nancy laid their problems out before him. Shy as she was, Nancy was also devoted. She’d told Frank so
many times that she would do anything to heal this inexplicable rift in their marriage. Told him about how much she’d been looking forward to their years as empty nesters. About how good it would feel to rekindle the spark that had led to their marriage. She was sure that, together, they could fan love’s flames higher than they’d ever been. But Nancy had also begun to understand that if she had any chance of pulling Frank back from the ledge, she’d have to make him see just how bad things had gotten.

  “Frank,” she said. “What we have here is a crisis.”

  There on the couch in their minister’s office, Frank felt like he was dying beside her.

  The minister’s face blurred. Nancy’s words had all stopped making sense.

  Only the word divorce snapped him back to attention.

  Divorce was something Frank could not afford. Not in the eyes of his children. And not in the eyes of Nancy’s lawyers—lawyers who’d charge $500 an hour to go through his finances and find Lord-knew-what when they got to his dealings with Richard Raley.

  “No, honey,” he said quickly. “Believe me, things are going to get so much better.”

  “Oh, Frank. I want to believe you. But I just don’t know what to do.”

  Out in the parking lot of their church, Nancy said goodbye, tearfully.

  “Do you want a ride home?” Frank asked.

  “I’ll walk home, sweetie. To clear my head.”

  But Nancy’s head was still cloudy as she crossed the road in front of the church.

  Out of nowhere, a four-door pickup appeared. Moving much too fast, it nearly knocked her into the gutter.