Black Cat Weekly #85

Chapter 7-1

byIt was the third night in a row that Leon Teller had seen the two-tone pickup parked in front of the old Crawford place. The truck might have been there before, he just hadn’t looked out of the bathroom window. He wasn’t curious about things when he needed to take a leak at three in the morning, but the truck looked like the Chevy his older brother used to drive, dark red and ivory, damn pretty before rust took the shine off it, and it caught his attention. It was too dark out there, without the streetlights working, to see the colors or the rust on this one.

The truck was never parked there during the day. Only in the middle of the night.

Leon leaned on the narrow window sill, the urge in his bladder forgotten for a moment. What the hell was going on over there? Nobody had lived in the Crawford house for at least ten years. It was an eyesore, the roof had caved in on one side, the walls were full of holes and streaked with mold black as soot, with Virginia creeper and poison ivy poking through the cracks. It was amazing no kid had yet sent a firebomb flying into it. Leon was tempted to give it a go. He’d always wondered what sending a Molotov cocktail soaring felt like. Something he should check off his bucket list before it was too late for him to throw anything.

A twinge in his groin reminded him why he was standing barefoot on the bathroom tile. When he was done urinating, a process that irritated him because it was getting more protracted every time, he gave another look at the street. The pickup was still there, nobody around, no lights, no movement of any kind. Leon went back to bed, ruminating.

“I’m of a mind to go take a look at the Crawford place.”

“No, you’re not,” Nell said.

Leon had told her of the pickup and the questions cricket-hopping in his head. She’d shrugged with a roll of the eyes. Nell believed in people minding their own business.

She put a plate of fried eggs and toast in front of him. “It’s full of critters. It’s so rotten the roof will fall on your head, and then what?”

Nell was right about the wildlife. The Crawford house was on the creek, at the very end, shallow water right there, only mud when the lake level went down. It must be crawling with enough cottonmouths to scare away a full revival tent.

“I’ll call the sheriff,” he said.

“Be my guest.” Nell stood with her fists on her hips. Leon’s beloved wife of fifty-eight years last St Patrick’s day, small and fierce. “How will you feel when the cops bust a couple of teenagers going at it?”

Leon didn’t believe kids chose that location, not with Lakewood Drive around the corner being the perfect date spot. Lots of trees and shadows and a romantic view of the lake to boot. He pretended to agree with Nell. He had long learned that life was much easier when he went along with whatever she said.

He didn’t mention the sheriff again. Instead, he called his friend Harry and invited him to spend the weekend. The crappie were biting, Leon said, and he didn’t like to fish alone.

Harry McLean was an Army vet and former cop. Both occupations didn’t fit the man’s temperament. Old-fashioned personality tests of the kind Leon remembered from when he was looking for a job out of college would have pointed that out in screaming colors. Maybe Harry was never tested, maybe he faked it. Leon could picture Harry bluffing his way through any kind of screening. He was one wily customer. His current job at DG Investigative matched his lie-sniffing talents. He didn’t bite into Leon’s fish tale.

“What’s the rub, Leon?” he said on the phone as soon as the invitation was proffered.

“I’d rather tell you when you get here.”

“That serious, uh?”

“Well, that’s part of the problem, maybe it’s nothing.”

Harry said he would drive up on Friday afternoon. “Okay, Pops. Nell’s in on it?”

“She thinks I’m a geezer with an overactive imagination to match my excitable bladder.”

That made Harry laugh. He was still years away from worrying about his prostate. Their friendship was the result of a nasty investigation when Harry was with Houston PD and Leon witnessed a crime. They found out they’d both done a stint in the military, Leon in Vietnam, Harry in Afghanistan, and that clinched the bond. They’d kept in touch after Nell and Leon moved out of town and Harry moved out of HPD.

“You’re going to bug Harry with that pickup truck?” Nell said.

“If I’m off my rocker, he won’t make any bones about telling me, hon.”

She sighed. “I’ll run to the store. You need charcoal for the grill?”

Leon wrote down a shopping list.

They didn’t fish on Friday. They took a cocktail cruise on the lake as an appetizer before digging into Nell’s lasagna. Grilled steak was on the menu for Saturday. Leon explained his predicament after dinner, when they plonked down on the back porch with a nightcap. Harry smoked. Leon had given up the habit twenty years ago.

“They might be cooking meth,” Leon said. “I hear it’s all over the countryside.”

“Not likely,” Harry said. “It isn’t the kind of thing you do in the dark in a ramshackle building. And it smells. Did you smell anything?”

“On top of rotting fish, septic tanks, and standing stinky water? No.”

“You knew the Crawford family?”

“I saw the old lady a few times when we were coming up here for the weekend. She’d been a widow for a while. Ill-tempered. She looked down her nose at us. We were city people, that said it all. She was in a retirement home when we moved in for good.” He leaned forward in his chair to close the distance with Harry. “I looked at the property records after calling you. A Kenneth Crawford is listed as the owner. No idea what the family relationship is. In all the years we’ve lived here, I never saw anybody over there.”

city people“What’s the best place to watch?” Harry said.

“The upstairs bathroom. The way our house sits, all the other windows are useless.”

They shoved an armchair between the toilet and the shower stall. With a pile of cushions stacked on top of a collection of encyclopedias, Harry was at a good height to observe the Crawford house.

“I’ll use the guest bathroom tonight,” Leon said.

“Good thinking, buddy. You may want to check on me, in case I doze off.” Nell had set up Harry with coffee and cookies.

As it often happens, according the law of immanent absurdity, Leon slept the whole night through. He was still drowsy when he padded into the kitchen at seven in the morning. Harry was sitting at the table doing a crossword puzzle. He looked far too bright-eyed for a man who had just pulled an all-nighter. He also had a glass of rye by his elbow.

“Ain’t it a bit early for the hooch?” Leon yawned.

“Or kinda late. Slept well?”

“Too well. So?”

Harry put down his puzzle. “The pickup pulled up a little before midnight. Two guys got out. They entered the house through a broken window. I didn’t see a flicker of light. They left four hours later.” He took a sip of his drink, smiling. “We have a mystery on our hands, Leon.”

“You glad I called you?”

“It’s a fun way to spend a weekend. No offense but it’s more exciting than fishing. I went out and got the license plate. I’ll soon know who the vehicle belongs to.”

“Might be stolen.”

Harry shook his head. “They wouldn’t use the same stolen vehicle every night. Can we take your boat up that creek, have a look at the place from the back?”

“Too shallow. But we could take the kayaks.”

“It looks like a perfect morning for it,” Harry said.

It would have been faster and shorter to cross the street and walk to the Crawford house but this was more fun, and safer, even if Leon spotted a couple of slinking shapes in the murky waters of the creek. He was careful where he dipped his paddle. God, he hated snakes. He saw that Harry was similarly cautious, not venturing too close to the collapsed bulkheads and dingy docks. The water was soupy, a greenish brown spotted with slime and bird droppings, reeking of corruption. No wonder there were no houses built that deep along the creek. A couple of ruined trailers, long abandoned, skulked under the trees, surrounded by weeds high enough to hide a man. This was a part of the lake real estate agents didn’t show to prospective buyers. It made Leon uneasy to think it was so close to his neat home, like a hidden room behind a closed door. A room where something nasty happened. He watched Harry take pictures, and itched to get out of there.

“That’s a massive deck.” Harry said, when they were back at the house. He was scrolling through his pictures.

Nell looked over his shoulder. “You could hold a debutante ball on that dance floor. Must have been pricey, all that planking.”

“Some people would do anything to avoid mowing,” Leon said. The deck of the Crawford house stretched from the back wall to the edge of the bulkhead. It covered more square footage than the house itself.

“That piece of land is so muddy, I doubt grass could get a foothold,” Nell said. “Are you guys going out fishing?”

“You’re game to go drift on cleaner water, Harry?”

“Sure.”

Ten minutes after pulling away from the dock, Harry was asleep with his feet up on the side of Leon’s pontoon boat, his fishing rod forgotten. It didn’t bother Leon. He enjoyed the quiet, and the crappie were indeed biting with gusto.

Leon was firing up the grill when the truck information came in, with a scan of a driver’s license. The pickup was registered to one Daryl Maher, eighteen, living in an apartment building three streets over.

“Kids,” Leon said. “I worried for nothing.”

“And kids are incapable of mischief?” Harry smiled. “I’m curious. What are they doing in there? I’ll borrow your kayak tonight, Leon.”

“Are you nuts? You can’t get out there in pitch darkness.”

“All I got to do is follow the bulkhead. The moon is almost full. There’ll be more light than I wish for.”

“What do you expect to see from the water? They’re in the house.”

“I expect to see a light that’ll tell me where they’re pottering around.”

“Probably smoking weed.” Leon wasn’t interested anymore. He should have listened to Nell and dropped the whole thing.

They didn’t talk about the Crawford house again. Grilled steak and cocktails and good conversation needed tending to. When Leon went to bed, he was convinced Harry had given up on the kayak excursion. The armchair and the encyclopedias were no longer in the bathroom.

It turned out he didn’t know how stubborn Harry could be. When he got up, at three in the morning again, and saw the pickup parked in its usual place, he thought of checking on Harry in the guest room. The bed was empty. With a pinch in the chest, Leon turned on the back-porch lights, and sure enough, the red kayak was missing. He considered waiting for Harry downstairs but didn’t want to worry Nell, so he went back up and, despite his best resolutions, fell asleep.