LITMIR.BIZ

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front porch appeared out of synch with the rest of the house, canting east while everything else canted west. A daylily was growing right up through the porch boards.

      “Is this where you lived?” she asked.

      “Yeah.” Dan slipped his glasses off, then wrenched his gaze from the house to her. “How’d you know?”

      Molly shrugged. “I can’t think of any other reason to come here unless heartstrings were pulling you back.”

      “Heartstrings,” he said. “Sometimes I think that was all that held this old place together.”

      “Do you want to get out and have a closer look?” Molly asked, her hand already on the door handle.

      Dan shook his head. “Too many snakes.”

      Molly thought he might as well have said too many memories from the way his mouth twisted down at the corners and the way his knuckles turned white as he gripped the steering wheel. “Tell me,” she said softly. “About the heartstrings.”

      “My mother ran off when I was two,” he said, his eyes locked on the ramshackle house. “And after that, my father dragged me around from one oil well to another in Texas and Oklahoma. By the time he died, I was twelve years old and I hadn’t lived any one place for more than two or three months. Then I came here, to live with Miss Hannah.”

      “Your aunt?”

      He shook his head. “My grandma. Born a Shackelford and died one, and never did bother to get married in spite of my daddy coming along.” He laughed softly. “She said she couldn’t live with a man for more than a couple of weeks without wanting to blow his head off with a shotgun, so she figured she was better off living alone than going to prison.”

      “I know the feeling,” Molly murmured. “So, you were twelve when you came to live with her?”

      “Twelve going on twenty-one. But she managed to knock a little sense and a few manners into my head.”

      “I’ll bet this place was all shiny and spit-polished back then,” Molly said as she watched an armadillo scuttle around a rear corner of the derelict dwelling. She was wishing she could have seen the place back in its prime. Wishing especially she could have seen the boy who was twelve going on twenty-one.

      “The county would never give Miss Hannah a proper address,” he said, still staring through the windshield. “That was the bane of her existence. So she made up her own. Thirteen twenty-eight Mockingbird Road.” He laughed. “She wouldn’t accept mail any other way.”

      “Stubborn,” Molly said.

      “Oh, yeah.”

      “And poetic.”

      Dan’s eyes drifted closed a moment. When he opened them, the green light there was hard as an emerald. “Miss Hannah died when I was seventeen. I walked out that door and I never came back.”

      “Until now.” Thank heaven, she almost added, wondering where that thought had come from.

      “Yeah. Until now.”

      He reached forward to twist the key in the ignition. “Let’s get out of here.”

      What a stupid thing to do, Dan thought as he wrenched the cap from a beer bottle and slung himself into the lawn chair. Piling bittersweet memories on bad ones wasn’t all that bright, and taking Molly out to Miss Hannah’s place was just about the dumbest thing he’d ever done.

      What did she care? Kathryn Claiborn had enough of her own bad and bittersweet memories to contend with. She didn’t need to be saddled with any of his, that was for damn sure.

      When they’d gotten back to Molly’s house, and while she was whistling and sorting out their purchases in a back room, Dan had picked up the phone in the kitchen and put in a call to Houston.

      “Bobby, I can’t do this.”

      “Sure you can, amigo. Hell, just consider it a paid vacation. We have no reason to believe the Claiborn woman is in any jeopardy. Far as we know, there’s not a single member of the Red Millennium who hasn’t blown himself up.”

      “Bobby…”

      “You have to do it, Dan.” Robert Hayes’s voice lost its southern affability and took on a bureaucratic chill. “Everybody else is working double, even triple shifts. You hear me? I’ve already gone to the wall for you, son, but I’m not putting on a blindfold and smoking a final cigarette on your behalf. You got that? If you don’t do this, you’re done. There won’t be anything more I can do.”

      Dan twisted the cap off another beer now, thinking it would be easier if he just ran an IV into his arm. Eliminate the middleman, so to speak. The way he was going to be eliminated soon.

      Against regulations, Bobby had shown him his psychological workup a few weeks after he got out of the hospital.

      The bullet that Deputy Marshal Shackelford took meant nothing to him. It was the bullet that killed his female partner that shattered his confidence. In my considered opinion, without long-term counseling, which Deputy Shackelford dismisses as “voodoo drivel,” he may never regain his former level of confidence, thus making him entirely unsuitable for the duties he is asked to perform.

      “Long-term counseling, my ass,” Dan muttered. You either did a job or you didn’t. You withstood the heat or you left the kitchen. If you said you lived at Thirteen Twenty-eight Mockingbird Road, then by God all your mail better be addressed as such or you’d slap it back in the mailman’s bag.

      He was glad Miss Hannah couldn’t see him now.

      Molly ate her spaghetti dinner at the kitchen counter, keeping an eye out the window as she slurped up the long strings of pasta. She’d called out to Dan earlier against her better judgment.

      “Hey! How about some spaghetti for dinner?”

      He’d saluted her with his bottle and called back, “No, thanks.”

      Somehow, after their visit to town and Miss Hannah’s house, the day had just frittered away. Molly hadn’t gone back to work. God knows Dan hadn’t even started. He’d opened a roll of wallpaper, stared at it thoughtfully, then rolled it back up and gone outside to his lawn chair where he’d been ever since.

      But despite his handyman shortcomings she liked him. Really liked him. Maybe she was drawn to his loneliness because of her own. Still, he didn’t seem to have the least bit of interest in her. He hadn’t asked her a single question about herself. Not “Where are you from?” or “What do you do?” or even a silly “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a hellhole like this?”

      It shouldn’t have surprised her. She wasn’t a very interesting person now, and probably hadn’t been even when she’d had a life. The most interesting thing that had ever happened to her was getting blown up by a terrorist’s experimental bomb, and that was something she could only discuss when and if she ever got to court, which seemed very unlikely now that the Red Millennium was considered dead as a doornail.

      Whoever said that blondes have more fun, she thought dismally, was way off the mark. Dan, on the other hand, seemed to be having fun, swilling beer while slung out in his shady chair. Maybe she’d do that, too. After all, it was her backyard.

      She scraped what was left of her spaghetti into the trash can, pulled out the plastic sack and hauled it to the big metal can out back.

      “Nice evening,” she called out, getting only a nod in reply.

      Maybe blondes had more fun because they were persistent, she thought. Like Raylene. She stood a little straighter, throwing her shoulders back, making the most of her 34Bs, then sauntered toward the trailer.

      “Pretty sunset,” she said. It wasn’t exactly an opening Raylene would have used, but she couldn’t quite imagine herself saying, “My Lord, Danny. Don’t you look cute out here all by your lonesome? Want some company?”

      Molly

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