Racing the Devil Read Online Free Page B

this?”
    “I don’t know what I think. Why don’t you give us all a break? Come on in and tell us how it happened.”
    “I can’t tell you how it happened. I wasn’t there.”
    I heard a long exhalation on the other end of the line. When he spoke again, his voice had softened. “Mac, I can help you, but you gotta give me something.”
    The nickname was a razor through the heart. I’d trusted Frank with my life, as he had trusted me with his, and now that trust was eroding like a child’s sand castle. But if he could still call me ‘Mac,’ maybe there was hope for it. I squeezed a breath past the knot in my throat and said, “Look, I’ll get back to you later, when I know what’s going on.”
    I hung up before they could trace the call. Hand on the receiver, I laid my throbbing forehead against the wall and thought about Heather.
    I’ll get rid of this on the way to the fridge . But had she? She’d stopped at the trash basket, but had she actually dropped the condom in it? Or had she put it in the refrigerator when she went to get the wine? I remembered how she’d held the glasses, primly, by the stems, and thought that maybe it was something more than primness that had made her hold them that way.
    Here, hold this . She’d gotten my prints on both glasses.
    Semen, hair, and fingerprints. While there were plenty of people who could have gotten prints and hair samples, she was the only one who’d had access to semen in quite a while.
    But why?
    How long had she been planning this perfect little murder?
    I think a murder would be interesting .
    Had she chosen me to be her fall guy because I was convenient? Was I just the one she happened to pick up?
    But if that was the case, how had she gotten my voice on the victim’s voice mail?
    And who was the man with the beard? The elusive, abusive Ronnie? Had there ever even been a Ronnie?
    I thought about the note she’d left. I’m sorry .
    Sorry for what, I had wondered.
    Now I knew.

I WIPED A LINE of perspiration from my forehead and left the motel on foot. My shirt was plastered to my back before I even made it out of the parking lot.
    I made my next call from the diner across the street and ordered a pot of coffee to occupy me until my ride arrived. His name was Billy, like about a million other good ol’ boys from the South. I have personally known three Billy Rays, a Billy Don, a Billy Jack, a Billy Bob, two Billy Joes, and even, once, a Billy Bill. William Bill Burleson. It said so on his birth certificate.
    My buddy’s name was William Mean, which had, in his army days, been shortened to the more descriptive (and more accurate) Billy Mean. In military fashion, he’d found himself called “Mean, William,” which eventually became Mean Billy, or sometimes even Mean Billy Mean.
    Back then, he was shaped like a sparkplug, all bone and gristle under muscles packed hard as a buffalo’s. Now that bone and muscle was blanketed under fifty pounds of fat. But Billy was no prey animal. He’d been in Special Forces, and he still moved that way, dangerous beneath the flab, like a caged tiger.
    He was three years younger than my father would have been, and back in the late sixties, had served two tours in Vietnam. Dad was Air Force and Billy was Army, but I wondered sometimes if their paths had ever crossed. There was no reason why they would have, but I wondered just the same.
    Billy swears, and I believe him, that he hardly felt afraid at all in ‘Nam. Fear was such a constant presence that he hardly even noticed it. But when he got back home, all that fear crashed down on him like fifty tons of bricks.
    He had night terrors. He was petrified of thunder. One afternoon, a woman spat at him as he was buying groceries. Another called him a rapist and a monster and a baby killer. Before long, he could hardly leave his own house.
    There was no money. His wife moved out and took their two-year-old daughter with her, and while Billy said he couldn’t blame her, it