Low Pressure

“Listen. Let me explain.”

“I went to look for her, didn’t I?”

He said nothing.

“You know I did. Because… because you saw me watching the two of you, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“Bellamy—”

“All this time,” she cried, “you could have told me! Why didn’t you tell me that I was remembering wrong? Why didn’t you—” The answer became obvious in a lightning bolt of clarity. “You weren’t flying with Gall. You didn’t have an alibi. You were in the state park, and you were fighting with Susan.”

For several moments, neither moved, then she lunged for the door and pulled it open.

“Fuck! Bellamy!”

She bolted through the doorway with such impetus that the only thing to break her fall from the second-story breezeway was the metal guardrail. She landed against it hard, banging her pelvic bone painfully. She gave a cry of pain, then another of fear as Dent’s hands closed around her upper arms.

Her sharp cry caused the two men on the parking lot below to look up. They’d been lounging against the hood of a car, but Rocky Van Durbin came instantly to life. He shouted, “There!” and pointed her out to his photographer, who was at the ready. The flash on his camera exploded in bursts of blinding light.

Dent wrenched Bellamy’s gripping hands off the guardrail and hauled her back into the apartment, then kicked the door shut.

He vented his frustration on the door, beating his fist against it to emphasize each eruptive, foul word. His impulse was to tear down the stairs and make Van Durbin sorry he had ever heard of Denton Carter, then go to work on the photographer and destroy his camera.

But when he’d suffered similar ambushes following Susan’s death, and again during the NTSB’s investigation into the near crash, Gall had been there like a flea in his ear, warning him against impetuous reprisals. “Reporters thrive on angry reactions. You want to beat ’em at their game? Ignore ’em.”

The gash on his cheekbone was throbbing like a son of a bitch, and when he wiped his face the back of his hand, already bleeding from the cuts on his knuckles, came away streaked with brighter, fresher blood. He figured the cut on his back had reopened as well.

When he turned into the room, Bellamy flinched, which made him all the madder. “If you’re more scared of me than you are of them, you know the way out.”

He left the path to the door clear for her as he retrieved his blood-soaked jeans from the bathroom floor and fished his cell phone from a pocket. He then strode into the kitchen and consulted the telephone number for the complex manager, which a previous tenant had penciled onto the faded wallpaper.

Viciously he punched in the number, and the call was answered almost immediately. “Yeah, that notice you put in everyone’s mailbox last week? About the guy who exposed himself to a woman in the North Unit? Uh-huh. Well there are two guys in the parking lot of South. They’re taking pictures through people’s windows with a telephoto lens. I’m almost sure it’s the same two I saw talking to some little girls on the playground this afternoon. You’d better call the police. Okay. Bye.”

He disconnected and looked over at Bellamy, who hadn’t moved or taken her wide gaze off him. “That ought to keep Van Durbin and his sidekick busy for a while.” He buttoned up his jeans and ripped off a length of gauze, which he folded and used to stanch the bleeding on his cheek. “I’m going to have a beer. Want one?”

She didn’t respond.

He took a can of beer from the refrigerator, opened it and sucked up the suds that spilled over the top, then took a deep swallow. He sprawled in the only easy chair in the apartment and calmly sipped at his beer, while Bellamy stared at him as though he was an exotic and potentially dangerous animal that should be caged.

The rings around her eyes were so dark they looked like they’d been put there by punching fists. Her face had been leached of color, but that might have been caused by the glare of his unforgiving overhead light. She looked completely done in, but his ire was such that he didn’t go easy on her.

“Well?” he said.

“What?” Her voice sounded rusty from disuse.

“You’re not going to ask?”

“Wouldn’t you just deny it?”

“Yes. But think what a great plot twist this would make for Low Pressure: The Sequel. You could shock your readers right out of their socks. The boyfriend was the killer after all. He, a sexual deviant if ever there was one, got away with murder.

“Flash forward eighteen years. He puts the moves on the baby sister, who’s all grown up now. Filled out real good. Makes his mouth water. She kisses like a bad girl till he acts on the invitation, then she shuts down like a maiden missionary. When she says ‘No!’ to him, he wigs out, takes her sweet body, and…” He gave an exaggerated shudder. “Grisly stuff. A page-turner for sure.”

She gave him a withering look, then went to the window, where colored lights were flashing on the slats of the uneven blinds. “The police are here. Three squad cars.”

“Why don’t you race down there and tell them that you’ve finally nabbed your sister’s killer?”

“Because I don’t believe you are. You are, however, a jerk.”