Low Pressure

Donald Haymaker lived in one of Austin’s older neighborhoods, which hadn’t yet had an influx of younger people looking for homes to redo and modernize. As they approached the small porch of his house, Bellamy asked, “How do you think we’ll be received?”

Dent didn’t have time to venture a guess. The former police officer opened his door even before they rang the bell. He regarded them as curiously as they assessed him.

He’d developed a pot belly, which looked comical in contrast to his hairless, bandy legs and knobby knees. His eyes were small and squinty, his nose upturned and sharp at the end. Put a silly cap on his head, and he’d look like one of the Rice Krispies elves.

He made a point of appraising the cuts and bruises on Dent’s face. “Still finding trouble, I see.”

“I guess no introductions are necessary.”

Haymaker snorted. “You I would’ve recognized anywhere. Even with your face messed up.” Then he shifted his gaze to Bellamy. “You? I wouldn’t have known, except that I’ve been seeing you on TV.”

“May we come in?” she asked politely.

He hesitated for only a moment, then stood aside. Beyond a small foyer was a cluttered living room that boasted a large flat-screen TV. Family pictures were lined up on the mantel. A mutt lay sleeping in the corner of the sofa. Taking up a lot of the floor space was a faux leather recliner with an oil stain matching the size and general shape of Haymaker’s head.

He motioned them toward the sofa, where Bellamy crowded in between Dent and the dog, who wasn’t instructed to vacate his spot in order to make room for them. Haymaker took the recliner and adjusted it to a comfortable angle with the footrest up. The bottoms of his white socks were gray.

He grinned puckishly. “What can I do for you folks?”

Dent got straight to the point. “Produce your buddy Dale Moody.”

The former cop laughed a little too loudly and loosely for it not to sound forced. “Old Dale,” he said, shaking his head and smiling fondly. “Wonder what became of him?”

“Well, for one thing he got drummed out of the Austin PD.”

Haymaker lunged upright in his lounger and stabbed the air with his index finger. “That’s a damn lie. Where’d you hear that? Dale left the department by choice. He wasn’t fired. He wasn’t even suspended.”

“So no one ever found out about what he did to me?”

Beside him Bellamy twitched with surprise, but she didn’t say anything. He’d asked her to let him loosen up Haymaker. He hadn’t told her how he intended to go about it.

Haymaker’s tongue darted out to wet his lips. “Okay, y

eah, Dale was a tough cop. He wasn’t always politically correct. Sometimes he got a little carried away, especially with punks like you who thought they were smarter than him.”

“I was smarter than him. I called his bluff and didn’t confess, and he didn’t follow through on his threat. I still have both eyes in perfect working condition.”

He turned to Bellamy. “Moody showed up at my house when my dad was at work. He bent me backward over our kitchen table and pressed a Phillips screwdriver to my eyelid. He said if I didn’t confess to choking Susan, he was going to puncture my eyeball and destroy forever any chance I had of flying an airplane.

“I was alone. I didn’t have a lawyer. For over an hour, Moody tried to get a confession out of me by threatening to blind me.” He turned back to Haymaker. “And this son of a bitch held me down while he did it.”

Haymaker rolled his narrow shoulders. “No harm was done, was it? You made out okay.”

“Allen Strickland didn’t.”

Bellamy’s softly spoken words had a noticeable impact on Haymaker, who began fidgeting even more, making the faux leather beneath him squeak. “You can’t lay it at Dale’s door that Strickland was killed in prison. The boy was tried in a court of law. He was found guilty by a jury of his peers—”

“On nothing but circumstantial evidence.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said quickly. “I was present only a few of the times that Dale questioned him, then I was assigned to another case.”

“You didn’t help Moody and Rupe Collier cook up the case against Strickland?”

“No.” Then, realizing he’d walked into a trap, Haymaker began backpedaling. “What I mean is, they didn’t cook up anything. They had a solid enough case to get a conviction. The jury thought so.”

“What did Detective Moody think?”

In response to Dent’s question, his beady eyes blinked nervously. “What do you mean?”