Spencerville

Obviously, the game was heating up. He didn't bother to put the Blazer behind the house, but parked it near the porch and went inside through the front door.

He went directly upstairs and took his 9mm Glock from the cabinet, loaded it, and put it on his night table.

He got undressed and went to bed. The adrenaline was still flowing, and he had trouble getting to sleep, but finally entered a state of half-sleep that he'd learned in Vietnam and perfected in other places; his body was at rest, but all his senses were placed on a moment's notice.

His mind took off in directions that he wouldn't have allowed if he'd been in full control of his thought processes. What his mind was telling him now was that home had become the last battlefield, as he always knew it would be if he ever returned. That was the great subconscious secret he had been keeping from himself all these years. His memories of Cliff Baxter were not as dim as he'd indicated to the Porters, nor as fleeting as he'd told himself. In fact, he remembered the bullying bastard very well, remembered that Cliff Baxter had jostled him more than once, recalled Baxter's heckling from the stands during football games, and very clearly remembered Cliff Baxter eyeing Annie Prentis in the halls, at school dances, at the swimming pool, and he recalled the incident at an autumn hayride when Baxter put his hand on Annie's butt to help her up into the hay wagon.

He should have done something about it then, but Annie seemed almost unaware of Cliff Baxter, and Keith knew that the best way to enrage a person like Baxter was to pretend he didn't exist. And, in fact, Baxter's rage grew month by month, and Keith could see it. But Cliff Baxter was smart enough not to step over the line. Eventually, he would have, of course, but June came, Keith and Annie graduated, and they were off to college.

Keith never knew if Baxter's interest in Annie was genuine or just another way to annoy Keith, whom Cliff Baxter seemed to hate for no reason at all. And when Keith had heard that Cliff Baxter and Annie Prentis had married, he was not so much angry at Annie or Cliff Baxter as he was shocked by the news. It had seemed to him that heaven and hell had changed places, that everything he believed about human nature had been wrong. But as the years passed, he came to understand the dynamics between men and women a little better, and he thought he understood the processes that had brought Cliff Baxter and Annie Prentis together.

And yet, Keith wondered if things would have been different if he'd called Baxter out, if he'd simply beaten the hell out of the class bully, which he was physically capable of doing. He thought about doing now what he'd failed to do in high school. But if he chose a confrontation, then a fistfight in the schoolyard wasn't going to settle it this time.

At about midnight, the phone rang, but there was no one there. A little while later, someone was leaning on his car horn out on the road. The phone rang a few more times, and Keith took it off the hook.

The rest of the night was quiet, and he got a few hours of sleep. At dawn, he called the Spencerville police, identified himself, and asked to speak to Chief Baxter.

The desk officer seemed a little taken aback, then replied, "He's not here."

"Then take a message. Tell him that Keith Landry would like to meet with him."

"Yeah? Where and when?"

"Tonight, eight P.M., behind the high school."

"Where?"

"You heard me. Tell him to come alone."

"I'll tell him."

Keith hung up. "Better late than never."

Chapter Thirteen

Keith Landry shut off his headlights and pulled the Blazer into the parking lot behind the high school on the outskirts of town. The blacktop lot ran up to the back of the old brick school where bike racks, basketball courts, and equipment sheds stood. Keith saw that mercury vapor lights illuminated the area, but otherwise nothing much had changed since he and his friends used to meet behind the school on summer nights.

He stopped near one of the basketball nets, shut off the ignition, then climbed out of the Blazer. He put his Glock semiautomatic on the hood, took off his shirt, and threw it over the pistol.

Keith took a basketball out of the rear compartment, and, by the light of the mercury vapor lamps, he began shooting baskets, layups and jump shots, and the sound of the basketball echoed off the building in the quiet night air.

He dribbled up to the net, faked a pass, then jumped and put the ball through the hoop.

As he worked up a sweat, he reflected on the other game he'd come here to play, and it occurred to him that this was not a particularly smart move. He'd lost his temper and had thrown out a childish challenge. "Meet me behind the high school, punk." Sounded good. But given the circumstances, this could turn out to be a fatal mistake. He knew he could handle the class bully with no problem, but Baxter might not come alone as instructed.