Cold in July (27 page)

“No shadows,” I said aloud, and as I walked through the
front door, I repeated it like a charm against evil. “No shadows.”

Excerpt

If you enjoyed Cold in July, you may also like Waltz of
Shadows, another fine Lansdale novel. It's now available as an e-book from Gere
Donovan Press.

Here’s how it begins:

Waltz of Shadows

All the blood and disaster began on a Saturday morning when
I thought everything was going just right. It was late October in East Texas,
and from my recliner I could see out the tall glass that makes up two of our
living room walls, and it was beautiful outside. A little cool looking, leaves
gone gold and red and brown and starting to fall. Clouds white as angel’s
panties could be glimpsed through the tops of the tall pines and oaks that made
up most of our two acres. A cat squirrel jumped from one oak limb to another,
then leaped out of sight. I felt like I was in a Disney movie.

Then I got the call.

I heard the phone ring, and was about to answer, assuming it
would be some minor problems at one of the videos stores I own, when Beverly
started downstairs.

I could see her through the stair railing. She was wearing
her shorty white bathrobe and flip-flops and had a white towel wrapped around
her head from having just washed her hair. Her legs were fairly pale since she
didn’t go in much for the sun, and they were lightly freckled, the way redheads
sometimes are, but they were long and smooth and muscled and I never tired of
looking at them.

She was carrying the upstairs cordless phone, talking and
looking at me over the railing and motioning me over, which meant she wanted me
to rescue her and talk to whoever it was.

I put the paper down and got out of the chair and met her at
the bottom of the stairs.

Our black German shepherd, Wylie, got up like it was part of
his job, came over and sniffed my crotch, then went after Beverly, who popped
him on the head with her hand. He went back to his spot and laid down with a
groan. Crotch sniffing was hard work for a dog, but it was his duty, even if no
one liked it.

“Well,” she said into the phone, “let me let you talk to
him.”

She handed me the phone and shook her head.

Upstairs I heard the kids yell again about something on a
cartoon show they were watching, and I put the phone to my ear and stood at the
foot of the stairs and watched Beverly climb back up, enjoying the way her
bottom moved beneath her bathrobe. Twenty years of marriage hadn’t changed that
for me.

“Hello,” I said.

“This is Bill,” said the voice. I knew then why Beverly had
wanted off the phone and why she had the sour face when she gave it to me.

“Hey, how you been?” I tried to sound as happy as possible.

“Not so good.”

He always said that. He’d go six months and I wouldn’t hear
from him, then something went rancid, first person he called was Uncle Hank.

But he’s my brother’s boy, so what you gonna do? It’s not
like he’s got anyone else. My brother, Rick, got killed in an auto accident
when Bill was seven, and when Bill was a teenager his mother remarried and Bill
didn’t get along at all with her new husband, then his mother got some kind of
weird disease you read about in the back of medical books, and died.

Bill was in many ways like his father. Always certain he was
merely a day short of the big success, though you couldn’t seem to put your
finger on what it was he was doing to acquire it. And, like my brother, he had
a passion for women that sent his judgment and sense of decency packing.

On top of all that, he was a bullshitter and had no more
true ambition than a frog.

I hated to get it started, but I said: “Tell me about it.”

Silence hung in the air for a time.

I sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and waited.
Wylie got up again and ambled over, nodded his head in the direction of my
crotch, but it was just a feint, to keep me honest. He laid down at my feet.

Bill said, “I got to talk to you in private. I don’t want to
do it over the phone. I need to see you. Can I come over? I’ll have to take a
taxi, but I think I can swing it. We can have a couple of drinks in the study.”

I thought about that one. I wasn’t in the mood to get
Beverly stirred up. Telling her Bill was coming over was like telling her I was
going to stack and store a wheelbarrow load of fresh pig manure in the house.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Beverly doesn’t like me, right?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Don’t have to. She talks to me like I’m a bill collector.”

“You two just don’t click.”

“We don’t click all right.”

“Look, what she’s got against you is ten thousand dollars
you haven’t paid back. Ten thousand you don’t plan to pay back. Some of us
work, Bill. Come over with the ten thousand in your hand, Beverly’ll meet you
at the door in her panties playing a bass drum.”

“Uncle Hank, you know I’m going to pay that money back.”

“No, I don’t. You got a job? You’re twenty-four years old.
It’s time you started footing your own bills.”

“Really, Uncle Hank. I’m not trying to borrow money. I need
your help.”

I was going to tell him to find someone else, but the words
wouldn’t come out of my mouth. All I could think of was Bill at seven years
old, right after my brother was killed.

“Listen,” I said. “Here’s the score. I got plans this morning,
and I don’t want to get in dutch with Beverly.”

“I hear that.”

“I’m gonna take a shower and take the family to lunch, then
I’ll meet you at your place.”

“I’m not at my place, and I’m not going back there. And if I
did go back, you wouldn’t know where to go, because I don’t live where I used
to.”

“What?”

“The place I moved to is the place I’m not going back to…
Forget all that, okay. I have to see you now.”

“After lunch, Bill, or get someone else. Call Arnold, see
what he says.”

Silence again. Arnold was my older half-brother from my
Dad’s earlier marriage. Arnold’s mom had died in childbirth. My father was
young then and hadn’t done so well with Arnold. Arnold didn’t so much grow up
as he got jerked up.

“All right,” Bill said. “Let’s do this. I’m at a motel.
Calls itself a tourist court, actually. I got it on a match book here… Christ,
how could I have forgotten a name like this. Sleepy Time Tourist Courts. I’m in
room forty. This place is a hole.”

“I know where it is. Another year or two without paint and
repairs, they’ll be holding that place up with a stick. Couldn’t you have found
something better?”

“Money.”

“Yeah, well, you did okay then. Listen up. We finish lunch,
I’ll drive over. Might be as late as two or two-thirty. We go by one of my
stores and pick up a movie for the night on Saturdays. Sometimes we goof around
a little. Run a few errands. I’ll move things quickly as possible.”

“What I’m talking here is more important than fucking lunch
and a movie. I’m talking some desperate shit.”

“It’ll hold,” I said. “See you after lunch.”

I didn’t give him time to complain. I hung up. I didn’t
really think what he had to say would amount to much, figured no matter what he
said, in the end it would all come down to borrowing more money.

I was mistaken.

With more than thirty books to his credit, Joe R. Lansdale
is the Champion Mojo Storyteller. He’s been called “an immense talent” by
Booklist; “a born storyteller” by Robert Bloch; and The New York Times Book
Review declares he has “a folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a front-porch
raconteur’s sense of pace.”

He’s won umpty-ump awards, including sixteen Bram Stoker
Awards, the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, a British
Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, the Horror Critics Award, the
Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, the “Shot in the Dark” International
Crime Writer’s Award, the Golden Lion Award, the Booklist Editor’s Award, the
Critic’s Choice Award, and a New York Times Notable Book Award. He’s got the
most decorated mantle in all of Nacogdoches!

Lansdale lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen,
writer and editor.

www.JoeRLansdale.com.

“Hap Collins and Leonard
Pine”

Savage Season (1990)

Mucho Mojo (1994)

Two-Bear Mambo (1995)

Bad Chili (1997)

Rumble Tumble (1998)

Veil’s Visit (1999)

Captains Outrageous (2001)

Vanilla Ride (2009)

Hyenas (a novella) (2011)

Devil Red (2011)

Blue to the Bone (TBD)

The “Drive-In” series

The Drive-In: A “B” Movie with
Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (1988)

The Drive-In 2: Not Just One
of Them Sequels (1989)

The Drive-In: A
Double-Feature (1997)

The Drive-In: The Bus Tour
(2005)

The “Ned the Seal” trilogy

Zeppelins West (2001)

Flaming London (2006)

Flaming Zeppelins: The
Adventures of Ned the Seal (2010)

The Sky Done Ripped (TBD)

Other novels

Act of Love (1980)

Texas Night Riders (1983)

Dead in the West (1986)

Magic Wagon (1986)

The Nightrunners (1987)

Cold in July (1989)

Tarzan: the Lost Adventure (1995)

The Boar (1998)

Freezer Burn (1999)

Waltz of Shadows (1999)

Something Lumber This Way
Comes (1999)

The Big Blow (2000)

Blood Dance (2000)

The Bottoms (2000)

A Fine Dark Line (2002)

Sunset and Sawdust (2004)

Lost Echoes (2007)

Leather Maiden (2008)

Under the Warrior Sun (2010)

 …And that’s not counting the
pseudonymous novels, the short stories, the chapbooks, anthologies, graphic
novels, comic books and all the rest.

“Cold in July” was first
published by Bantam in 1989.

This eBook edition (
v2
)
was created in September 2011 by
Flyboy707
.

This is a work of fiction.
Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.

N
o copyright
 2011 by Flyboy707.