Heat Race - Tanya Chris Page 0,102

you too.”

“You understand why I have to do this, right?” He couldn’t leave his father out there to come after them again. No more mercy.

“Just be smart about it.”

Saul couldn’t help smiling, not surprised that “be smart” would be Elias’s advice, but he understood Elias’s point. With the sheriff in Otis’s pocket, he couldn’t just stroll in there and murder him in cold blood. He would need to provoke a fight big enough to claim self-defense.

“I’ll walk over to your parents’ house when I’m done here,” he told Elias as he climbed out of the car. “Don’t wait around.” He could see the doubt in Elias’s eyes, but he was determined not to take anyone else down with him. If there were repercussions for what he was about to do, he would face them alone. He shut the car door with a definitive thud and watched until Elias drove away, then headed for the house.

When his knock went unanswered, he peered through the windows of the garage, saw that it was empty, and felt like an idiot. He’d been so wound up about the confrontation it hadn’t occurred to him that his father might not be home.

He had a key to the front door, but he didn’t use it. He didn’t live here anymore. But he did let himself through the gate into the backyard to get away from the dust of the street and the gawking eyes of neighbors.

The backyard was as neglected as the house, a relic of his childhood with an old swing set rusting in one corner and a bare spot in the center where the grass had never recovered from his soccer years. His mother had planted roses in the beds on either side of the back door, and the ones on the right side still bloomed. He didn’t have her green thumb, but he’d tried his best with them, giving them fertilizer and bug killer and trimming them back each year. They’d suffered from his absence this year. The leaves were dotted with holes, and dead blooms had been left to rot in place.

The roses on the left side of the door had gone with his mother, never to bloom again. As a child, he’d imagined she’d taken them with her, but he knew better now. She hadn’t gone anywhere, and neither had the roses. Over and over, his gaze returned to that patch of weedy dirt on the left side of the door where roses as pink as his mother’s cheeks had once bloomed.

Now he did use the key in his pocket. He let himself into the house, passing through it to the garage where he selected a shovel from the jumble of gardening tools leaning against the side wall. He’d always been strong, but the bond had made him stronger, and he set to digging with a determination fueled by anger. His father hadn’t just killed his mother. He’d killed her roses so he could hide the evidence.

He didn’t have to dig very deep before his shovel turned over something besides dirt. The long white bone that could only be a femur bore no identifying characteristics. It’d been ten years. Plenty of time for flesh to putrefy and cloth to rot. But Saul knew whose femur it was. He turned away to vomit, spewing out the agonized contents of his stomach in a bitter gush.

The sound of his father’s truck pulling into the garage told him the time for revenge was at hand. He’d left the back door open, not bothering to disguise that he was here or why, so it wasn’t long before his father came out to find him standing next to his mother’s grave with his hand on the hilt of the shovel he’d used to unearth her.

His father didn’t say a word, just took a stance in the middle of the yard where Saul had worn away the grass, setting his feet wide and knocking the ball cap off his head. He knew what Saul intended and wasn’t going to try to argue his way out of it. Maybe Saul should admire him for facing his punishment like a man, but there was nothing admirable about his father, not even this. Otis figured he could take him, that was all, figured he could bury Saul right there next to Barb and wipe his hands clean of another troublesome family member who wouldn’t do as they were told.

“You killed her,” Saul said, just to have it on record.

“Only so