To Hatred Turned by Ken Englade Read Free Book Online

the divorce proceedings for him and Rozanne. He explained the situation to the lawyer’s aide, a woman named Sandy Miller, and asked her what she thought he should do.
    “Sit tight,” she advised him, “and I’ll make a couple of phone calls to see what I can find out.”

5
    With everything that had been happening that day, Larry apparently had failed to note the irony in the fact that Little Peter was occupying himself that afternoon at an ice-skating rink, since ice skating is not a common activity in Texas, especially when the weather is still hot. At about the time he began calling Rozanne, the thermometer at the official weather station in Richardson peaked at ninety-six degrees, which tied the record for the day.
    While Rozanne was accustomed to crisp, colorful New England autumns, there is no comparable season on the north Texas prairie. Dallas residents, rather, have come to expect uncomfortably warm temperatures and high humidity for roughly half of every year, often beginning as early as April. Typically, the Dallas “summer” ends abruptly sometime in November with the arrival of a cold front from Canada, usually a rolling, rapidly moving mass of clouds that takes on the characteristics of a weather phenomenon called a “blue norther.” It barrels southward across the empty, flat countryside, dyeing the sky a frightening blue-gray and sending the temperature plummeting by thirty degrees or more in less time than it takes to eat a leisurely lunch. To Texans, there is nothing strange or foreboding in this brusque change of seasons. After all, the locals like to say with a certain amount of perverse pride, there is nothing between the North Pole and Texas except a four-strand barbed-wire fence.
    But no blue norther was predicted for October 4. The sky that day was a bright, cloudless blue and it emanated a heat that sizzled like a blast from hell.
    In the meantime, until Mother Nature did her part, everyone in North Texas would suffer. The lucky ones that evening shut themselves inside their air-conditioned homes, dined in air-conditioned restaurants, or sought relief in an air-conditioned movie house. The unlucky ones had to work out in the elements, unprotected from the heat. Among the latter were Winfred Duggan and Glenn Moore, veteran paramedics for the Richardson Fire Department.
    At 6:33 P . M ., while others were digging into chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes, washed down with copious amounts of sweet iced tea, Duggan and Moore were in their ambulance, perspiring freely even though the vehicle’s air conditioner was cranked to the max. The radio crackled and a bored-sounding dispatcher called their number.
    Duggan acknowledged.
    “Proceed to Loganwood Drive,” the disembodied voice commanded.
    “What’s the problem?” Duggan asked.
    “A sick woman,” the dispatcher responded.
    Moore shrugged and swung the vehicle around until it was heading north, where Loganwood Drive cut a three-block-long, tree-lined swath through a peaceful residential neighborhood. The dispatcher gave no indication of an emergency, so Moore laid off on the siren and the accelerator.
    As Moore drove, Duggan, who had been riding ambulances in Richardson for nine years, began preparing himself mentally for what the two were likely to find when they reached their destination. Probably a little old lady who had slipped and fallen in her living room, he thought, or someone having trouble catching her breath in the heat.
    “What number we looking for again?” Duggan asked as Moore turned onto Loganwood.
    “Eight oh four,” Moore replied.
    As Moore drove slowly up the street, Duggan called out the addresses. “Seven ninety-four…seven ninety-six…seven ninety-eight…eight hundred…eight oh four…here it is!” he said, prompting Moore to brake in front of a house that did not look materially different from its neighbors.
    Number 804 was a white, clapboard structure built in an L, with the garage, the short side of