999 (53 page)

Ed Gorman

ANGIE

Ed Gorman, like Joe Lansdale and a few others in this book, has worn many hats—which is an apt description, since he’s been a Western writer, and the image of Ed in a cowboy bat just isn’t something I can hold in my head. He’s also been a book editor (as one example, he edited, with Martin H. Greenberg, one of the most successful and lauded horror anthologies of the 1980s
, Stalkers),
magazine editor
(Mystery Scene),
columnist
(Cemetery Dance magazine),
mystery writer (A
Cry of Shadows
and the more recent thrillers
Black River Falls
and
Cold Blue Midnight),
and, of course, horror writer (short stories under his own name, novels under the name of Daniel Ransom). The fact that he’s managed to distinguish himself in all these capacities is remarkable, and ample proof of his energy and versatility
.

For
999,
Gorman has produced a cold-eyed and sneaky little study of human nature; if Guy de Maupassant were still around, he might have penned this story
.

R
oy said, “He heard us last night.”

Angie said, “Heard what?”

“Heard us talking about Gina.”

“No, he didn’t. He was asleep.”

“That’s what I thought. But I went back to the can one time and I saw his door was open and I looked in there and he was sittin’ up in bed, wide awake. Listenin’.”

“He probably’d just woken up.”

“He heard us talkin’.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked him,” Roy said.

“Yeah? And what did he say?”

“He said he didn’t.”

“See, I told ya.”

“Well, he was lyin’.”

“How do you know?” she said.

“He’s my son, ain’t he? That’s how I know. I could tell by his face.”

“So what if he did hear?”

Roy looked at her, astonished. “So what if he did? He’ll go to the cops.”

“The cops? Roy, you’re crazy. He’s nine years old and he’s your
son.”

“That little bastard don’t give two turds about me, Angie. He was strictly a mama’s boy. And now that he knows—”

He didn’t need to say it. Angie had been waitressing at a truck stop when she’d met Roy. He was living in a trailer with his son, Jason, and his wife, Gina. He went for Angie immediately. On her nights off, he’d take her to Cedar Rapids, where they’d go to a couple of dance clubs. They always had a great time except when Roy got real drunk and started trouble with black guys who were daring white girls. Roy had some friends who were always talking about blowing up places with blacks and Jews and fags in them. Roy always gave them a certain percentage of his robbery money. That’s what Roy did. He robbed banks, usually small-town ones that were located on the edge of town. Roy was a pro. He figured everything out carefully in advance. He knew the exit routes and where the bank kept the video surveillance cameras, and he checked out the teller windows in advance to see which clerk looked most vulnerable. He’d served six years in Fort Madison for sticking up a gas station when he was nineteen. He was thirty-six now and vowed never to be caught again. What she liked about him was that he had a goal in life. There was this one bank in Des Moines where he said he could get half a million on a payroll Friday. They’d go to Vegas and then they’d go see this whites-only compound up in the Utah mountains. That was the only part that Angie didn’t like. She didn’t understand politics and Roy and his buddies always carrying on about Jews and queers and colored people bored her. She had a way of looking awake when she was really
not
awake. She did that practically every time Roy and his buddies started talking about some militia deal they had heard about and intended to join.

The wife got wind of the courtship between Roy and Angie, though, and raised hell. She wouldn’t give him a divorce, and she threatened to tell the cops about all his robberies all over the Midwest. So one rainy night he killed her. Shoved a knife into her right breast, which silenced her, and then cut her throat. He loaded her into a body bag and packed a hundred pounds of hand weights in there with her and then drove his two-year-old Ford out to the river that very moonglow night and threw her in just below the dam. The only trouble Roy had was his son, Jason. The kid just kept wailin’ and carryin’ on about where’s my mom, where’s my mom? He hadn’t wanted the kid in the first place, had beat the shit out of her, but she still wouldn’t get an abortion. Even back then he’d had the dream of this big Des Moines bank on payroll Friday, and who wanted a kid along when you had all the cash with you? But Gina had her way and Roy was stuck with the little prick. And now Jason had overheard him talkin’ about killin’ his mother. Roy knew that somehow, some way, the little prick would turn him in.

Roy said, “Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.”

She watched him carefully. “Sometimes you scare the shit out of me, Roy. You really do. He’s your own flesh and blood.”

“I didn’t want him.
Gina
wanted him.”

“And you killed Gina.”

“For
you”
he said. “I killed her for
you.”
Then, “Shit, honey, here we go again. Arguin’. This ain’t what I want and it ain’t what you want, either. You c’mere now.” Then, “A kid like that, he’s a ball and chain.”

He liked it when she sat in his lap. He liked to feel her up to the point that his erection got so big and bulgy it was downright painful. She’d wriggle on it and make him even crazier. Then, as now, they’d go in on their big mussed sleepwarm bed and do the trick.

Afterward, today, he said, “I better get into town. I want to be there at noontime. See what the place is like around then.”

He was scoping out a bank. He was planning to rob it day after tomorrow. Their cash supply was way way down. The trailer park manager was on Roy’s ass for back rent.

Roy said, “Don’t say nothin’ to him when he gets home from school.”

“All right.”

“You just let me handle everything.”

“All right.”

“It’ll be better for us,” Roy said, trying to make her feel better.

“Haulin’ that kid everywhere we go, that isn’t the kind of life we want. We want to be free, babe. That’s just the kind of people we are. Free.”

Roy had killed people before and it had never bothered her. But never a kid before, that she knew of. And his
own
kid to boot.

He kissed her breasts a final time and then said, “I’ll figure out what to do about Jason and then you’n me’ll go dancin’ tonight. Okay?”

“Okay, Roy.”

Roy was gonna kill him for sure.

One day, when Angie was thirteen, her grandmother said, “That body of hers is gonna get her in trouble someday.” The irony being that Grandmother herself had had a body just like it—killer breasts and hips that made young men weep in public—when she’d been young. And so had Angie’s mother, the person Grandmother was talking to.

The thing being that the worst trouble Grandmother had ever gotten in was getting knocked up by a soldier home on leave from WW II, a pregnancy that had brought Angie’s mother, Suzie, into the world. The worst Suzie had ever gotten into, in turn, was getting knocked up by a Vietnam soldier home on leave, a pregnancy that had brought
Angie
into the world.

Angie, however, got into a lot more trouble than just spreading her sweet young thighs. She saw a TV show one night where this beautiful girl was referred to as a “kept woman,” a woman who lounged about an expensive apartment all day, looking just great, while this older man paid her rent, gave her endless numbers of gifts, and practically groveled every time the kept woman was even faintly displeased. An Iowa girl with a wondrous body like Angie’s, was it any wonder she’d want to be a kept woman, too?

When she was fifteen, she ran away from home in the company of a thirty-two-year-old woman from Omaha who took her to a hotel in Des Moines. Angie slept with ten men in three years and made just over a thousand dollars. One of the men had been black, and that gave her some pause. She could just hear her dad if he ever found out about her (A) screwing men for money or (B) screwing a
black man
for money.

She went back home. Her dad, who worked as an appliance service repair man for Al’s American Appliances, didn’t have the money for a private shrink so they sent her to the county Human Services Department, where she saw this counselor for free. She spent two hours filling out the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test, which just about bored her ass off. He kept peeking in the room and asking her if she was about done. That’s what he
pretended
to do, anyway. What he was really doing was staring at her breasts. Held fallen in love with them the moment they walked in the door. She ended up screwing him on the side. He had a wife who worked at Wal-Mart in Cedar Rapids and two little girls, one of whom was lame in some way and whom he got all sad about sometimes. He was thirty-eight and bald and felt guilty about screwing her and cheating on his wife and all but he said that her tits just made him dizzy when he touched them, just dizzy. He kept her in rap CDs. She loved rap. The way the gangsters in the rap videos took care of their girlfriends. That’s what she wanted. She wanted to meet some guy who’d give her a life of ease. A kept woman. No work. No hassle. No sweat. Just sit around some fancy apartment and read comic books and watch MTV and porno movies. She loved porno movies. The thing was, she didn’t like sex very much, except for masturbating, but if sex was the price she had to pay for a life of ease, so be it.

She dropped the counselor as soon as she managed to get through high school. She got a job in Cedar Rapids as a clerk in a Target store. She lasted three weeks. She took her paycheck and bought a very sexy dress and then she started hanging out in the lawyer bars downtown. Her first couple of months, things went pretty good. She hadn’t found a guy who’d make her an official kept woman, but she’d found several guys who’d give her a little money now and then, enough money for a nice little apartment and a six-year-old Oldsmobile.

But things did not go well after a time. She caught the clap and profoundly displeased a couple of the men who gave her money. Then she ran into two men who were long of tongue but short of wallet, a car salesman who drove them around in sleek new Caddies, and a supper club owner who wore her like a pinkie ring. They were full of promises but had no real money. The Caddie man had two wives and two alimonies; and the supper club man owed the IRS boys so much in back taxes, he could barely afford a pack of gum. He’d had a supper club over in Rock Island several years back, and he’d been charged with tax evasion, later dropped to a simple (if overwhelming) tax debt.

Then, the worst thing of all happened. On the night of her twenty-sixth birthday, Angie got busted for prostitution. She was in a downtown bar sitting with a couple of hookers she knew getting birthday party drunk, when one of the lawyers suggested they all go out to his houseboat. Well, they did, and the cops followed them. Angie insisted that she accepted gifts but never cash for sex per se but it was a distinction apparently too subtle for the minds of the gendarmes. They hated these two particular lawyers and were gleeful about arresting them. Cedar Rapids had a new police station and Angie was impressed with it. She saw a couple of cute young cops, too, and thought she wouldn’t mind dating a cop. It was probably fun. She was booked and fingerprinted and charged. It all, like much of Angie’s life, had a dream-like quality. She was just walking through it—as if her life was a TV show and she was simply watching it—the reality of her trouble not hitting her until the next day when her name appeared in the paper. The Cedar Rapids paper was read by everybody in her hometown. Angie called home and tried to explain. Her mother was in tears, her father enraged. They told her not, definitely
not
, to attend the family reunion two weekends hence.