Bad Men (2003) (33 page)

She considered going to the movies. It had been so long since she’d sat in a movie theater to watch something that wasn’t a cartoon or a kids’ comedy. Maybe she could make the twilight showing over at the Maine Mall Cinema. She glanced at her watch, saw that it was just after six-ten, and broke into a trot as she headed for the theater.

“What the fuck is wrong with her mouth?” said Dexter.

He and Braun were watching a pay-per-view movie in their motel room. Tom Cruise was some kind of deformed guy in love with a Spanish chick with dark hair. Tom had dumped Cameron Diaz for the dark-haired chick, which made no sense to Dexter at all, especially since the dark-haired chick seemed to have picked up the wrong mouth somewhere along the line.

“Well?” he said to Braun. “Look at it.”

“Looks good to me,” said Braun. Dexter had run out of movies to watch on his DVD player, and had turned on the TV. Braun couldn’t concentrate on his book with the movie playing, so he had resigned himself to watching the screen. There was nothing else for them to do anyway, not until Scarfe contacted them.

“Nah. I ain’t saying she ain’t pretty or nothing. Hell, I’d fuck her for free. But her mouth…I don’t know, it’s just too big for her face. Who is she, anyway?”

“Penelope Cruz.”

“She married to him or something?”

“No, Cruz with a
z
. I hear he’s dating her, though.”

“Fucking Tom Cruise. You think it’s true about him?”

“What? That he’s—”

“Yeah.”

“No. You think he could be going out with her if he was?”

“It might be a front.”

“Hell of a front. Hell of an ass too.”

“Yeah, but that mouth. It just looks
wrong…
”

Tell and Shepherd were sitting in the IHOP beside the Days Inn, eating pancakes with lots of sugar and butter and cinnamon on top. Shepherd was listening to Tell. Tell was full of shit sometimes, but it was kind of interesting shit.

Like, there they were in the IHOP, and this guy had rolled by in his wheelchair. He was wearing khakis and one of those black POW/ MIA T-shirts. His legs were gone from the knees down, and his trousers were pinned up. His arms were huge. Shepherd figured the guy must be pushing himself up the side of mountains to get arms that big. Then Tell said: “You know my brother was a cripple?”

“No shit?”

“Lost a leg in Vietnam, couple of months before Tet.”

“Which leg?”

“Right leg.”

“No shit?”

“Came home on crutches with one trouser leg pinned up, just like that guy, except he still had one leg. He was real upset.”

“Man had a right to be upset, he lost a leg.”

“Sure. Terrible thing, losing a limb. He stayed in his room, drinking, sleeping in his own filth. Wasn’t nobody could get through to him. Then he got this phone call. Ed Sullivan—you remember Ed Sullivan?”

“Yeah, he was a strange-looking guy. Head and body didn’t look like they matched.”

“He had short arms, was what it was. Anyway, Ed was a big supporter of the war, and he wanted he should do his part, so he invited some vets on to the show and my brother was one of them. He loved Ed Sullivan.”

“So he went to the show?”

“Hell, yeah, he went. He and his buddies were flown in, driven to the studio in big limousines, given front-row seats, the whole deal. They’d all lost limbs in Vietnam—arms and legs and shit. Ed insisted that all the guys should be cripples, otherwise they could be just anybody, you know? Anyhow, during the dress rehearsal for the show, Ed calls for the lights and cameras to be pointed at them, and he starts making a big fuss, and the audience starts whooping and hollering. So Ed looks at the boys, and smiles that big smile he had, and tells them to take a bow. I mean, it’s Ed Sullivan, telling them to take a bow. So my brother and his buddies, they stand up to take their bow.”

“Yeah? So they stand up…?”

“And my brother fell over. He only had one leg. He stood up, kind of wavered for a second, then went sideways. Banged his head. Most of the other guys who’d lost legs managed to stay upright by supporting themselves on their seats, although they all looked kind of unsteady. Not my brother, though. He was gonna stand up straight and take a bow if Ed Sullivan told him to. He loved Ed Sullivan.”

“A man’s got to love another man to try to stand straight on one leg just because he told him to do it. Your brother must have been kind of pissed at Ed, though.”

“No, he wasn’t pissed at all. Fact was, he said he kind of appreciated someone treating him like he still had both legs. So after that my brother got himself a false leg. He wanted to be able to stand upright next time someone important told him to. He used to take it off to sleep, though. That’s how he died. There was a fire in his apartment block, and when the alarms went off there was smoke and shit, and he died trying to find his false leg. He didn’t want to be no cripple hobbling out. He wanted to preserve his dignity.
The Ed Sullivan Show
taught him that. He loved Ed Sullivan.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.”

Shepherd thought that was kind of interesting. That was what he meant about Tell.

“We did a bank job once, over in Pensacola,” said Shepherd, not wanting to be outdone in the storytelling stakes. “Spent two weeks casing the bank. This was in the old days, before all them new security systems, and lasers and shit.”

“It was a different time. Man needs a degree to take down a bank now.”

“Yeah, they do make it hard for a man these days, and no mistake. Anyway, we get to the bank, morning of the job. Manager goes in, his staff after him, and we come in behind them before they got a chance to close the door.”

“And?”

“And there’s two guys with masks already in there, waiting to hold up the bank. They’d come in through the roof during the night, and they were standing in there when the manager arrived.”

“No shit?”

“Well, we were kind of perturbed, you know? We must have been casing the same bank during that same two weeks, and we never saw each other.”

“Can happen.”

“Surely can. So we got this moment, right, where we’re looking at them wearing their masks, and they’re looking at us wearing our masks, and the manager and his people are looking at all of us. So I say, ‘The fuck are you doing? This is our bank.’ And this other guy says: ‘The fuck it is. We spent a month on this job.’ ”

“Bullshit.”

“No, I don’t think so. Coming in through the roof, that takes some planning.”

Tell relented. “I guess.”

“So there’s a standoff, until I say, ‘Well, why don’t we split the take?’ and the two guys look at each other and kind of shrug, and say, ‘Okay.’ ”

“So you split the take?”

“Fifty-fifty, seeing as how they’d had to come in through the roof and all.”

“That was damn Christian of y’all.”

“Yep, mighty white. Like you said, it was a different time. That happened now, there’d be a bloodbath. But people had principles then. They had standards.”

“So y’all went away happy?”

“Kind of. The two guys got to their car and we held them up, took their share of the cash.”

“Survival of the fittest.”

“Absolutely. We didn’t kill them, though.”

“Course not. You had standards.”

“Damn straight. It was a different time.”

“You said it. A different time. More pancakes?”

“Sure,” said Shepherd. “Why not?”

Willard stood in the parking lot of the Days Inn, smoking a cigarette. There was the IHOP maybe one hundred feet away, where Shepherd and Tell were eating. Willard could see them at the window. They hadn’t asked him to come along with them. They were probably talking about him at this very minute, plotting how to get him out of the way. Willard wasn’t too worried about Tell, but Shepherd and Dexter were real threats, maybe Braun too.

Willard hated Shepherd, Dexter, and Braun.

He pulled the baseball cap lower on his head and looked at himself in the side mirror of the van. With his blond hair covered, and a thin growth of beard, he didn’t look too much like the picture of him that they were showing on TV. Moloch had warned him against going out, but Willard wanted some air.

He started walking and had almost finished his cigarette by the time he reached the sidewalk. He took a last long drag on the butt and watched the woman approach. She stood at the entrance to the theater parking lot. Willard registered the disappointment on her face.

“It’s closed,” he said. Willard thought that it looked like it had been closed for some time, a couple of months at least.

She looked at him. She said nothing for a moment or two, then replied:

“I’d forgotten.”

“I think there’s another theater somewhere around here,” said Willard. He had seen something about it in the guest-services book in his room.

“Yeah,” said the woman. “I know. I’ll just give it a miss.”

Willard smiled his best smile—“You take care now”—and wondered what it would be like to cut her.

Marianne smiled back and turned away. She walked quickly, but not too quickly. She didn’t want to give anything away, even as her insides churned and she thought: Willard. It’s Willard.

They’re here.

It was only coincidence that had exposed her to the man named Willard. It was during the last days, when she was becoming more and more fearful of Moloch and his ways. She thought that he might in turn be growing suspicious of her, that he was concerned by what she might know and of what might happen if the police forced her to reveal any knowledge of his activities, or if she chose to do so of her own volition. One day, one week before the date she had chosen for her escape, she had seen Willard sitting in a car outside their house, and knew that Moloch had told him to watch her. She recognized the pretty young man from his photograph in the newspaper, the one linking him to the death of the older woman, and from one previous occasion, when she had arrived early for a rare dinner with her husband and had seen him at the bar, talking intently to Willard, his mouth almost touching the younger man’s ear, so that she had thought at first that they might be lovers. She had kept her distance, and had approached her husband only after the other man had gone.

It was Karen Meyer who told her the young man’s name, after Marianne explained how she had seen Willard waiting near the house. That was why she hadn’t been in touch. Karen had been angry. It was their next-to-last meeting, arranged in advance to clear up any remaining details or concerns. They were standing in a single stall in the ladies’ room at the mall.

“You took a risk coming here, a risk to both of us.”

“No, I didn’t. He followed me for two days. He didn’t know I’d spotted him, and I gave him no indication that I knew. I behaved like an angel, and I know that’s what he told Edward.”

Karen relaxed a little.

“Who is he?” asked Marianne.

“His name is Willard. I don’t know anything more than that about him. He just looks pretty. There’s something wrong with him, though, real deep down. Look in his eyes and you’ll find yourself dying in a thousand different ways, with his hands on you right to the end. You see him coming for you again and you take off, you hear me? You take off and you never look back. We’ll come up with another way to get the stuff to you, but you see Willard coming up your garden path and he’s only going to be coming for one reason. He might drop by to check up on you again before then, so act naturally over the next few days. Don’t give them any cause to suspect.”

And that was what she had done, walking calmly, ignoring the presence of the man her husband might be planning to have kill her. On the last day, the day of Moloch’s bank job, she knew she was safe. Willard would be with him, or close to him, but it was not until she was two hundred miles from the city, Danny asleep in his seat, that she began to relax even slightly. She continued to move from city to city, town to town, never staying long in any one location, before settling at last upon the island, the place to which she had decided to flee many months before after reading a feature about the Maine islands in a travel magazine, content that, for now, her trail was unlikely to be uncovered.

But she had never forgotten Willard, or the potential threat that her husband, even incarcerated, might pose to her. It could have been merely a coincidence, of course, that Willard was now up north, far from home, but she didn’t think so. No, they were here, and they were coming for her, for if they were in Portland, then they knew she was on the island, and soon they would arrive on it. As she walked away from Willard—not too fast, not too slow—she tried to retrace their steps, figuring out how they had found her. Only two people could have told.

Karen.

And her sister.

Marianne walked to Maine Mall Road and tried to hail a cab, using the opportunity to pause and glance back to where Willard still stood. He was not looking at her. Then he turned, and his eyes seemed to alight on her face. Marianne waited for him to head into the IHOP, or back toward the motel. Instead, Willard began to walk quickly along the sidewalk.

He was heading straight for her.

Willard didn’t talk much. He guessed that a lot of folks considered him dumb, seeing as how he had never been much for school, and maybe they thought he was afraid to open his mouth because people might laugh at what came out. But Willard wasn’t afraid of anyone, and those who might have felt the urge to laugh at him would quickly have suppressed it as soon as they looked in Willard’s eyes. Sure, Willard had trouble with reading, and he wasn’t so good with figures, but he had the instincts and intelligence of a natural hunter, combined with a curiosity about the nature of pain and hurt when applied to others.

He had sensed something from the woman when she had looked at him. It was more than the natural fear that he frequently recognized in women: the care they took not to get themselves trapped alone with a stranger; the grip with which they held on to their purses; the casual look around the smarter ones took as they prepared to open their car door in the parking lot. No, this was different, keener. Separated, thought Willard, with a husband who isn’t taking it too well; or maybe trying to avoid a boyfriend who doesn’t want to split from her, because then he’ll have to find someone else to beat on. Willard’s nostrils were almost twitching as she stood before him. He liked the scent of her. It aroused the predator in him.