Bad People (16 page)

“Do what you want.”

“Is that a dare?”

“Oh my god. The same conversation over and over.”

“I’m boring you now. Until we have a
real talk
it isn’t over.”

“I see. Not until you say so.”

“Yes. Until we both say.” She felt sick. She was as sick of this as he was, why couldn’t he understand that? “Listen to me!”

“What? Huh?” he said. The three glasses wine.

“This is only half a talk,” half done. Connie gets everything. Everything. Erika—nothing. “He could have come to me, didn’t he know that?”

“Who?”

Robb
, of course. “He could have come to me. What is wrong with that fucking Connie? Didn’t she see the signs of trouble in her own marriage.”

“You can’t blame her for Robb’s issues.”

“No! Not Princess Connie!” They all felt that way about her, all the them. She roped them in, all of them, with her long neck and her oh so fine cheekbones. No, it was too much to expect Glen, her own fucking husband, to take her side against precious Connie.

“ Are your forgetting Robb was the one who was murdered? And all I hear from all of you is, poor, poor Connie.”

“She’s a widow, Erika. And the rest of it. The embezzling, the drugs, how can you…” he faded away.

“How can I what? Finish your sentence?”

“Never mind.”

“Finish it! How can I what? Be so cold?”

He turned his face toward hers and in the headlights of a passing car she saw her husband’s face turn hard. “No. How can you be so jealous?”

“Jealous! Me? Of her. Spare me.”

“Did you ever fuck Robb?”

“Shut up. Don’t turn this around.”

“No, I wouldn’t presume. That’s your game, twisting words, throwing words in my face. You’re the master of that. I just want to know. I don’t care.”

“If you don’t care, then you must not really want to know. Stop looking at me already.”

“You didn’t, no. But you wanted to. What’s the matter, he tell you you’re not his type?”

“He did not.”

“Not in words maybe. But you weren’t his type, Erika. Know how I know?”

“Shut up.”

“Because you’re nobody’s type. You’re mean and, yes, cold—that no one’s type at all…”

She swallowed, tried to choke out some words. All she could manage: “Look who’s talking.”

He faced front now. So did she. She held the wheel in both hands and at arm-length. They spoke no more.

Chapter 18: Luke

Luke’s phone messages to Connie had not been returned. He left three—and no more—modulating his voice to sound undisturbed each time. He watched her building Thursday night, then Friday, but she stayed in. Saturday she went out. He watched from Ardiss’s car, parked at the end of Connie’s block. He knew Connie’s car and when it came out of the underground garage under her building he leaned forward. Still early, around five. And because she has shaded windows he could not tell whether or not she was alone—or what she was wearing. Several men had entered the building by being buzzed in over the previous hour of Luke’s vigil. He recognized none of them, but anyway they could have been entering the building for any reason at all. Too early for a date certainly, perhaps she was only going shopping or to meet a girlfriend. Still, if she had time to do those things, it raised the question of why she did not return his calls. She was not especially busy—considering everything.

He followed. There was a slight chance she would notice him—although she’d only seen his car once. In all likelihood she would not notice, because she had no reason to believe anyone would be following her. If, by fluke, she did happen to spot him—so what? He was only driving down a public street after all.

He toyed a moment with the idea of actually revealing himself—and how that would go.
Oh, what a surprise to see you Luke, I’ve so ashamed that I’ve been meaning to call
—or some such. She’d lie, but uncovering the lie could be pleasant. Most people couldn’t lie well—they couldn’t lie because they were suckers and they believed they owed the truth to other people.

Or maybe she’d surprise him—maybe she lied quite well—she was successful after all. Maybe she was one of the smarter ones—like Jay Porter, his first mentor. Jay Porter had not disappointed for months. Connie was clearly Jay Porter’s superior—much more money, much better car, kept herself physically fit—but Jay Porter had knowledge of The Mind. Jay Porter did not have The Mind himself, but he recognized it when he saw it. Luke was possessed of The Mind, and he had come to understand that other people were not. Until very recently Luke believe that his greatest asset was his body—he’d believed that throughout his childhood, through high school and beyond, through the killing of Robb Hart. But he had discovered since then that he’d been selling himself short, there was much more to him than that.

Jay Porter had loved Luke—as he himself had put it—”the way Stephen Hawking loves black holes.” Luke had always understood his superiority to other people—but one thing he could not understand is why everyone did not feel that way about themselves. Were they stupid?

Yes, they were stupid. Some might have great intellects, useful talents that would allow them for a time to overcome their essential weaknesses, but no one but Luke had the Mind. The Mind was the understanding of “the primacy of self” as Jay Porter put it. Most people—perhaps all other people—Luke was coming to suspect—were lost in this myriad of emotions and drives and need for approval. The need for other people. They forgot, or never understood, that there is one’s self—and outside that is everything else. So they became confused, acting outside their self-interest—even believing they drew meaning from understanding and attending to the needs of others. The truth was more beautiful.

Beautiful that he, Luke, was born perfectly possessed of The Mind in this world of the confused and feeble thinkers who could serve his needs. He only had to continue to mimic their ways, learn to speak their gibberish, learn to move the muscles of his face in their style, in order to have everything he wanted.

It took work though. Jay Porter had not enough insight to understand that. Even from his vantage point—high above the rest of the simians, high enough to look up still higher and see Luke, he still could not grasp that fact. He believed that life must be easy for Luke. And the fact that it was not, had once caused Luke pain. Now he understood it. It gave him a lump in his throat, he almost burst into tears—or laughter—right that moment, thinking of it. Following Connie’s Jetta, he understood how much he’d learned in a few months. How much he’d learned about life from Robb’s execution.

The old Luke would have hounded Connie with calls. If threats worked he would have threatened her, if lying worked he would have lied, if begging worked he would have begged to get something he wanted.

Life had not been easy, because Luke had expected everyone to see reality. Now he understood the value of patience. The vulnerable self-loathing girls like Ardiss, they were diseased livestock really.

Ana a few thousand dollars earned off a coward like Barry, too feeble to even do his own killing—that money was gone in a flash. Whether three months or six months it was gone.

People like Ardiss, like Barry, practically fell over themselves looking for an ass-fucking—but the prize-prey—the talented, the wealthy, the well-adjusted—like Connie—they were real game. He shouldn’t have killed Robb, because Robb could have yielded Luke much more that ten thousand dollars had he lived—Luke wasn’t sure how, but was certain he would have come up with something. It didn’t matter now. He would come up with something for Connie to do for him. Something big. A lot of big things, possibly. But Jay Porter would have thought of that as hard work.

Jay Porter in the end was lost in his fantasies. The back room of the comic book store had always been filled with serial-killer memorabilia. A clown painting by John Wayne Gacy, ancient reel-to-reel tapes of interviews with Charles Manson. Idiot shit perpetrated by retards who could not control their impulses and landed in jail. This—and this is why in the end, Jay Porter fell as short of the glory and The Mind as anyone—this was the only thing Jay Porter could manage to dream of doing if he someday fulfilled his dream and came into possession of the Mind. Killers were the heroes of Jay Porter’s limited imagination.

Jay Porter had wanted more, but he couldn’t imagine what the next step was, though he might have gleaned an inkling at the end.

The end for Jay Porter was some weeks after Luke had received the final payoff from Barry at the library. Once the contract was completed, one link between Barry and Luke remained. Jay Porter. Jay Porter had known both Luke and Barry and had put them in touch with each other..

Barry it appeared, after his behavior at that library, was falling apart, but he was a culpable as Luke, so Luke did not fear him confessing. They had met twice in public; Barry had no idea where to find Luke, or anything about him. Well there was Ardiss, but she’d worked that coffee job under a fake id with a stolen social security number, and now she worked at a different one. So even if Barry connected Ardiss with Luke, he’d have a hard time finding her. Ardiss, being simply stupid, had never put anything together, and still thought Luke had done security consulting for Barry, which is what Luke had told her.

In such a situation, it would be the assassin, when caught, who would then roll over on the person who hired him. That was not going to happen, because Luke couldn’t be caught. He was done with murder, done with street crime. His exposure to Robb and Connie’s lifestyle had shown him there were easier, less dramatic ways to make money. Luke would always have to be careful if he were a criminal, but once he became an entrepreneur—once he had his own infomercials on TV, his own interviews in magazines, his own sold-out seminars, where the applause of thousands would greet him—thousands of wet milfs and their wide-eyed daughters, he could stand up and accept praise for his accomplishments in the sunlight. The more he stood up, the more they would praise and honor him. He was comfortable knowing he had the skills to take a human life when needed, but that was but one very blunt weapon is his expanding arsenal.

However, before all this had begun to come to him, there had been that final connection to sever. Jay Porter himself had told Luke this.

Jay Porter explained to Luke that he had left that one loose end. For whenever Barry would look at Jay he would look at him with resentment in his eyes. Jay Porter decided he could not shake Barry’s resentment. Jay Porter told Luke frankly, looking glassy-eyed, that he knew he himself weak, that one day he would betray Luke, and he did not want to end like that.

Jay Porter talked it all out with Luke one evening in the back of the comics store. They sat on boxes of worthless Archie and Jughead digests from the ‘90s. The room was bare. Jay had disposed of his entire life’s secret work. The collection of serial killer memorabilia—gone. Luke did not ask him what he had done with it, or why he had done it. He just listened as Jay spoke on and on about his own regrets and frailties, and finally his plan.

“I’m ordinary, Luke,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of the race is meat. All my life I desired to be the one thing I can’t be. It’s taken you to show me that. You really did it, Luke. You really did it! It was in the paper; I know it happened. I’ve tried to talk to Barry—he won’t take my calls. He doesn’t come in any more! It happened, and yet—to look at you Luke, to look at you is to look on the face of purity. You did it! You did it! You squeezed the life out of another being. You were that vessel’s passage to elsewhere! Oh I bet he never met anyone like you. I wonder if he understood at the end? Did he understand what was happening to himself?”

Luke nodded. He didn’t know and couldn’t care less what Robb had been thinking as he died—until this moment Luke had never considered it at all—but he knew by now when to assume an all-knowing pose with Jay Porter. Jay already believe Luke knew the inner thoughts of others, and Luke enjoyed the way Jay’s eyes flashed with wonder and his nostrils flared when Luke let him believe he was as supernatural as Jay fantasized he was.

Jay’s reverie lasted it seemed like minutes, and he pulled himself out of it finally, regretfully, by force. “So you’ll have no trouble doing this next thing, Luke. You will give me the same gift you gave Robb Hart.”

Luke raised his eyebrow at that, though not in shock that Jay wanted to die, or that he wanted Luke to do it—he had come to understand in that moment that Jay Porter hated himself.

Once, not long after they’d met (Luke browsed the store almost daily, Jay gave him free comics) the older man starting talking to him in earnest, trying to convince Luke of Luke’s own natural genius. He got Luke reading actual books. Books on psychology, books on Hitler and Napoleon. Luke still devoured graphic novels and financial and self-help books, such as those by Robert Kiyosaki and Suze Orman, but he no longer had time to keep up with the new Star Wars and Halo novels, and he grew to disdain mainstream superhero comics. He had no time for video games, and discovered that television was shit.

His vocabulary improved, though his spelling did not. Jay explained that Luke was an auditory learner. He picked up words and idea by their sound.