Bad People (44 page)

Her eyelids fluttered. “I won’t,” she said.

She was looking at the ground and he bent his head under hers to kiss her. Her lips were cold; she had been outside for a while, wearing too little as usual of course. She was shivering. He pressed his tongue into her mouth. He wrapped his arm around her while still holding the shotgun. The shotgun lined up along her spine and against her little ass.

He felt more alive than he had in months. The clarity was exhilarating. Ardiss’s mouth tasted alive, and he pressed so deeply into it that she finally had to press her little hands to his chest, and whimper, trying to get him to stop. He broke free, and she breathed.

He took her by the forearm and pulled. “Let’s go,” he said, as they walked.

He had her show him how to get in. She said something again about mountain lions. He started to ignore that but instead decided to listen to her and maybe placate her. She was upset and for some reason she didn’t want him seeing S/D, but he did not yet know why. He would find out, so he asked her about the mountain lions.

She told him they were in the back yard, had been anyway, and had chased her and S/D around the pool. They had only got inside in time to avoid being eaten.

Luke stopped with her on the lawn and looked at her.

“You were in the back. Out back, and went in through the back door. So the back is unlocked, we don’t have to climb in through any window.”

She looked at him, started to say something, just changed her mind, and said instead: “No. We don’t.”

“We’ll go around back.”

“We don’t have to. I came out the front. I unlocked it.”

“Why did you say we had to go in through the window, then.”

“Because. I wasn’t thinking. I don’t know.”

He rolled his eyes at her. Started to walk toward the door and then stopped again. He leaned into her and looked deep at her eyes to find what he could behind them.

She seemed to shrink away, like a time-lapse of a flower dying.

“What’s got into you tonight, Ardiss,” Luke demanded. “Is there some reason you want me to go in through the window and only the window.”

She shook her head. “I just don’t want to go back in there at all.”

“Is he awake. Is he waiting in there for me.”

“No. No. He’s on the floor. He’s knocked out.”

“Did you kill him. Is that what you did.”

“No! No. Just forget him. He’s harmless. Let’s just go. Please Luke.”

“Did you fuck him? That’s it. You fucked him.”

Her eyes went wide. He flung her arm away. He stepped back. She was filth. She even smelled like it, like S/D, he now realized.

She staggered and stayed upright. She leaned toward him. Tears came quickly to her in any case, and they did so again now. “Like
you
wanted me to!” she yelled.

“I said seduced him. Draw him in. But I forgot how stupid you are.”

“I’m not stupid! Don’t say that to me!”

“You’re stupid. You’re stupid.”

“No! I hate you! Stop it!”

“Now you say it.”

“No!”

He grabbed her again, this time by the hair, and twisted the locks in his hand, twisted the locks around his fingers like he would mess around with rubber bands until his extremities turn cold and purple. Her knees started to buckle and she sank to the grass.

“Say ‘my name is Tiffany.’” He ordered her, using her real name, the one she was ashamed of and tried to leave behind. “You’re not Ardiss. Say ‘my name is Tiffany and I’m stupid.’”

“No!”

“Say it!
My name is Tiffany and I’m a stupid trailer park whore!
”

Her scalp was wet, and her hair had become slippery. He pushed her down, ripped his hand free and wiped it on her back. She stayed there, crying, face down, refusing to turn up and look at him. “Say it!” he demanded.

She still wouldn’t. Just cried and kept trying to hide from him. He kneeled on her, his knee in the base of her spine. “Last chance!” he said. “Say it!”

“No!”

He drove the rifle butt down between her shoulder blades. He heard a satisfying crack. Why wouldn’t she say it?

He hit her the same way the same place again. “Why did you fuck him!” This time she didn’t yell, she made a wet gurgle into the grass. He flipped her over. His knees at the side of her chest, he squeezed his thighs tighter. He peered into her face.

Her mouth was moving, the words were faint but she was trying to speak and he leaned over. “Because he was nice.”

Because he was nice?
“What’s nice about him!”

Luke raised the rifle and brought the butt down hard near her ear. The butt buried itself in the soft grass. Ardiss hardly noticed. Half senseless, her eyes shone unfocused in the bright moonlight.

“I felt sorry for him…” she whispered.

Luke stood up and left her in disgust, heading for the house. He flung the front door open, pointed the shotgun.

Empty. He looked back at Ardiss.

She still barely moved, just one hand reaching up, as if trying to grasp at an imaginary firefly.

Luke went inside. His footsteps echoed on the hardwood, which flexed and gave ever so slightly for him as he crossed the living room.

The house looked small somehow, smaller than he had remembered it, though he had committed it to memory. Without furniture it felt and looked different. Clean. And cold. The cold refreshed him. He had developed a thick film all over his skin from the night’s works: the product of sweat drying and dampening repeatedly. He wanted a shower. He would have one, but not yet.

He passed into the dining room and peered into the kitchen. The tile floor was as bare as the dining room and living room floors. He stepped inside.

S/D was not there.

A shovel was. The shovel that Ardiss had claimed to have hit him with, it must have been. But no S/D. Well, Ardiss had not managed to kill him. That was good, Luke wanted to talk to him. Now, in fact, more than ever.

Ardiss said she felt sorry for him. For
him
. S/D had everything. He didn’t have to work; he had a car, a laptop, clothes, they even paid for his college. He had everything.

Or had
had
everything. S/D didn’t appreciate it, didn’t enjoy it, just whined and felt sorry for himself.

He had everything Luke wanted and he never even had to look for it or try and figure anything out on his own. S/D didn’t need the Mind to guide him, because he was born already across the finish line.

“S/D?” said Luke. Perhaps he was hiding. Waiting for him. More likely he had run.

The kitchen sliding door back to the pool area was closed. Luke checked it. Unlocked, as Ardiss had said, but she had also said mountain lions attacked them. There were no lions.

The garage.

Luke saw the door in the kitchen that led to the garage. That was where S/D had gone. Now he understood. Ardiss had given everything to S/D, not just her body. Now S/D was waiting for him where it all began. Where Luke had first asserted himself into the family. Where S/D wanted to die too. He knew. Stephen-David knew, just as the other men had known, when his time came to step aside. The Mind never failed. It worked in Its own way, but it never failed.

He’d have no more trouble with S/D, who had come to this house, to the garage, to die. No other outcome made sense. No other reason for S/D to return to the house existed, or
could
exist. Luke flung the garage door open.

Dark.

Almost perfect dark, as it had been that night in the summer.

That night in baseball season.

Because of the angle, the door Luke had opened barely served to allow any of the bright moonlight into the garage. He stepped in. His senses heightened; he could tell from the sound of his footsteps that the garage, like the rest of the house, was bereft of materials. The garage had already been emptied, and the floor steam cleaned, the day he had shown up there to see Connie, tan legs in her cotton shorts, that summer. Luke remembered that detail.

He was standing in almost the same spot now on which he had strangled Robb.

He looked hard at the blackness directly downward. He stared long enough that a glow of red seemed to fill the space. The kind of bright spot that forms when he pushed his fingers deep into his closed eyelids. The kind of spot that was like a memory burned onto the retina. Luke’s spot. It burned and flowed and moved with the energy of that first kill—
his
energy, the energy of Mind.

“S/D,” said Luke, into the darkness. “Say something. Show me where you are and lets finish this.”

He listened, hearing only silence, not even S/D’s panicked breath, yet it must be there to make the circle complete.

Luke understood now that more magic was at work than he had suspected.

His destiny called him to absent all the men in Connie’s life. This is what had hindered her before. What had prevented her revealing to him all the secrets of entrepreneurship. The things that weren’t in books. The intangible secrets to living and being in the world.

“S/D!” Luke said clearly. “Show yourself!”

From outside came the sound of an engine. It started at the end of the block and grew louder. Luke waited to hear if it would pass the house and keep on going but it did not. The engine was coming fast. And it stopped fast. Brakes squealed.

Luke went to the garage door.

Padlocked. He stepped back and blasted the lock with the shotgun. He had to get the door open and see what corner S/D was hiding in. He had to kill him fast with the remaining shell. Then reload from the box of shells in his pocket and deal with whatever car had come.

He pushed the garage door up. Headlights flooded in. Luke turned away, using the headlights to see the garage.

Empty! S/D was not in there at all. Luke turned. The car was not stopping. The headlights grew. Luke raised the shotgun and fired.

Chapter 50: Ethan

“That don’t look good,” said Tommy.

Ethan Starvold concurred. The damage to the gate outside Connie Wexler-Hart’s condominium building did not look good. The gate was off its track and jammed in the open position.

A hysterical woman, a murder suspect in a dormant case, calls Tommy Brussels’s cell ranting about a co-conspirator coming to kill her, and now they drive up to find the damage to the building’s security. Coincidence? No.

But. “The gate is knocked outward. Whoever did that was leaving,” Ethan said.

Tommy grunted. Ethan Starvold turned Tommy’s brown Cadillac into the driveway. “At least we don’t have to buzz to get in,” he said.

“Probably need a key to get into the building from the garage though.”

“Yeah, true. Still let’s look this over first. Inside they circled the garage. Big building, probably sixty units. Good-sized spaces in the garage. In Ethan’s building the parking lines were drawn narrow. Living where Ethan did practically guaranteed dings in you doors. “Wonder what they get for these?”

“You can’t afford it,” said Tommy.

“Even if I could, I’d never get what I paid for mine back out of it now.”

“Told you not to buy at the height of the bubble.”

“Bull
shit
, you did. You didn’t know about any bubble.” In fact, Tommy with his selective memory of the past, was now claiming exactly the
opposite
of what he had really told Ethan at the time, though Ethan wasn’t going to bother to try and remind him.

What Tommy, the real estate genius, had
really
said was
real estate
always
goes up,
never
down
.

His sage advice as someone who had paid eighty thousand dollars for his own four-bedroom palace sometime in the Mesozoic Era, was to buy as early as you can, and hold forever. Well, Ethan
had
bought a place as early in his life as the banks would allow, which was not all that early, and he was certainly going to be holding a long, long time. Unless he got lucky and the place burned.

As Ethan completed his turn around the parking garage, which had required stopping, cranking the wheel, and reversing, a couple times, owing to the caddy’s whale-like turning radius, a woman came through the locked door the stairwell. Tommy flagged her down, and identified himself. The woman held the door for them, as Ethan parked, and Tommy asked her some standard questions.

After, Ethan and Tommy climbed the stairs to Wexler’s floor. Tommy puffed a little, though it was only a few flights. Ethan turned back to say something to tweak his partner about being out of breath, but he blanked, which he regarded as a disappointment. This did not go unnoticed by Tommy, who waved his hand dismissively at Ethan and told him to shut up, even though he hadn’t spoken. That made Ethan smile.

Connie Wexler’s door was at the far end of the hall. When they got there, they saw what looked like the top of a manila envelope sticking out from under the door. Ethan pushed the buzzer, then knocked, and waited.