Big Driver (14 page)

Al said nothing.

Tess thought,
I'm kneeling here talking in imaginary voices. I've lost my mind.

Yet part of her knew she was trying to
keep
her mind. The only way to do it was to understand, and she thought the story she was telling in Doreen's voice was either true or close to true. It was based on guesswork and slopped-on deduction, but it made sense. It fit in with what Ramona had said in her last moments.

You stupid cunt, you don't know what you're talking about.

And:
You don't understand. It's a mistake.

It was a mistake, all right. Everything she'd done tonight had been a mistake.

No, not everything. She was in on it. She knew.

“Did
you
know?” Tess asked the man she had killed. She reached out to grab Strehlke's arm, then drew away. It would be still warm under his sleeve. Still thinking it was alive. “
Did
you?”

He didn't answer.

“Let me try,” Doreen said. And in her kindliest, you-can-tell-me-everything old lady voice, the one
that always worked in the books, she asked: “How
much
did you know, Mr. Driver?”

“I sometimes suspected,” he said. “Mostly I didn't think about it. I had a business to run.”

“Did you ever ask your mother?”

“I might have,” he said, and Tess thought his strangely cocked right eye evasive. But in that wild moonlight, who could tell about such things? Who could tell for sure?

“When girls disappeared? Is that when you asked?”

To this Big Driver made no reply, perhaps because Doreen had begun to sound like Fritzy. And like Tom the Tomtom, of course.

“But there was never any proof, was there?” This time it was Tess herself. She wasn't sure he would answer her voice, but he did.

“No. No proof.”

“And you didn't
want
proof, did you?”

No answer this time, so Tess got up and walked unsteadily to the bleach-spattered brown hat, which had blown across the driveway and onto the lawn. Just as she picked it up, the pole light went off again. Inside, the dog stopped barking. This made her think of Sherlock Holmes, and standing there in the windy moonlight, Tess heard herself voicing the saddest chuckle to ever come from a human throat. She took off her hat, stuffed it into her jacket pocket, and put his on in its place. It was too big for her, so she took it off again long enough to adjust the strap in back. She returned to the man she had killed, the one she judged perhaps
not quite innocent . . . but surely too innocent to deserve the punishment the Courageous Woman had meted out.

She tapped the brim of the brown hat and asked, “Is this the one you wear when you go on the road?” Knowing it wasn't.

Strehlke didn't answer, but Doreen Marquis, doyenne of the Knitting Society, did. “Of course not. When you're driving for Red Hawk, you wear a Red Hawk cap, don't you, dear?”

“Yes,” Strehlke said.

“And you don't wear your ring, either, do you?”

“No. Too gaudy for customers. Not businesslike. And what if someone at one of those skanky truck-stops—someone too drunk or stoned to know better—saw it and thought it was real? No one would risk mugging me, I'm too big and strong for that—at least I was until tonight—but someone might shoot me. And I don't deserve to be shot. Not for a fake ring, and not for the terrible things my brother might have done.”

“And you and your brother never drive for the company at the same time, do you, dear?”

“No. When he's out on the road, I mind the office. When I'm out on the road, he . . . well. I guess you know what he does when I'm out on the road.”

“You should have
told
!” Tess screamed down at him. “Even if you only suspected, you should have
told
!”

“He was scared,” Doreen said in her kindly voice. “Weren't you, dear?”

“Yes,” Al said. “I was scared.”

“Of your brother?” Tess asked, either unbelieving or not wanting to believe. “Scared of your
kid brother
?”

“Not him,” Al Strehlke said. “Her.”

- 39 -

When Tess got back in her car and started the motor, Tom said: “There was no way you could know, Tess. And it all happened so fast.”

That was true, but it ignored the central looming fact: by going after her rapist like a vigilante in a movie, she had sent herself to hell.

She raised the gun to her temple, then lowered it again. She couldn't, not now. She still had an obligation to the women in the pipe, and any other women who might join them if Lester Strehlke escaped. And after what she had just done, it was more important than ever that he not escape.

She had one more stop to make. But not in her Expedition.

- 40 -

The driveway at 101 Township Road wasn't long, and it wasn't paved. It was just a pair of ruts with bushes growing close enough to scrape the sides of the blue F-150 pickup truck as she drove it up to the little house. Nothing neat about this one; this
one was a huddled old creep-manse that could have been straight out of
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
. How life did imitate art, sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation.

Tess made no attempt at stealth—why bother to kill the headlights when Lester Strehlke would know the sound of his brother's truck almost as well as the sound of his brother's voice?

She was still wearing the bleach-splattered brown cap Big Driver wore when he wasn't on the road, the lucky cap that turned out to be unlucky in the end. The ring with the fake ruby stone was far too big for any of her fingers, so she had put it into the left front pocket of her cargo pants. Little Driver had dressed and driven as his big brother when he went out hunting, and while he might never have time enough (or brains enough) to appreciate the irony of his last victim coming to him with the same accessories, Tess did.

She parked by the back door, turned off the engine, and got out. She carried the gun in one hand. The door was unlocked. She stepped into a shed that smelled of beer and spoiled food. A single sixty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling on a length of dirty cord. Straight ahead were four overflowing plastic garbage cans, the thirty-two-gallon kind you could buy at Walmart. Behind them, stacked against the shed wall, were what looked like five years' worth of
Uncle Henry's
swap guide. To the left was another door, up a single step. It would lead to the kitchen. It had an old-fashioned latch rather than a knob. The door squalled on unoiled
hinges when she depressed the latch and pushed it open. An hour ago, such a squall would have terrified her into immobility. Now it didn't bother her in the slightest. She had work to do. That was all it came down to, and it was a relief to be free of all that emotional baggage. She stepped into the smell of whatever greasy meat Little Driver had fried for his supper. She could hear a TV laugh-track. Some sitcom.
Seinfeld,
she thought.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Lester Strehlke called from the vicinity of the laugh-track. “I ain't got but a beer and a half left, if that's what you came for. I'm gonna drink up and then go to bed.” She followed the sound of his voice. “If you'da called, I coulda saved you the tr—”

She came into the room. He saw her. Tess hadn't speculated on what his reaction might be to the reappearance of his last victim, carrying a gun and wearing the hat Lester himself wore when his urges came over him. Even if she had, she could never have predicted the extremity of the one she saw. His mouth dropped open, and then his entire face froze. The can of beer he was holding dropped from his hand and fell into his lap, spraying foam onto his only article of clothing, a pair of yellowing Jockey shorts.

He's seeing a ghost,
she thought as she walked toward him, raising the gun.
Good.

There was time to see that, although the living room was a bachelor mess and there were no snowglobes or cutie-poo figurines, the TV-watching setup was the same as the one at his mother's house
on Lacemaker Lane: the La-Z-Boy, the TV tray (here holding a final unopened can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a bag of Doritos instead of Diet Coke and Cheez Doodles), the same
TV Guide,
the one with Simon Cowell on it.

“You're dead,” he whispered.

“No,” Tess replied. She put the barrel of the Lemon Squeezer against the side of his head. He made one feeble effort to grab her wrist, but it was far too little and much too late. “That's you.”

She pulled the trigger. Blood came out of his ear and his head snapped briskly to the side. He looked like a man trying to free up a kink in his neck. On the TV, George Costanza said, “I was in the pool, I was in the pool.” The audience laughed.

- 41 -

It was almost midnight, and the wind was blowing harder than ever. When it gusted, Lester Strehlke's whole house shook, and each time Tess thought of the little pig who had built his house out of sticks.

The little piggy who had lived in this one would never have to worry about his shitty house blowing away, because he was dead in his La-Z-Boy.
And he wasn't a little piggy, anyway,
Tess thought.
He was a big bad wolf.

She was sitting in the kitchen, writing on the pages of a grimy Blue Horse tablet she had found in Strehlke's upstairs bedroom. There were four
rooms on the second floor, but the bedroom was the only one not stuffed with junk, everything from iron bedsteads to an Evinrude boat-motor that looked as if it might have been dropped from the top of a five-story building. Because it would take weeks or months to go through those caches of the useless, the worthless, and the pointless, Tess turned all her attention on Strehlke's bedroom and searched it carefully. The Blue Horse tablet was a bonus. She had found what she was looking for in an old travel-tote pushed to the very back of the closet shelf, where it had been camouflaged—not very successfully—with old issues of
National Geographic
. In it was a tangle of women's underwear. Her own panties were on top. Tess put them in her pocket and, packrat-like, replaced them with the coil of yellow boat-line. Nobody would be surprised to find rope in a rapist-killer's suitcase of trophy lingerie. Besides, she would not be needing it.

“Tonto,” said the Lone Ranger, “our work here is done.”

What she wrote, as
Seinfeld
gave way to
Frasier
and
Frasier
gave way to the local news (one Chicopee resident had won the lottery and another had suffered a broken back after falling from a scaffolding, so
that
balanced out), was a confession in the form of a letter. As she reached page five, the TV news gave way to an apparently endless commercial for Almighty Cleanse. Danny Vierra was saying, “Some Americans have a bowel movement only once every two or three
days,
and because this
has gone on for years,
they believe it's normal
! Any doctor worth his salt will tell you
it's not
!”

The letter was headed
TO THE PROPER AUTHORITIES,
and the first four pages consisted of a single paragraph. In her head it sounded like a scream. Her hand was tired, and the ballpoint pen she'd found in a kitchen drawer (RED HAWK TRUCKING printed in fading gilt on the barrel) was showing signs of drying up, but she was, thank God, almost done. While Little Driver went on not watching TV from where he sat in his La-Z-Boy, she at last started a new paragraph at the top of page five.

I will not make excuses for what I have done. Nor can I say that I did it while of unsound mind. I was furious and I made a mistake. It's that simple. Under other circumstances—those less terrible, I mean—I might say, “It was a natural mistake, the two of them look almost enough alike to be twins.” But these are not other circumstances.

I have thought of atonement as I sat here, writing these pages and listening to his television and to the wind—not because I hope for forgiveness, but because it seems wrong to do wrong without at least trying to balance it out with something right.
(Here Tess thought of how the lottery winner and the man with the broken back evened out, but the concept would be difficult to express when she was so tired, and she wasn't sure it was germane, anyway.)
I thought of going to Africa and working with AIDS victims.
I thought about going down to New Orleans and volunteering at a homeless shelter or a food bank. I thought about going to the Gulf to clean oil off birds. I thought of donating the million dollars or so I have put away for my retirement to some group that works to end violence against women. There must be such a society in Connecticut, perhaps even several of them.

But then I thought of Doreen Marquis, from the Knitting Society, and what she says once in every book . . .

What Doreen said at least once in every book was
murderers always overlook the obvious. You may depend on it, dears.
And even as Tess wrote about atonement, she realized it would be impossible. Because Doreen was absolutely right.

Tess had worn a cap so that she wouldn't leave hair that could be analyzed for DNA. She had worn gloves which she had never taken off, even while driving Alvin Strehlke's pickup. It was not too late to burn this confession in Lester's kitchen woodstove, drive to Brother Alvin's considerably nicer house (house of bricks instead of house of sticks), get into her Expedition, and head back to Connecticut. She could go home, where Fritzy was waiting. At first glance she looked clear, and it might take the police a few days to get to her, but get to her they would. Because while she had been concentrating on the forensic molehills, she had overlooked the obvious mountain, exactly like the killers in the Knitting Society books.