Hell on Church Street (23 page)

I shook my head. I knew I could make this happen. I could feed her a story and make her believe it. I could still pull it off. But I needed energy. I needed desire. And right then I was empty. I was scared. I couldn’t pull it off.

She looked in the backseat and saw the suitcase.

“You’re running away?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why are you leaving?” she asked me.

“Some people want to kill me,” I said. “Some other people are talking about me and you. Some other people want to put me in jail. A lot of people are looking to do a lot of things to me.”

“People know about us?”

“Didn’t you tell them?”

She frowned. “I told my brother.”

On another night I might have been able to roll with that news. But I was tired and scared and hurting. “That was stupid,” I said.

“Don’t call me stupid.”

“That was incredibly fucking stupid.”

“Don’t call me stupid. I’m not stupid. You think I am, but I’m not.”

“Then why would you tell your fucking brother about us? How did that seem like a good idea?”

“I never heard you talk that way before, using the F-word.”

I shook my head. I wished I hadn’t picked her up now. “That’s what you’re worrying about? At a time like this, you’re concerned about my cussing?”

She sat, silent and thinking. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“I’m driving around. Don’t worry. I’m not about to kidnap you. I don’t know what you think of me, but I’m not going to force you to leave town against your will. You can stay here with your brother and Nick and all the other assholes at the church.”

“You say that like they’re a bunch of bad people,” she said.

“Aren’t they?”

“They’re all better than you,” she grunted. I drove past a trailer park and down a lonely corridor of trees.

“That’s nice,” I said. “Now you hate me.”

She looked behind us. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere. I told you, I’m just driving around.”

We passed a tiny salvage yard out there in the middle of nowhere, and then there was nothing but trees holding up the overburdened starry sky.

Angela stared at my headlights coldly tunneling into the darkness before us. “I want to go home,” she said.

“I’ll take you home.”

“Stop the car,” she demanded, but her voice was wobbling a bit. “Turn around and take me home right now.”

“Don’t be that way,” I said. “Relax. I have some things I think we need to talk about.”

She stared at me, chewing at the inside of her mouth. “Where are you taking me?”

“I’m not taking you anywhere. We’re driving around, talking.”

Before I knew what had happened, she started to cry.

“Why are you crying?”

“Because you’re scaring me. You just keep driving even though I told you I want to go home.”

“Now you’re just being stupid,” I told her. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you. You know I wouldn’t hurt you. You know that, right?”

She looked behind us but there was nothing back there but darkness and the red glow of my taillights. She started to cry harder. It frustrated me.

“You need to stop that,” I told her.

 
“I’m not mad at you anymore, okay? Please, just take me home.”

“Why do you keep crying? Christ. Get a hold of yourself.”

“Please take me home,” she said. “I won’t tell anybody I saw you. I’ll tell Gabe and Nick I was lying.”

“Nick?”

She shook her head.

“Did you talk to Nick?”

“No.”

“You just said his name. Why did you just say his name? You said Gabe and Nick.”

“I didn’t tell him anything. I told Gabe, and I think he told Nick. But maybe he didn’t, maybe he didn’t.”

I punched the steering wheel. “Goddamn it!” I yelled. “Why would you do that? Everything I’ve done was so we could be together. There are people after me.
The Norris family.
Do you know who they are? They’re Sheriff Norris’s family, and do you know why they’re after me? Do you?
Because I killed him, Angela.
I didn’t mean to, but I killed him to protect us. He wanted to tell everyone about me and you.”

She sobbed now, holding her face in her hands. “Please,” she said.

“But you already did. You told Gabe and Nick.”

She wobbled out
please
again. It was getting irritating.

“Why are you afraid?” I demanded.

“Please…” She was trembling. “I shouldn’t be here. They said I shouldn’t see you again. I shouldn’t be here.”

“Why are you afraid of me, Angela? Talk to me. What are you afraid of? What do you think you know? What kind of ideas has Nick been giving you?”

She was still trying to say
please
but it wouldn’t come out because of her crying. Slowly, she started to hyperventilate. Within a few seconds she was huffing and gasping for air.

“For Christ’s sake, stop it,” I said. “Just take a deep breath and let’s have a conversation about all of this. Did you hear what I just told you?”

When she squeaked out another
please
I shouted, “Jesus!” and swung over to the side of the road and threw the car in park. Dust swam in my high beams.

Her breathing got worse, like she was dying.

“Stop doing that!”

“Please,” she coughed.

“Stop saying ‘please’ like I’m doing something bad to you. You slow down and tell me why you’re so upset. We can figure this out together. You think you know something terrible, don’t you? But you don’t. You’ve gotten bad information and you’ve listened to the wrong people and none of it,
none of it
, is true. They all just want to steal the church away from me. They want to steal you away from me.”

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

“Good,” I said. “Now open your eyes and look at me.”

She opened her eyes. She looked at me.

I don’t know what I thought she was going to see. Maybe I was hoping she’d open her eyes, look at me and see how much, despite all the bad things that had happened, I truly loved her.

But when she opened her eyes and fixed them on me, I knew in an instant I had lost her. She turned white, blank, emptied of Angela and filled with a horror of me. In that instant, her face seemed to absorb all my sins. It was like looking into a mirror for the first time and discovering you’re a monster.

She fumbled the door open and fell out of the car. I scrambled out of my seat. Neither of us made a sound. We were past words. By the time I got outside, she was already running, her footsteps crunching in the grass leading to the woods. We ran in the pale headlights, her long, frantic shadow flickering across the trees. As I got closer to her, my shadow swallowed hers.

I caught her at the edge of the woods. Turning around she screamed and punched me in the face. The pain shot down my neck and down my back and into my stomach and groin. As I collapsed in the damp leaves, she started running again. I forced myself up and started after her. It wasn’t easy. But her sock cap had slipped off and her hair was flowing behind her, and I grabbed her hair and pulled her down.

I pulled out the knife. She wailed and kicked and bit at me, but I stabbed her three times in the chest and that was all there was. The third time I really got her, and she stopped fighting and just lay there and bled to death. It took a while, and we lay in the freezing ditch and she died fast, but not as fast as her parents. Her head was tilted back in the mud, and her last cold breaths spurted out. They got shorter. The final one was only a wisp that curled off her upper lip and dissipated in the night air.

I lay there for a few moments after she was gone and stared at my own breath. Finally I got up. I pulled the knife out of her, and it caught on her coat. I had to work it out and cut myself in the process. Not bad, but I opened the skin on the back of my left hand.

I cleaned the knife off on her coat and left her there, on her back, staring up at the cloudless night sky, that endless expanse of shivering stars.

Part Three:

The Worst Man in the World

Chapter Twenty-six

 
“And that’s all there is,” Webb told me. In the light from the dashboard, his face was a pale green and his eyes were black. “I disappeared after that. I cleaned out my bank account and drove west, staying to
backroads
, parking in the woods during the day, driving at night. I heard about myself on the radio a few days after I left town.
My name, description, and the make and model of my car.
At first it was assumed that Angela had run off with me, but in the early morning on the third day of my escape
her body was discovered by convicts out picking up trash
. I drove and drove, swapping license plates a couple of times, taking it slow and safe, gassing up at night and avoiding people whenever I could. I finally wound up outside of a dirty little town in Texas. There weren’t a lot of prying eyes, but I knew I was I taking too big a risk keeping my car. So I drove out to the woods, buried the license plates and burned the inspection sticker and insurance papers. Then I covered the car in limbs. It was a long walk to the nearest town to get a Greyhound but that only increased my chances of the car going undetected for a while. When I did find a bus, I rode west.”

“Why are we back in Arkansas?”

It was the first thing I’d said in a long while, and my voice cracked when I said it. There was something weird about hearing myself again. We had been in Arkansas for a couple of hours, sliding in from Oklahoma, past the foothills of the Ozark Mountains where, I guess, Doolittle Norris had tried to kill Webb. We had driven through Little Rock, a small city by a small river. Then he’d taken an exit, and we were in some shitty section on the outskirts of the city. Nothing but fast food joints, pawn shops and check cashing places.

We passed a billboard, with a big cartoon dollar bill on
it, that
read: FREE BUCKS BACK.

“Why would you come back here?” I asked. This time my voice didn’t crack.

“I’m coming to that in a minute,” he said. “I grew a beard, dyed my hair blond and dressed like a beggar. I became a beggar with Bertie Mae’s gun and a little under a thousand dollars in my pocket. I drifted. I don’t know how it is with other fugitives, but I never had much trouble avoiding the cops. I just stayed out of the way. I ate when I had to, drifted from here to there,
slept
during the day and only came out at night. Somewhere in southern California a bum beat me up and took the gun and some of my money, but I had the majority of it in a sock. Most people just looked the other way when they saw my dirty, shambling form swaying up the street in front of them.