Hell on Church Street (24 page)

“Everyday I worried about being caught, but then one afternoon I was sitting outside a little truck stop eating a candy bar I’d found half finished in a dumpster when I overheard a radio news report from a mini-van at the curb. The man driving the mini-van was airing up his tire while his wife and kids were inside loading up on pork rinds and Mountain Dew. His door was open and the announcer on the radio said my car had been found and positively identified in a
three car
pile up in the desert near Twenty Nine Palms. The body inside was believed to be mine.

“It took me a while to get the whole story, but the way I understand it some drifter stumbled across my car, took a try with starting it, was probably shocked to find that it worked and rode off into the sunset. And then somewhere around the Marine base in Twenty-Nine Palms he got into a terrible wreck and burned to death.”

“You’re lucky as hell,” I said. “I’ve never been that lucky in my life.”

“Well, yes, at first I greeted the news as a miracle, but I haven’t even gotten to the lucky part yet. Of course, they figured out pretty quickly it wasn’t me in the car. But then the damnedest thing happened. It turned out the guy in the car was wanted for a couple of murders in Nevada. When the cops found my blood in the car, from where I had cut myself the night I killed Angela, they assumed I’d been hacked up somewhere. They probably kept looking for a while, but they wrote me off pretty quickly.

“After the first year or so, after the fire and the dead body in the car, I finally stopped running and I wound up in the north. That’s when I started to live like a termite. It doesn’t matter where a termite lives. I stayed in the dark, and I consumed. I replaced ambition with food. I consumed cheap food by the truckload and got fat and smoked cigarettes and watched pornography and lived in a state of filthy poverty.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“Years.”

“So why are you here now?”

“Because a couple of nights ago I saw Oscar.”

“Oscar…the kid Angela had the crush on?”

Webb nodded. “In a crappy corner of a dark little nothing city a thousand miles from Arkansas, he walked right in the front door of the supermarket I work at.”

“Maybe he didn’t notice you.”

Webb shook his head. “He looked right at me. It took him a moment, but he put it together. I didn’t recognize him at first, either. The last time I saw him, he was a teenager. He’s a grown man now, with thinning hair and the beginnings of a paunch. We had one of those awkward moments where you know you know someone but you can’t quite place
them
. And then he smiled that dumb alabaster smile, and it clicked for me. Oscar.
Stupid, handsome Oscar.
And at the same instant, beneath the beard and the fat and the distance of years and worry on my face, he recognized me.”

“Sure he recognized you? Did he say anything?”

“Nothing, but I could tell he recognized me. We only met once, years ago, but I murdered a girl he went to school with. I murdered her parents and the county sheriff. Now, think of it from his point of view. He once met
Geoffrey Webb
, the cold-blooded serial killer being hunted across Arkansas and Texas on the news, and he shook my hand. He probably tells the story at parties—‘How I Met The Killer At Church.’ When he saw me at the store, he turned white and his smile dropped like a guillotine. He hustled out the door pretty quick, and I expect he was on the phone before he got to his car.”

“What did you do?”

“I took off my apron and left out the back door. I ran.”

“When was that?”

“A couple of days ago. I’ve been running since then. Thinking. Thinking for the first time in years. I had shut down my brain, shut down my life, turned myself into nothing but a mouth and a distended stomach. But then Oscar walked in the door and I thought, ‘Oh, Jesus, that’s Oscar.’ And since I had that horrible thought, my mind has been like a boat taking on water. Everything started to sink, and it’s been sinking ever since. Now that the police know I’m alive, they’ll be looking for me, and they won’t stop this time until they find me.”

He turned onto Church Street. It was a nicer part of town, more residential. Little houses and yards. After a while, we passed Higher Living Baptist. It was smaller than I’d pictured it. Hard to believe, looking at the chipped steeple and ratty sign out front, that you’d murder someone to get control of such a place. But I guess people have been killed for less.

He stopped at a red light. Somewhere around here he had murdered the entire Card family. People here knew him. If Oscar really had recognized him, they’d all know about it here. It would be on the news. The cops might even be looking for this car right now. The light turned green and a chill ran down my back. I’d put away my gun a few hours ago, but now I took it out again and started tapping it against my thigh.

He drove away from town.
The houses got farther and farther apart.
Soon we were driving along a dark corridor of trees.

“I thought I could live like a termite,” he said. “I thought that was my punishment.
To live like a bug.
But then Oscar showed up, and I realized I couldn’t even live like that anymore.”

“What are you going to do?”

“That remains to be seen,” he said. “ ‘Conscience does make cowards of us all.’ ”

“Say what?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Just quoting something that has no meaning. I don’t really want to die, but I don’t really want to live, either.” He turned down another road. We were in the middle of nowhere. “So some way or another, this has to end.”

“What do you mean?”

He slowed down and pulled onto the shoulder of the road. We crunched over some gravel, and then he stopped in the grass.

He put the car in park. “This is it,” he said. He leaned up and stared through the windshield. “I think it is, anyway. Of course, it was late and I wasn’t in the best frame of mind at the time.”

He cut the engine and got out of the car. I climbed out behind him, the gun at my side. He turned around and jerked his fleshy chin at the wallet in my other hand. “There’s three thousand dollars and some change in there,” he said.

I slipped the wallet into my pocket and said, “Okay.” I glanced around like someone might be watching.

The black two-lane road had disappeared in the dark, and now trees boxed us in on every side.

He looked up at the stars and took a deep breath.

“This is where she died?”
 
I asked.

Still looking at the stars he answered, “Where I killed her, yes.”

“So why are you here?”

“I want to die here.”

I just stared at him.

He said, “It seems fitting. I certainly deserve to die, don’t I?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay.”

I kept staring at him.

“Why bring me here?” I said finally.

“I think you know.”

“That’s why you brought me here, to do it for you?”

“Of course.”

“Why me?”

“Why not? You were ready to kill me a few hours ago for the money in my wallet. Fine. I gave it to you.”

He didn’t flinch.

“You could easily do it,” he said.

That’s where he was wrong. I’d never actually killed anybody before. Slapping a guy around and telling him you’ll blow his brains out is easy. I’d been doing it off and on for years.

This was something else, though. My hand was shaking—I didn’t want him to see it, but my hand was shaking so bad I could barely hold onto the gun.

He said, “Your hand is shaking.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “You can do what you’re going to do. I don’t need a murder wrap hanging over me.”

He stared back at me so hard I had to look away, and then his eyes brightened a little and he said, “Do you know it just sunk in? I get it now. It took me a while because I’m exhausted, but…
You
’re a fake, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“You’re just a thug. You kick the shit out of mouthy rednecks, and you tell yourself it means something. But you’re just a cut rate Saturday night badass. You’re scared, and you’re all talk.”

“Fuck you, man. Just because I don’t want to put my head in the noose for you…”

“Rationalize it how you want. You’re a fake. I was always a bad man pretending to be a good man, but you’re something more pathetic than that. You’re an ordinary man pretending to be bad.”

 
He laughed at me and turned and walked back to the car.

For a moment everything around us was quiet, like the whole world had died. All I could hear was my breathing and his feet stomping in the grass.

He opened the car door and white light split the field like a sheet. I stared at the ground. Angela died right here, bleeding to death in the frozen grass, staring up at the sky.

When he shut the door, the field snapped back into darkness.

“You feel bad?” I asked over my shoulder. “About Angela, I mean. You feel guilty about what you did to her?”

Webb returned holding a gun. That got my attention.

“Bought this from a guy at work a couple of years ago,” he said. “I had the idea that I might shoot it out with the cops when the day came.” He held it with both hands, like an artifact. “Silly notion, really.”

I kept my eye on the gun.

Webb took a long hard breath. He started to unbutton his shirt. “The hell of it is,” he said, “I’ve never really felt guilty about anything in my life. Not really. For whatever reason, I just…never have.” He pulled off his dress shirt and dropped it on the ground. “That’s why I could never ask for forgiveness. From God, I mean. The world’s a hellhole. What is there to forgive?”

I didn’t have anything to say to that.

“I’m leaving,” I said. Still holding on to my piece, I dug out his wallet and pocketed all the cash except for a hundred dollar bill. Then I threw the wallet to him. “Put that in your coat. I don’t want the cops thinking you got knocked off in a robbery, even for a little while.”

He just dropped the wallet on the ground and said, “You don’t really think I’m going to let you leave here, do you?”

“What?”

“What’s your name?”

I was about to tell him to fuck off when he raised the gun and pointed it at me.

“Your name?”

“Paul.”

He said something but blood started pounding in my ears and I missed it.

“You don’t got any reason to kill me,” I said. My hand was sweaty and the gun felt like a cinder block.

He took a step toward me. “Everyone dies, Paul. Even Jesus died. Death’s never needed a reason.” He gestured at the gun hanging useless in my hand. “You got any bullets in that thing?”

“Yes,” I said.

Sweat dripped in my eyes, and I wiped it away with my free hand. I could see his face in the blue moonlight. I needed to piss.

 
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Lift your gun.”

“Why?”

“You want to leave this field alive?” he asked.

“Yes.”