Joyride (2 page)

Just so he wouldn’t forget just who and when.

He wondered why he hadn’t.

Killed her.

It felt cowardly somehow.

There had been deaths at his hands for sure but he hadn’t dared for years now, not with what they called the higher animals, and even then it was only cats. And one old miserable stray dog.

Even then it was wonderful.

Of course the aftermath wasn’t. Not exactly. He’d had to bury them in his yard. Worrying all the time that his mother would see or suspect something. Whereas here, now…

Here he could have just pulled her into the bushes and left her that way.

The way god left his dead.

The bird who strikes the wire.

The old raccoon too crippled to fish or scavenge anymore.

The weak and the stillborn and the cold and hungry.

The way the dead had been left useless—no, not useless, because you had to think about the soil and how the dead enriched the soil—since life began.

God’s way.

There was nobody who would miss her. Not for a few days at least and maybe not for a long time. Her parents
had moved to South Carolina and they’d never been close.

They had that much in common, at least, he and Susan. Nobody would miss either of them.

He lit a Camel. Susan didn’t like him to smoke. Now it hardly mattered.

The Black Locust Tavern had gone half smokeless three months ago. A separate section, and smaller than the other, for those with the habit. It was a case of the manager, Peters, allowing himself to get pussywhipped by a bunch of yuppies and blue-hair oldsters.

Peters was in the notebook, naturally.

RETAL.

He climbed a shelf of rock and allowed himself a glance over the edge. He was susceptible to vertigo sometimes but felt sure that this was the way to beat it. Just keep on looking over. The trail below was obscured by a squat stand of windblown pines growing out of the rock, trunks twisted like elbow joints of gutter pipe to accommodate the need for growth both out and up simultaneously. The pines weren’t doing too great a job at either. They looked small and beat and scruffy.

He moved away. The pond wasn’t far.

He had dreamed last night that he and his mother had driven to a house neither of them knew but which was to be her home from then on and he abandoned her there, old and crippled in the legs, which she had never been, left her standing shaky in the enormous open yard looking confused and frightened and angry. There were cats in the yard and she hated cats. He had driven away laughing. The dream was very vivid. Very real.

He wondered if Susan would ever fuck him again. It was possible. But not likely.

Too bad. She was pretty good at fucking and there were fewer notes about her in his notepad than there were on most people. He decided to give it a week or so and then see if maybe he could talk to her. If he could talk to her then he could possibly convince her to start fucking again because even if it wasn’t the whole thing it was something.

He was considering taking one of the sandwiches out of the backpack, unwrapping it and eating it along the trail because he’d worked up an appetite by then with all this
stress
when he heard voices—shouts—coming from below. He walked over to the edge again and peered down through the trees.

He saw movement there, shifted to a more open area and saw the three of them clearly in a tight little circle moving in and then outward, back and forth like a rough awkward dance slightly off the trail in the brush.

He felt a tingling. Something scuttling crablike down his spine.

He saw what they were doing and forgot all about Susan and all about his notepad and the dream of his mother and all about his sandwich. He knew suddenly that his life had changed forever and he let it flow over him.

He watched.

Between the first and second strokes of the Louisville Slugger, Howard Gardner had time to entertain a number of notions, think a number of thoughts—none of them too deep but most of them important.

You little bitch you’re not gonna get me
was the first thought and probably the most significant. Because that gave him anger, and anger gave him fight.

Wrong! I’m
gonna get
you
was the second most important
simply because it was so utterly wrongheaded. His immediate concern was the man with the baseball bat. Not the woman. At the moment the woman was just a distraction. And that was too bad, because Howard did not need any distractions.

Move and tuck,
he thought.
Come on. You can get this guy. You’re bleeding, dammit!
He could feel it rolling down the side of his face.
Fuck it! Get the bastard. You’ve got the reach and you’ve got the weight.

I’ll kill the little bitch.

He should have known in the first place.

Something was wrong with the whole setup. Why in hell would she want to be alone with him after all this time, and alone in the woods no less. For what? Old times’ sake? Because they used to climb up here and picnic once in a while? Those days were long gone and since then she’d taken the house from him and the car and half the business and even had the Barstow PD on his ass, had a restraining order out against him the little fuck so that he wasn’t even supposed to come near her, his own ex-wife! But there was no restraining him then—no way—and there was no restraining him now.

The dizziness wasn’t good, though.

The guy Lee had been standing behind him. He’d never even seen the guy. Carole had simply stopped to admire the scenery and suddenly
bam
! lights bursting in his head but Lee had misjudged the reach. Caught him midway through the wood instead of at the thick end of the bat so that it slid off his ear and the side of his head down to the collarbone. The collarbone felt broken. But Howard was standing. He was by god standing!

He feinted left and came in right, beneath the blow—boxing the guy, just like in the Navy. Planted a right fist
in a surprisingly tight belly while the bat rolled harmless off his shoulder. The guy fell back into the bushes and Carole made a choked-off screaming sound behind him. Some woman-scared little shriek.

You bitch.

You fuck me, and then you fuck
with
me and now you want to get rid of me. Is that it?

What’s the matter?

Am I too much trouble for you?

He turned to her, to maybe quite fucking
possibly
throw her the hell off the mountain—he could do it, they were that close to the edge right here—and he was wondering if he would
feel
like doing it to her when he got over there because it was
completely up to him,
it had always been up to him whatever he wanted to do with her, stepping toward her thinking oh to hell with it, to hell with the running after her and the hassle and jerking her around, trying to make her life fucking miserable, it would be easier just to end her nasty little life right here and now, he was thinking this when the guy got up out of the bushes and let him have it again.

He’d screwed up bad, turning toward her. Going after her.

And the guy was good this time. Much better. His head split open really bleeding now so that he had to wipe the blood pouring down off his forehead out of his eyes in order to see, and he realized that he was on his knees. He didn’t remember falling.

But something was queer. Something was wrong.
What the hell was happening?

The guy should have hit him again by now.

Sure. That was it.

What the hell was wrong with the guy?

The guy had
hesitated.

Asshole.

His vision cleared enough to see a pair of legs standing in front of him and he grabbed them, jerked them toward him and hugged tight and lifted and Lee fell, flailing at him with the bat, smashing down across the middle of his back to his hip, the bat coming down so hard that he could feel the hip bone crack. Not like the head wound. Hell the head wound hardly hurt at all. Pain like a bulldozer now.

But by then he was up on top of him pounding at the blurry oval that he knew was Carole’s lover’s face, watching it turn red suddenly, red with the guy’s blood or his own he wasn’t sure which and didn’t care because he was connecting, he could feel teeth jab into his fist and then something soft that was probably his eye and he was howling, Howard was howling dousing his pain with the blind ecstatic glee of manslaughter when he sensed—not saw—her step up right beside them standing above them and sensed—not saw—her lift the rock.

He smelled the new fresh dirt off the rock. It smelled like the blood-smell only richer. Thicker.

And then for a moment he felt some kind of amorphous contact, some sudden enormous pressure from above snapping down his head and his neck, Lee sliding off to one side, the earth and grass looming.

And then felt nothing at all.

Wayne lay low over the rocks. No vertigo now.

No.

He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

They fucking
dared
!

He almost felt like shouting, like whooping up there
in sheer delight. My god! At first he hadn’t been sure what he was seeing, it had looked like maybe nothing more than a fight down there, maybe over the woman. One of the men had a baseball bat but he’d seen worse in the parking lots of bars at night with jacks and tire irons so that it was only at the end of it when the woman picked up the rock and brought it down on the taller, bigger man that Wayne knew what he was seeing.

Murder.

He felt like calling down to them.
Hey! Guys! Hey! Include me in!
He felt like going down there. See this thing up close. Hell—maybe even help out a little. Who the hell
were
these people? Where the hell did they come from? He couldn’t
remember
being this excited. Not by anything! He was aware of his heart racing and a pounding in his ears.

They
dared
!

God
damn
! he wanted to go down there.

But instead he did the smart thing, he guessed it was the smart thing, he watched silently as the man wiped the blood off his face—he was bleeding from the mouth—and then bent down and lifted off the rock. The rock was big and flat and beneath it the man’s head looked like somebody had pushed it all out of shape and painted it red. The man heaved the rock off to one side down the mountain and returned to where the woman was standing, hands fluttering, saying something to him and then looking nervously both ways up and down the trail. She needn’t have worried. Apart from Wayne they were alone there and would be for quite a while. He had a good view of the trail and it was empty.

It seemed to be just dawning on her that they—that
she
—had actually just killed somebody. It was not just her
hands—he could see even from up here that her whole body was shaking. He noted that it was a very good body. The tight jeans and T-shirt made that clear. He didn’t know which was more attractive, the body or what he’d just watched it do.

The man seemed calmer. He wrapped his arms around her and held her for a moment.

Wayne could hear a muffled sobbing.

After a moment he let go and moved back to the dead man, took each of his wrists and started dragging. The head lolled sideways and left bloody skid marks across the path. The dead man’s expensive-looking running shoes scraped out their own trail.

And Wayne wondered how in hell they were expecting to get away with this.

It was going to be hard to clean up the mess up there. Head wounds did a lot of bleeding. This one sure did. And even the most mentally deficient cop was probably going to check the slope above the place a corpse had landed.

He watched as the man dug a small hiker’s backpack out of the brush beside the trail, turned the dead man over and slipped his arms through the shoulder straps, turned him again and hitched it together across his chest.

Hiking accident,
thought Wayne.

Sure, maybe.

But there was still the problem of the bloody trail.

It was only when the body disappeared down off the rock face and he heard the long silence and then the dim, faraway splash that he realized that these people were smarter than he’d thought and maybe even knew what they were doing—that in fact they’d chosen the site pretty well. There was a stream down below that would be
running deep and fast these days with all the rain they’d been having. He couldn’t see it from where he was but he and Susan had passed it on the way up.

The body would carry.

Not bad, he thought. Not bad at all.

If they were lucky they might even get a little more rain tonight or tomorrow morning to wipe the slate clean altogether. He wondered if they’d checked the weather reports.

He bet they had.

He smiled. Watching them was absolutely the best damn time he’d had in years. Even now, as they were getting ready to leave. Even as the man kicked dirt across the path and pulled off his bloody shirt, turned it inside out and wet it from a thermos, used it to wipe the blood off his face and hands and stuffed it into a second, larger backpack he’d hidden with the smaller one in the brush; then took a clean shirt out of it and put it on.

The woman just sat there on a rock, watching, slack, as though her legs might not be up to supporting her. The man took a roll of plastic wrap out of the pack and wrapped the bat and put that in there too along with the thermos and zipped the backpack shut. He slipped the pack over his shoulders and they were ready.

And the nicest thing happened then.

The man turned and looked up the mountain.

And Wayne knew him.

The man was a customer over at the Black Locust Tavern. Came in now and then.

A scotch drinker, he thought.

He didn’t know his name.

He watched the woman rise—it seemed as though she was going to be able to walk on out of here after all—and
the two of them move away down the path. Just a pair of hikers out for a walk on a nice sunny day. If somebody passed them and thought that the woman looked a little shaky—well, it was no easy climb.

The whole thing, Wayne thought, including the killing, had probably taken less than ten minutes.