Joyride (7 page)

“You,” Lee said.

He knew the man immediately.

His memory for faces was good. Besides, as bartenders go, the guy was memorable. He poured short and cheap and used far too much ice and never bought a round no matter how long you sat there. But for the life of him he couldn’t figure him here in this house. It was like seeing a movie star in Hoboken, New Jersey. He didn’t fit.

“What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

The man just smiled and looked at Carole and sipped a tumbler of scotch. This one not so short at all.

“Mr. Lock and I have been talking,” said Carole.

He looked at her. She hadn’t looked this bad, this strung out, since the Notch.

“He knows everything, Lee.”

He couldn’t have heard correctly. Nobody knew. Not even the police. They’d spoken to no one. It was impossible.

“Say that again?”

“He knows everything.”

He could see she was working hard at keeping herself under control. She sat with her legs crossed tight and her arms folded. Her face had that pinched look again. She was not drinking.

Well, fuck this. He was.

He put down the briefcase and went to the bar. The
Glenfiddich was out. The guy was drinking Glenfiddich over ice. Which said something about the type of guy he was. Lee poured his neat. The shakes had reached into his hands all of a sudden, into his shoulders.

“You want to explain that to me?” he said, not to Carole but to the man.

“I saw it,” he said. “I watched you. The baseball bat. The rock. The clean-up. All of it. I was right over your heads, up on a ridge there. Then I went down to the stream. He’d already moved quite a ways, actually, by the time I got down there. I pushed him out into the middle of the stream. Figured I’d help out a little.”

The whiskey burned only slightly. The man was enjoying this, leaning forward, smiling.

“So what do you want? Money? How much?”

The man just looked at him. He seemed amused.

“Company, Lee” said the man. “All I want is company.”

He was thinking about the gun in the drawer. He was thinking about ways to kill the man.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“Carole says that it was her husband you killed and that he deserved it, that there was no other way. That you’d tried the police and that you’d tried to bribe him off with money. I believe her. I see no reason not to. I know plenty of people who deserve to die. Plenty, believe me. But I don’t really care about any of that now.”

He leaned forward even farther, intent. The black snub-nose pistol gripped tightly in his lap.

“What I want to know from you, Lee, what I want to know right now is what it was
like.
See, I want you to tell me. I’ve really…
wondered,
you know?” He smiled.

Lee looked deep into the smile and something in there
scared him. Money, blackmail he could understand. It was the way of the world. It was business. But this was crazy.

What was it like?
They were in the company of some weird sick freak here.

“Who knows?” the man said. “Maybe I’ll want to try it.”

Lee just looked at him. And the man must have thought that he didn’t understand.

“Killing somebody,” he said.

Lee’s whiskey glass was empty. He put it down on the sideboard. He glanced at Carole. From the look of her, he guessed they were thinking along the same lines.

He took a breath. Go on, he thought. Say it. Better the demon you know than the one you don’t know.

“Are you talking about us?” he said.

Lock laughed. Like this was very funny to him.

“God, no! Never! You’re missing the point entirely. I want to
know
you guys. I
respect
you guys. What you did took incredible balls,
incredible
balls! I’m in
awe
of you two guys. I mean, look how
well
you did it. Even forgetting the little assist from me. I mean, you’re probably the
last
two people I’d want to kill. Honest!”

The man looked down.

Beast was nuzzling his pants leg.

“Hey, kitty!”

He reached down and scratched her ear.

He didn’t know shit about cats. Probably didn’t like them either. He scratched her much too hard and too vigorously. Beast shot him a look and trotted away.

He relaxed into the sofa. Sipped his whiskey.

“Look, let’s begin at the beginning. You tell me all about it, I mean all about yourselves, and I’ll tell you all about me. We’ll understand one another in no time.
You’ll see. Only, let’s do it in my car, okay? We’ll go for a little ride the three of us. It’s going to be a really nice night tonight. We’ll have a little dinner, take a little ride. And you can drive, Lee. You see? I even trust you with my Volvo. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

He stood up, the gun in a neutral position at his side. Lee found the word he’d been looking for to describe the man. The guy was
cheerful.
Relentlessly cheerful.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll buy you a drink. I bet you could use one.” He laughed. “I bet I scared the beejeesus out of you! Right, Carole?”

Carole looked at Lee. He nodded.

She stood up.

“I’ll go get my jacket,” she said. She moved toward the stairs.

“That’s where the gun is, isn’t it,” said Lock. “Upstairs.”

Carole stopped and turned. “What gun?”

He grinned. “Come on. I know you’ve got one somewhere. It’s up there, right? Well, bring it on down. The more the merrier!”

He turned to Lee. “What is it? Colt? Magnum?”

And then he looked back to Carole.

“Please, guys,” he said. “We’re all gonna be friends here. I know you don’t exactly believe me on that yet, but you will. I’m making you a solemn promise. I’m not going to hurt you, either of you, as long as you don’t do something where I have to.

“Now Lee’s right here not five feet away from me. I’m a very good shot. And I bet you’re not, Carole. So just go on up and bring it down. I trust you. Go ahead.”

Lee watched her ascend the stairs. There was a slouch to her strong back that was depressingly familiar.

She looked like she’d been beaten again, felt the pounding of rough hands against soft flesh.

She was not going to try something. Not now. In her place he wouldn’t have either.

They walked to the car. Lock had Carole’s jacket draped over the Magnum and it was trained on the center of Lee’s back. The .38 was in Lock’s back pocket. Just until you get to know me better, he’d said again. And he apologized.

He’d admired the Magnum greatly and at length. Would they mind if they took it with them?

That was fine with Lee. One more gun meant one more opportunity. Though so far the guy had covered all his bases neatly.

He figured it couldn’t last. The guy would make a slip. They’d be able to get to one of the guns and then they’d face him down. He felt sure that faced down, Lock would fold.

And then what? he thought.

They couldn’t just run to the police and turn him in.

Lock knew.

And in a crunch Lee had no doubt that he would tell anybody and everybody exactly
what
he knew.

The way out, of course, was to kill him. And kill him as soon as possible, before anybody could associate him and Carole to the man. While as far as anybody else knew they were still all strangers to each other.

Could he do it? He felt pretty certain he could. The only question was how.

It was not like Howard. This time he wouldn’t hesitate. The man was a lizard, crawled out from under a rock.

Take your time, he thought. Think and keep thinking. And when you see something,
move.

“You parked pretty far away,” he said.

Wayne smiled. “Well, I didn’t want to arouse any suspicions.”

That was good. That was
very
good.
He didn’t want to arouse any suspicions.
They were walking four blocks through their own neighborhood, curbs empty everyplace you looked from their house all the way over to the Nichols’s house, they were walking all this way to get into a car that could have been parked right out in front of their own driveway.

He didn’t want to arouse any suspicions.

It’s a good sign, he thought. The guy is not all that organized.

He’s got blank spots.

Maybe he could use that.

“I forgot to feed the cats,” said Carole.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lock said. “We won’t be gone that long. You drive, Lee. Okay?”

He had never met anybody who jumped so hard and fast at getting on a first-name basis.

It seemed important to him.

He got into the driver’s seat, Carole silent beside him, looking as though she were hardly breathing.

Lock—correction,
Wayne
—climbed in back.

“So. Where to, Wayne?” he said.

He could see the smile brighten through the rearview mirror.

“Just drive, Lee,” he said. “Just drive.”

Rule knocked. Number 2211 again. Twice in two days was his personal record for the place but he had a feeling he might be breaking that soon.

The BMW and Edwards’s Porsche sat in the driveway.

There was nobody home.

He tore a leaf off his notepad and wrote
Important, please call
with his name and number and wedged it tightly between the door and casing trim.

The stained glass sidelights on the door made him think of the dollhouse—he’d done those sidelights in clear thick plastic—and the dollhouse made him think of Chrissie and Ann in California.

What time was it there, three o’clock? Ann would still be at her computer at the bank and Chrissie would be just getting out of school, going to her grandmother’s house or maybe to the Y after-school program.

There was a time he’d have known which.

It was no big thing, but he missed knowing.

Get off it, he thought.

You’re obsessing.

He walked down the stairs. He gazed through the windows of the Porsche and the BMW. There was nothing much to see. The Porsche was neater than her BMW, which surprised him a little. Just a newspaper folded on the dashboard—while Carole’s car had cigarette wrappers, a crumpled-up piece of notepaper, something that
looked like a stepped-on breath mint and a faceup Jefferson quarter on the floor and a small brown paper bag flattened on the passenger seat. Both cars were locked.

He stepped past the hedges to the front bay window and looked inside. He could see two glasses on the sideboard in the living room, an indentation in the couch where somebody’d been sitting pretty recently and a brown leather briefcase set down in the middle of the room. It was not the usual place to leave a briefcase but apart from that things looked perfectly normal. In one of the glasses ice was melting.

He’d just missed them.

It was beginning to get dark. The investigation up at the Notch would be winding down. Covitski, who’d arrived an hour after Rule, was running the show up there now. He’d be calling in shortly.

It was probably not worth waiting for them to return.

He wondered whose car they were in. Who was keeping them company.

The coroner’s report on Howard wouldn’t be on his desk until tomorrow morning earliest. He’d asked for a hurry-up. He even stood a chance of getting one because it was impossible to tell at this point if they were dealing with accidental death or homicide and there were not all that many deaths under questionable circumstances in this county. The coroner’s office would be interested in this one the same way a computer nerd would be interested in some exotic little bug in his machine. Something challenging for a change.

Rule was rooting for simple death by misadventure. Carole Gardner had enough problems. Even if it turned out that Howard was killed by his goddamn ski instructor for zigging when he should have zagged any homicide
investigation would inevitably start with her. They’d put her through the wringer. They had to.

Meaning he had to.

And he didn’t feel like doing that.

He realized that in some ways this was personal. That money aside, Carole reminded him of Ann. He even thought they looked a little alike in some ways. It was probably why Ann was on his mind so much today. At least partly that.

There were similarities. Ann’s husband, Chrissie’s father, had been a heavy drinker too. And abusive. He worked on a smaller scale than Howard. But then most people did.

In her case it was mental abuse mostly. Ann hadn’t the brains to do a damn thing as far as he was concerned and Chrissie was just an accident of chemistry that in his view had turned into a demanding, whining little brat. When he was drunk he struck out. He hit. He did that a time or two. And then one night he sent his daughter reeling across the kitchen headfirst into the refrigerator door.

Ann packed their bags and that was that.

For sheer innovative nastiness Howard Gardner made Ann’s husband look like a punk but there were enough similarities between them so that he sympathized with the woman.

Enough so that he wanted this fall of Gardner’s to be the final miscalculation of a guy with enough alcohol in his blood to fuel the Concorde. And nothing more.

The coroner’s report would either say that or it wouldn’t. Until then there wasn’t much to do except head on back and wait for Covitski’s return and hopefully, Carole’s call. She’d never failed to return his messages in the
past. He had no reason to suspect this was any different except for two cars sitting lonely in the driveway and a briefcase in the middle of the living room floor.

And the fact that this time Howard was dead.

He considered that. All the way back to the station he considered it.

Howard was dead and you could say he’d been courting death for quite a while in various ways, and at 2211 there was nobody home.

What did you do, Carole? he thought.

Just what in hell did you do.

They were on Interstate 89 heading toward Montpelier before she really started listening to what he was saying and even then it came upon her slowly, something about his mother and neighbors and an old house over on Sycamore and two old men he’d read about in Waterbury who’d faced one another with shotguns after one of them took a shot at the other’s cat and now both of them were in the hospital probably dying. And so on.

Until then either she couldn’t concentrate or she’d successfully blocked him out—she wasn’t sure which. All she could hear was herself speaking quietly inside her own skull. What she was saying was that they were in deep and terrible trouble. That it was over now. That there was no alternative left now but to get to Rule and tell him everything. It was the only way to get rid of the man.

Already, in just this hour or so since he strolled up the driveway into her life, telling Rule would be a relief. Arrest seemed in every way preferable to his company.

And to his knowledge.

She felt unclean because of his knowledge. So filthy she wanted to cry.

She listened to the voice inside her head and it sounded dull and flat and wise as doom. It was leaden, it was enervating. As though even her blood were moving more slowly, thickening inside her.

The man had been inevitable.

It was only right, wasn’t it, that somebody had found out?

It was only justice.

They’d killed a man.

Never mind that Howard was evil. Evil was only her opinion of him. The voice inside her said it was a highly educated opinion, but so what?

What right did she have?

She had grown up knowing right from wrong down to the letter. She had learned it, she thought, the hard way. Sometimes she thought that as a child she had struggled to learn.

Knowing it was a contract. It bound you to the rest of the human race. She believed in it.

She’d broken that contract.

In some ways she deserved the man.

Justice. Guilt. Depression.

The three held hands, played ring-around-the-rosy inside her. Became one and the same word almost. One heavy black form that shapeshifted within her until she could feel nothing but weight, density, and darkness.

Ring-around-the-rosy.

The reference was to the Black Death, wasn’t it? To the plague.

Filthy.

Let it come, she thought. Fine, let it happen. I’ll let go of it.

Let it all be over.

She could almost hear the tumbrels moving through the streets. She deserved them.

“Pull up! Quick!
Pass her
!”

The voice jolted her.

She felt the car lurch forward as Lee obeyed. Behind her Wayne was pounding on his seat, excited. Lee looked confused, like he didn’t know exactly what the point was here.

She glanced beyond him out the driver’s side window. Saw that they were gaining on a blue Ford wagon, passing it on the right. The driver was a woman, profiled dim and gray in the dusk.

Wayne rolled down his window.

They were passing slowly, gradually nosing past her.

“Give her the horn.”

“What?”

“I said give her your horn. Use the horn!”

Lee hit it with his fist, two short bursts. The woman glanced over. Carole had the impression of both youth and age at once—a young mother maybe. It would fit the way she looked. Baggy sweatshirt. Hair pulled back in a ponytail. Driving a wagon.

Carole turned and saw Wayne lean out the window motioning to the driver. Pointing down at her right rear tire.

So that was it.

Something was wrong with the tire.

The woman saw him, understood, gave him a worried smile and nodded. She slowed, turned the wheel and fell back into the lane behind them.

“Pull over.”

Lee was frowning. “Why? What for?”

“The tire. She’s gonna need help with that.”

Carole watched the wagon stop along the narrow shoulder. Lee pulled over.

“Come on,” said Wayne.

The woman was opening her door, getting out of the car.

The Magnum was up and pointing at Lee across the seat.

Lee opened his door, put one foot outside it and so did she on her side.

“You going to take that with you, Wayne?” he said.

Wayne laughed. He put the gun down beside him on the car seat.

“Just remember the other one,” he said. “Okay?” He patted his back pocket.

The woman was moving around behind her car, looking first at the rear tire on the driver’s side and then walking around to the other.

Cars whooshed by as they approached her. Some had their headlights on. It was getting close to dark.

The woman looked up at them, puzzled. She was blonde, a little overweight, but pretty.

“I don’t see…”

Carole found herself glancing through the woman’s backseat window. She didn’t know what she was looking for. A car seat for a child maybe.

There wasn’t any.

No kids’ stuff in the rear compartment either. A tire. A checkered quilt. That was all.

For some reason she felt relieved. She didn’t know why.

Not right away.

It took her only a moment to check inside the woman’s car but when she looked up again Wayne was two steps ahead of them when he’d been a step behind her only a second ago, he’d moved that fast, and Lee was lurching back. She nearly stumbled into him.

The look on his face was shocked. Frightened.

And the gun was up and firing.

Her name was Deanna Morris. A file clerk and typist for a Barstow law firm taking what she called a “mental health day” after six grueling days and nights helping to prepare a brief on a child molestation case,
The People vs. Sunnybrook Day Care
, a detestable case to her way of thinking because she was sure that the people at Sunnybrook were guilty, and she herself was five months’ pregnant by her husband Carl, her own burgeoning motherhood making their defense of Sunnybrook’s owners all the more repulsive—but it was a job. She knew that this would be her last “mental health day” for a while. The pregnancy would probably consume the rest of her sick days and maybe then some.

She was on her way to meet Carl at his construction site, to pick him up after work because the Chevy’s driver-side window had popped off its track again and the car was at the shop. They were going to have dinner. Probably Italian.

Payments on the house were reasonable. So were payments on the two cars.

She and Carl were happy together now that the lean times were over and they both, thank god, were working finally. For their son—the sonogram had told them it was a boy—there would be comfort and stability, at least for the foreseeable future.

She was five feet three inches tall.

The man with the gun was much taller, perhaps five-nine.

So the first bullet entered high through the deltoid
muscle of her shoulder, plowed through her pectoral muscles to the sternum, chipped the sternum and exited through the ribs of her back.

She heard herself scream and the flat report of the gun simultaneously.

By then the man had shot her a second time.

Instinctively she had thrown up her left hand toward him to ward him off, and turned her back. The first bullet’s impact spun her around even farther so that her back was square to him as he fired the second shot—and she was crouching a little, her fingers still splayed behind her like a discus thrower or a bowler at the peak of her backswing.

The shot tore away most of her left index finger before entering her back to the right of the vertebral column and scattering her kidneys out in front of her all across the tarmac. It looked like an open dog-food can had simply exploded out of her.

She fell sideways to her knees, catching herself with the palm of her right hand. She knelt there canted to the right trying to breathe. There was no pain, only amazement, horror at the awful thing she had witnessed the man do—and though she could not have phrased it, a raw yearning disappointment. A final scan for meaning that ended in senseless waste.

She was a realistic person, she had prided herself in that, and understood as she fell that her life, so full of purpose both mundane and far-reaching just seconds ago, had now suddenly entered into the realm of the useless and the ridiculous. A sock with a hole where the toes peeked through. A garden hose clogged all summer. A stewpot with no handles.

That was what she was.

That was what the gun had made of her.

A joke.

“
Eeeee
yah!”

Wayne was leaping along the shoulder like a crazed ape, like some fucking wide receiver who’s just scored the winning touchdown.

“Jesus Christ! Did you
see
that?”

The woman’s body slumped on its side. Lee smelled urine, shit, and gunpowder. Cars whizzed by. He could feel the warm thrusting breeze of their passing. One seemed to slow and then moved on.

“Come on. Get back in the car.” The gun was pointed at him. Then at Carole.

Then back at him again.

“Get into the car!”

They did as he said. There was no way he could get to the Magnum. Wayne was too close. And Wayne was timing it perfectly. He had the rear door open, one foot in, and the .38 trained on Lee’s back through the window until Lee got his own door open. Then he just slid inside. He held both guns now, the Magnum pointed at Lee’s ear and the .38 at Carole.

“Drive!”

He waited for a break in traffic and pulled away.

He looked through the rearview mirror. The woman’s station wagon receded behind him. Just beyond it one pale arm pointed toward the highway. The glint of a bracelet in the lights of an approaching car.

Why hadn’t someone stopped?

Why weren’t they stopping now?

“Put on your lights.”

He was aware of Carole sobbing beside him, her fist clenched tight to her mouth.

There were a million things to say and nothing worth saying. They drove in silence.

The silence buzzed and droned.

He drove and shook and gripped the wheel.

He adjusted the mirror so that Wayne was in the frame. It seemed important to have him there.

The look on his face was distant. The eyes glittered brightly, skittered in their sockets. Only the eyes moved. He could see the man relax into something and he could guess what Wayne was doing, that he was replaying the whole thing over in his mind.

He would want to do that.

Of course he would.

Lee had replayed Howard’s death a few times too by now. The difference was he’d had no choice. They’d come unbidden. Images skewed so that it was he who was holding the rock, not Carole.

He saw it now.

He was driving badly. He knew that. As though the wheel had too much play in it suddenly. His lane seemed elusive. Passing cars were giving him a wide berth.

“We ought to…I should get off the highway,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I think I’m not doing so well here. Driving, I mean. We ought to go somewhere. Stop. For a little while, anyhow. Give me a minute to…collect myself, you know?”

Wayne smiled.

“Yeah. Pretty fucking wild, wasn’t it?”

He laughed and slapped his seat again. The .38 was
gone from his hand. Either it was on the car seat beside him or he’d pocketed it.

“Okay. Sure. Take your next exit. You like McDonald’s? Maybe we can find a McDonald’s. Get some burgers. I’m sorry about that drink I promised. It’ll have to wait. Okay?”

He and Carole exchanged glances.

“What?” said Wayne. “You got a problem with that?”

“No. No problem.”

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I
fucking did it.
Jesus! You feel that way after?”

“What way?”

“Like everything’s different. Like from now on, everything changes.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

The exit was coming up.
WILLIAMSTOWN
, the sign said. He had no idea they’d come this far.

“So how did it feel? Watching me I mean.”

“How did it feel?”

He pulled off onto the ramp. Slowed. He saw Carole turn, dry-eyed, wild-eyed suddenly glaring at the man.

“It felt sickening,” she said. “It felt sickening you son of a bitch. You sick
bastard
!”

And then she was up on her knees on the car seat, leaning over, trying to pummel him with her fists, Wayne fending her off easily but in one hand he still held the Magnum and Lee thought Jesus Christ the thing could go off right here inside the car and what the hell was she
doing?
Wayne was laughing, her blows completely ineffectual and she knew it, so she was going right over the seat after him, trying to climb right into the back, screaming, furious, calling him
bastard bastard bastard.

He slowed where the ramp went into a curve, slid into
the curve and, despite slowing, fishtailed, then got beyond the curve on a straightaway and reached across. He found the back of her blouse at the neck with his hand and he grabbed it and pulled.

“Carole! For chrissake!”

The man was still laughing, squealing, having a hell of a time with her, slapping her fists away with his open left hand and the barrel of the fucking gun and Lee pulled at her again, pulled hard.

And he guessed she was off balance because her head nearly went back into the windshield. Her right hand smacked the rearview mirror and her back hit the dashboard hard enough so that the glove compartment popped open and wedged against her as she slid knees-first off the seat down onto the floor.

It hurt. You could see it on her face.

Too fucking bad.

A bullet would have hurt a whole lot more.

He was drifting almost to a stop now. Luckily there were no cars behind him.

“You all right?”

She nodded.

She wouldn’t look at him.

She pulled herself up onto the seat and sat staring.

He adjusted the mirror.

Wayne was smirking at her, his eyes trying to bore into the back of her skull. It was just as well she didn’t see them, he thought. It could start her up all over again.

He had a car full of goddamn lunatics here.

He glanced at the road ahead and then back at Wayne again. His face seemed to have softened in the instant he’d looked away.