Meeting Evil (16 page)

Of course he was ignoring the obvious: a call to the police. If it were only that simple! He was a wanted man, and the official mind, even when striving to be well-meaning, tended toward rigidity. Look at Swanson’s performance at the farm. He had chosen John as the more dangerous of the fugitives, manacled him with the only set of handcuffs, and refused to let him speak. It was really this mistake that had led to the officer’s downfall, maybe even his death, which then could be added to John’s other supposed crimes, none of which had any basis in reality but all of which would no doubt be doggedly cherished by the cops until time could be spared for their enlightenment, in a place where his safety could be assured while he was so establishing the truth. At the moment—and who could blame them?—they were like sharks in bloody water.

Even at such an extremity he must call no further attention to himself by breaking the law. He hastened to the mechanic in the garage, who at the moment was lowering the car on the lift.

“Excuse me. This is an emergency. Can I rent a car from you?”

The mechanic’s blue-gray pants and shirt looked impeccable, unmarked by grease, but his face was streaked. He failed to acknowledge John, simply continued to stare at the vehicle until its tires met the floor.

“It’s an emergency. I’ve got to rent a car.”

At last the mechanic glanced at him. “Look in the phone book if you want.” He nodded in the direction of the office.

“No time for that!” But John’s urgency had no effect on
the man, who turned coolly on his rubber-soled shoes and went to the rear of the garage, where he rubbed his hands on a blackened rag.

The owner of the automobile at hand had strolled away before John got there and had not come back. He was likely in the men’s room. John opened the door, stepped into the car, started the engine, and rapidly backed out of the garage. He had no interest in whether he was being pursued and did not look back. At the ramp leading onto the motorway, he was far too exercised to read the signs and could only hope he chose the right way home. The traffic was too heavy to have allowed him prompt access in his normal state, but he cared nothing for personal safety now and less for that of any stranger, and he forced a savagely grimacing man in a red car to brake and let him enter the procession, which almost immediately thereafter, too late for him to back out, slowed to a bumper-to-bumper crawl.

He had made a bad choice of route. By now rush hour had arrived. Any local road would have been preferable. The only hope was that Richie, too, was frozen in traffic—if indeed he had been as stupid and taken the motorway. This was the worst situation John had been in throughout a day of misfortunes. He had been holding off, for he was mostly an unbeliever who would have considered it unethical to pray only when he was in trouble. But he felt so powerless now as to have returned to early childhood, when the Almighty could be implored with all honesty, and he asked God to give him help in his dire need, for he had exhausted all the measures at his own command. He told himself he could hardly expect to get a favorable response after all these years of neglect, but in fact he lied: he did look for immediate aid, and when it did not come, he was infused with resentment. It should not be possible to get up one morning and guiltlessly
meet the day, only to have it claimed by evil so soon thereafter, by now threatening all that he held dear.

The traffic had at least been creeping along until now, but all at once, as if in perverse response to his prayers, it stopped altogether, and not only in his proximate segment but as far as the eye could see, a mile or more, for the roadway ahead went into a gentle incline.

John hurled the door open and leaped out. First he ran in the direction in which the cars in his lanes were pointing, between the files of static vehicles, with an intent eventually to reach a stymied Richie, but after a while he realized that the man had had too good a start on him to be overtaken soon in this fashion—if Richie had even taken the motorway, as to which there was no way of knowing—and cut horizontally through the ranks to the corrugated-steel guardrail, ran down a gritty embankment to a blacktopped local road, and hurled himself with agitated cruciformed arms into the route of the next vehicle that came along, which finally stopped, though until the last moment he believed it would not.

Only after a man in a wide-brimmed felt hat appeared behind an opened door on either side of the car, and each twin pointed a pistol at him, both shouting abusive commands, did he react to the automobile, the rooftop light-rack of which should long since have identified it as a police car.

If the appearance of the state troopers represented the prayed-for intervention in his affairs by the Deity, then quite clearly God despised him.

The troopers handcuffed and searched and arrested him. Again he was read his rights.

“Okay,” he cried, “I’m not resisting. But will you just please send somebody to protect my wife and children? An insane criminal is on his way to get them.” He shouted the address several times.

At close range the troopers were anything but twins. One was much taller than the other and had red-brown eyebrows that all but joined over his nose.

The other, thickset and swarthy, said, “Do yourself a favor and don’t talk like that. You’ll be lucky as it is if you’re not lynched.”

The taller trooper asked, “What’d you do with the weapons?”

“I didn’t have any!” John said. “Will you please protect my family? I’ll give you all my story, but get on your radio and send somebody to protect my wife and kids.” He told them the address again. “I know this guy. He’s capable of anything.”

“What’s your real name?” demanded the dark-complexioned trooper, whose own name, Brocket, was displayed on a tag over the upper-left pocket of his tunic.

“John Felton.”

“You got no I.D.”

“Everything’s at home,” said John. “Take me there. I’ve got to protect my family. I can prove who I am. I’ve got a wife and two kids, a job with a prestigious—”

“Jesus,” said the taller officer, glowering under his sandy eyebrow, “it turns my stomach to hear you talk about yourself like you were a normal human being instead of some sick piece of shit who would try to kill some old lady invalid just for kicks, I guess, wasn’t it? She didn’t have anything to steal.”

They seized John, one on either side of him, marched him to the car, and put him in the rear. Brocket climbed in after him, while the tall trooper, whose name tag he had been too distracted to read, took the driver’s seat and immediately thereafter began to speak into the handpiece of the radio.

John continued to shout during this sequence.

“If you don’t shut up,” Brocket said calmly, “I’m going to shoot you.”

John tried to impose control on himself. “Just listen. My wife and children are in terrible danger. Please check on them! I’ve never tried to kill anybody in my life. I’ve spent most of the day saving other people from being killed by this maniac, or anyway doing everything I could to keep it from happening. You just ask—” In his anxiety, he had forgotten her name. “You found her, didn’t you? At the farm? With the young boy?
Save my family!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Brocket said. “Now we got you, there won’t be any more trouble in this part of the state.”

“
I didn’t kill anybody!
Or try to. Why would I? I’m not a criminal.”

“Come on,” Brocket said, as the trooper behind the wheel started the car. “We got you now, and you’re not getting away. Might as well come clean. It’ll make you feel good, believe me. You cut the throat of that girl who pumped gas this morning. She didn’t make it. But the woman at the taxi company is still living. You botched that one, slashing from behind that way. She was able to give a good description. She’s in Intensive. She’ll live to nail you, buddy. Then there’s that business with the tractor-trailer driver. We got witnesses who put you at the scene.”

The car was traveling at high speed, and now the trooper in front hit the siren, the sound of which was like a screw penetrating John’s cranium.

“None of that is true! All of it was Richie’s doing. I didn’t even—”

“I’m not talking about this Richie. He was just along for the ride, wasn’t he?”

“Sharon!”
John shouted. “That’s her name. Haven’t you
found her yet? She can vouch for my story. She was there the whole time.”

“Spare me this crap,” said Brocket.

“
My family’s in danger.
He’s heading for my house.”

“Let’s make a little deal,” Brocket said in a seductive undertone. “You just own up to what you did, and on our side we’ll call the local force to look in at this home of yours.”

“I didn’t do anything to own up
to.
You’ll learn that if you catch this guy. He’s a maniac. But he told Swanson up at the farm, the officer, that I had nothing to do—”

“The town cop whose head you smashed?” Brocket asked. “Yeah, I’m sure he will want to give you a clean bill of health.”

The radio was quacking, but John could not understand a syllable. He returned to asking again about Sharon and the boy. “Didn’t you find them?”

“How could I?” Brocket said. “We weren’t at the farm. We were looking for you.”

“You know that Swanson was hurt. By Richie, not me! Why don’t you know about Sharon and Tim?”

“John,” said Trooper Brocket, “we been trying to put the pieces of the story together. But we don’t exactly yet understand just how it was you went on this rampage in the first place. Maybe you got some kind of reasons. It might help if you try to explain, get a head start now, before we take you back to formal interrogation, which I assure you will be an awful long session. Maybe we can cut down some on that, right here and now, just between you and me and, of course, my partner Franklin up there. But he won’t bother us, will you, Franklin?”

At the steering wheel, Franklin shook his close-cropped skull and raised a finger but said nothing. He had removed his wide-brimmed hat, as had Brocket, who had dropped his into the front passenger’s seat.

John was so relieved to hear that Brocket wanted the whole story that he almost wept. He began, “We were having breakfast—”

“You and Richie?”

Already it was going bad! “No! My wife and myself. Joan, my wife, and the children—actually the kids and I had already had ours. Joan was—”

Brocket interrupted again. “Okay, John, granted. But how do you get from there to killing the female gas-station attendant? Do you even know the poor thing’s name? She was nineteen. Kelly Holt.”

John lowered and shook his head. “God Almighty. But you see what he can do.” He looked up. “I’m not going to say anything more unless you send somebody right now to my house.”

Franklin was looking at him in the rearview mirror. “They been trying to call the number, but the line is busy.”

“It’s off the hook,” John shouted. “My little daughter does that. Please
send a car there.
“

“Settle down, John,” said Brocket. “Let’s get back to your story.”

“I refuse to say anything more until I know my family is protected from this madman.”

“If he’s so crazy, John,” the trooper asked, “then what did you see in him?”

“He knocked on my door and asked me to give his car a push.”

Brocket nodded. “And you just left home and went off with him? He must have had something you wanted. Good-looking guy, is he?”

John decided not to react to these innuendos. “The car started going downhill. My shirt was caught in the door. I had to run and jump—no, wait a minute…” That did
not make sense, but for an instant he could not remember the precise sequence of events.

“Well, what difference does it make?” asked Brocket, moving his heavy dark jaw as if chewing. “What matters is a witness puts you at the gas station at approximately nine twenty-five.”

“Sure,” said John. “Richie was out of gas, so I stayed with him in case he needed another push, but he made it to the station all right. I was going to leave and walk back home then, but I hurt my leg jumping into the car, and he insisted on giving me a lift back.”

“You couldn’t tear yourself away from him?”

“I told you, my leg hurt. Now listen, I’m not going to—”

“All right,” Brocket said, “you already mentioned that. They’re sending a car.”

“Why couldn’t you have told me that before?” John asked angrily, though he was relieved as well. “Why do you keep treating me like a criminal, after what I’ve been through today? I don’t have anything against the police. I’ve always admired the job you people do. Christ Almighty, all day long I’m stuck with this guy, and I didn’t even know, I swear to God, that he was committing these crimes you speak of. I mean, I knew he ran down the truckdriver, but he had some kind of excuse for that. I admit I made a mistake in going along with him on that even partially—I mean, I had nothing to do with driving into the guy, who by the way was coming after me with a tire iron for something I didn’t do, and—”

“Calm down, John,” Brocket said. “We’ll get everything in eventually, and we’ll be doing it all on video so there can’t be any mistake, but right now just stick to the time frame if you can.…” He had brought a black notebook from the pocket of his tunic and was scratching in it with a pushbutton pen.

“Okay, but how could I know what he was doing to that girl at the gas station? They went inside the office. I didn’t see them. I didn’t try to watch them. Why should I? He mentioned later there was some problem with his credit card. I don’t know. I wasn’t anywhere near the office. I stayed out by the car.”

“So when did you make the assault on the woman in the taxi office?”

“Oh, no!” John said. “I didn’t touch her in any way. She refused to accept me as a passenger, probably because she didn’t like my looks and she absolutely would not take my word that I lived in a perfectly nice part of town.… Oh, yeah, that’s right: I didn’t have any money with me. She wanted the fare in advance.”

“So you knifed her in the course of this altercation?”

John tried to breathe deliberately. “I don’t carry a knife. I didn’t even say anything threatening to her. I was just sad that she wouldn’t take my word.”