NIGHT CRUISING (21 page)

God, what was she going
to do to get away from him? She'd made that one effort during the
height of the wind and rain when Cruise seemed most vulnerable. She
thought she could get the door open and be gone before he could
react. The stunt almost got her killed. She had felt her wind being
cut off by his thick arm. Black dots appeared before her eyes from
lack of oxygen. Her neck still ached from the strangling she took.
She knew she was lucky to be alive.

Then they'd both been
stunned by the rap on the window and the appearance of the fat man.
He was bellowing about his car being wrecked, something about his
wife being trapped. Cruise wasn't gone long. Molly wondered if the
woman was okay. If they'd gotten her out.

She saw Cruise starting
back up the slope to the car. He picked up his clothes as he came,
held them modestly in front of himself. He circled the trunk, opened
the driver's door, withdrew the car keys. He went again to the trunk
and Molly watched out the rear window until minutes later the trunk
lid was lowered. Cruise was dressed again. He had gotten into dry
clothes.

She waited as he
climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine. He had brought
a wet scent into the car--rainwater, lake water. His hair still
dripped. "Did you get the woman out all right?"

"She was dead."

Molly bit her lower
lip. They drove slowly around the curve in the road and she saw the
white Escort in the car lights. She also saw something--was it a
body?--on the gravel lining the road next to the car.

She turned her head,
looking back, trying to be sure.

"He's dead too,"
Cruise said.

"What...why...did
you...?"

"Yes," he
said simply.

Molly couldn't look at
him any longer. She stared instead ahead at the white dividing lines
in the road. "I don't know how you can do that," she said
when she was able to speak.

"Why not? He
wouldn't have been happy without his wife anyway."

"How do you know
that?" She spoke in a dull monotone. She thought all her
indignation had been sapped; thought she might be losing touch with
her deepest emotions, or at least losing touch with the necessity to
express them.

"It's a gift I
have. Knowing."

Molly couldn't stand
hearing what he had to say anymore. Everything he said was a torture
to her. He was playing God, the God of Death. Being crazy was worse
than dying, she thought. Cruise was already crazy and now she feared
she might be losing her mind too the way she kept thinking of him as
a nature god, a death god. There was only so much shock she could
endure before she turned into an inhuman being who couldn't be
shocked. Someone just like him.

Despair at her
situation set hooks into her brain and deadened it the way Novocain
killed all the pain in a rotten tooth. She didn't want to feel
anything. Maybe that's what going crazy meant. You stopped feeling.
The appalling truths became commonplace. The heart shriveled to a
lump smaller than the tiny nubs that were her breasts.

#

Mark Killany was nearly
to the outskirts of Tucson with the car radio tuned to a local
station when he heard the first reports.

Man robbed and
murdered, found beside his wrecked car near Theodore Roosevelt Lake.
His wife was dead too, apparently from being thrown forward into the
windshield when the car overturned in a ditch during tornado weather.
It was the couple's son, eleven-year-old Brian Delham, who had been
relatively unhurt in the back seat who found his father. He told the
police about the man who came to help them. The man with long hair, a
beard, and mustache. The man who killed his father. Hiding on the
floor of the car, Brian had watched the murderer drive away, heading
north. It was a blue Chrysler, the boy said. He was positive. It was
old. Big. He didn't get the license plate number, but he'd never
forget the killer's face.

Mark sped to the next
exit ramp and made a U-turn that took him east again on I-l0. He had
trouble breathing. He cranked down the window, drank in great heaving
drafts of fresh air. The radio announcer said the murder occurred on
Highway 666. Mark had seen the exit for it miles back. He had to get
there. He had to get in touch with the Arizona highway patrol. He
wanted to tell them about Molly. That she might be with the killer.
If it was the same man he'd been following across country, the same
man the hooker in Mobile identified, then he might still have Molly
with him.

Or worse yet, he might
not
have her with him. He could have...murdered her too. The
boy didn't say anything about a girl being in the car.

"Shit," he
wailed. "Dammit to hell, shit, shit, shit."

The speedometer needle
rose past eighty, ninety, hovered there. Mark didn't care if he was
stopped for speeding. He had to get to 666 and Roosevelt Lake. He had
to tell someone about the danger Molly was in. His girl. His baby.
The blue Chrysler.

#

Lannie Lavanic Reed
lived in a modest three-bedroom house on a dead-end street in
Flagstaff, Arizona. It was a working-class neighborhood where some of
the people couldn't find work or else they made a salary that didn't
cover all the expenses. Oil drip spots from worn-out cars marred the
driveways. The Big Wheels and bicycles of the neighbor children were
broken or rusted and lying forlorn in the weedy yards. Plastic
garbage cans sans lids were stacked at the curbs where wandering
packs of wild dogs knocked them over for the sparse loot they
contained.

Some of the homes were
empty, windows broken or boarded over. Blue cardboard HUD warning
signs were taped to the windows of sagging garage doors.

Cruise pulled into his
sister's driveway. He parked next to a twelve-year-old brown Chevy
station wagon with ripped seats and a dented front fender. Once the
engine was off, ticking away its heat in the early morning hours,
Cruise began untying his witness. She moaned as he slipped the rope
from her wrists.

"I'll have to
hobble you once we're inside, but for a few minutes I'll let you stay
free so you can go to the bathroom. I'll get Lannie to feed you too."

Molly grunted. She
hadn't talked to him since the lake incident. She was an
unsatisfactory companion the way she'd argue with him, get her smart
mouth running, then suddenly clam up and give him the silent
treatment. Her presence was wearing thin, so thin he thought he'd
made a mistake not leaving her floating face-down in the lake back on
Highway 666.

"C'mon," he
ordered, pulling himself wearily from the car. She tried to make a
break for it, he'd still be able to catch her before any harm was
done. She could scream around here for an hour and not more than two
people would look out their windows to see what was going on. No one
wanted to get involved. Too many of the residents had speed labs in
the kitchens and marijuana gardens in the bedrooms.

It made Cruise sad that
Lannie had to live in a place like this. There were lots of
neighborhoods in Flagstaff where decent people lived, but it cost too
much, more than Lannie could afford. Still, it wasn't right his
sister lived this way. Broke his damned heart. Sometimes he sent her
money he scored. It was never enough.

Molly came around the
car, a docile little sheep. He marched her before him to the recessed
doorway. In the cement entry lay a black plastic machine gun and a
boy's cap made of camouflage material. One of Lannie's kids left his
junk out. There wasn't any way to make them mind. Lannie had given up
trying a long time ago. She had five kids, stepping stones, from
Sherry, who was the toddler in diapers, to Wayne, who was ten. Wayne,
the eldest, was the probable owner of the gun and cap.

Cruise tried the
doorknob, found it locked. Didn't blame her. The street was a war
zone what with the druggies, the teenage burglars, the unemployed.
They'd lift their grandmother's girdle if they thought there was any
money in it.

Cruise tried the
doorbell. He listened, couldn't hear it ringing inside. He pounded
finally on the door.

"Let's wake them
all up," he said to Molly. "Get those little toads of
Lannie's into high gear before sunup."

It took a while, but
eventually the door creaked open on a safety chain. A woman wearing a
red chenille housecoat looked out.

"Don't frown. It's
me," Cruise said. "And a friend."

Lannie shut the door,
lifted the chain, then opened up to them. She stood back in a dark
hallway, one hand holding closed the robe. Her glasses had slipped
down on her nose and she peered over them like a schoolmarm.

"You look like
shit, Lannie'" Cruise moved past her down the hall, pulling
Molly behind him. They came out into a living area stuffed with
Salvation Army and garage sale furniture, toys scattered on the
matted dirty carpet, clothes draped everywhere. Old newspapers
teetered in stacks on every conceivable surface.

Cruise wrinkled his
nose. "Home sweet home,' he said.

"I don't need your
bullshit, Cruise. What do you want?"

Lannie slouched into
the room and cleared a place on the stained and worn orange
upholstered sofa.

"Don't you want to
meet Molly first? Molly, this is my sister, Lannie. Lannie, Molly.
She's Irish you can tell by her hair. She doesn't want to stay with
me now, so watch her."

"Goody. Another
one of those."

"Where's Daddy?"
Cruise moved toward another hallway that led to the bedrooms.

"He's sleeping,
what do you think? We don't usually get up around here before dawn in
case you forgot."

Cruise paused, his back
to the room. "Is he worse?"

He heard Lannie sigh
the way she might with one of the kids when they asked too many
unanswerable questions. "He's not going to get better, Cruise.
You already know that."

Cruise nodded. He moved
on down the hallway until he came to the door of his father's
bedroom. This is where his father had slept for the past ten years.
Lannie wouldn't put him in a home. She knew Cruise would have killed
her if she tried.

He opened the door
slowly, his fist swallowing and squeezing the doorknob. Breathed in
the smell of age that bathed the room with its aroma. Old clothes,
old skin, old air going in and out of old lungs.

Feeble light from the
one window in the far wall made the bedroom appear watery and
insubstantial. There was too much furniture in the room. An iron
bedstead, unpainted and gray as lead. A bedside table covered with a
lamp, a Bible, bottles of vitamins, tubes of salves. A standing
wardrobe made of dark cherry, the mirror on its front cracked right
down the middle. A stuffed easy chair, torn on the arms. A metal
tube-legged kitchen chair, seat in canary-yellow. Rips in the vinyl.
There was more, so much more. A battered chest of drawers, flaking
white paint, the top stacked with newspapers and folded clothes.

Cruise approached his
father's bed. He stared down at the old man. Here lay the monster of
his dreams, the master of his past, the fearsome right hand that so
often struck him low. He didn't look much changed except for the skin
on his face and hands that lay atop the sheet. The skin had been
ruddy and weathered and tough as oiled leather. Now it was papery
white and thinly veined with blue. His father still retained his
thick brown hair, tinged gray on the sides. He still had the massive
forehead, the large nose that dominated his features, the narrow mean
lips.

Where the real change
had come with age was in the old man's brain. He'd been diagnosed as
suffering from Alzheimer's disease the week Lannie took him into her
home to care for him. His mind was a quicksand pit where you could
throw in anything and get nothing back. He forgot his name. He forgot
to go to the bathroom, how to hold his dick to take a piss, how to
wipe himself. He forgot how to feed himself, forgot where he was, who
he had been, and all of what he had done.

Cruise reached out a
tentative hand and touched his arm. The old man woke immediately,
eyes swiveling to the side of the bed without moving his head. "Who?"
he asked.

"Hi, Daddy. It's
Cruise."

"Who?" The
old man came up onto his elbows to squint at Cruise. "Who are
you?"

"Your son. Herod,
remember?"

"I don't know you.
Who are you?"

Cruise reached behind
him and caught the back of the kitchen chair. He dragged it close to
the bedside and sat in it. He held his father's hand in both his own.

"Don't worry about
it," he said. "I know you, that's enough, isn't it?"

"Where am I?"

"You're at
Lannie's house. You've been here for years, Dad."

"I'm hungry."
He smacked his lips.

"Lannie will cook
breakfast soon. Why don't I sit here and tell you about a few things
while she does? Wouldn't you like that?"

The old man stared at
him the way he would a stranger. Cruise began to tell him about his
latest trip across country. He told him, in detail, about the Lot
Lizard who called herself Minde. How she'd almost gone with Dirty Old
Man and how he, Cruise, got to her first. How he'd already prepared a
shallow grave outside of Charlotte. How fiercely Minde had fought for
her life. Then he told him about Molly, picking her up at a truck
stop in Mobile. What a pretty girl she was, so naive, so young, so
trusting. He told him how much it meant to him to have company along.
How lonely he got without someone at his side.

He told his father
about Riaro, about the visit to the cemetery after he killed him. He
told how Molly tried to call her father, how he'd almost missed
finding her in time. He brought the old man up-to-date on his life
since the last time he'd seen him. He ended with the story of the
tornado, the rap on the window, the way it felt to kill the frantic
fat man who jiggled and struggled as he died in his arms.