NIGHT CRUISING (27 page)

He walked home. His
clothes dried on the way. It was late afternoon when he walked into
the house. When his parents began to wonder where his brothers might
be he told them the first whopping lie of his life. "They said
they were going to town early for the dance."

When Orson and Fdward
were never seen again Cruise's father inquired in town. No one had
seen the truck. Or the boys.

The family fretted for
a few days, but they didn't call in the police or fill out a missing
person's statement. They had heard rumors that Orson's girlfriend was
pregnant. They decided that was reason enough to abscond. Cruise
thought they didn't much give a damn or they might have even decided,
in their quiet talks in the bedroom at night, he had something to do
with the disappearances. Either way no one made him pay for murder.
It amused him to think, in the coming days before he left home for
good, that killing was such an easy way to get things done. If the
blood that covered him didn't bother him so bad, he thought he could
probably do it again.

Later he found that he
could.

He opened his eyes to
the stars and felt a slap of vertigo that made him sway on his bare
feet. He was standing in mud that squished between his toes, the
empty water jug in his hand. He panicked, wondering how long he had
been standing there dreaming of his brothers.

He dropped the jug and
hurried around the car to Molly's side. She wasn't there.

He turned in a circle,
looking for her outline on the desert. He saw a dark stick figure
moving toward the west, toward the ranch houses.

Cursing his lapse, he
ran to the trunk, threw in his soggy clothes and shoes, slammed it
shut. He grabbed the keys from the fender and slipped into the car
wearing only his wet undershorts.

He ought to run her
down.

He ought to hurt her.

The cuts on his arms
bled onto his thighs as he drove across the bare land toward the girl
speared in his headlights.

#

Molly thought her lungs
would burst. She could hear the car behind her, closing in like a
bumblebee aiming at the lush heart of a flower. She ran harder, her
feet slapping the firm sand with a flat crunching sound. She was too
far from the houses! She'd never make it!

Oh, God, oh, God, he'd
run her over.

She stumbled on the
thought and fell flat on her face, knocking the wind from her
belabored lungs. She gasped, trying to get air again. She heard the
engine of the Chrysler roaring in her ears. It blocked out the world.
She brought her fists to each side of her face, sucking in air
finally, closing her eyes and her mind to what might happen to her in
the next few seconds. She couldn't think of it, couldn't get her mind
to conjure the image beyond the one of her lying helpless on the
ground while the car sped across the sand straight at her body.

She screamed out,
pressing her fists into the sides of her head, legs automatically
pulling up to her groin, toes curling in her shoes, feet tucking
toward her buttocks to present the smallest possible target.

She might have lost
consciousness for a while. She couldn't remember hearing the car
braking or the sound of the car door opening and closing or the touch
on her arm. The first thing she did hear was Cruise's voice
demanding...

"Get into the
car."

She couldn't get up.
She expected to be run over and that expectation had become real in
her head so that now she didn't believe she was still whole. She lay
there, exhausted, not enough air in all the sky for her to breathe
right again.

She felt herself
lifted, taken into his arms. Her head hung down and she still
couldn't breathe, her chest sucking up and down like a bellows.

She was put into the
car, but she kept slipping from the seat, her legs Jell-O, her arms
like strings attached to her shoulders. He shut the car door and the
sound rattled her teeth.

Shouldn't the third try
have been the charm? she wondered idiotically. She tried to leave him
in Mexico. In Yuma. This time she should have succeeded. Third time a
charm--was that a superstition?

When she had run this
time, he had been in some kind of trance. He had stood behind the car
after pouring the water over his head, stood so long she thought he
had fallen asleep. He didn't even move an eyelid when she opened the
door and began sprinting away.

Shouldn't she have made
it? Was her luck so bad or did she have any? But yes, she had luck
left. He hadn't driven the car over her prone body. She had lots of
luck, but it just wasn't sufficient to get her free.

Strength returned to
her limbs. She was able now to lift a hand to her face and brush the
sand from around her eyes. She spit. Sand granules were in her mouth,
grating on her tongue. She stuck out her tongue and wiped it on the
back of her hand. She wiped her hand along the leg of her jeans.

She turned in the seat
a little and saw the trunk lid open again. Soon it lowered and she
saw Cruise dressed in fresh clothes. A sky-blue shirt, long sleeves.
Navy trousers. When he sat in the driver's seat, she cringed, and
moved closer to the door on her side.

"We're going into
Mexico again," he said.

He turned the car
around and returned to the bumpy road they had taken into the desert.

'"This time
there's no hotel room for you. I'll leave you tied in the car."

She almost wanted to
thank him. Being bound seemed an infinitesimal annoyance compared to
being run over by a big blue Chrysler.

They drove past the
tired border guards without a hitch. Cruise showed them his driver's
license, his car insurance. Molly sat with a docile look on her face,
though her red curly hair was all in disarray, and there was sand on
the front of her shirt.

In Mexicali, Cruise
drove to the far side of town where he found cantinas open all night.
Molly saw that he knew the people in this section of town, knew them
as well as he had in the other Mexican town east of Juarez. They
called to him as he drove up. "Senor Cruise! Amigo!"

They came to the car
windows and watched curiously as he tied her with the yellow nylon
rope. He looped it through the armrest, making it fast. Even if she
could get out of the car, she was hobbled, ankles tightly tied
together, and she wouldn't get anywhere. She'd be back on her belly
again, in trouble and out of luck.

"Please..."
she begged.

Cruise told her to shut
up. He said, "I don't need you to witness this part of my life."

She didn't know what he
meant. She expected to have plenty of time to think about it.

She didn't know the
drunk Mexicans who had grouped around the car to watch her
imprisonment wouldn't give her much time for thinking. She didn't
know they wanted to have some fun with another of Cruise's young
female hostages.

#

The murders at the Pick
'N Save in Yuma, Arizona, occurred between two-thirty and three A.M.
At four-thirty Mark Killany heard the news on the car radio as he
drove the streets of Flagstaff.

There hadn't been
witnesses to the crime. But the throat slashings matched the way the
murderer killed the obeseMr. James Comquest near Lake Roosevelt.

"Authorities
believe the same suspect is responsible for both murder sprees,"
the news announcer said, "and that he's moving south through the
state of Arizona. The highway patrol has alerted California state
police to watch for any car resembling the one described as being
driven by the killer."

Mark pulled over to the
curb to listen. He held his jaws rigid in thought. Yuma. First the
lake, then Yuma. Had the killer ever gone to Flagstaff, or even to
Globe?

Consulting the road map
spread on the bench seat of the car, Mark found the route that would
take him south to Yuma. It was one helluva drive and he was tired. He
needed a thermos of coffee to keep him awake.

He found a service
station open. They had a small convenience store that carried
thermoses. There were three on a bottom shelf. The boxes were covered
with a patina of dust. Mark took one to the counter, slipped out the
thermos. "I'm going to fill this with coffee. Add it onto my gas
ticket, will you?"

He was on the way to
Yuma by five A.M. Once there he'd call back to Globe, see if they had
any information the radio newscast overlooked.

How long a head start
did the fucker have anyway? He had killed Comquest the night before.
A convenience store clerk and a customer tonight. It couldn't have
taken him that long to get to Yuma. That meant he had holed up
somewhere along the way. He might have slept in his car in a national
park. Or did he know someone in Arizona who had taken him in? Did he
just drive at night, sleep during

the day?

Mark would have to
throw some of these questions at the detective in Globe, gauge his
reaction.

But the important
questions none of them could answer were the ones doing chaotic
things to Mark's mind.
Was Molly with the killer? Was this the
same man she had taken a ride from in Mobile?

The coincidence of the
same kind of car and a man described the same way made him almost
sure. Sure enough to follow the leads. To wherever they led him.

He had seen a film once
on cable TV about a serial killer. He had a home in South Florida,
drove a Porsche, owned his own business. He went into shopping malls
pretending to be a photographer looking for models. He conned young
girls to his car in the parking lot, then he kidnapped, raped,
brutalized, and left them dead alongside the roads countrywide. About
nine victims in all if Mark remembered correctly.

The scary thing about
him, though, was that he took one girl from a mall and
did not
kill her.
Instead, he made her stay with him on the road for
nearly two weeks. Checking into motels together, letting her drive
the car, even in the end trusting her to help him lure another young
woman from a mall.

The psychologist
working with the FBI theorized he didn't kill this one girl because
she'd been raped at age thirteen. When
he
raped and threatened
to kill her, she was so traumatized, she didn't seem to care if she
died or not. The other girls begged for their lives. That gave him
the momentary thrill of having complete control and power. He killed
then. But the girl he kept with him--her name was Tina--didn't beg
for her life. It was what saved her.

Eventually the killer
put her on a plane in Boston to send her home. Later he was spotted
by an FBI agent and shot with his own gun while they fought over it
in the front seat of the car.

Mark remembered from
the film that the psychologist believed Tina hadn't tried to escape
her captor because she was suffering from the "Stockholm
syndrome." Prisoners in World War II first exhibited the
syndrome and it was documented in psychoanalytic textbooks. Some
prisoners, it seemed, stopped caring whether they lived or died, were
in such deep shock that they would not try to escape if given the
chance. They were locked into a psychological as well as a physical
prison, traumatized, tortured, and turned into shadows of their
former selves.

If Molly was with a
murderer, she wouldn't be with him under her own free will.
Therefore, she was a hostage. Hostages died. Not many of them were as
fortunate as Tina.

Drinking coffee from
the thermos, driving faster than the speed limit, Mark worried about
his daughter and what might be happening to her now. If she was with
a killer, she wouldn't react the way Tina did. She hadn't been
traumatized before. She'd try to escape any chance she got. And the
hostage-taking serial killers of the world had little patience with
the girls who wanted to survive.

"Shit," Mark
said aloud. He poured more coffee into the thermos cup while holding
the wheel with one hand.

It was still a long way
to Yuma. If his hopelessness welled any higher, he thought he might
drown in it and that wouldn't help Molly at all.

He wished he hadn't
thought about the cable film. He had to harbor some hope that whoever
Molly was with, the man displayed a modicum of forbearance. Without
it Molly was lost.

#

Molly believed she was
lost.

No matter how loud she
called for Cruise to help her, no matter how much she tried to talk
some sense to the men surrounding the Chrysler, nothing got any
better. The best she could do was wait out the demeaning experience,
try to think of something else.
Endure. Survive.

Just as soon as Cruise
passed through the portal of the cantina, Molly knew she was going to
be in for a hard time. With Cruise out of sight, the man closest to
the car window on Molly's side reached in and grasped one of her
breasts. Mostly he got hold of a bra cup. The Nubs hid behind the
stiff material of the padded cup like scared rabbits behind a
thicket. When he twisted his wrist, the bra lifted from her chest.
She wanted to laugh in his face.
Ha ha,
she thought,
you
can't get me. I'm too skinny to get hold of, you prick.

But she was wrong. She
wasn't going to be protected from a mauling by the mere presence of a
padded brassiere. Frustrated to find he had a handful of cloth, the
Mexican grinned slowly before tightening his grip and ripping the
front of her shirt down to her waist. Molly sat looking down at
herself, furiously embarrassed, her skin blotching with red all over
her chest and stomach.

"You get away from
me!"

But they didn't speak
English. Or they didn't care to. She heard a half-dozen tongues
wagging, but not one word she recognized. Other men stuck their heads
in the back window to gawk at her. Two of them crawled onto the hood
and pressed their faces flat against the windshield. Their faces
looked as grotesque as Halloween masks. Finally one of the men opened
the driver's side door and slid into the bucket seat next to her.