Spree (29 page)

Now Andy and Heather broke apart and began, hurriedly, getting fully dressed. This Heather did without shame, and it was fun watching her.

“Are you my friend?” Andy asked Nolan, desperately, hopping on one foot, as he tugged a shoe onto the other foot.

“Sure,” Nolan said.

“Good,” Andy said, smiling tightly. “If my wife asks, will you say we’ve been here all evening?”

“Sure,” Nolan said.

Andy was dressed now, and so, nearly, was Heather.

Rather frantically he went on: “She could show up any minute. Can you keep your cool and cover for us?”

“Sure.”

“God bless you,” Andy said, grinning.

Heather smiled at Nolan and kissed him on the cheek and said, “You’re a saint.”

Nolan followed them as they went out through the bar and watched silently from a window as they made their way to the parking lot, Andy getting in his Corvette, the girl in her Mustang, driving off separately.

Nolan went to the back room and returned the .38 to its drawer and sat at the desk.

“What was that about?” he said, aloud.

19

HE WAS
digging in the moonlight, sideways.

She didn’t know what it meant: it was simply the image before her eyes, as they slowly opened. A man was digging, shovel crunching into cold ground, washed in ivory moonlight, and she was on her side, so it was a sideways view, and out of focus. Still groggy, she moved her head just slightly and looked up. She saw the skeletal branches of a tree—the tree she lay under—and through them she could see clouds moving quickly across a blue-gray night sky, like a scrim of smoke gliding across the stationary partial moon. It didn’t seem real.

But the pain in her head did; it ran across her forehead, over her eyes, like a headband of hurt. And the still, cold night air seemed very real; she was only in her sweater and jeans and anklets—her bed was the snowy ground. And the sound of the shovel, that was real too, as it chopped at roots and cut through frozen earth. She moved her head back to where it had been and looked through slits and saw him, digging, in the moonlight.

Lyle.

Handsome Lyle, wearing a brown leather jacket and gray designer jeans, digging, basking unwittingly in shadows from the moving clouds.

He was, she knew at once, digging a grave. It was the right shape; he’d roughed it out and was now only a few inches in. But it was a grave. Her grave.

The pain and the cold were her friends. They made this surreal landscape real. They were something to hold on to, to steady her, while her thoughts raced, while she peeked through the slits of her eyelids and wondered what she could do to keep from sleeping forever in the hole Lyle was making for her.

She lay perhaps ten feet from the foot of the grave. This was not as far as she would have liked. As Lyle walked around the grave, working on this end and that, he often came very close to her. He seemed frustrated. The temperature had fallen; apparently this ground was harder than he had anticipated.

She wondered if she should just get up and bolt and run. She had no sense of where she was—other than lying on her side under a tree near a grave an imbecile was preparing for her. The ground didn’t seem to slope, so they were a ways away, anyway, from the cabin and the hill at whose foot were the highway and the Mississippi. Lyle stood in a small open area, but mostly there were trees, here. Some evergreens but mostly gray, winter-dead ones; more death than life in these woods.

Was she supposed to be dead already? Did he think whatever he’d hit her with had killed her? Or had Lyle simply not got around to the deed as yet; the wood-stock revolver was still in his waistband, the metal catching moonlight and winking at her, occasionally. Perhaps she’d got through to him sufficiently these past few days to make killing her not so easy a chore for Lyle. Maybe he was putting it off.

No. That wasn’t it. He was working at that grave with a mindless diligence; nothing was bothering him. He was that most frightening of men: a guileless dope who meant you no harm but would kill you without blinking. Lyle would do that because his pa had so ordered. To Sherry, in that frozen, surreal moment, Lyle embodied the banality of evil. It was the ultimate empty irony: she would be killed by someone who didn’t even dislike her.

After fifteen minutes or so, Lyle got tired and sat at the edge of the grave, which was now perhaps five inches deep everywhere, more or less. He put the shovel down, so that it was between him and Sherry, whose eyes seemed to be closed. He sat on the ground, hugged his knees to him and looked up at the moon and the smokelike scrim of clouds and didn’t see it coming when Sherry smacked him in the side of the face with the shovel.

He tumbled half in the shallow grave, half out. Feet sticking out. She raised the shovel to hit him again, but he reacted quickly, for a stunned moron, pulling out that .38 and firing at her.

The bullet careened off the metal scoop of the shovel, with a whang, putting a dent in it as the sound of the gunshot cracked open the night and Sherry flung the shovel at him and ran.

She had no idea where she was headed; no sense of direction at all. She just ran where there was space, where the trees weren’t too thick, her shoeless feet, covered only in the thin little socks, crunching and cracking the twigs and snow-and-leaves-layered earth.

She could not hear him behind her, but perhaps that was only because her own breath was heaving so, filling her ears with the sound of her life struggling to hold on to itself.

Maybe that fling of the shovel had caught him good; maybe he was unconscious, not following her at all.

This she thought, this she prayed, but she didn’t slow down. She ran with strides as long as she could make them, cutting them only when a tree got in the way, and then she tripped over something, an extended root, and tumbled into the snow and leaves, and stopped just long enough to pick herself up and heard it: silence.

What a wonderful sound.

Maybe he wasn’t following her. Maybe the shovel did get him. Or she’d lost him, maybe.

Nonetheless, she began to run again, her legs aching, her feet nicked and nudged and pierced countless times by twigs and burrs and acorns, but it felt so good for her feet to tingle and even hurt, her legs to burn and ache, it made her feel so alive; at the same time her head no longer ached and the cold air was just something crisp to run through. Her face stretched tight in a sort of smile and she felt a euphoria as she ran breakneck through the woods, keeping up with the rolling clouds that shadowed her.

But the second time she tripped, catching another root, she went down hard, and it knocked the wind out of her. And as she was getting up, she heard him.

Lumbering through the woods, not far away at all. Twigs and branches snapping, cracking, like he was using a machete to clear a path; but it was no machete—just Lyle. Diligent, guileless Lyle, looking for her to take her back to the hole he was digging for her. Like his pa said.

She tried to run and realized she’d turned her ankle; she didn’t feel it going down: just now, trying to run on it, it made itself known. She could still run, but nowhere near as fast; this was a pitiful, hobbling sort of excuse for running, a shambling, mummylike two-step, and the sound of Lyle moving through the woods toward her was growing louder.

She hid.

She crawled behind a cluster of thorny brush, which nicked and bit at her skin, reminding her she was alive, yes, but she was past enjoying that sensation and teetering instead on the edge of despair and desperation. Her feet were cold and bleeding, the thin socks torn to shreds from her marathon run. She crouched behind the thicket and tried not to breathe audibly. She stopped breathing through her mouth, pulling the air in ever so gently through her nose, sipping and savoring it like a priceless wine.

She was quaking with fear and cold as he lumbered by, gun in hand; he wasn’t running, exactly—it was more like a jog. An idiot jogger wants to kill me, she thought.

Like a four-wheel-drive vehicle, he rolled past, woods be damned, the sound of his forward movement taking several minutes to die down. She waited. She had no idea what to do next.

Stay put? It was night, but she had no notion of the time—if dawn came soon, she’d be naked here. If nighttime lasted long enough, perhaps that dangerous dork would comb the entire woods and find her, finally. If she took off and started running again, he would hear her, quite probably, and, very certainly, take up pursuit again.

What would Nolan do?

Nolan would find a way to kill the bastard, but that wasn’t Sherry’s way. She’d given that her best shot with the shovel, and blew it. It wasn’t likely nature would provide her with a killing tool better than a shovel. Someone who knew the woods would find something to use, no doubt; but Sherry had only stalked shopping malls before. She had never been camping in her life. This was a hell of an indoctrination.

She was shivering with the cold, now. Wondering where she was. Looking up through branches at the spooky sky, wondering how to read it, wishing, way back when, she’d been a Girl Scout and not a cheerleader.

Maybe if she just moved quietly through the woods—in the opposite direction from where Lyle had pushed on—she might get somewhere. Maybe even civilization. The road and the river were around here somewhere.

She moved out from behind the bushes and began making her way through the woods again. Not running. Moving quickly, yes, but not running; pausing at a tree every few yards to listen for Lyle. Hearing nothing.

Pretty soon she came upon the grave in progress again.

It froze her to the earth, like Lot’s wife. She had no idea she’d gotten turned around. Here she was back at square one.

But—once past the shock of stumbling across what Lyle intended as her permanent home —was this so bad? There was the shovel again, sprawled half in, half out of the would-be grave, much as Lyle had been when she tried to bash him. It was a weapon. She picked it up.

And just in time, because Lyle stepped out into the moonlight and his handsome blank face squeezed in something like thought and he aimed the .38 at her and she swung the shovel like a bat and caught his wrist and the gun went flying.

“Don’t fight me,” Lyle said, reaching his hands out toward her as if she should embrace him. There was no malice in his voice at all.

“Fuck you, asshole!” She swung the shovel at him and caught him in the side and he went down, moaning. She moved toward him quickly, the hurting ankle slowing her just a bit, and raised the shovel to deliver a finishing blow, and the bastard reached out and grabbed that bad ankle and pulled her legs out from under her. She fell back, tumbling.

Tumbling into the grave.

It was shallow, but it was her grave, and it was no place she wanted to be; her mind filled with horror. The shovel was no longer in her hands. She was on her back in her own grave. A scream caught in her throat.

And Lyle was standing at her feet, in the grave, looking down at her, with his blank, banal pretty-boy face marred by one of her shovel blows. Good. She kicked a field goal with his nuts and he grabbed himself with both hands, howling, and pitched forward on her.

He wasn’t unconscious, but he was in pain, enough pain that he couldn’t do anything about her scrambling frantically out from under him, cursing him, hitting at him, clawing at him, and then scurrying off, back into the woods, a different direction this time.

Running again, hobbling on the ankle, but running, hearing nothing but her own panting, her stomach aching, her feet numb, her legs aching but pumping, like her heart keeping the blood going; she wasn’t dead yet.

She paused against a tree, panting. Wondering how long she could keep this up; when her legs would go out on her. She couldn’t hear him back there. That was something, anyway. Couldn’t hear him shambling after her.