The Ax (18 page)

People believe in serial killers these days. Movies and novels have come out populated almost entirely by serial killers, as though it’s a tribe, or a fraternal organization, like the Elks. The great thing about serial killers, I guess, for the people who make up those stories, is that they never have to worry about motivation.
Why
did that person kill that person? It’s unfair to ask that, in such a story, because the answer always is, he did it because that’s what he does.

I have a motive. I have a motive, and a very specific category of person I have to get rid of. Which means, unless I’m very careful, I could be vulnerable. A clever detective might begin to get me in his sights. But if Everly and KBA, my only two gunshot victims in Connecticut, were merely part of the pattern of a serial killer, wouldn’t that make me safe?

And does this woman in the green Ford Taurus deserve to live, any longer?

She backs out of the parking space. She doesn’t bother to look at me, or acknowledge me. She drives away, and she will never know just how close a call that was.

I ease the Voyager into the space, and stop. Still in the car, I put on the raincoat, then transfer the Luger to its right pocket. This is the kind of raincoat that in college we called the shoplifter’s special, because the pockets are open at the top inside, to give access from both the inside and the outside of the raincoat, which means you can put your hand in the pocket and
through
the pocket. And that’s what I do, and hold the Luger waiting in my lap, as I keep my eye on the Honda Accord.

Serial killer. That had been a strange thought. It was never serious, though.

I wait ten minutes, and then I see him. He’s pushing a shopping cart, laden with small boxes and white plastic shopping bags, with a big sack of peat moss lying over everything else. The Accord is parked facing in, so he stops at the back of it and opens the trunk, while I climb out of the Voyager, holding the Luger against my right leg, and walk forward between the cars until I’m on the same row as he is, just three cars to my left.

He’s wrestled the peat moss bag into the trunk, and now he’s surrounding it with the rest of his purchases. He’s bent forward, head partly under the open trunk lid, as he moves his new boxes and bags.

I stop behind him. I say, “Are you Mr. Kane Asche?”

He turns, with a questioning smile. “Yes?”

“I know you are,” I say, and bring the Luger up past the right flap of my raincoat, the raincoat bunching up around my right wrist, and I shoot him.

The bullet doesn’t hit his eye, it hits his right cheek and makes a mess there. The raincoat pulled my arm down, just that little bit. His eyes stare, as he falls backward, half in the trunk, half sagging down across the rear bumper.

This is no good. This is messy, bloody, awful.
And
he’s alive. I lean closer, put the barrel of the Luger almost against that staring terrified right eye, and I shoot again, and his head snaps back, and now he lies there, mostly on his back, sprawled, mouth wide open, one eye wide open.

I walk, not briskly, back to the Voyager. I get in, leaving the Luger in my lap, covered by the flap of my raincoat. I start the Voyager, shift into reverse, back out of there, drive away.

There’s very little traffic, all the way home.

Well, that wasn’t so bad.

And
I got a good night’s sleep, dreamless—at least, nothing I remember or that bothered me in any way— and woke up refreshed this morning, feeling positive about things for the first time in a while.

I think what it is, in addition to the business with Asche being simpler and cleaner than the two before it, almost as clear-cut as the very first one, I think there’s the knowledge that finally I’m more than halfway through this thing. At the beginning, I had to do the six resumé, and I have to do Upton “Ralph” Fallon, but then that’s it, that’s the end of it, forever and ever.

(I’ll know how to handle the situation ahead of time, if anything like this ever looms again.)

But now I’ve done four of them, so there are only three to go, and that lifts my spirits considerably. It’s like realizing you’ve finally made it past the midway mile marker in a long and grueling race.

Also, there’s some sort of early indication that there might be a thaw between me and Marjorie. Nothing tangible, really, no words said on the subject, merely a difference in the quality of the air inside the house. A little conversation between us, casual, about minor things. Not like normal life exactly, but closer.

This change may have happened because she’d finally come out with it, told the truth, or at least partly, and doesn’t have to keep her burdensome secret any more. (If only it could be that easy for me.) And also probably because I’d agreed to the idea of counseling, and because the first session has happened, however little might have been accomplished so far, and because it looks as though the counseling can continue.

And maybe, just maybe, even more than all of that, it could be there’s been a change in me as well. Maybe, when I was determined to kill the boyfriend, when I wasn’t even turning it over in my mind but just accepting it as a fixed and certain thing to be done, maybe during that time I was clenched and tense around Marjorie, stalking her, watching her, searching for a trail to my prey. And now that I’ve caught on to myself, stopped myself, now that I’ve realized how awful that idea was and given it up completely, maybe she can sense a new ease in me, and my relaxation helps her to relax.

Long-term joblessness, it hurts everything. Not just the discarded worker, but everything. Maybe it’s wrong of me, snobbish or something, to think this hits the middle class more than other people, because I’m middle class (and trying to stay middle class), but I do think it does, it hurts us more. The people at the extremes, the poor and the very rich, are used to the idea that life has great swings, now you’re doing well, now you’re doing badly. But the middle class is used to a smooth progress through life. We give up the highs, and in return we’re supposed to be protected from the lows. We give our loyalty to a company, and in return they’re supposed to give us a smooth ride through life. And now it isn’t happening, and we feel betrayed.

We were supposed to be protected and safe, here in the middle, and something’s gone wrong. When a poor person loses some lousy little job that had no future anyway, and has to go back on welfare, that’s an expected part of life. When a millionaire shoots the works on a new venture that falls flat and all of a sudden he’s broke, he knew all along that was a possibility. But when
we
slip back, just a little bit, and it goes on for month after month, and it goes on for year after year, and maybe we’re never going to get back to that particular level of solvency and protection and self-esteem we used to enjoy, it throws us. It throws us.

And what’s happening is, because we’re family people, it’s throwing the families, too. Children turn bad, in a number of ways. (Thank God we don’t have that problem.) Marriages end.

Do I want my marriage to end? No. So I have to realize that what’s happening to us now is only happening because I’ve been out of work for so long. If I were still at Halcyon Mills, Marjorie wouldn’t be running around with somebody else. She wouldn’t be working two stupid jobs. I wouldn’t be killing people.

I didn’t play the radio in the Voyager when I drove Marjorie to the New Variety just after lunch, for her afternoon cashier job, and that’s because we were talking, we were in an actual conversation. It felt good. We talked about whether or not we might want to go see the movie that’s at the New Variety now, and that she’d try to get a sense of whether or not the movie’s any good while she was there this afternoon. And we talked about dinner, what to have, should I stop at a store after dropping her off or should we shop together later when I pick her up again. We didn’t talk about anything that matters—money, jobs, the kids, marriage, counseling—but just
talking
was enough.

And now I’ve come home, and I’m in my office, and I’m planning my next move. Only two resumés to go. What an astonishment. What a relief.

Three weeks ago, I wasn’t even sure I could do it. I was afraid I wasn’t up to it. Three weeks ago. It feels like a thousand years.

I study them, my two remaining resumés trying to decide which to go after first, which to go after second. I’ll start on it tomorrow, drive to that resumé’s address, check it out, see how it’s going to go.

One of the remaining resumés is here in Connecticut, the other over in New York State. And of course Upton “Ralph” Fallon is in New York State, too.

The easiest ones have been in Connecticut. It was in Massachusetts that Mrs. Ricks complicated the situation and made it all so much worse, and it was in New York that I’d had to hit that poor man with the car.

Maybe it’s just superstition, but I think the way for me to go is to finish Connecticut first. Do that next, then the last two are both in New York. And then it’s over.

The phone rarely rings when we’re asleep, maybe once or twice a year, and that’s usually some drunk with a wrong number. But there’s been a change in us, in Marjorie and me and our relationship to the late-night telephone call, and I never realized it before.

I come slowly awake, in the dark middle of the night, very beclouded by sleep. I can hear Marjorie murmuring into the telephone, and then she turns the light on, and I squint, not wanting to be awake, and the clock says 1:46. (We deliberately got a bedroom alarm-clock-radio
without
illuminated clock numbers, because we like to sleep in darkness. I’m always aware of those floating numbers at the level of my sleeping head whenever I spend a night in a motel.)

Slowly I focus on Marjorie and her conversation, and it’s something troubling to her that’s keeping her responses very down and quiet. “Yes, I understand,” she says, and “We’ll get there as soon as we can,” and, “I appreciate that, thank you.”

Sometime in through there, during the course of the conversation, failing to understand who she can possibly be talking to or what possible subject it could be about, I suddenly have my realization about us and late-night phone calls, and it is this: I didn’t hear the phone ring.

We have phones on both sides of the bed, but it’s only the phone on my side that rings, quietly. It used to be, whenever the phone rang at night, I would immediately wake up and deal with it—the drunk, the wrong number—and Marjorie would sleep right through the whole thing. I think in every marriage, that’s one of the unconscious items that’s worked out early on, who will wake up when the phone rings. In our marriage, it was always me, and now it isn’t me any more.

Since I lost my job, Marjorie is the one who wakes up when the phone rings. She can’t count on me any more; she has to be alert for herself.

I sit there, while Marjorie continues to talk into the phone and listen to the phone, and I turn this new understanding over and over in my head, to study it. I don’t know if it makes me mostly angry or mostly sad or mostly ashamed. All three, I guess.

Marjorie hangs up, and looks at me. She’s very solemn. “It’s Billy,” she says.

I think, an accident! At the same instant, I think, but he’s in bed in this house, in his room, asleep. Stupid, still clearing cobwebs, I say, “Billy?”

“He was arrested,” she says, astoundingly. “He and another boy.”

“Arrested?
Arrested?
” I sit up, almost falling over.
I’m
the one who’s supposed to be arrested! “Why would he—? Why would they—? For God’s sake, what
for
?”

“They broke into a store,” she says. “The police found them, and they tried to run away. They’re at the state police barracks in Raskill.”

I’m already struggling out from under the covers. The sheet and blanket cling to my legs, not wanting to release me into this terrible unknown. “Poor Billy,” I say. A store? What store? “It’s all my fault,” I say, and go into the bathroom to brush my teeth.

The CID detective at the state police barracks, a sympathetic soft-voiced man in a rumpled brown suit, talks to us first, in a small square office painted pale yellow. Three walls are smooth shiny plastic, the fourth, an exterior wall, is bare rough concrete block. The floor is a different kind of smooth shiny plastic, black, and the ceiling is plastic soundproofing panels, off-white. Since the canary yellow paint on the concrete block was certainly put there as a very good sealer, it occurs to me that, if anything really horrible were to happen in this room, they could hose it clean in two or three minutes. From my position, in this green plastic chair facing the gray metal desk, I can’t see a drain in the floor, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is one.