The Follower (17 page)

“There won’t be any cameras there, right?”

“No, it’s not like that at all. I mean, you can look around if you want, but I promise you—this is just good clean fun.”

They made a left on the next corner and continued along the dark side street. A cold front must’ve come through because the temperature felt like it had dropped ten degrees. For a while it was awkward, and they didn’t talk much, and Andy was starting
to feel weird about the whole thing, wondering if this was such a great idea after all. Then they started talking about baseball, about how steroids had ruined the game and tarnished all the records, and Andy started feeling okay about it again. He hoped Joe wasn’t bullshitting, that his wife—Cara?—was really some super-hot model. But if it turned out she was really ugly or whatever, it would be no big deal, either. He’d just say, “No thanks, see ya,” and bail. He had zero to lose, so why not go for it?

When he reached East End Avenue, Joe started crossing the street, heading toward Carl Schurz Park. All the apartment buildings were on the other side of the street so Andy wondered where Joe was going.

“Where’s your building?” Andy asked, slowing down, lagging a few feet behind.

“Oh, right over there,” Joe said, pointing downtown on East End. “I just have to make a little pit stop first.”

“What kind of pit stop?”

“Well, Cleara likes to get high, to get in the mood, and I don’t have any shit on me.”

“Oh,” Andy said, “so where’re you going?”

“My dealer hangs out on the promenade,” Andy said. “It’ll take two sees and we can smoke a little, too. You like to get high?”

Andy hadn’t smoked pot since college, but he used to get wasted all the time.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes.”

“So come on, let’s go.”

Andy hesitated, worrying about the random drug tests at work. But if he said he was afraid, he’d feel like a wimp, and he hated feeling like a wimp. He wanted to be a risk taker, the type of guy who could do something crazy like this, meet a guy in a bar and get high and go to fuck his wife, without getting nervous about it.

“All right,” Andy said and followed the guy into the park.

They walked in silence for a while, then Joe asked, “You ever been in this park before?”

“No,” Andy said. “I mean, I passed it when I went running once, but I never went in.”

“I love it here. It’s really quiet, really peaceful. It’s like a slice of the country in the middle of the city. You can come here with a book, sit on the grass, and nobody bothers you. Cleara and I have picnics here all the time. Yeah, we really love it.”

They continued along the path, stepping around puddles. There was some light from the small, old-style lampposts, but it was still dark and hard to see too far ahead.

“Listen,” Joe said. “You can hardly hear anything, right? You wouldn’t even know you’re in Manhattan.”

They were heading toward the stairs leading downward when Joe suddenly started sneezing. He bent over to get a hold of himself, then straightened up, smiling, and said, “Allergies.”

Squinting, Andy said, “So where does your…dealer hang out?”

“Not far from here,” Joe said.

They went down the steps, toward an underpass. There was a nice cool breeze coming through the tunnel, pushing back Andy’s hair. Then, at the bottom of the stairs, Joe grabbed Andy, forced him back against the concrete wall, and started squeezing his neck.

Andy tried to grab Joe’s arms, push him away, but he couldn’t get anywhere. He felt pressure building in his head.

“You shoulda left her alone, Frat Boy,” Joe said. “You shoulda left her alone.”

What the hell was he talking about? What the fuck was wrong with him? Andy tried to suck some air through his throat, any air, but couldn’t. Then he thought,
This isn’t happening. I’m not even here
. But, fuck, he still couldn’t breathe, and Joe, with his face all red and bulging veins in his forehead, looked totally insane. Andy thought,
If I could just get one breath, one fucking breath
. He struggled, trying desperately to pry away Joe’s fingers. But the fucking guy seemed to be wearing gloves or something and Andy couldn’t get the fingers loose. He tried to kick Joe but couldn’t get any force into it. He was weak, everything spinning, then he couldn’t fight back. He didn’t know where he was anymore, or who he was. He was looking at Joe’s face, but it wasn’t even a face. It was nothing at all.

When Peter Wells was nine years
old he asked his mother if she would marry him someday. His mother didn’t take it seriously, acting like it was a big joke—maybe her son was going through some sort of romance period, a phase—but Peter was dead serious. He told his mother again and again how much he loved her and how he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Finally, she told him that it was getting to be too much, that he was starting to upset her, and that he had to stop it. Although Peter knew that his mother really was in love with him and just didn’t want to admit it, he stopped expressing his feelings because the last thing he wanted was for the woman he loved more than anything to be mad at him.

For the next few years, Peter continued to pine, in secret, for his mom. Most kids his age tried to spend as little time with their mothers as possible, feeling embarrassed to be around them, but not Peter. He loved doing things with his mother. He went everywhere with her—to the Pittsfield Mall, to Price Chopper; he even waited at the salon while she got her hair done. To impress her, he got interested in the things she was interested in—classical music, old movies—and he rushed home every day to listen to NPR. When he wasn’t with her, like at school, he’d sit in the back of the class, gazing out the window, thinking about her. After school, at night, he’d tell his mother he needed help with his homework just so he could spend more time with her. Although she’d never admit it, Peter knew his mother enjoyed his company, too, and not
only in the usual way mothers enjoy their sons’ company. There was definitely an unspoken bond between them, a special connection that other mothers and sons didn’t have.

When Peter reached puberty, naturally his mother was the star of most of his masturbation fantasies. He imagined many scenarios, but his favorite was their wedding night. They were in the honeymoon suite and it was their first time together. He imagined taking off her dress, what her breasts would look like, what they’d feel like. He enjoyed the buildup, but tried not to ejaculate, and it annoyed him whenever he accidentally did. He felt like ejaculating degraded his mother, made her into one of the slutty women in a copy of
Hustler
he’d once seen.

Peter became a master at hiding his emotions. No one had any idea that he had a thing for his mother—his father was probably the most clueless of all. As far as his old man was concerned, yeah, maybe Peter was more of a momma’s boy than most kids, but there wasn’t anything abnormal going on. And the thing was, there
wasn’t
anything abnormal going on. Of course, Peter knew that most boys didn’t fall in love with their mothers and want to marry them, but his situation was different. His mother wasn’t even his mother. He’d been adopted and his real parents were Canadian, lived somewhere near Montreal. And there wasn’t a huge age difference between him and his adoptive mother either. They were only twenty-seven years apart so when he was twenty she’d be forty-seven, when he was twenty-five she’d be fifty-two, et cetera, et cetera. It seemed like the older they got the less of a big deal it would become. Yeah, some people would think it was weird, a mother marrying her adopted son, but what difference would it make? They would be in love and that’s all that would matter.

Peter’s plan was to propose to his mother for real on his eighteenth birthday. He figured his father would probably be dead by then anyway. His father was sixty-four, had a heart condition, and had already undergone a quadruple bypass. He was in such bad shape that there was even talk of attempting a transplant at some point. Even if the old man somehow managed
to survive, Peter didn’t think he would be much of an obstacle. He knew his mother and father weren’t really in love and that his mother would divorce him in a second to marry her son, as soon as it became legally possible.

Then, the summer after ninth grade, everything suddenly changed. It was funny because it started as a typical Saturday morning in July—very harmless. Peter and his mother and father had breakfast on the screened-in porch and then his mother announced she was taking a shower. Peter and his father remained at the table, his father reading the
Berkshire Eagle
. Peter waited a couple of minutes, taking the last few bites of his French toast, then said he was going up to his room. Instead, he went to the bathroom door in his parents’ bedroom and carefully opened it, just an inch or two. His mother never locked the door while she showered and Peter had always assumed that she did this on purpose, because she expected him to look in, because she
wanted
him to.

As usual the sliding shower door was only halfway shut, so whenever his mother reached for the soap or shampoo, or stepped away from the spray to scrub herself, Peter had a great view of her full breasts, wide hips, and the wet dark hair between her legs. The house was old, built in the nineteenth century, and the stairs and floorboards always creaked in advance of anyone approaching. But because of the noise of the shower, it wasn’t as easy to hear, and Peter had to listen closely for any noise of his father. Meanwhile, he unsnapped his shorts and reached into his boxer briefs and started playing with himself. He got hard right away and the sight of his mother, reaching up to massage shampoo into her hair, her breasts becoming higher and firmer, made him even more excited. He had to squeeze himself to prevent an orgasm and then something happened that had never happened before.

Whenever Peter watched his mother in the shower, they never made eye contact, even though he knew she knew she was being watched. Although the bathroom door was always cracked open very slightly, if she wanted privacy she could have simply locked it. Peter had always assumed that his mother never looked in his direction because she wanted him
to watch her, but didn’t want to admit to it, or at least didn’t want to bring any attention to it.

This was why Peter was surprised when his mother looked right at him. It was such a big change from the norm that Peter didn’t know how to react. He froze for a couple of seconds, his left hand still gripping his cock, then smiled. He expected his mother to smile back, maybe invite him to come into the shower with her. But his mother wasn’t smiling. She had a look of shock, horror, repulsion, and then she was screaming at him, storming out of the shower, grabbing a towel from the rack and fumbling to wrap herself with it. Peter was very confused, unable to understand what he’d done to make her so upset. Before he could say anything, his mother opened the door fully, came over, and grabbed him. She screamed, “You bastard! You disgusting fucking bastard!” and slapped him across the face as hard as she could.

Peter hadn’t thought about that slap, how devastating it had been, in a long time, but as he was squeezing Frat Boy’s neck, waiting for him to hurry up and die already, it all came back to him—the way his mother had suddenly turned on him, how she’d called him “a disgusting fucking bastard,” how in that instant his total love for her turned to total hatred. But he really had no idea why he was thinking about all this now, at this moment, when he should’ve been concentrating on getting Frat Boy dead. He started squeezing the bastard’s neck with even more force, feeling like he was compressing the neck to nothing, that his hands would soon meet in a mess of blood, broken bones, and flesh.

Although Frat Boy’s eyes looked frozen and lifeless and his body was limp, Peter didn’t let up for another minute or two. Finally, he released his grip and let Frat Boy crumple onto the concrete. Peter’s hands hurt and his fingers were so tense that it was difficult to straighten them out of their curled positions. But looking down at the body, he was pleased that problem numero uno was officially out of the way. Not wasting a second, he kneeled, removed Frat Boy’s wallet, took all the money, then left the wallet next to the body. Then he took off the gloves and calmly stuffed them in the back left pocket
of his jeans while looking toward the stairs to his right and to his left. There was no one in either direction and it was quiet except for the sound of water falling from the ceiling of the tunnel in a steady drip. Peter doubted anyone in the park could have heard anything anyway. Except for a weak gasp when Peter had made his move, pushing him up against the wall, Frat Boy hadn’t made a peep.

Peter wanted to leave the tunnel and the park as fast as possible, but he knew running away would be the absolute wrong thing to do. If someone saw him and then discovered the body he would be an obvious suspect. So he left the park calmly, walking with his head down just in case, and made it out to East End Avenue without passing a single person. East End was pretty empty as well. Across the street, up the block, a man was walking his dog but he was facing the other direction and was too far away to get a good look at Peter anyway. Toward Grade Mansion, a few kids were walking uptown, but they were a block or two away. As Peter crossed the street, a cab was waiting at the red light. Peter purposely didn’t look in the driver’s direction, but it didn’t matter anyway. Why would a cab driver care about some random guy on the street?

Walking along Eighty-sixth Street, toward York Avenue, Peter passed a couple of people. He kept his head down slightly, avoiding eye contact. He didn’t care if people noticed his dark hair—he just didn’t want anyone to get a good look at his face. Approaching First Avenue, the sidewalks became more populated, and he must’ve passed dozens of people by the time he reached Third. But Peter wasn’t concerned about being noticed anymore. He was too far from the murder scene for anyone to make a connection. But, just to play it safe, rather than taking a cab, he took a subway. While there were many more chances of being noticed on a subway, it seemed more likely that a cabdriver would take a close look at him, and he wanted to stay as anonymous as possible. He also wanted to get back to his hotel room quickly and was worried that he’d have to wait a long time for a train to come. But someone upstairs must’ve been watching over him tonight, making sure everything went his way, because moments after
he arrived on the platform a train pulled into the station. He got on one of the cars toward the back of the train and sat at the far end, near the door leading to the next car. There were several other people in the car, but they didn’t even seem to notice Peter was there.