The Suicide Motor Club (17 page)

JASPER COUNTY DEPUTY STEWART HENSON HELD A LONG-STANDING CONTEMPT
for the Avalon Garden of Wonders and Motor Lodge. Even when he was a kid and Arthur Britton himself used to serve hot dogs and hamburgers on Memorial Day, or play Santa Claus when the December sky wasn't spitting sleet or snow, or dress up like a tinpot King Arthur on summer days, the place felt just plain
off
. Stewart had ridden the Ferris wheel at the age of twelve and had observed that even with fresh paint on the outside, the insides of the cars had been rusty and creaky, full of sharp edges that promised lockjaw. Now, fourteen years later, three years into his service with the sheriff's department, he wished somebody would take a bulldozer and knock that damn wheel down, maybe just turn the whole place back into a field while they were at it. It was a magnet for trouble. People were always throwing roadkill into the pool or busting open the motel doors to smoke grass or just plain squat there until fined or, depending on the deputy's mood, jailed. The night before, a known busybody had called in about fireworks there, but the place had been dark and still when his buddy Mike went by, and he said he did a thorough walk-around. Yesterday the same caller had complained of gunshots, but the sheriff had considered the source and ignored the call. Mrs. Jackson would be phoning in again within
the week to report motorcycle gangs, or dogs barking, or maybe because the black bear that frightened her in March had come back, once again leaving tracks on neither yard nor porch, nor any mark at all upon the door she claimed he “beat on with his paws.”

Now Deputy Henson was stuck working night shift because Mike had had some kind of nervous breakdown. Got the idea he had a tick in his face nobody could see and scratched himself to pieces with his fingernails, then worked himself over with a pocketknife until he needed the ER in Joplin. Had poked himself all the way through the cheek and hurt his gums, they said. This was the kind of thing junkies did, but Mike wasn't like that. His wife had been hysterical from all the blood; she'd never seen anything like that in her life. But then her moving her momma in with them to eat them out of house and home might have had something to do with it; that woman could nag the wet out of water. His own wife knew where he stood on
her
momma, meaning standing on her momma didn't sound like such a bad idea. Maybe with golf shoes. He laughed about that, sitting in his cruiser behind the cottonwood stand two miles east of the Avalon Garden, poking the hard muscles under his shirt, then felt bad about laughing. He wasn't a perfect man, but at least he did sit-ups. Lots of them. That was pride, he knew that, and he felt bad about that, too, but only for a minute. And then he was thinking about the girl he should have married and how big her breasts got after her baby and wondering if maybe her once-pink nipples went brown and how nice it would be if he could see for himself. Before he could feel bad about that, he heard sirens in the distance. The radio crackled.

A red Pontiac possibly associated with a disappearance in St. Louis was heading east on 66 with two officers in pursuit.

Just as he was getting his mind out of Jane Richardson's brassiere, he noticed police lights bathing the fields behind him crimson, saw two sets of headlights coming. First, a dark shape that proved to be
the Pontiac in question blew by him at something like ninety-five with his headlights off. How was the driver seeing? Jed Milsap and Otto Van der Meer barreled after him in the other on-duty cruiser, sirens wailing, a Missouri state trooper taking up the rear. Stewart turned his ignition and hit his lights, spraying dirt behind him as he accelerated out of his hidey-hole.

If he'd had his mind on his work, he could have taken that GTO in the side as it went by, but then he didn't know if he really had the stones to ram a car going that fast; a guy doing forty on a country road was one thing, but anything could happen when you started kissing metal on the high end of the speedometer. He didn't much like the idea of getting shot at, either, but he'd take a shoot-out over a high-speed wreck. His right hand absently touched the wooden butt of his service revolver, then went back up to the steering wheel. He fell in behind the speeding cars, pushing his big Dodge 880 as hard as he could, wishing he had Milsap's lighter, newer pursuit-package Fury—that thing screamed.

He rushed by a couple of civilians who'd pulled over to let the chase go by, braking before the sharp curve near Outlook Road, then jamming it down again when 66 leveled out. That GTO was really eating up road. He had nearly caught up with the state boy playing caboose when he saw a dark shape nosing up behind him on his left, using the opposite lane.

A black Camaro SS with its lights off and tucked.

He barely had time to think
Shit they're together!
before the wicked thing had pushed into his rear bumper and spun him into a bewildering kaleidoscope of dust and receding sirens and oncoming headlights. He found himself sitting halfway across the seat with one shoe off, his tie up over his shoulder, and his hat on the passenger-side floor. The Dodge had stalled. Headlights filled his rear window, and soon a middle-aged guy with tortoiseshell glasses was peering at him
through the dust, asking him was he okay. He fumbled back into his seat, said, “Yeah, thanks, buddy, just get clear.”

The Good Samaritan was backing up when a white shape rushed up and knocked him down. A smallish man. The Camaro driver.

Henson reached for his service revolver but now his door was open and the man sat on his lap, looked him in the eye.

“Wow, big soft brain on you, huh?” he said. The thing's eyes took Deputy Henson in, welcoming and a little sad, eyes like Jesus in that Gethsemane painting but shining a little.

“Yes,” Henson said.

Henson felt safe and warm, as though the pale young man on his lap knew all his worst secrets and approved. The creature spoke and the words were alarming but made sense. He got off Henson's lap, spoke some more, and pointed at the road. The deputy stumbled first into the corn, then remembered his new job and waited by the road for headlights. He hoped he would survive. He was grateful for the messenger who was even now driving off in his cruiser, thank God for him. Bad things were afoot in Jasper County. Maybe the worst things ever.

—

LUTHER NIXON, NECK BRACE, AND ROB PICKED UP THE FIRST TAIL SOON AFTER
they crossed into Missouri; the deputy probably just wanted them for speeding—the GTO had been doing about eighty. Luther swore colorfully and started to pull over, putting on his blinker like a good boy, meaning to charm the cop and be on his way. Then he peeked in his rearview mirror and noticed a second cop riding shotgun in the cruiser, a quick-looking little '64 Fury. The charm was maybe still doable if he could get them both to look at him at once. That was when he saw the westbound state trooper put on his lights and make a U-turn. Somebody had been on the radio. Somebody knew his car. That changed the game completely.

“You fellas want to go for a ride?” he said into the rearview mirror, then opened up the four-hundred-cubic-inch V-8 and shot forward. Rob turned around in the backseat and looked at their pursuers, fishing for their eyes—he probably wouldn't be able to get a clean charm at this distance with a distracted subject, but if he did, he might be able to make him pull off or even wreck just by pointing. Neck Brace, sitting up front, grinned a childlike grin, his thick fingers working the pocks in his forearms like rosary beads.

Pretty soon a third cop was on their tail.

“Oh, I don't like this. I don't like three skeeters on my peter. Where th'fuck's Cole?”

They shot around a curve and Luther started to pull away from his pursuers; years on the track and the moonshine trail made him expert at the alchemy of brakes and gas on a tight turn.

“Should I shoot 'em?” Rob half shouted over the bellowing engine.

“Not less you hafta. Wrecks puzzle 'em, bullets stir 'em up.”

Luther checked the mirror in time to see the farthest set of headlights wink out.

“There's my beautiful Coley-Cole. That's how it gets done. Two I can get on top of. Whatcha think, big boy? Feel like goin' Geronimo on 'em?”

Luther slowed and downshifted, the big engine moaning, as he let his chasers edge closer. Neck Brace grinned harder, started shifting in his seat. The pursuit Fury, which had been holding a little gas back, now gunned forward and right, partly onto the shoulder, trying to get behind Luther and spin him out.

“Uh-uh,” Luther said, “no goddamn way,” and he shot into the opposite lane and punched his pedal again, forcing an oncoming car into the far ditch. Now he pulled a car length ahead of the cruiser and eased back right.

Neck Brace flowed out of his seat and grabbed the roof, worked
his legs out, all of this much faster than one might have thought possible for a creature of his dimensions. He turned his white moon-mask face back to the cars behind him.

—

INSIDE THE JASPER COUNTY CRUISER JUST BEHIND THE PONTIAC, DEPUTY MILSAP,
the armpits of his uniform sopping wet, said to Deputy Van der Meer, “Oh no. He ain't gonna.”

Turned out he was gonna.

The big, pale thing in the neck brace vaulted off the car and spun, awkward in shape but strangely balletic, grabbing his knees in midair, rolling so his back faced the oncoming vehicle. In the split second before impact, Deputy Van der Meer remembered grabbing his own knees just like that as he cannonballed into the pool on Memorial Day to splash his kids. The remembered taste of Budweiser flooded his mouth even as he saw the windshield shoot inward, how like water splashing, and felt his bowels loosen and saw the dirty garment of his long-dead two-hundred-fifty-pound killer so close he could almost count shirt threads.

—

LUTHER SAW ANOTHER CRUISER PARKED ACROSS BOTH LANES OF ROUTE 66
ahead, so he put the GTO in neutral and mashed the parking brake hard, jamming the steering wheel to the left. Tires screamed and smoked on the asphalt as he spun, whipping his nose around 180 degrees. He put it in gear and drove straight for the oncoming state trooper, who broke and veered right even as Luther went to his own right. The trooper attempted the same bootlegger's turn Luther had just executed but ended up spinning out mostly off the road before he got himself righted and rejoined pursuit of the GTO. The other trooper now joined him. Luther slowed, meaning to try to pick up Neck Brace,
who had just pried and unstuck himself from the wreck of the Fury, half naked, covered in the blood of two other men and limping hard, but he waved Luther off and crouched behind the steaming car where it lay on its side near a speed limit sign. Luther drove west, baiting the Missouri troopers rapidly approaching. Just as they passed the dead Fury, the huge, white, bloody thing in the neck brace dove from behind it and folded himself up under the oncoming left wheel of the lead car, which shot up into the air and landed hard on its roof, screaming like a dying thing as it slid, showering the pavement with sparks. The second trooper, skidding away from the big man on the road, who was impossibly reaching a white, hairy hand for his tire as if he meant to pull it off,

why isn't he dead

regained traction and turned his attention forward again just in time to see the oncoming Dodge 880 once driven by Deputy Henson of the Jasper County sheriff's department cross the middle lane. Just before he collided head-on with the other vehicle, the young trooper at the wheel took up the handset of his radio, saw the hawkish white face of the kamikaze barreling at him illuminated by his own headlights, which he had at some point flicked to bright.

He squawked the word “Vampire” into his radio.

And then he died a spectacular death.

—

THE CREATURE THEY CALLED NECK BRACE HAD A LOT OF WORK TO DO.

When his spine healed enough from the second break (the tire had been much worse than the windshield), he stripped a windshield wiper from the state trooper's vehicle he had flipped and jammed it through the eye of the squirming man still in that car and stirred until he stopped squirming. A farm truck rolled by, slaloming wrecked vehicles, looking for a place to pull over and help, but Neck Brace looked at the driver and waved him on, so he drove on with a spit bubble in
his mouth and later couldn't rightly say what he had seen. Neck Brace opened the trunk of the cruiser as much as the angle of the wreck would allow and fished road flares from among the gear that fell out. He lit these and spread them along the road. He gripped the flipped cruiser, gritted his teeth, and heaved, at last and at the outer limit of his strength pulling the car so it blocked both lanes. He walked toward the fire he saw, saw his friend Cole get small, wriggle halfway out of the wreck of two police cars, both of which had started to burn. Neck Brace ran now and pulled Cole the rest of the way out, pulled off Cole's smoldering jacket, pulled him off the road entirely.

“D'ya see that?” Cole slurred, his face half skull, the face of a man killed by road and metal.

Neck Brace nodded even though he hadn't seen.

He held the wet skin of Cole's face back on until it caught and healed. He propped Cole up until he felt Cole's shoulder right itself.

After a moment, Cole stood almost strong, slapped Neck Brace on the back.

“I think I mussed my hair,” he said.

He scanned the road for his Camaro SS, which Calcutta should be driving up by now, but all he saw was Luther and Rob in the GTO.

Picking up a very angry-looking Calcutta.

“It better not be,” he said. “It just had better not goddamn be.”

—

THE JASPER COUNTY DEPUTY STEPPED OUT OF THE CORN AND FLAGGED DOWN THE
young lady in the Volvo. She did not want to stop in such a wilderness, but the uniform reassured her and she complied.

“What is it, Officer?” she said.

“Bad wreck,” he said. She didn't care for how wild his eyes were. His name tag said
Henson
. “I need you to pull your car across and block the road.”