by Dean Koontz
in the basement to finish packing, then brought up his suitcases and put them by the back door. He was eager to get going, because the weather was bad and he had a long drive back to New York, wasn’t likely to get there until two in the morning at the earliest. But Dad didn’t want to see him leave. God, he loved P.J. so much. Dad brought out his scrapbooks about all those high-school and college football triumphs, wanted to reminisce. And P.J. gives me this wink, like to say, Hell, what’s another half hour matter if it makes him happy? He and Dad went into the living room to sit on the sofa and look through the scrapbooks, and I decided I could save P.J. some time later by putting his suitcases in the trunk of his car. His keys were right there on the kitchen counter.”
Celeste said, “I’m so sorry, Joey. I’m so, so sorry.”
He hadn’t become desensitized to the sight of the murdered woman in the bloodstained plastic tarp. The thought of what she’d suffered was enough to make him sick to his stomach, weigh down his heart with anguish, and thicken his voice with grief, even though he didn’t know who she was. But he could not get up and turn his back on her. For the moment he felt that his rightful place was on his knees at her side, that she deserved no less than his attention and his tears. Tonight, he needed to be the witness for her that he had failed to be twenty years ago.
How strange that he had repressed all memory of her for two decades—yet now, in this replay of that worst night of his life, she had been dead only a few hours.
Whether by twenty years or by a few hours, however, he was too late to save her.
“The rain had let up a little,” he continued, “so I didn’t even bother to put on my hooded windbreaker. Just snatched the keys off the counter, grabbed both suitcases, and took them out to his car. It was parked behind mine at the end of the driveway, in back of the house. I guess maybe Mom must’ve said something to P.J., I don’t know, but somehow he realized what was happening, what I was doing, and he left Dad with the scrapbooks to come after me, stop me. But he didn’t get to me in time.”
… a thin but bitterly cold rain, the blood-filtered light from the trunk bulbs and P.J. standing there as if the whole world hasn’t just fallen apart, and Joey saying again, “I only wanted to help.”
P.J. is wide-eyed, and for an instant Joey wants desperately to believe that his brother is also seeing the woman in the trunk for the first time, that he is shocked and has no idea how she got in there. But P.J. says, “Joey, listen, it isn’t what you think. I know it looks bad, but it isn’t what you think.”
“Oh, Jesus, P.J. Oh, God!”
P.J. glances toward the house, which is only fifty or sixty feet away, to be sure that neither of their parents has come out onto the back porch. “I can explain this, Joey. Give me a chance here, don’t go bugshit on me, give me a chance.”
“She’s dead, she’s dead.”
“I know.”
“All cut up.”
“Easy, easy. It’s okay.”
“What’ve you done? Mother of God, P.J., what’ve you done?”
P.J. crowds close, corners him against the back of the car. “I haven’t done anything. Not anything I should rot in jail for.”
“Why, P.J. ? No. Don’t even try. You can’t … there can’t be a why, there can’t be a reason that makes any sense. She’s dead in there, dead and all bloody in there.”
“Keep your voice down, kid. Get hold of yourself.” P.J. grips his brother by the shoulders, and amazingly Joey isn’t repelled by the contact. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t touch her.”
“She’s there, P.J., you can’t say she isn’t there.”
Joey is crying. The cold rain beats on his face and conceals his tears, but he is crying nonetheless.
P.J. shakes him lightly by the shoulders. “Who do you think I am, Joey? For Christ’s sake, who do you think I am? I’m your big brother, aren’t I? Still your big brother, aren’t I? You think I went away to New York City and changed into someone else, something else, some monster?”
“She’s in there,” is all Joey can say.
“Yeah, all right, she’s in there, and I put her in there, but I didn’t do it to her, didn’t hurt her.”
Joey tries to pull away.
P.J. grips him tightly, presses him against the rear bumper, nearly forcing him backward into the open trunk with the dead woman. “Don’t go off halfcocked, kid. Don’t ruin everything, everything for all of us. Am I your big brother? Don’t you know me any more? Haven’t I always been there for you? I’ve always been there for you, and now I need you to be there for me, just this once.”
Half sobbing, Joey says, “Not this, P.J. I can’t be there for this. Are you crazy?”
P.J. speaks urgently, with a passion that rivets Joey: “I’ve always taken care of you, always loved you, my little brother, the two of us against the world. You hear me? I love you, Joey. Don’t you know I love you?” He lets go of Joey’s shoulders and grabs his head. P.J.’s hands are like the jaws of a vise, one pressed against each of Joey’s temples. His eyes seem to be full of pain more than fear. He kisses Joey on the forehead. The fierce power with which P.J. speaks and the repetition of what he says are hypnotic, and Joey feels as though he’s half in a trance, so deeply in P.J.’s thrall that he can’t move. He’s having difficulty thinking clearly. “Joey, listen, Joey, Joey, you’re my brother—my brother!—and that means everything to me, you’re my blood, you’re a part of me. Don’t you know I love you? Don’t you know? Don’t you know I love you? Don’t you love me?”
“Yes, yes.”
“We love each other, we’re brothers.”
Joey is sobbing now. “That’s what makes it so hard.”
P .J. still holds him by the head, eye to eye with him in the cold rain, their noses almost touching. “So if you love me, kid, if you really love your big brother, just listen. Just listen and understand how it was, Joey. Okay? Okay? Here’s how it was. Here’s what happened. I was driving out on Pine Ridge, the old back road, cruising like we used to cruise in high school, going nowhere for no reason. You know the old road, how it winds all over, one damn twist and turn after another, so I’m coming around a turn, and there she is, there she is, running out of the woods, down a little weedy slope, onto the road. I hit the brakes, but there’s no time. Even if it hadn’t been rainy, there wouldn’t have been time to stop. She’s right in front of me, and I hit her, she goes down, goes under the car, and I drive right over her before I get stopped.”
“She’s naked, P .J. I saw her, part of her, in the trunk there, and she’s naked.”
“That’s what I’m telling you, if you’ll listen. She’s naked when she comes out of the woods, naked as the day she was born, and this guy is chasing her.”
“What guy?”
“I don’t know who he was. Never saw him before. But the reason she doesn’t see the car, Joey, the reason is because just then she’s glancing back at this guy, running for all she’s worth and glancing back to see how close he is, and she runs right in front of the car, looks up and screams just as I hit her. Jesus, it was awful. It was the worst thing I hope I ever see, ever happens to me my whole life. Hit her so hard I knew I must’ve killed her.”
“Where’s this guy that was chasing her?”
“He stops when I hit her, and he’s stunned, standing there on the slope. When I get out of the car, he turns and runs back to the trees, into the trees, and I realize I gotta try to nail the bastard, so I go after him, but he knows the woods around there and I don’t. He’s gone by the time I make it up the slope and into the trees. I go in after him, ten yards, maybe twenty, along this deer trail, but then the trail branches off, becomes three paths, and he could’ve followed any of them, no way for me to know which. With the storm, the light was bad, and in the woods it’s like dusk. With the rain and the wind, I can’t hear him running, can’t follow him by sound. So I go back to the road, and she’s dead, just like I knew she’d be.” P.J. shudders at the memory and closes his eyes. He presses
his forehead to Joey’s. “Oh, Jesus, it was terrible, Joey, it was terrible what the car did to her and what he’d done to her before I ever came along. I was sick, threw up in the road, puked my guts out.”
“What’s she doing in the trunk?”
“I had the tarp. I couldn’t leave her there.”
“You should’ve gone for the sheriff.”
“I couldn’t leave her there alone on the road. I was scared, Joey, confused and scared. Even your big brother can get scared.” P.J. raises his head from Joey’s, lets go of him, gives him a little space for the first time. Looking worriedly toward the house, P.J. says, “Dad’s at the window, watching us. We stand here like this much longer, he’s going to come out to see what’s wrong.”
“So maybe you couldn’t leave her there on the road, but after you put her in the trunk and came back to town, why didn’t you go to the sheriff’s office?”
“I’ll explain it all, tell you the whole thing,” P.J. promises. “Let’s just get in the car. It looks strange, us standing here in the rain so long. We get in the car, turn on the engine, the radio, then he’ll think we’re just having a private chat, a brother thing.”
He puts one suitcase in the trunk with the dead woman. Then the other. He slams the trunk lid.
Joey can’t stop shaking. He wants to run. Not to the house. Into the night. He wants to sprint into the night, through Asherville and across the whole county, on to places he’s never been, to towns where no one knows him, on and on into the night. But he loves P.J., and P.J. has always been there for him, so he’s obligated at least to listen. And maybe it’ll all make sense. Maybe it isn’t as bad as it looks. Maybe there’s hope for a good brother who will take the time to listen. He’s only being asked for time, to listen.
P.J. locks the trunk and takes the keys out of it. He puts his hand against the back of Joey’s neck and squeezes lightly, partly as a gesture of affection, partly to urge him to move. “Come on, kid. Let me tell you about it, all about it, and then we’ll try to figure out what’s the right thing to do. Come on, in the car. It’s just me, just me, and I need you, Joey.”
So they get in the car.
Joey takes the passenger seat.
The car is cold, and the air is damp.
P.J. starts the engine. Turns on the heater.
The rain begins to fall harder than before, a real downpour, and the world dissolves beyond the windows. The interior of the car seems to shrink around them, humid and intimate. They are in a steel cocoon, waiting to metamorphose into new people and be reborn into an unguessable future.
P.J. tunes the radio until he finds a station that is coming in clear and strong.
Bruce Springsteen. Singing about loss and the difficulty of redemption.
P.J. turns down the volume, but the music and the words are as melancholy when played softly as they are when played louder.
“I figure the sonofabitch must’ve kidnapped her,” P.J. says, “been holding her somewhere in the woods, in a shack or a hole somewhere, raping her, torturing her. You read about that sort of thing. Year by year there’s more of it. But who’d ever think it would happen here, in a place like Asherville? She must’ve gotten away from him somehow when he let his guard down.”
“What did he look like?”
“Rough.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Dangerous. He looked dangerous, a little crazed. He was a big guy, maybe six four, a good two hundred forty pounds. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t catch up with him. He could’ve creamed me, Joey, that’s how big he was. I’d probably be dead now if I’d caught up with him. But I had to try, couldn’t just let him run away without trying to bring him down. Big guy with a beard, long greasy hair, wearing dirty jeans, a blue flannel shirt with the tail hanging out.”
“You have to take her body to the sheriff, P.J. You have to do that right now.”
“I can’t, Joey. Don’t you see? It’s too late now. She’s in my trunk. It could look like I was hiding her there until you found her by accident. All sorts of interpretations could be put on it—and none of them good. And I don’t have any proof that I saw the guy chasing her.”
“They’ll find proof. His footprints, for one thing. They’ll search the woods out there, find the place where he was keeping her.”
P.J. shakes his head. “In this weather, the footprints have all been washed away. And maybe they won’t find where he was keeping her, either. There’s no guarantee. I just can’t take the chance. If they don’t turn up any proof, then all they have is me.”
“If you didn’t kill her, they can’t do anything to you.”
“Get serious, kid. I wouldn’t be the first guy to be railroaded for something he never did.”
“That’s ridiculous! P.J., everyone around here knows you, likes you. They know what kind of guy you are. They’ll all give you the benefit of the doubt.”
“People can turn on you for no reason, even people you’ve been good to all your life. Wait till you’ve been away at college longer, Joey. Wait until you’ve lived awhile in a place like New York City. Then you’ll see how hateful people can be, how they can turn on you for little or no reason.”
“Folks around here will give you the benefit of the doubt,” Joey insists.
“You didn’t.”
Those two words are like a pair of body blows, a one-two punch of truth that leaves Joey deeply shaken and more confused than ever. “God, P.J., if only you’d left her back there on the road.”
P.J. slumps in the driver’s seat and covers his face with his hands. He’s weeping, Joey has never seen him weep before. For a while P.J. can’t speak, nor can Joey. When at last P.J. finds his voice, he says, “I couldn’t leave her. It was so awful—you didn’t see, you can’t know how awful. She’s not just a body, Joey. She’s somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister. I thought about what if some other guy had hit her and I was her brother, what would I want him to do in my place. And I’d have wanted him to take care of her, to cover her nakedness. I’d never want him to just leave her there like a piece of meat. Now I see … maybe it was a mistake. But at the time I was rattled. I should have handled it differently. But it’s too late now, Joey.”
“If you don’t take her to the sheriff’s office and tell them what happened, then the guy with the beard, the long hair—he’s going to get away. Then he’ll do to some other girl the same as he did to this one.”
P.J. lowers his hands from his face. His eyes are pools of tears. “They’ll never catch him anyway, Joey. Don’t you see that? He’s long gone by now. He knows I saw him, can describe him. He wouldn’t have hung around these parts ten minutes. He’s out of the county by now, running fast as he can for the state line, headed for someplace as far away from here as he can get. You better believe it. Probably already shaved off his beard, hacked at his long hair, looks totally different now. What little I can tell the cops won’t help them find him, and I sure as hell can’t testify to anything that would convict the bastard.”
“It’s still the right thing to do—going to the sheriff.”
“Is it? You’re not thinking about Mom and Dad. Maybe if you thought about them, it wouldn’t be such a right thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m telling you, kid, when the cops don’t have anybody else to pin this on, they’ll try to pin it on me. They’ll try real hard. Imagine the stories in the paper. The star football player, the local boy who made good and won a full scholarship to a big-time university, gets caught with a naked woman in the trunk of his car, tortured to death. Think about it, for God’s sake! The trial’s going to be a circus. Biggest circus in the history of the county, maybe the state.”
Joey feels as though he is repeatedly throwing himself against a giant, furiously spinning grindstone. He is being worn down by his brother’s logic, by the sheer power of his personality, by his unprecedented tears. The longer Joey struggles to discern the truth, the more confused and anguished he bec
omes.
P.J. switches off the radio, turns sideways in his seat, leans toward his brother, and his gaze is unwavering. It’s just the two of them and the sound of the rain, nothing to distract Joey from the fiercely persuasive rhythms of P.J.’s voice. “Please, please, listen to me, kid. Please, for Mom’s sake, for Dad’s, think hard about this and don’t ruin their lives just because you can’t grow up and shake loose of some altar-boy idea of what’s right and wrong. I didn’t hurt this girl in the trunk, so why should I risk my whole future to prove it? And suppose I come out all right, the jury does the right thing and finds me innocent. Even then there’ll be people around here, lots of people, who’ll continue to believe I did it, believe I killed her. All right, I’m young and educated, so I get out of here, go anywhere, start a new life where no one knows that I was once tried for murder. But Mom and Dad are middle-aged and dirt poor, and what they have now is pretty much all they’re ever going to have. They don’t have the resources to pull up stakes and move. They don’t have the options that you and I have, and they never will. This four-room shack they call a house—it isn’t much, but it’s a roof over their heads. They almost don’t have a pot to piss in, but at least they’ve always had a lot of friends, neighbors they care about and who care about them. But that’ll change even if I’m cleared in a courtroom.” The arguments rolled from him, a persuasive tide of words. “The suspicion is going to come between them and their friends. They’ll be aware of the whispering … the unceasing gossip. They won’t be able to move away, because they won’t be able to sell this dump, and even if they could sell it, they don’t have any equity to speak of. So here they’ll stay, trapped, gradually withdrawing from friends and neighbors, more and more isolated. How can we let that happen, Joey? How can we let their lives be ruined when I’m innocent in the first place? Jesus, kid, okay, I made a mistake not leaving her back there and not taking her to the cops after I wrapped her up and put her in the trunk, so go get a gun and shoot me if you have to, but don’t kill Mom and Dad. Because that’s what you’ll be doing, Joey. You’ll be killing them. Slowly.”
Joey cannot speak.
“It’s so easy to destroy them, me. But it’s even easier to do the right thing, Joey, even easier just to believe.”
Pressure. Crushing pressure. Joey might as well be in a deep-sea submersible instead of a car, at the bottom of a trench four miles under the ocean. Thousands upon thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch. Testing the integrity of the car. Bearing down on him until he feels as though he will implode.
At last, when he finds his voice, it sounds younger than his years and dismayingly equivocal: “I don’t know, P.J. I don’t know.”
“You hold my life in your hands, Joey.”
“I’m all mixed up.”
“Mom and Dad. In your hands.”
“But she’s dead, P.J. A girl is dead.”
“That’s right. Dead. And we’re alive.”
“But … what will you do with the body?”
When he hears himself ask that question, Joey knows that P.J. has won. He feels suddenly weak, as if he is a small child again, and he is ashamed of his weakness. Bitter remorse floods him, as corrosively painful as an acid, and he can deal with the agony only by shutting down a part of his mind, switching off his emotions. A grayness, like a fall of ashes from a great fire, sifts down through his soul.
P.J. says, “Easy. I could dump the body somewhere it’ll never be found.”
“You can’t do that to her family. They can’t spend the rest of their lives
wondering what happened to her. They won’t ever have any hope of peace if they think she’s … somewhere in pain, lost.”
“You’re right. Okay. I’m not myself. Obviously, I should leave her where she can be found.”
The internal grayness—sifting, sifting—gradually anesthetizes Joey. Minute by minute he feels less, thinks less. This strange detachment is vaguely disturbing on one level, but it is also a great blessing, and he embraces it.
Aware of a new flatness in his voice, Joey says, “But then the cops might find your fingerprints on the tarp. Or find something else, like some of your hair. Lots of ways they might connect you to her.”
“Don’t worry about fingerprints. There aren’t any to find. I’ve been careful. There’s no other evidence either, none, no connections except …”
Joey waits with bleak resignation for his brother—his only and much loved brother—to finish that thought, because he senses that it will be the worst thing with which he has to deal, the hardest thing he will have to accept, other than the discovery of the brutalized body itself.
“… except I knew her,” says P.J.
“You knew her?”
“I dated her.”
“When?” Joey asks numbly, but he is almost beyond caring. Soon the deepening grayness in him will soften all the sharp edges of his curiosity and his conscience.
“My senior year in high school.”
“What’s her name?”
“A girl from Coal Valley. You didn’t know her.”
The rain seems as if it might never end, and Joey has no doubt that the night will go on forever.
P.J. says, “I only dated her twice. We didn’t hit it off. But you can see, Joey, how this will look to the cops. I take her body to the sheriff, they find out I knew her … they’ll use that against me. It’ll be that much harder to prove I’m innocent, that much worse for Mom and Dad and all of us. I’m between a rock and hard place, Joey.”
“Yes.”
“You see what I mean.”
“Yes.”
“You see how it is.”
“Yes.”
“I love you, little brother.”
“I know.”
“I was sure you’d be there for me when it counted.”
“All right.”
Deep grayness.
Soothing grayness.