The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  Nora’s hands moved to the bottom of the window, efficient little hands, and pushed it up. She thrust her left leg through the frame and saw it outlined against the grass below, her slim leg encased in blue denim, her ankle, her narrow, sockless foot in a brown basket-weave loafer. Her leg seemed entirely surreal, suspended above the grass. What would it do next, this entertaining leg?

  The entertaining leg strained toward the strip of green between the building and the concrete path, and, when she pushed her bottom over the windowsill, abruptly landed on the grass. Awkwardly, she pulled her right leg through the window. As soon as she hopped backwards, Dick Dart flew face first through the empty space, the revolver clutched to his chest. He got his feet under him in midair, landed so close to her that she felt the shock in the earth, spun her around, and jabbed the gun into her back.

  “Keys,” Dart said. She reached in her pocket and pulled them out as she trotted toward the car. “Get in and drive. Go!” He was already sliding into the passenger seat.

  Sweating, Nora backed out of the parking space. “You want me to take that little road?”

  “What a piece of shit you drive. We’re going to have to trade up. Faster, faster. When you get to the end of this street, turn left and get to I-95.”

  Nora slowed down for the stop sign at the end of the road, and Dart swore and held the gun to her head. Nora pressed the accelerator, rocketed past the stop sign, and turned left. Holding the gun to her head, Dart checked the rear window and whooped. “They’re not behind us! Those dummies are still talking to the door!” He lowered the gun and slapped his knee. “Hah! They couldn’t get through the reporters. Shows you how shitty the press in this country is.” He grinned at her. A stench of sweat, oil, bad breath, and secret dirt floated out of him. “Brighten up, you’re on the road with Dick Dart, it’s an adventure.”

  Traveling at sixty miles an hour down a tree-lined, completely foreign street she knew she had seen dozens of times, Nora barely took in his words. Her hands had clamped to the wheel, her teeth were gritted, and her eyes felt peeled. She ran two more stop signs. Where was I-95?

  “I knew we were connected the first time I saw you. I’m protected, I’m guided, and nothing bad is ever going to happen to me. What the fuck are you doing?” He rammed the revolver’s barrel into her ear. “Stop, damn you.”

  Nora slammed her foot on the brake. Her hands shook, and her throat had constricted.

  “Where are you going? Hardly the time for the scenic route.” Metal ground into her ear.

  “I don’t remember how to get there,” she said.

  “Cool under fire, are we?” He glanced at the rear window, then removed the gun. “Back up past the stop sign, turn right. Go to Station Road, turn left. We want north, toward New Haven.”

  She backed up and made the turn toward Station Road. In the distance, sirens wailed.

  “Step on it, bitch, you cost us about thirty seconds. Move it!”

  Nora hit the accelerator, and the Volvo jolted forward. At the next stop sign, she nipped past a Dodge van just entering the intersection. The driver hit the horn and held it down. “Asshole,” said Dart. “Blow these guys off, run around them.”

  Two cars proceeded down the road ahead of them. The sirens seemed to get nearer. A man in cycling shorts and a helmet rode a bicycle toward them in the center of the opposite lane. “What about—”

  “Go through the dumb fuck.”

  Nora accelerated into the cyclist’s lane. The man driving the car in front of them turned his head to stare, the surprise on his face nothing compared with the astonishment on the cyclist’s. Nora honked. The man, who had something like five seconds in which to decide what he wanted to do, wasted two of them on wagging his index finger and shouting. Nora locked her elbows, stretched her mouth taut, and uttered a high-pitched, panicked whine.

  “Bye-byeee,” Dart sang.

  The cyclist wrenched himself sideways and disappeared from the windshield a moment before being struck by the Volvo. Nora twisted her head. She had a momentary glimpse of man and bicycle entangled at the bottom of a shallow, grassy ditch, then blew past the second car at seventy miles an hour.

  “Hope he broke his dumb neck,” Dart said. “Good work, kiddo. But if you stop for the Station Road light, I’ll shoot off your right nipple, am I understood?”

  Nora blasted up a little rise, and at the top felt the car leave the road for a second before thumping back down. Dick Dart yipped and waved the revolver. Two blocks away, at the end of the empty road, the traffic light burned red. Cars streamed in both directions through the intersection.

  “I can’t do this.”

  “Poor baby, you’ll miss that nipple. Gonna smart, too. But you know what?” He patted her on the top of her head. “I bet it turns green before we get there. If I win, you have to tell me everything you did to Natalie Weil.”

  “If you lose, we get turned into tomato soup.” She roared through an intersection, and one block separated them from the traffic light.

  “C’est la vie.”

  Making a low sound in her throat, Nora straightened her arms and locked her elbows.

  “Slow down a little for the turn.” Dart sounded completely calm.

  Nora slammed her foot on the brake, and her chest bumped the wheel. Dick Dart, who had been lounging back in his seat, slipped forward and down until his knees hit the dashboard. The car slewed halfway around and shot out into the intersection just as the light turned green. Dart pushed himself back into his seat and grabbed the door handle. Nora hauled on the wheel and brought the car into line.

  “Hooray! Nora keeps her nipple,” Dart shouted. “Personally, I’m very happy about that.”

  He’s happy about that? Nora thought. She said, “I have to slow down—look at all these cars.” A line of automobiles was strung out in packs of two and three on the long four-lane straightaway of Station Road.

  “Pass ’em, crank it up and pass ’em, I’m not kidding. We get on the expressway, we’re outta here. Then you can tell me about Natalie Weil.”

  The next four minutes were a blur of honking horns, startled faces, waving fists, and accidents averted only by the last-second recognition on the part of other drivers that, yes, the woman driving the Volvo wagon in the oncoming lane really did intend to keep moving. Several times, Nora’s insistence on forward progress caused some minor fender damage to the vehicles of the drivers who had to accommodate the drivers who had to accommodate her. Finally, she crossed laterally over the right lanes in another outraged din and twirled onto the ramp to the northbound lanes of the expressway. What seemed to be four solid lanes of cars and trucks racing in the direction of Hartford and New Haven appeared before her. Nora closed her eyes and kept her foot down on the accelerator. When she opened them three long seconds later, she found herself about to smash into the rear end of a sixteen-wheeler with huge BACK OFF, DUMMY mud flaps. She backed off.

  A state police car with a flashing light bar screamed toward them on the other side of the divider and flew past.

  “You want to continue your criminal career, you could always get a job as a getaway driver. Now we want to move along a little less conspicuously before we turn into Cousin Lenny’s.”

  This was the restaurant where Davey had convinced himself of her innocence while eating meat loaf submerged under ketchup.

  “Why there?”

  “Every cop in the state—fuck, every cop in the Northeast—is looking for this Swedish piece of shit. Nora, sweetie, if you’re going to be a getaway artist, you have to learn how to think like one.”

  I’m not your sweetie, she thought.

  “Okay, tell me what you did to Natalie Weil.”

  He was leaning against the passenger door, smirking.

  “How do you know about her? You were in a cell for two days.”

  “When I wasn’t discussing my hobbies with nauseating Leo Morris, that dishonest squirrel-eyed fart, I spent a lot of time talking with Westerholm’s fine young
officers. They told me about the other interesting matter taking place in the station. I heard that the station commander thought you kidnapped Ms. Weil and the chief of detectives thought you were innocent.”

  “They told you that?” asked Nora, aghast.

  “If I happened to be the murderer of several of Westerholm’s most notable bitches, a matter I strenuously denied, though not to you, of course, if I happened to be the celebrity in question, I would undoubtedly be interested in learning that I had inspired a copycat. Not just any old copycat, no no, but the delightful Nora Chancel, wife to pretty but ineffectual Davey Chancel. Needless to say, I was honored. Leo Morris, on the other hand, did not take the news as happily as I did.”

  “Leo Morris knew?”

  “I told him. He was not delighted by the prospect of mounting your defense. In fact, he dislikes you, your husband, and the entire Chancel clan.”

  “Leo Morris?”

  “Let us not wander from the point. You did it, didn’t you? You beat the crap out of that little asshole. You locked her up and did nasty stuff to her.”

  Nora did not respond for a second, and then said, “Yes. I beat the crap out of her, and then I dragged her into a filthy room and did nasty stuff to her.”

  “What did she do to you?”

  “She slept with my husband.”

  “Were you going to kill her?” Dart had become less offhand.

  “I could hardly let her go, could I?”

  “What an event! My opposite number, my female self! It doesn’t mean I won’t kill you, but I’m thrilled.”

  “Why break me out of jail if you’re going to kill me?”

  “If you’re a good girl I might keep you around.”

  “You could travel faster on your own.”

  “What would you do if I let you go?”

  “Get some money from a cash machine, I guess, and go to New York. Figure out a way to get in touch with Davey.”

  “You wouldn’t last a day. You’d be standing in a phone booth a block away from the cash machine, trying to sweet-talk nebbishy Davey Chancel into sending you your favorite Ann Taylor dress, and all of a sudden a hundred cops would be aiming guns at you. Listen, you have to learn to think in a whole new way. In the meantime, I can keep you out of trouble.”

  “This is your idea of staying out of trouble?”

  “This is my idea of staying out of prison,” he said. “There’s one other reason I want to keep you around for a while.”

  The skin on the nape of her neck contracted. She glanced sideways to see him leaning against the door, his hands folded on one knee and his mouth in a twist of a smile. “What would that be?”

  “Unlike you, I have a plan. You have this quality—what to call it?—a sort of a peasant forthrightness, which I see opening necessary doors.”

  “Which doors?”

  He placed his index finger to his smiling lips.

  “What’s this plan?”

  “I suppose I can give you the broad outlines. We are going to go to Massachusetts and kill a couple of old farts. Here comes that disgusting restaurant. Turn into the lot.”

  Nora flicked the turn indicator and changed lanes. The huge sign, COUSIN LENNY’S FOOD GAS, floated toward them.

  “Can I ask you another question?”

  “Ask.”

  “How did you know I wear Ann Taylor dresses?”

  “Nora, my love, I spend my entire life doing nothing but talking to women. I know everything.”

  “Can I ask you another one?”

  “As long as it isn’t tedious.”

  Nora turned onto the access road into Cousin Lenny’s parking lot. “Holly Fenn said one detail about those murders was never released to the press. What was it?”

  “Ah, my little signature. I cut them open and took out most of their internal organs. Let me tell you, you learn a lot more doing that than you do from anatomy books. Okay, go over there to the far side, and we’ll wait for the right donor to come along.”

  Nora advanced down a row of parked cars to the far end of the lot. Concrete barriers stood before a line of green Dumpsters. Behind the Dumpsters a weedy field extended toward a distant windbreak of gaunt trees.

  “Back in,” Dart said. “We want to be able to see our prospective benefactors. Weigh their advantages and disadvantages.”

  “You know how to do that thing with the wires?”

  “If I knew how to hot-wire a car, we’d already be in a car on our way to Fairfield. But we’re not, are we, dearest Nora? No no, no no. We desire the keys to our new vehicle, and therefore we must take them from the hands of the temporary owner. We prefer an elderly person who trembles at the prospect of violence.” He leaned forward, put his hands on the dash, and looked from side to side. His right hand held the revolver, index finger inside the trigger guard. “The constables are bound to show up soon. We need our benefactor, and we need him now.”

  “Don’t kill anybody,” Nora said. “Please.”

  “Little Miss Failed Executioner. Excuse me.” He scanned the lot again. “Hello, hello. What do we have here? A definite possibility.” A long, black Lincoln driven by an elderly man with a round, bald head moved toward them through the sunlight. Beside the driver sat a young woman with shoulder-length dark hair. “Daddy Warbucks and his trophy bimbo,” said Dart. “Two-for-one sale.”

  “Everybody in the restaurant would hear the shots.”

  “And pretend they didn’t.”

  The Lincoln backed carefully into the second of three empty spaces. “The man loves his vehicle,” said Dart. He fastened his hand around Nora’s wrist. “My side.” He pulled her toward him and slid the hand holding the revolver into his jacket pocket.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Diddums widdums hurtum booboo?” He kept his hand around her wrist as Nora squirmed out of the car, and pulled her along behind him toward the Lincoln. “I start to run, you start to run, got it?”

  She nodded.

  Dart dragged her another two yards, then stopped moving. “What the hell?”

  The bald man was gazing at the young woman with an expression of absolute innocence. The woman gestured” the man smiled. Pulling Nora behind him, Dart walked slowly toward the Lincoln. The woman smacked her palm against her forehead, opened her door, got out, and resolved into a fourteen-year-old girl in a tight white jersey, cutoff jeans, and platform espadrilles. Without bothering to close her door, she loped toward the entrance to the restaurant. In a seersucker suit, a starched white shirt, and a navy blue necktie, the old man sat peacefully behind the wheel of his car.

  “Allah is good, praise be to Allah.” Dart jerked Nora across the asphalt to the open door. He bent down and said, “Greetings.”

  The old man blinked his shining blue eyes at Dick Dart. “Greetings to you, sir. Can you help me?”

  “I intend to do just that,” Dart said. His hand hung suspended within his pocket, the revolver bulging the fabric.

  “I do not remember who I am. Also, I have no idea where I am or how I got here. Do you know if this is my car?”

  “No, old buddy, this one’s mine,” Dart said. The hand came out of his jacket pocket, and the bottom half of his suit jacket swung forward. “But I saw you come in, and I can tell you where yours is.”

  “Goodness, I do apologize. I can’t imagine how I came to . . . I hope you didn’t imagine that I intended to steal your car.” The old man got out and stood blinking benignly in the sun. “I have a granddaughter, I know that much, and I seem to have the impression that she was with me just now.”

  “She went into the restaurant,” Nora said.

  “Goodness. I had better go in and look for her. Where did you say my car was?”

  “Other end of the lot.” Dart glared at Nora. “Can’t miss it. Bright red Cadillac.”

  “Oh, my. A Cadillac. Imagine that.”

  Dart took Nora’s hand and pulled her toward the open door. “Miles to go before we sleep. Better find your car befor
e you look for your granddaughter.”

  “Yes.” The old man marched a few paces across the lot, then turned around, smiling. “Miles to go before I sleep. That’s Robert Frost.”

  Dart got into the Lincoln. For a moment, the old man looked disappointed, but the smile returned, and he waved at them before resuming his march toward a nonexistent red Cadillac.

  Dart spun the car toward the expressway. “God, it’s even full of gas.” Then he snarled at Nora. “Why did you tell the old zombie about his granddaughter?”

  “I—”

  “Don’t bother, I already know. You felt sorry for him. We’re the two most wanted people on earth, and you take time off to do social work.”

  He moved smoothly out into the traffic. Cool air streamed from vents on the dashboard. “That was so beautiful I can’t stay mad. ’Can you help me?’ I almost fainted. He asked me if this was his car!” Dart tilted back his head and released a series of laughs abrupt as gunfire. “He gave it to me!” More laughter. “See that big goofy face? Old fuck looked like a blank tape.”

  “You’re right,” Nora said.

  “Check the glove compartment and find out his name from the no-fault slip.”

  Nora opened the glove compartment and stared at what was within. A fat, shiny, black leather wallet sat beside a tall stack of bills held together by a rubber band. “You’re about to get a lot happier.”

  “Why?” Nora removed the wallet and the money from the glove compartment. “Oh. My. God. Look at that. How much is it?”

  A wad of bills distended the wallet’s money compartment. She riffled them, hundreds and fifties and twenties. Then she pulled the rubber band off the stack. “An amazing amount.”

  Dart yelled at her to count it. Nora began adding up denominations—twenty thousand in hundreds, a thousand in fifties, and five hundred in twenties.

  “Twenty-one thousand, five hundred dollars? Who the hell was this guy?”