Joyride

by Jack Ketchum

  She got up.

  “Oh and by the way,” he said. “No 911s or anything, okay? I’m not stupid.”

  Her legs still felt shaky but they held her. She got to the phone and dialed. But she must have gotten the number wrong because the voice on the other end belonged to a little girl of maybe six or seven and there were no little girls at Lee’s office for god’s sake so she hung up.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I dialed wrong,” she said.

  He seemed to find that hilarious. “Jesus, Carole! You’re a mess! Calm down, will you? Come on. Give it another try.”

  “Can I…do you mind if I use the bathroom?”

  “After you call.” He laughed again. “It’ll add that element of…urgency.”

  She dialed again. This time she got it right. His secretary put her on hold for a moment and then he was on the line and she was telling him to please come home, please Lee, please, come home right away. She was begging again. While the man Wayne stared at her across the room and tapped his knee with the barrel of the .38.

  She heard Lee asking her what the hell was happening and why she was crying.

  She hadn’t even known she was crying. She hadn’t been aware.

  Hurry, she said.

  She hung up the phone and turned to the man on the couch. The man was probably ten years younger than she was. Thin. Wiry. Without the gun the man might not have been bad looking in an ordinary sort of way but the gun reminded her of Howard, the gun had the dark potent magic to deform the man and turn him ugly.

  “What…what do we do now?” she asked.

  He shrugged. Then he smiled. It was an oddly friendly smile.

  “We get to use the bathroom,” he said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “You,” Lee said.

  He knew the man immediately.

  His memory for faces was good. Besides, as bartenders go, the guy was memorable. He poured short and cheap and used far too much ice and never bought a round no matter how long you sat there. But for the life of him he couldn’t figure him here in this house. It was like seeing a movie star in Hoboken, New Jersey. He didn’t fit.

  “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

  The man just smiled and looked at Carole and sipped a tumbler of scotch. This one not so short at all.

  “Mr. Lock and I have been talking,” said Carole.

  He looked at her. She hadn’t looked this bad, this strung out, since the Notch.

  “He knows everything, Lee.”

  He couldn’t have heard correctly. Nobody knew. Not even the police. They’d spoken to no one. It was impossible.

  “Say that again?”

  “He knows everything.”

  He could see she was working hard at keeping herself under control. She sat with her legs crossed tight and her arms folded. Her face had that pinched look again. She was not drinking.

  Well, fuck this. He was.

  He put down the briefcase and went to the bar. The Glenfiddich was out. The guy was drinking Glenfiddich over ice. Which said something about the type of guy he was. Lee poured his neat. The shakes had reached into his hands all of a sudden, into his shoulders.

  “You want to explain that to me?” he said, not to Carole but to the man.

  “I saw it,” he said. “I watched you. The baseball bat. The rock. The clean-up. All of it. I was right over your heads, up on a ridge there. Then I went down to the stream. He’d already moved quite a ways, actually, by the time I got down there. I pushed him out into the middle of the stream. Figured I’d help out a little.”

  The whiskey burned only slightly. The man was enjoying this, leaning forward, smiling.

  “So what do you want? Money? How much?”

  The man just looked at him. He seemed amused.

  “Company, Lee” said the man. “All I want is company.”

  He was thinking about the gun in the drawer. He was thinking about ways to kill the man.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “Carole says that it was her husband you killed and that he deserved it, that there was no other way. That you’d tried the police and that you’d tried to bribe him off with money. I believe her. I see no reason not to. I know plenty of people who deserve to die. Plenty, believe me. But I don’t really care about any of that now.”

  He leaned forward even farther, intent. The black snub-nose pistol gripped tightly in his lap.

  “What I want to know from you, Lee, what I want to know right now is what it was like. See, I want you to tell me. I’ve really…wondered, you know?” He smiled.

  Lee looked deep into the smile and something in there scared him. Money, blackmail he could understand. It was the way of the world. It was business. But this was crazy.

  What was it like? They were in the company of some weird sick freak here.

  “Who knows?” the man said. “Maybe I’ll want to try it.”

  Lee just looked at him. And the man must have thought that he didn’t understand.

  “Killing somebody,” he said.

  Lee’s whiskey glass was empty. He put it down on the sideboard. He glanced at Carole. From the look of her, he guessed they were thinking along the same lines.

  He took a breath. Go on, he thought. Say it. Better the demon you know than the one you don’t know.

  “Are you talking about us?” he said.

  Lock laughed. Like this was very funny to him.

  “God, no! Never! You’re missing the point entirely. I want to know you guys. I respect you guys. What you did took incredible balls, incredible balls! I’m in awe of you two guys. I mean, look how well you did it. Even forgetting the little assist from me. I mean, you’re probably the last two people I’d want to kill. Honest!”

  The man looked down.

  Beast was nuzzling his pants leg.

  “Hey, kitty!”

  He reached down and scratched her ear.

  He didn’t know shit about cats. Probably didn’t like them either. He scratched her much too hard and too vigorously. Beast shot him a look and trotted away.

  He relaxed into the sofa. Sipped his whiskey.

  “Look, let’s begin at the beginning. You tell me all about it, I mean all about yourselves, and I’ll tell you all about me. We’ll understand one another in no time. You’ll see. Only, let’s do it in my car, okay? We’ll go for a little ride the three of us. It’s going to be a really nice night tonight. We’ll have a little dinner, take a little ride. And you can drive, Lee. You see? I even trust you with my Volvo. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  He stood up, the gun in a neutral position at his side. Lee found the word he’d been looking for to describe the man. The guy was cheerful. Relentlessly cheerful.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll buy you a drink. I bet you could use one.” He laughed. “I bet I scared the beejeesus out of you! Right, Carole?”

  Carole looked at Lee. He nodded.

  She stood up.

  “I’ll go get my jacket,” she said. She moved toward the stairs.

  “That’s where the gun is, isn’t it,” said Lock. “Upstairs.”

  Carole stopped and turned. “What gun?”

  He grinned. “Come on. I know you’ve got one somewhere. It’s up there, right? Well, bring it on down. The more the merrier!”

  He turned to Lee. “What is it? Colt? Magnum?”

  And then he looked back to Carole.

  “Please, guys,” he said. “We’re all gonna be friends here. I know you don’t exactly believe me on that yet, but you will. I’m making you a solemn promise. I’m not going to hurt you, either of you, as long as you don’t do something where I have to.

  “Now Lee’s right here not five feet away from me. I’m a very good shot. And I bet you’re not, Carole. So just go on up and bring it down. I trust you. Go ahead.”

  Lee watched her ascend the stairs. There was a slouch to her strong back that was depressingly familiar.

  She looked like she’d been b
eaten again, felt the pounding of rough hands against soft flesh.

  She was not going to try something. Not now. In her place he wouldn’t have either.

  They walked to the car. Lock had Carole’s jacket draped over the Magnum and it was trained on the center of Lee’s back. The .38 was in Lock’s back pocket. Just until you get to know me better, he’d said again. And he apologized.

  He’d admired the Magnum greatly and at length. Would they mind if they took it with them?

  That was fine with Lee. One more gun meant one more opportunity. Though so far the guy had covered all his bases neatly.

  He figured it couldn’t last. The guy would make a slip. They’d be able to get to one of the guns and then they’d face him down. He felt sure that faced down, Lock would fold.

  And then what? he thought.

  They couldn’t just run to the police and turn him in.

  Lock knew.

  And in a crunch Lee had no doubt that he would tell anybody and everybody exactly what he knew.

  The way out, of course, was to kill him. And kill him as soon as possible, before anybody could associate him and Carole to the man. While as far as anybody else knew they were still all strangers to each other.

  Could he do it? He felt pretty certain he could. The only question was how.

  It was not like Howard. This time he wouldn’t hesitate. The man was a lizard, crawled out from under a rock.

  Take your time, he thought. Think and keep thinking. And when you see something, move.

  “You parked pretty far away,” he said.

  Wayne smiled. “Well, I didn’t want to arouse any suspicions.”

  That was good. That was very good. He didn’t want to arouse any suspicions. They were walking four blocks through their own neighborhood, curbs empty everyplace you looked from their house all the way over to the Nichols’s house, they were walking all this way to get into a car that could have been parked right out in front of their own driveway.

  He didn’t want to arouse any suspicions.

  It’s a good sign, he thought. The guy is not all that organized.

  He’s got blank spots.

  Maybe he could use that.

  “I forgot to feed the cats,” said Carole.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lock said. “We won’t be gone that long. You drive, Lee. Okay?”

  He had never met anybody who jumped so hard and fast at getting on a first-name basis.

  It seemed important to him.

  He got into the driver’s seat, Carole silent beside him, looking as though she were hardly breathing.

  Lock—correction, Wayne—climbed in back.

  “So. Where to, Wayne?” he said.

  He could see the smile brighten through the rearview mirror.

  “Just drive, Lee,” he said. “Just drive.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Rule knocked. Number 2211 again. Twice in two days was his personal record for the place but he had a feeling he might be breaking that soon.

  The BMW and Edwards’s Porsche sat in the driveway.

  There was nobody home.

  He tore a leaf off his notepad and wrote Important, please call with his name and number and wedged it tightly between the door and casing trim.

  The stained glass sidelights on the door made him think of the dollhouse—he’d done those sidelights in clear thick plastic—and the dollhouse made him think of Chrissie and Ann in California.

  What time was it there, three o’clock? Ann would still be at her computer at the bank and Chrissie would be just getting out of school, going to her grandmother’s house or maybe to the Y after-school program.

  There was a time he’d have known which.

  It was no big thing, but he missed knowing.

  Get off it, he thought.

  You’re obsessing.

  He walked down the stairs. He gazed through the windows of the Porsche and the BMW. There was nothing much to see. The Porsche was neater than her BMW, which surprised him a little. Just a newspaper folded on the dashboard—while Carole’s car had cigarette wrappers, a crumpled-up piece of notepaper, something that looked like a stepped-on breath mint and a faceup Jefferson quarter on the floor and a small brown paper bag flattened on the passenger seat. Both cars were locked.

  He stepped past the hedges to the front bay window and looked inside. He could see two glasses on the sideboard in the living room, an indentation in the couch where somebody’d been sitting pretty recently and a brown leather briefcase set down in the middle of the room. It was not the usual place to leave a briefcase but apart from that things looked perfectly normal. In one of the glasses ice was melting.

  He’d just missed them.

  It was beginning to get dark. The investigation up at the Notch would be winding down. Covitski, who’d arrived an hour after Rule, was running the show up there now. He’d be calling in shortly.

  It was probably not worth waiting for them to return.

  He wondered whose car they were in. Who was keeping them company.

  The coroner’s report on Howard wouldn’t be on his desk until tomorrow morning earliest. He’d asked for a hurry-up. He even stood a chance of getting one because it was impossible to tell at this point if they were dealing with accidental death or homicide and there were not all that many deaths under questionable circumstances in this county. The coroner’s office would be interested in this one the same way a computer nerd would be interested in some exotic little bug in his machine. Something challenging for a change.

  Rule was rooting for simple death by misadventure. Carole Gardner had enough problems. Even if it turned out that Howard was killed by his goddamn ski instructor for zigging when he should have zagged any homicide investigation would inevitably start with her. They’d put her through the wringer. They had to.

  Meaning he had to.

  And he didn’t feel like doing that.

  He realized that in some ways this was personal. That money aside, Carole reminded him of Ann. He even thought they looked a little alike in some ways. It was probably why Ann was on his mind so much today. At least partly that.

  There were similarities. Ann’s husband, Chrissie’s father, had been a heavy drinker too. And abusive. He worked on a smaller scale than Howard. But then most people did.

  In her case it was mental abuse mostly. Ann hadn’t the brains to do a damn thing as far as he was concerned and Chrissie was just an accident of chemistry that in his view had turned into a demanding, whining little brat. When he was drunk he struck out. He hit. He did that a time or two. And then one night he sent his daughter reeling across the kitchen headfirst into the refrigerator door.

  Ann packed their bags and that was that.

  For sheer innovative nastiness Howard Gardner made Ann’s husband look like a punk but there were enough similarities between them so that he sympathized with the woman.

  Enough so that he wanted this fall of Gardner’s to be the final miscalculation of a guy with enough alcohol in his blood to fuel the Concorde. And nothing more.

  The coroner’s report would either say that or it wouldn’t. Until then there wasn’t much to do except head on back and wait for Covitski’s return and hopefully, Carole’s call. She’d never failed to return his messages in the past. He had no reason to suspect this was any different except for two cars sitting lonely in the driveway and a briefcase in the middle of the living room floor.

  And the fact that this time Howard was dead.

  He considered that. All the way back to the station he considered it.

  Howard was dead and you could say he’d been courting death for quite a while in various ways, and at 2211 there was nobody home.

  What did you do, Carole? he thought.

  Just what in hell did you do.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  They were on Interstate 89 heading toward Montpelier before she really started listening to what he was saying and even then it came upon her slowly, something about his mother and ne
ighbors and an old house over on Sycamore and two old men he’d read about in Waterbury who’d faced one another with shotguns after one of them took a shot at the other’s cat and now both of them were in the hospital probably dying. And so on.

  Until then either she couldn’t concentrate or she’d successfully blocked him out—she wasn’t sure which. All she could hear was herself speaking quietly inside her own skull. What she was saying was that they were in deep and terrible trouble. That it was over now. That there was no alternative left now but to get to Rule and tell him everything. It was the only way to get rid of the man.

  Already, in just this hour or so since he strolled up the driveway into her life, telling Rule would be a relief. Arrest seemed in every way preferable to his company.

  And to his knowledge.

  She felt unclean because of his knowledge. So filthy she wanted to cry.

  She listened to the voice inside her head and it sounded dull and flat and wise as doom. It was leaden, it was enervating. As though even her blood were moving more slowly, thickening inside her.

  The man had been inevitable.

  It was only right, wasn’t it, that somebody had found out?

  It was only justice.

  They’d killed a man.

  Never mind that Howard was evil. Evil was only her opinion of him. The voice inside her said it was a highly educated opinion, but so what?

  What right did she have?

  She had grown up knowing right from wrong down to the letter. She had learned it, she thought, the hard way. Sometimes she thought that as a child she had struggled to learn.

  Knowing it was a contract. It bound you to the rest of the human race. She believed in it.

  She’d broken that contract.

  In some ways she deserved the man.

  Justice. Guilt. Depression.

  The three held hands, played ring-around-the-rosy inside her. Became one and the same word almost. One heavy black form that shapeshifted within her until she could feel nothing but weight, density, and darkness.

  Ring-around-the-rosy.

  The reference was to the Black Death, wasn’t it? To the plague.