by Jack Ketchum
“Covitski, my heart goes out to you. I’m two cases shy of an even dozen, you know?” He flipped some pages in the Wourmouth file. “And this one. I just love this one. Who the hell would ever think that a simple domestic dispute would blow up into so much goddamn paperwork?”
Covitski laughed. “It happens. When you got a husband, you got his wife, you got his girlfriend, two cousins and an eighty-year-old drunken grandaddy all doing the disputing.”
“I guess. Anyhow, good luck. Who’s the victim?”
Covitski consulted his pad.
“Morris, first name Deanna. Married. Husband’s name is Carl. Two, maybe three slugs in her. Blonde, late twenties. Driving a blue ‘91 Ford wagon.”
“Any leads?”
“Nah. Nothing.”
“Yeah. Well, like I say, good luck.”
“Uh-huh.”
He was just out the door when the phone rang—his line. Rule picked it up anyway.
Most of his attention was still with the Wourmouth file until he heard what the guy had to say.
The man’s voice was scared and jittery and Rule could read him instantly. The man wanted desperately to hang up. He couldn’t bring himself to do that just yet. But he was working on it.
Which meant that Rule had to play this fish very carefully.
The man thought he saw a murder.
Or more precisely, the aftermath of one.
Rule took his name and number, coaxed it out of him slowly and gently, voice nice and even, soothing, got the location of what the guy had seen, a description of what the guy had seen, the time of day and all the details.
Once he’d calmed him down, the caller had a pretty good memory. Even took a partial, GO something, on the plate of a 1993 Volvo, color red, parked along the highway.
He described a thin, dark-haired man in a white shirt, medium build, early thirties, climbing into the back of the Volvo. There was another somewhat older man driving and a dark-haired woman sitting beside him. The woman wore her hair long. She was slim and attractive. The driver’s hair was thinning.
Rule wrote it all down even though calls were taped routinely. Thanked the man and arranged to get a written statement from him in the morning.
Then thought, well. What have we got here?
Covitski had a break. That much was certain.
And maybe so did he.
It didn’t quite add up. In fact it didn’t add up at all on the face of it but he had a feeling when the man was describing the couple, the man and the woman, riding in front.
He got up and poured himself a cup of coffee, black and thick and nasty, into his Disneyland mug, souvenir of the Magic Kingdom, sunny California, and then he called Covitski.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I want to do another one,” Wayne said. “You want to help this time?”
Like he was talking about a second hand of gin.
“All I want to do is get out of here, Wayne,” said Lee. “That’s all either of us want. You know that.”
“Why? Look, we do one more and then I’ll drop you somewhere. I’ll go away. I swear.”
They sat in the McDonald’s lot and she was listening to them, not believing this conversation, not believing anything about it, Wayne talking through bites of his Quarter Pounder. The smell inside the car was sickening. Grease, onions. Meat.
She had the window open but there was no breeze. The night was still. The night cloyed.
Cars passed by on the way to the drive-through window.
Wayne sipped loudly through the straw. Iced tea with lemon.
She could call to someone. Someone passing by.
She could jump out of the car and run.
He’d shoot her. He’d shoot before her foot was even out the door. Before she was finished screaming.
He wouldn’t mind a bit.
She wanted to cry. She wanted a gun.
She kept seeing the woman’s death played out in front of her exactly as it had happened, down to the smallest detail. Index finger pumping blood. Eyes squinting shut—see no evil. Woman on her knees, draining out onto the tarmac. Balance sliding away. Slumping. Falling.
Crumpled. The woman a death sack.
My god, that poor young woman.
“Then why not let us out right now then?” Lee was saying. Still trying to talk to him. As though something about him might respond to the rational.
“Let us out right here. Then you go do…whatever it is you want to do.”
Wayne looked at him and shook his head as though Lee were somebody’s idiot brother.
“Company,” he said through a mouthful of hamburger. “Remember, Lee? Company. ‘Member what I said? It’s great having somebody around who knows how you feel. It’s the greatest thing in the world.” He laughed. “Well, almost the greatest.”
“We don’t have the slightest idea how you feel, Wayne.”
“Sure you do.”
He sounded almost shy. Something grotesquely innocent about the man. Like he was really just a little boy caught in some sin he had never comprehended in the first place. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife explained to a three-year-old. Mommy? What’s covet? What’s neighbor?
What’s wife?
Except that he wasn’t a little boy and the word in question here was simple.
The word was murder.
She thought of Howard. She still could almost feel the weight of the rock raised above her.
Simple? Was it really?
Yes, she thought. For her and for Wayne both, when you got right down to it, it was simple. She knew what she did. And so did Wayne. The trouble was he felt nothing but excitement over it, like a kid starring in his own home movie.
He doesn’t feel.
He hasn’t got a clue.
Listen to him.
“I mean,” he was saying. “I know it’s not the same for everyone. Everybody’s different. I’m not saying you know exactly how I’m coming at this, Lee. I mean, it’s not even necessary. But I kind of like the idea of you guys as witnesses, you know what I mean? In the old-time sense. Bearing witness, you know? That kind of thing. And hell, I couldn’t ask for better witnesses. See, you’ve at least been there. You know what I’m going through to that extent at least.”
She couldn’t help it. Enough, she thought.
“No,” she said. “We don’t. What are you going through, Wayne?”
Her voice sounded every bit as cold and mean to her as she’d meant it to be. He didn’t seem to notice.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “I know you’re still mad at me, Carole. And I don’t blame you because let’s face it, I did, I scared you. But I know you know what I’m talking about even if you won’t admit it because you felt it too, I saw you with that rock and you had to feel it. See, here you are, you’re doing what you were meant to do. Everything’s right. You were meant to get rid of Howard. It felt right to get rid of Howard because Howard was such a son of a bitch, and at the same time it was the most important, most fucking expressive thing you ever did in your life. Am I right? I mean, what do you compare it to? Skiing? Sex? A European vacation?”
He laughed. “It’s ridiculous! There’s no comparison with anything.”
He sat quiet for a moment.
“I think it’s a secret,” he said. “I think it’s just this great big secret they keep from us. That they don’t want us to know about unless maybe there’s a war on or something and then, sure, they want you to know so you’ll line up and do it and go on doing it and enjoy yourself all to hell. But otherwise they keep it from you. It’s their secret. About how fucking good it feels. Y’know?”
There was no point debating him.
There was no point talking at all. Wayne exhausted her.
She watched the cars pull up to the window. Kids dating. Families. Friends. Mac and a Coke and a large fries, please. All so terribly normal. Outside the car the whole wide world was normal. Or—who knew?—maybe this was normal, maybe cars were filled with lunatic
s all across America.
What rough beast…
All of them having conversations just like this one.
She thought of Howard’s fists. Howard had exhausted her too.
She knew you could get used to anything.
When you did, it became normal.
It was dark. The amber overhead lights in the parking lot blazed through a light fog. The lot looked like sundown on the day after World War III. A nuclear sky. Beyond the lot she could see headlights shooting by over a black, unilluminated highway.
She needed to get to a phone. To call Rule. Somebody.
Confession would be fine. Normal.
She heard him crinkling up the McDonald’s wrapper and stuffing it into the bag.
“Please. Let us go,” she said. “Let us leave.”
Even exhausted, it was worth a try.
He was quiet. He even seemed to give it thought.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to do that. You’ve got to look at it from my point of view, Carole. I’m sorry. One more. It’s very important to me. And then, maybe.”
“You can’t do this, Wayne. You killed an innocent woman.”
He laughed. “Of course I can. Hey, just look at us. See, that’s what they never tell you. Anybody can. Everybody can.
“It’s a free country.”
They were back on 89 South. Wayne wanted them to cross the New Hampshire border into Hanover.
What’s in Hanover? Lee asked.
“Dartmouth.” Wayne shrugged, as though that explained something. And Lee thought, yes—Dartmouth. A college town, with plenty of cops around.
It might not be such a bad idea.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Wayne said. He could actually feel him grinning in back of him. He was getting to be able to sense the guy. “You’re thinking that once we get there you can ram us into a tree or something, call attention to us somehow. Am I right?”
The guy was crazy but he was no fool. Though sideswiping a parked car somewhere in the center of town was more what Lee had in mind.
“But think, Lee. Think. Remember what I said? About you two guys being the last two people in the world I’d want to hurt?” He laughed. “Well, it’s true. You’re the last two people. See?”
Mood swings were running second by second inside the guy. The voice went intent and serious now.
“I’d consider that a betrayal. Wouldn’t you? I’d shoot, Lee. And I wouldn’t stop shooting. I’d empty this fucking gun into both of you and I wouldn’t give it another thought.”
Then he laughed. “Hey, what have I got to lose, you know?”
What indeed.
Lee thought he’d known a little something about losing until he met Wayne. But Wayne was working a different strata entirely.
He’d been born a war baby, almost a year to the day after Hiroshima. His mother had died of bone cancer when he was six. He remembered a gray-faced woman barely able to turn and relieve her bedsores for fear of breaking yet another bone. His father had done his best afterward.
He came of age, as they say, in the late sixties. He was going to school in Boston when Flower Power hit the streets of Beacon Hill and for three months that summer, the summer of ‘67, the Summer of Love, the same wild optimism seemed to waft like a blessing over everybody who lived there, like a kind of permanent LSD high of the soul, getting into your blood whether or not you were actually dropping the stuff.
They were kids. By sheer force of style they were going to change the world. Brand-new tie-dyed apostles carrying the Word to their pagan, world-weary elders. And of course the word was Love.
When the summer was over Lee began a two-year fling with teaching, driving home to his high school kids whenever the opportunity arose the same simple and to him obvious notions he’d embraced upon the Hill. Along with plenty of others it took him time to catch on to the fact that anger, manipulation and greed had already co-opted those notions and twisted them out of recognition.
It had happened so fast. Love was fury—fury at the shootings at Kent State, at the death of Martin Luther King. Getting high was bad dope and burnout. Peace was going to war with War, getting whacked by a riot stick on some peace march because that pimply twenty-year-old kid at the head of the line who read himself to sleep with Das Kapital and whacked off to the poems of Mao decided that it would be an act of keen political savvy to firebomb a cop car and get some heads busted in time for the nightly news.
He thought it was Roger Corman who said right around then that if he could somehow get the word losers into the title of every one of his films then they’d all make a million bucks. He had it right. They were all losers, from then on, failed idealists who had seen the clear pure light that summer and then had seen it come to nothing.
He’d gotten into drugs. Screwed his way to oblivion. Then swapped drugs for booze. Watched his father die.
And then he said, finally, fuck it. By then there were Right-to-Lifers on the streets telling the world exactly what to do with their bodies and souls.
Fuck it.
He’d gotten into real estate. The art of selling too much land for too much money to people who would eventually allow him to sell it again for even more money to people who couldn’t afford it in the first place.
He’d gotten into that.
And later, Carole.
You couldn’t change the world anymore, at least not for the better, but you could change somebody’s world and he’d settled for that. Even with what they’d done—what they’d irrationally and beyond hope felt driven to do, he saw that now—even with the nightmares and the memory he would probably have forever he wasn’t unhappy with the decision.
So Wayne sits back and says, What have I got to lose?
Lee asked himself the same question.
For him the answer was easy. That was the difference between the two of them.
Life. Liberty. And don’t forget the fucking pursuit of happiness.
He had already killed a man to hold onto these things and to hold onto her. He didn’t regret it. Even though they were going to get caught now one way or another, he’d taken his shot. So it didn’t work out. So what. You didn’t give up. You still wanted to make it work somehow. You still plugged away at it because you never knew. You didn’t drop dead for anybody.
He’d admit to having come by a certain coldness over the years, a certain distance. To the best of his capacity to love he did love Carole. Of that he was quite certain. It wasn’t as though he was in this for the money and the comfort.
The problem was that he’d found out along the way, through a pretty long string of lovers, that you could burn out on passion and romance the same way you could burn out on bad dope or optimism or any other damn thing. It happened. And once it happened it was forever. So that then, even when something undisputably good came along, you maintained a kind of reserve.
Not that you didn’t mine it for everything it was worth. Sure you did. But you stayed a little aloof from it too. Because mines had a tendency to come crumbling down in the course of time and when they did it was a whole lot better to be sitting on top of one than to get caught in the dark deep inside.
So answer the question, he thought.
What have you got to lose?
Whatever was left.
That was what.
And that was not nothing.
The sign said HANOVER/DARTMOUTH UNIVERSITY and he pulled off onto 91.
They were close to town.
He’d try to find a way to get rid of Wayne. He’d look hard for that. But he wasn’t going to die trying.
You could plead temporary insanity to killing Howard and if the lawyer was good enough you might even make it stick.
You couldn’t plead a damn thing to a bullet.
The woman had fallen not three feet away from him. He could see her wedding ring.
If Wayne was really smart enough and careful enough and if he really wanted to stay with them, then Lee guessed that he was stayi
ng.
The guns said so. And what the guns said was always right. It was the way of the world.
The hero in him had died long ago.
Rest in peace.
Tommy Braun was walking up Allen Street, heading up to the Balloon where there were potted plants in the window and the drinks were too expensive, he hated the place, but he wasn’t going to be drinking any beers there anyway, he was just returning these three terrific copies of Taboo to Greg McCallum who washed their dishes in back, Number 4, Number 5, and the Taboo Especial. He’d read them each a couple of times and thought he liked Number 4 the best because of the Moebius Eye of the Cat and the S. Clay Wilson. But the other issues were pretty hot too.
It was warm out, much too warm to rush. So he took his time. Knobby knees poking out through the holes in his jeans. Wire-rim glasses mended with electrician’s tape. The three oversized paperback comics swung gently along at the end of his arm.
It would probably have amused him that because of the books and the glasses the guy in the Volvo mistook him for a student. Tommy cordially hated students—who all seemed to have more money than they knew what to do with, who made beer a whole lot more expensive than it needed to be and the availability of datable women damn near nonexistent.
He was about to turn the corner, thinking that maybe he could get Greg to part with his collection of Cry for Dawn for a few days, when the car slowed down beside him and the guy leaned out and Tommy thought they were going to ask him directions.
He stopped, nearly always ready to be helpful directing somebody even when it was a student doing the asking. He was good at directions. He had a perfect sense of north south, east and west and he knew the streets and roads for miles around.
He saw the gun only for a moment, bright silver shining thing in the streetlight, before the slug from the .357 Magnum exploded through the right lens of his glasses, turning the lens to powder, liquefying the eye itself and thundering up through his cerebrum and out through the back of his head like a runaway train hurtling back through the parking lot behind him.