by Jack Ketchum
Her sister and she had long since stopped talking. There were too many memories.
There was no one.
Until now. Until this parody.
Their brand-new buddy.
She was damned if she’d give it all up to him. Enough to shut him up. But not all of it.
“He tied me,” she said. “He raped me. And he cut me.”
“With a knife.”
“Yes, with a knife.”
“That’s all?”
She looked at him.
The fucking soulless zombie.
Amazing. That they really existed. Walked, talked, brushed their teeth and went to the toilet just like all the rest of us.
“It was enough, Wayne. Believe me.”
“Where did he cut you?”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is, I want to know. He tied you to what, to the bed?”
“Yes, to the bed.”
“Faceup or facedown?”
“Faceup for god’s sake!”
“And then he raped you.”
“Yes.”
He was listening intently.
“What did he say?”
“Say?”
“Yes. What did he say to you?”
“He said he was going to let me live. Something like that. That he could use the knife if he wanted to, but that he wasn’t going to.”
“And then he did.”
“What? Yes. He did.”
“He lied.”
She saw it all over again, heard every word.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you, I’m taking off the gag. I’m not going to kill you this time. The point of the knife drifting slowly, scraping across her skin. Drifting down to her navel, pricking it slightly, into her pubic hair. Brushing back and forth. Laughter. Maybe I’ll shave you. The knife gliding up again…
The horror was back, and with it the deep gut-wrenching humiliation. Now as then, she wanted to cry. Now as then, she didn’t.
“Yes, Wayne. He lied,” she said.
Her voice was controlled and quiet. You would have to know her far better than Wayne did to hear what this felt like. Lee would know.
“When he raped you. Did he…use anything?”
She almost had to laugh at him. Wayne was a goddamn comedian! “What? A condom? Howard?”
“No. I mean, did he use anything…”
Suddenly she was furious.
“What are we talking about, Wayne?” she hissed. “A goddamn coke bottle? His fist? A gerbil maybe? He used his cock, Wayne. You perverted asshole!”
He leaned forward.
“Watch it, Carole,” he said. “I have my little book right here, you know?” He patted his breast pocket. “I give you a lot of leeway ‘cause I scared you pretty bad back there. But I don’t bend over backward forever. Remember that. I was only asking a question. So he raped you. You were faceup and he used his cock. Then he cut you. Where?”
“You don’t need to know that, Wayne. You just want to know.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I do need to know. I need to know everything.”
“Why?”
“So I can make an informed decision.”
“About what?”
“About…all of it.”
“All of what, Wayne?”
“About what to do with you, for chrissakes!”
And there it was. Finally. Out in the open. All the entrails hanging out to dry.
While Wayne just sauntered on through his little white cloud of oblivion.
“What’s wrong with you, Carole? You can see that, can’t you? You’re not a stupid person.”
“No, Wayne. I’m not.”
“So you know I have to decide. So it’s up to you to help me decide. So tell me. What can it matter to you anyhow? It’s over and done with. Past is past.”
Howard and Wayne. Under the skin they were so damn similar she felt a hot wave of nausea just being in his presence. Past is past. Over and done with.
Hey! Why can’t you just forget all about it, bitch?
She could still hear Howard yelling something very much like that out on her lawn that night. What the hell’s wrong with you?
When the past was not remotely past. Not when it included the shame and pain she could feel to this day. Not when she could still feel the blade of the knife—not its tip this time, no, its blade—slide across her breast to the fear-erect nipple, feel it slice ever so slightly across the nipple’s flat wide tip and then continue, the pressure harder now, a thin red line burgeoning wet across the valley between her breasts, as Howard’s pleasure bloomed inside her, she could feel it obscenely big between her legs and then jerking, spurting as the blade crossed to the right breast, the other nipple, biting deeper, bisecting the soft ridge of flesh as she screamed and screamed into the friendless still night.
Wayne and Howard. Howard and Wayne.
“I could make you strip, you know. I could take you back to the motel and make you show me. Instead, I’m asking you.”
How they do love power, she thought. How they gloried in it.
“Yes, you could, Wayne. But you wouldn’t see anything if you did,” she lied. She lit a cigarette.
“He cut me practically everywhere, if you have to know. Shoulders, belly, breasts, thighs. Very small nicks. Nothing serious. They healed. But they were enough, don’t you think?”
She exhaled. “It took him quite a while.”
That much, anyway, was true.
Wayne was studying her, nodding. It looked to Carole as though he was going to believe her.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s enough.” Then he laughed. “Enough for me, anyway.” He patted his book again. All the names in there. All the offenses.
“But is it enough for you? I wonder.”
He studied her a while longer. Then sipped his tea and shrugged. “Sure. Sure it is. I guess it’s plenty.” He smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t make you show me. I honestly think I know how humiliating that would be for you.”
She wanted to laugh in his face. The sanctimonious little prick.
Humiliation—real humiliation—was not even in his vocabulary.
To her it was an enemy so old it had almost, once, become a friend.
“Okay. You told me,” he said. “I’m glad. There’s something I want you to do for me now.” He looked around the bar.
“You know, I’ve been dreaming of sitting here doing this since the first night I saw you and Lee in the restaurant. Us sitting talking like this. Us with our little secret.”
She sipped her scotch. She felt out of the woods for the moment. She would show him nothing.
“What,” she said.
“Hmmm?”
“You said there was something you wanted me to do for you. What?”
“Oh, right. I was distracted. You’re very beautiful, you know that?”
She let it pass.
“You see those two?” he said.
He nodded toward the couple across from them. The Irish woman and her boyfriend.
The silence between them hadn’t broken. The woman was gazing down into her lap now, gazing at her fingers. Lightly clenching and unclenching them. So much pain, she thought. The man was still sitting to one side facing away from her, his legs crossed, casually smoking a cigarette. Their parting so inconsequential to him.
“What about them?”
“I want you to go over. Ask for a smoke or something. Get them to talk to you. Get them over here to the table.”
He slurped at the ice and the dregs of his tea through the bent straw. His eyes skittered.
So that she saw, long before she heard, what he had in mind.
“No,” she said.
She had to preempt him. To draw the line. To stop this freezing feeling suddenly clutching at her insides.
Not them. Never. Not this poor sad lonely girl.
I’d kill myself first.
But it was as though he hadn’t heard her. And
she knew then that she was not out of the woods here by a long shot. She had never been, not for a second. Telling him what he’d wanted to hear had meant nothing. A minor test of obedience. And fear.
Good doggie.
His voice was cold and hollow.
“I want them,” he said. “And you are going to get them for me. So finish your scotch. Finish your cigarette.
“And go over.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The visit was illegal, strictly informational. He hoped Covitski was being neat about it downstairs. Ideally it should look like nobody had been here at all.
So far there wasn’t much anyway. Prescription downers in the medicine cabinet. Men’s clothes in the drawers and closet in two distinct sizes—they’d be Lee’s and Howard’s. So she was slow getting rid of his clothing. So what.
Then he opened the drawer to the night table.
And this was interesting.
He walked downstairs. Covitski was standing in the living room.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” he said.
Rule scanned the room.
“Clipboard,” he said.
“You got it.”
He walked over. The clipboard looked out of place on the polished glass table. It was the only thing sitting there. There were three sheets of unused lined yellow paper clipped to it, and on top of it, a yellow number-two pencil. He focused on the pencil. Covitski was looking at it too.
“Either of them strike you as the kind who chews his pencils?” Covitski asked him.
“No. In fact I can’t even figure the clipboard. You could say she maybe uses the board, jotting down specs on houses, land measurements, that kind of thing. Okay. But only three sheets of paper? Just three? She’d have a whole pad there or else the remains of one. Plus there’s no writing.”
“His, maybe. Edwards’s.”
“Same problem. Plus it’d be in the briefcase, wouldn’t it?” The briefcase was still standing in the middle of the room. Definitely a man’s. Thick, bulky, and showing wear. A woman would pick something lighter, narrower. And she’d probably take care of it better. Nobody had touched it, apparently, since he’d noticed it through the window.
“So we got us a third party,” said Covitski. “Hired gun?”
“Could be.”
It was possible. He wondered if Lee and Carole would be stupid enough or desperate enough to involve somebody else in their killing. If they had done the killing in the first place. He guessed that smarter people had done dumber things.
Twenty-one years ago you had Watergate.
“I don’t suppose you came across a .357 Magnum,” he said.
Covitski looked surprised. He shook his head.
“Hell, no.”
“There’s a box of shells in a drawer up there, maybe a dozen rounds missing. But no weapon.”
“You tossed the room?”
Rule nodded.
“There’s nothing down here. I been everywhere. She’d probably keep it up there anyway, wouldn’t she? With the cartridges.”
“Probably. You know what?” he said. “I keep thinking about the highway. Your shooting. The red Volvo. The guy’s description of the male and female.”
“What, you figure they’ve gone loony or something? Out on the highway shooting up the populace? Hell, Joe, I can see them doing Howard but…” He shook his head again.
“Anyhow, a .38 did that one. Not a Magnum. You really think there’s a connection?”
“I don’t know what to think. You found nothing at all in the kitchen?”
“Nope.”
“She was taking prescription downers. The bottle’s half-empty. Dated less than a week ago, so she was popping quite a few of them. It might indicate problems.”
“Unless Edwards was taking them too.”
“Possible.”
Two cats, one black and one tabby, were sitting in the middle of the room about three feet apart looking back and forth from Rule to Covitski. Studying them. Like, Are these guys friends or enemies? The black one was Beast. He forgot the name of the tabby.
He sighed. “I’ll tell you, the thing that bothers me, that brings me back to the Volvo, is the two cars parked out front. That and the clipboard. They both say visitor to me. If they’re not home, there has to be a third car somewhere. With them in it.”
“We’ll check the cab companies. But it’s unlikely they’d have problems with two cars on the same day. My guess is that we’ll find that nobody picked up anybody at this address. Not today.”
“So then we’re looking for a third car. Probably with three people in it. So why not the Volvo? I mean, how often does it happen that this town gets two homicides in less than a week?”
Covitski shrugged. “Never.”
The last violent death—if it even qualified as violent death—that Rule had seen was over three months ago. A guy had swallowed his dentures. He was a tourist from New Jersey whose wife had read him a wrong turn on the map. The guy threw such a fit about it that he’d simply inhaled the dentures. They’d thought it was a heart attack all the way to the autopsy.
“I think we should go see how the computer’s moving on that plate ID. Also if we can get handgun registrations for Gardner or Edwards.”
“Aw hell, Joe. It’s damn near ten. Mae’s gonna kill me.”
“I’ll drop you off. No problem.”
They headed for the door.
“Did she feed the cats?”
“Huh?”
“In the kitchen. Did the cats have food and water?”
“I dunno.”
Rule turned and walked back into the kitchen. Covitski followed. There was a half inch of water in the bottom of a white glass bowl. The food dishes were empty. Like most cats these two were sloppy eaters. The remains of their last meal were scattered all over the floor. The food was old and crusted. Probably the morning feeding. There were pop-top cans of Friskies on the counter.
He opened one.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be here,” said Covitski.
“The cats won’t tell.”
They were rubbing at his ankles now, the tabby giving him her backside and the side of her mouth where the scent glands were located.
He split the can between them.
The cats dug in.
“She should have fed them,” he said. “You got the cars, you got the clipboard, you got the cats. Something’s wrong.”
They walked to the door.
“You still want me to drop you?” he asked.
“Nah. The hell with it,” said Covitski. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll get a life. Maybe Mae won’t ax me. I read somewhere that women find men who are dedicated to their professions very sexy.”
Rule laughed. “I wouldn’t know.”
“I mean, you got to figure Albert Schweitzer got some, don’t you?”
“I suppose you do.”
Covitski came back from the men’s room, drying his hands on a paper towel. Rule was at the computer.
“We got it,” he said.
Covitski leaned over his shoulder and read aloud. Rule took a pad and started writing.
“Red ‘93 Volvo, Vermont State driver’s license number GO2333J6, registered to Wayne Philip Lock, 4183 Gastonboro Road, Barstow. Jesus, look at this! They pulled the guy’s license on a DWI!”
“Get on the phone to the State Police. Tell them we need an APB, possibly armed and dangerous. Give them the DWI case number. One to three occupants of the vehicle. Give them descriptions of Lee Edwards and Carole Gardner. Meantime I’m going to punch in a request for handgun IDs on Edwards, Gardner, and this joker. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He had a pretty good feeling on this. It was why he loved the job those times he didn’t hate the job. It was why he put in the hours and took the suits to the cleaners and shaved every morning and maybe why Ann was gone.
He figured that in every cut of meat there was something spoiling.
He looked at Covitski.
Somebody did.
By ten forty-five a smart, ambitious, and very-easy-to look-at lady named Pamela Donelly who was the Assistant DA on call that night was working on a search warrant, the auto ID and the .38 constituting to her mind sufficient probable cause, and they were back in the car headed for Wayne Lock’s home on Gastonboro Road.
Covitski drove. Rule sat on the passenger side watching for the Volvo even though he knew the chances were ridiculously slim that Lock would still be in the area. Sometimes you got lucky.
The road was narrow, winding, nearly empty of traffic at this hour. Lock lived in the old part of town bordering Woolcott, the houses set close together, built mostly after World War II and built badly for the most part so that half of them had begun to lean as they settled, an inch or two this way or that way, and it gave them a slightly drunken look that the sparse starving shade trees curbside didn’t much enhance.
It was an ugly, gnarled neighborhood surrounded by mountains, rolling hills and beautiful farmland. An insult to all that, a gob of spit in the tourist’s eye. Nothing graceful or even interesting anywhere.
Until you got to Fort Ticonderoga here.
The fence began along the cracked sidewalk, turned an asymmetrical corner on each side along the driveway and the neighboring yard and then marched down the lawn like an invading army of white birch pickets stabbing massively at the thin, pitiful grass. The numbers 4183 looked to have been burned into the birchwood of the hinged door with a soldering iron and then colored in with bootblack. The pickets looked to Rule to be ten feet tall.
On the left-hand side in front, one of them was missing. A gap in Lock’s wooden suit of armor. Other than that, the thing looked impregnable. Of course, that was just an illusion, all you had to do was open this swinging hinged door here and…
…hope to hell that he wasn’t waiting with the .38 on the other side.