Joyride

by Jack Ketchum

  “The thing I don’t like, she says he was alone. No passengers.”

  “No Gardner and no Edwards.”

  “Right. But then, get this. They had a drive-by in Hanover just a few hours earlier. Some kid. Right in the goddamn center of town. Weapon, a .357 Magnum…”

  “So there’s the Magnum! He’s screwing around with weapons, with MOs.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Any ID on the car?”

  “Nobody saw it. But you can bet it’s our guy. Listen, I’m leaving now. How soon can you meet me?”

  “I can be out of here in ten, fifteen minutes.”

  “Try for ten, okay?”

  “You got it.”

  He slipped his pants over the day-old shorts. Who gave a shit.

  Two more dead, he thought. Some poor girl raped. And the two passengers, male and female, disappeared.

  It was fucking grim. It really was.

  Still—he could almost hear the parrot.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Wayne turned on the overhead light.

  He took out his pad.

  He began to read the names.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Lepke radioed it in just past the New Hampshire state border near Bradford and read them the plates.

  He had his instructions. Follow, do not apprehend. Repeat. Do not apprehend.

  That was fine with him.

  They were sending in the troops. Fine.

  He was a highway cop in a cruiser. Nobody told him that hero was part of the job description.

  He wondered if the guy in the Volvo was headed back to Barstow. You never knew with loonies. And judging from the dispatches this one was a certified Toon. Drive-bys, rape. The whole nine yards.

  He was tailing one of the bad guys. One of the real bad guys. It felt pretty good.

  There was nobody much on the road so he dropped back a ways. So far he felt sure the guy hadn’t made him but he was riding a cherry and the guy wasn’t blind. There was somebody coming up behind him, moving slowly up on his left, he could see the headlights in the rearview mirror. Maybe he could get this citizen here between them. He’d be much less conspicuous. He dropped back.

  The citizen was driving a brand-new Mazda, blue. Lepke glanced over. A male suit in his late forties. The guy crept past Lepke the way they always do passing a cop, signaled nicely and got into lane ahead of him.

  Very good.

  And they cruised along that way for a while.

  Then the Mazda got antsy. You couldn’t blame him—the Volvo wasn’t exactly going hell bent for leather, the guy was doing maybe five to seven under the limit. The Mazda signaled and pulled out into the fast lane.

  Lepke watched him crawl up parallel to the Volvo, real slow, still aware of the cruiser behind him.

  Watch, he thought, another mile or so, another hill between them, and the Mazda would be up to seventy. Like Lepke wouldn’t know this. Like all cops are dummies.

  He could scoot over the hill and take the Mazda in three minutes flat.

  He was thinking this and picturing it and thinking that another time and he’d have done exactly that when something that sounded like a fucking cannon went off ahead of him, Jesus! and he saw the glint of metal out the Volvo’s driver’s-side window and saw the splash of glass and something else, something dark and wet, bursting out of the Mazda.

  And then three things happened simultaneously.

  The Mazda started to drift, decelerating rapidly but still doing maybe forty, forty-five, toward the metal guardrail that separated the northbound from the southbound lanes. The guy was leaning on his horn. Something was.

  And the Volvo was picking up speed. Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five on the radar. And Lepke had to wonder if the guy hadn’t made him as a cop from square one.

  He was reaching for his mike and hitting the emergency channel and tromping on the gas pedal himself, deciding he had no choice now but to go after the crazy bastard, when the Mazda hit the rail.

  And the timing was all fucked up.

  Because the Mazda ground screeching, sparks flying, up against the rail for five or six feet and then turned and drifted back, aimless as a poleaxed steer into his lane at about thirty miles per hour, did this just as Lepke was about to pass him—and he couldn’t judge whether to hit the brakes or not it was so fast and close so he just kept going, accelerating, going after the son of a bitch, praying that this speed was exactly the right speed, and he heard his call numbers on the radio come in come in as the Mazda rammed his door and caved it in on him.

  He felt his legs go first and then his ribs and then his forearm snap against the steering wheel, all in rapid-fire succession, the steering wheel snapping too, and then he was spinning in some screeching-metal waltz with the Mazda a full three hundred and sixty degrees and there were flames licking at him bursting over him pinned there, clothes going, seared into his body, becoming his body, hair going, eyes already beginning to fucking fry inside him as he screamed and writhed and screamed and glanced through the splintered windshield and saw the last thing he would ever see.

  The empty highway. The hill. The Volvo gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  There was as much energy in the room as Rule had ever seen there and it was four in the morning.

  Hamsun, called in with no more sleep than Rule had gotten, which was none, was in his cubicle with the door wide open, on the phone to the State Highway Patrol. There were cops on phones taking reports, and other cops filing them, typewriters going like a secretarial pool. Somehow the press had gotten wind of it, and papers were calling from as far away as New York City. The phones were ringing like they were holding a telethon in there.

  Wayne-Aid.

  When Covitski walked in, he’d just gotten off the line to Bradford.

  “You ready?” he said. “He killed a cop.”

  “He what?”

  “He killed a cop.” Rule gave him the thumbnail. “Look,” he said.

  He got up and walked to the wall map.

  “This guy is pretty strange. First we make him here on 89 heading down toward Montpelier. Then he’s across the state line into Hanover; he shoots the kid there with the Magnum. Next he’s all the way over in Plymouth. Rapes one student, kills another. And finally here. Across the line again out of Bradford.”

  “He’s making a circle.”

  “Looks like it. He sure as hell isn’t headed for Mexico.”

  “What’ve we got going?”

  “We’ve got cars at his house, the Gardner place, Susan Olsen’s, and his mother’s rest home, though that’s one hell of a long shot. We’ve got an interstate APB so that the entire east coast from D.C. up to Canada is keeping an eye out for him.

  “A red Volvo, for chrissake. The crazy son of a bitch doesn’t even have the sense to switch cars.

  “And the feds are in this, too. Once he crossed the border with Gardner and Edwards, he bought himself a federal kidnap rap along with everything else. It’s a matter of time. We’ll get him.”

  “What now?”

  “We do what everybody else is doing. We answer the phone. We wait. The feds will be over in about”—he checked his watch—“twenty minutes. Pick our brains. Wonderful, right? You want some coffee?”

  “I’m thinking about Edwards and the Gardner woman. It doesn’t look good, does it.”

  “No. Not with five dead that we know of it doesn’t.”

  The phone rang. Covitski sat down and picked it up.

  “Black,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “The coffee. Make it black.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  He saw them the moment he turned onto his street. The car was unmarked, but he knew who they were.

  He could practically smell them.

  He cut his lights and crawled to a stop. Parked the Volvo half a block down.

  He reached into the backseat, found what he needed, and then got out and quietly closed the door.

  He
heard someone pounding inside on the lid of the trunk. That meant they were still alive. He was glad they were alive. He wanted them alive.

  His witnesses.

  The streetlight had gone out a week ago and no one had been around to fix it yet. That was a problem living in this part of town. But now, of course, it was all to his advantage. He thought that even the town itself was playing right into his hands.

  It was only right. The town belonged to him.

  He stayed close to the hedges. There was a little boy and a little girl living here in this house. Twins. They were probably seven years old. Across the street a pair of old ladies, spinsters. He kept moving.

  He stopped in front of the Crocker house. The woman was named Rebecca and the man was called Lance. What in hell kind of a name was Lance? They kept a nice place, you had to give them that. The lawn was neatly trimmed. He would see the man out there mowing every Saturday.

  They were in his book, though, because of the name. The name offended him.

  The car was directly in front of him, parked by Ed Schorr’s. Ed was all right. He worked in the post office. Whenever he went in there for stamps or something, Ed was very efficient and had a pleasant manner. It was his wife who was a bitch. She wore too-tight dresses and too much makeup and when you smiled at her she didn’t smile back. Like she was somebody. And not the wife of some fucking postal clerk.

  The two policemen were sitting with the windows open, the idiots. Of course, it was hot. But they were making it easy. He knew exactly how it was going to play.

  He stepped over.

  Treat and Burkeman were still fresh.

  They were used to the night shift and they’d only been sitting there an hour and a half. In fact, Treat, behind the wheel, still had almost half a cup of 7-Eleven coffee in his hand.

  Burkeman had finished his, along with a jelly roll and a two-pack of Twinkies. Burkeman liked junk food, which partly accounted for the fact that at thirty-three he still had problems with his complexion. Zits grew on him during the night like toadstools. He kept his face scrupulously clean, but it didn’t help. Zits liked him. What could you do.

  They were talking about Willie Bly, a cop who had unloaded on a bunch of teenagers three nights earlier after sitting at Logan’s all day drinking whiskey. Yelling at the kids, calling them every name in the book because they were out there smoking cigarettes and leaning on his ten-year-old Chevy when he came out of the bar. Bly loved that Chevy and he hated teenagers. The fact that he had three of his own probably had something to do with it.

  The teenagers complained to their parents and their parents complained to Bly’s supervisor and now Bly was suspended for a week. The fact that one of the kids was a councilman’s daughter probably had something to do with that, too.

  Burkeman thought it was unfair. But Treat held that Bly was going to have to learn to keep his trap shut someday, anyhow—did Burkeman remember when Bly called Hamsun, a fucking captain for chrissake, that lardass no-Dick Tracy?

  In front of half the squad room?

  Burkeman did, and they were laughing over that and Treat was sipping at his tepid coffee when the guy came out of nowhere and leaned in through Burkeman’s window, smiling, and stabbed him in the throat with an eightinch high-carbon stainless steel kitchen knife, pushed it all the way through so that Treat was looking at three inches of bloody steel sticking out of his partner’s neck as he dropped his coffee and reached for his gun and the guy brought up his other hand and popped him one in the forehead.

  Burkeman was still alive then, barely, knife and all. Enough so that he saw the two inches of green rubber garden hose the guy had used as a home-made silencer fall off into his lap, thinking, Jesus I’m fucked, I’m truly fucked, and then What the hell is that? as he looked down stunned at the length of hose and Treat bounced off the driver’s-side door and slumped over onto Burkeman’s shoulder, a neat little hole in the center of his forehead oozing blood. He had just time to be aware of all this, hands moving sluggish, slow-motion to his neck, when the guy reached in and took the handle of the knife and pulled it forward. He felt his windpipe go and the guy tugged again and he saw the spray.

  And that was that, thought Wayne, for their silly outpost.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Carole heard the key slip into the lock and felt Lee gently squeeze her hand.

  In the instant before the trunk lid opened she was a little girl again, huddling close to her older sister Alex in the dark.

  The door to their bedroom was about to open. Their father was about to enter.

  Their father was a teacher of high school math—later, when Carole was a teenager, he would become principal—a tall thin man with glasses and dark wavy hair. A little like Dennis’s dad in Dennis the Menace. Until he was principal and his hair went gray and white.

  Her father would enter in his pajamas and whisper to one of them, Alex or Carole, and one of them would get out of bed and follow him through the darkened hallway past the bedroom where her mother lay sleeping into the guest room which was not really a guest room but where her father slept most nights, and he would pull back the covers for her and she would climb into bed. The bed smelled of her father who would stand watching her in the doorway until she either fell asleep again or pretended to, and then he would climb in beside her. Moments later he would begin touching her, hesitantly at first, and then probing deeply with his fingers, and Carole or Alex would try very hard not to cry.

  It’s all right, he would say. Daddy loves you. Daddy will always love you. You’re a good girl. You’re a good girl now.

  In the moment before the trunk opened out to the reality of the street her sister gripped her hand one last time.

  Then there was Wayne smiling in at them.

  His hands were stained and glistening. He held the small .38 in his right hand. The suitcase sat beside him next to the curb.

  “Help,” she said. “I need your hand.”

  It was true. She wasn’t lying. She could not have gotten out of there without him. Her head swam. More so now with the sudden rush of air. Her bones felt thin and brittle inside her.

  She reached for his hand.

  “Help me.”

  She could see him hesitate for a moment.

  Then he took it.

  She managed to straighten out her right leg slightly and slip it over the rim of the compartment, using his grip for balance so she wouldn’t fall back onto Lee.

  He pulled her forward and she felt her foot touch the street and then her body was following, unfolding, drifting out of the compartment toward him, the leg scraping painfully down over the bumper and then almost buckling at the ankle as it received the full weight of her.

  He pulled harder and her lungs filled with the warm fresh air as her left foot snagged on the rim, the toe of her shoe not quite making it over and her free hand darting out to him, to the shoulder of his gun hand, grasping at his shoulder, falling toward him, drunk on fresh sudden air, catching hold of his shirt and clutching it and this was no trick, she was actually falling, this was not what they had planned. Irony upon irony, it was absolutely real.

  She heard him swear. And instead of supporting her felt him shift to the side and pull suddenly away, releasing his grip on her hand as her own clenched fingers lost the fabric of his shirt and slid uselessly down over his chest.

  She felt him wrap the arm of his gun hand around her waist and pivot and hurl her away from him toward the street and the raised yellow curb, heard him shout and knew that Lee had done something after all, something with the jack from the trunk.

  Then the curb loomed. And struck her like a stone.

  Lee half shoved it, half flung it at him.

  The jack caught him square in the hip, crack of bone and a loud metallic clatter as it fell to the street. He saw Carole hurtling toward the curb as Wayne stumbled with the impact and his own momentum, hurt, almost but not quite losing it, almost falling, and he was out of the car on legs that felt like an old man
’s legs going for the gun.

  The gun came up to meet him.

  He heard his cheekbone shatter.

  He fell and barely caught himself on the rim of the trunk. Thinking, ah no ah Jesus Carole we fucked up. Not even hurting yet. Not even worrying about her. Just We fucked up.

  He turned. Staring into the short round barrel of the automatic.

  “You assholes,” said Wayne. “Look what you did.”

  He looked.

  She was lying in the gutter.

  There were leaves and twigs in there and some kind of candy or cigarette wrapper and her legs didn’t look right. They were splayed and there was no dignity to them and no beauty with her skirt up around her waist, and the angle looked all wrong to him.

  Oh, god, he thought.

  Her arms were wrong too. One up over her head, her hand up over the curb like she was pawing her way toward the grass beyond it and the other lying palm up fingers crooked at her side. Her long hair whipped out in front of her as though she were someone captured in a photo—a woman surprised by a heavy wind that had come at her and caught her from behind.

  “Real nice work,” Wayne said.

  “Fuck you.” Fawwk eeuuu.

  His jaw worked against the muscles of his cheek and the cheekbone screamed raw broken pain.

  Wayne did not seem to mind being cursed at this time.

  “Get up,” he sighed. “Go see if she’s alive or dead or what.”

  He got up and walked over. Knelt unsteadily beside her.

  In the moonlight the top of her head looked black. He could see the thick steady ooze of blood. He felt for a pulse in her neck.

  Thank god.

  “Doctor,” he said. “She needs a doctor.”

  “Not a hearse?” Wayne smiled. “Lucky you. Pick her up.”

  “Shouldn’t move her.”

  “Pick her up you fucking little traitor or I will kill your traitorous ass right here and she can get up and get her own fucking doctor. Do it!”