Joyride

by Jack Ketchum

  “Okay.”

  “You’re gonna go back after this and you’re gonna fuck every boy in Bushwake High, aren’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Say it.”

  “I’m gonna go back after this and fuck every boy in B-Bushwake High.”

  “And you’re gonna eat every pussy in Bushwake High.”

  “I’m gonna eat every pussy.”

  “Where?”

  “Bushwake High.”

  “You want to eat pussy?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Good. But I got a better idea. C’mere, Sherry. Get down here in front of her. Gimme the camera. Now I want you to put your tongue up Sherry’s ass. Spread your cheeks, Sherry. That’s right. Now put it right up there, right up her ass. Not her pussy, her ass for chrissake. Put it in deep. That’s right. Good.”

  It was just past midnight and they’d finished the champagne and taken turns fucking her with the empty bottle when he decided he wanted to piss on her. She shot them doing it in the tub. He told her she looked good with her hair all drenched in piss. He wanted to shit on her too but after a few tries it was clear that it wasn’t going to happen. Sherry probably could have managed it but she didn’t volunteer. They let her shower. And it was after she showered and they handed her the big fluffy towel that she made her one bad mistake. She opened her eyes and saw them.

  She closed them right away but the damage was done. They knew it and probably she knew it too, though she kept trying to make believe it hadn’t happened and she was still making believe right up until the time they marched her into the basement and then it was all no, nononono please no until Sherry turned off the camera and put it down on the cold cement floor and picked up the baseball bat and hit her several times in the head with it until she and Owen were sure that she was dead.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The second girl was named Ashley Link and they dumped her body in a ditch along the roadside. It had been far too much trouble and taken far too long to cut up Stephanie’s body and encase the various parts in boxes filled with cement and then drive to the lake and dump them. Owen’s chain saw kept jamming up on such sticky half-liquid substances and once the cement set, the boxes were very heavy. The stench in the goddamn basement lasted weeks.

  She figured you learned by your mistakes.

  So they stripped her and washed her and dumped her and cleaned up the car and that was that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Owen was acting awfully damn nervous lately. Sherry didn’t really see why.

  They’d brought him in for questioning about the rapes but then they’d questioned pretty much every man of his description in the county and evidently come up empty because that had been nearly six months ago and they’d heard nothing further from them since. They hadn’t actually killed anybody in a while.

  The rapes continued naturally and sometimes she helped him with the camcorder and sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes he just went out on his own.

  But it was getting harder and harder to get him to relax.

  They’d be driving to the supermarket and Owen would say something like, see that girl? Jesus, I raped that girl. You think she saw me just now? You think she noticed the car? Sherry had her doubts that these were the same girls he’d raped because it happened easily half a dozen times and he couldn’t have been all that busy, could he? She never contradicted him though and instead took pains to calm and reassure him that no, the girl hadn’t seen them, they’d been going too fast or the girl had been looking the other way or whatever it took.

  He’d taken to hiding their videotapes behind a slat in the wall of their garage.

  He was showering four or five times a day. She’d come home from work at the veterinarian’s office and he’d already be home from his day behind the office desk and she’d find him in the shower. He’d shower before and after fucking her.

  He’d never done that before.

  He bought these bottles of Germ-X hand sanitizer with vitamin E at the drugstore to keep in his pocket and whenever they went out to a party or a restaurant or wherever there was going to be some shaking of hands to do he’d use it surreptitiously under the table or in the men’s room.

  When the local TV news reported that they’d found the slabs of concrete he got worse.

  It was bad luck on their part or maybe bad planning. They’d had very little rain for a while so the shoreline of the lake had unexpectedly receded and some kids found what turned out to be a human elbow poking out of one of the disintegrated boxes, so the cops dragged the lake and found the rest of them. Nobody was linking them to Ashley in the ditch and certainly not to the rapes but Owen was clearly worried.

  She’d gone to some lengths to cheer him up. One of his favorite games since Talia died was for Sherry to dress up in her little sister’s clothing, much of which she’d kept since except for footwear she and Talia were pretty much the same size. She’d pretend to be Talia while he videotaped her—not Talia drugged and asleep as she had been in reality but Talia actively wanting him to take her virginity, to be her first guy.

  She’d put up her hair like Talia’s and wash off all her makeup and slowly strip down for him and talk to him all the while in this little-girl voice of Talia’s which she found she could imitate perfectly. Then she’d jerk him off and blow him acting like it was her first time doing that too. Poor unsophisticated Talia needed his instructions so he gave them to her. And when she fucked him there was even bleeding because she’d bought some fake blood in a novelty store and inserted it with a tampon.

  The blood was just water, sugar and food coloring.

  So it presented no problem healthwise.

  But now even that game wasn’t working half the time. Nor were the handcuffs or the toys.

  Owen was becoming unpredictable.

  It was almost a relief when they arrested him.

  It happened just before dinner. Owen was in the shower. The jazzed-up Ragu spaghetti-and-meat sauce was simmering on the stove and she was reading this item in the paper about a mother who’d almost killed her daughter. The mother hadn’t bothered to take her daughter to a doctor when the girl botched her own homemade belly-button piercing. Infection set in and in great pain the thirteen-year-old took to the living room couch in their apartment so she could at least watch TV. Then stopped eating or eventually even moving. She lay there for about three weeks the paper said. Finally when neighbors complained about the stink they found her wearing diapers not only on her butt, but to soak up the fluids oozing from her belly. The girl’s mother had no health insurance and didn’t believe in doctors anyway.

  When the doorbell rang she put down the paper and went to the door and there were these two cops in uniform and two more in jacket and tie. They showed her their badges and asked for Owen and she said he was showering. They asked could they come in please and she smiled and said certainly and suddenly the house seemed crowded which unnerved her. She excused herself to turn off the spaghetti sauce and went to the bathroom and called for Owen.

  She was surprised to find when they arrested him that there were two more uniformed cops at the back door. They were expecting he might try to flee.

  She was surprised to find that they were arresting him not just for rape but for murder too.

  She was surprised as hell when it turned out that Owen had voluntarily given the police a DNA sample when they’d asked him to six months ago, questioning him about the rapes. He hadn’t told her. They’d only just gotten around to doing an analysis—the labs were way backed up they said. She guessed that the DNA sample explained his nervousness. But why in god’s name he’d do something that foolish even given how dumb the cops were in general was a mystery to her.

  Still it was only when they presented her with the search warrant that she began to seriously worry. Not all the videotapes were hidden in the garage. There was one in the VCR. They’d been watching it the night before last. It was one of the older ones which went back two or three years or so.
She didn’t remember the girl’s name offhand but they’d brought her home and drugged her and Owen had raped her as usual but in one scene there was Sherry, using the girl’s limp right hand to masturbate with and she was laughing.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In the first year of their marriage Owen had once made a very big mistake. Got it into his head that it would be fun and exciting to use the halothane on Sherry.

  “Then here’s the deal. While you’re out I not only get to fuck you and you know, do whatever I want with you, but I whip your butt till it’s red as this goddamn sofa. You wake up, you hardly know what happened to you.” He was grinning. “You wake up a changed woman.”

  “Won’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well for one thing if you do anything painful to me, I’ll probably wake up.”

  “Your kitties and doggies don’t wake up when Doc Welles is slicing and dicing, do they?”

  “That’s different. It’s a steady dose they’re breathing. It’s measured.”

  “So? You start to wake up, I reapply.”

  “No. No thanks.”

  “Why not?”

  “Does the name Talia mean anything to you, Owen?”

  “Dammit! That was your fault! You were the one…”

  “Please. Let’s not go through all that again.”

  “I want to go through all that again, Sherry! I’m sick and tired of you blaming me for the whole damn thing!”

  “I don’t blame you for the whole damn thing, Owen.”

  “The fuck you don’t.”

  “I don’t. I told you that before. Look. You wanted to fuck her. Fine. But it didn’t work out, did it. Now you want fuck me the same way and it’s dangerous. No thanks! You get it? Jesus!”

  “Bitch!”

  “What did you call me?”

  “I called you a bitch.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, please. You’re being an asshole. Fuck you, Owen.”

  “Fuck me?”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “Fuck me?”

  “That’s what I said, yes! Fuck you!”

  And that was the first and last time he hit her.

  But the blow was hard enough to blacken her eye and swell her cheek and when she got up off the floor she didn’t hesitate for a moment or say a single word to him but simply grabbed her keys and drove off in her car while he was still trying to apologize to her from the driveway. She drove to her friend Ruth’s house from Dr. Welles’s office and though Ruth was having dinner guests at the time she took one look at her and let her in.

  Ruth’s three guests were her boyfriend and her childhood best friend and her best friend’s husband who as it happened was a criminal attorney and who convinced her fairly easily over coffee and ice packs to report Owen to the police on the theory that if he did this once to her the chances were very good he’d do it again. Abusers typically did. So the four of them drove to the station where she filed a report and had Polaroid photos taken of her massive shiner.

  Which, years later, when she was implicated in charges of rape and murder, made her deal with the DA’s office so much easier.

  The deal was quite straightforward. Sherry would plead guilty to two counts of accessory to murder in exchange for her testimony against her husband. Like Patti Hearst and Hedda Nusbaum and many others before her she was a victim too, weak and battered and unable to do other than comply with Owen’s odious desires. She would confess to obtaining the halothane for him and helping him dispose of the bodies and to participating in sexual acts with the victims and she would describe these murders and these acts in full detail at his trial.

  In exchange for this she would receive a twelve-year sentence on each count to be served concurrently and would be eligible for parole in three years with time off for good behavior. She would waive her right to a preliminary hearing and her own trial would be over swiftly.

  Sherry figured it was a no-brainer.

  And by the time Owen in a perfect fury fessed up to the location of the videotapes the deal was writ in stone. The prosecutor and by extension the public were just going to have to live with it.

  A deal’s a deal.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The night of his death by lethal injection Sherry received the news shortly after twelve through the ever-efficient prison grapevine—death by lethal injection being of special interest to its population. There had been no last-minute stays of execution nor had one been expected despite the public outcry over her own complicity in the crimes once the substance of the videotapes became general knowledge. In the two years since his trial she had neither seen nor heard from him. Only what was in the papers or reported on the TV news. She kept no photos of him or of the two of them together. Only of her mother and her father and their miniature poodle Sasha and her sister Talia.

  Word came to her through the bars from a lifer named Felicity. They knew each other well. Three months ago Felicity and Sherry had modeled swimsuits and little black cocktail dresses at Sherry’s birthday party. Another of the inmates snapped photos of them and sold them to the newspapers. They didn’t mind. They looked good in the pictures. Felicity had entered a plea of not guilty to four counts each on charges of kidnapping, forcible confinement, sexual assault and sexual assault causing bodily harm along with her live-in boyfriend Jimmy. The plea was a mistake for both of them. As Sherry told her more than once she should have taken the deal.

  Sorry, Sherry, she said now. Just that. Sorry.

  Felicity was never big on emotion.

  She fell back upon her bed and began to cry.

  Her cell mate was a pretty twenty-two-year-old black trustee named LeeVonne Amber Anderson. LeeVonne was in her fifth year of doing ten to twenty for armed robbery but the Andersons were a big family and had seen their share of human tragedy. So she was not without compassion. She sat down beside Sherry and tried her best to comfort her.

  “You got to be strong now, baby,” she said. “You know that. You knew it was gonna happen someday, right? Can’t go on appealing forever.”

  “I know, I know. It’s just…I loved him, ‘Vonne. I loved him so fucking much…”

  “ ’Course you did.”

  “Despite what he did to me. Despite him beating me and all.”

  “He was your man. Of course you loved him. Sure you did.”

  “You should have seen the wedding, ‘Vonne. Everybody was there. And he was so handsome. We were like, the perfect couple. You know? We were perfect. Everybody said so.”

  “I bet you were, honey. Listen, you want me to get you anything? Something from the refrigerator? Bottle of water? Can of Sprite maybe?”

  “No thanks. You’re a doll.”

  “How about some tea? I can fire up the hot plate for you. Some Mello Mint maybe.”

  “Before we got married we used to drive up to the lake and go swimming. Everybody thought he was a lifeguard, he had the most beautiful body. He was like this beautiful young Adonis, this young god.”

  “He’s gone to his maker now, honey.”

  “I never would have married him if I knew it would end up this way.”

  “Sure you would have. You loved him.”

  “I got him killed, ‘Vonne! Jesus!”

  “No you didn’t, honey. He got himself killed. You know that, girl. Now come here. Come on.”

  LeeVonne held her and let her cry it all out and they were silent for a while after that and then as was her custom she drew her hand slowly down inside Sherry’s prison-issue orange jumpsuit and beneath her Victoria’s Secret panties and rubbed her and slid her fingers into the warm thick wetness inside of her until she moaned and turned and kissed her and they spoke no more until each of them was done.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The morning of her release Sherry was nervous. Just a little scared.

  She was famous after all. Being famous on the inside was one thing. That was good. Outside was a differ
ent story. There were death threats on the Internet. There was even a betting-pool site—“The Sherry Jefferson Death Pool: When the Game’s Over, Everybody Wins.” While it stated that the site did not condone violence against her it took bets on the exact day she would die. Players were not allowed to fix the results of the pool by killing her or having somebody else kill her. But the pool had thus far amassed over 30,000 dollars.

  So nervous was natural.

  She sat with LeeVonne in the dayroom watching CNN waiting to see if she’d be mentioned. Hoping she would not. The big news that morning was that some seventeen years after the massacre of 5,000 Kurds in Iraq an international tribunal in the Hague had finally ruled that it indeed did constitute genocide and handed down a maximum sentence of fifteen years in prison to businessman Frans van Anraat for selling poison gas to Saddam Hussein.

  It was followed by a story about a cat who had gone repeatedly back into a burning apartment building to save her three newborn kittens. That all four cats were being adopted together by the same family was so sweet it nearly made her want to cry.

  When the prison guards came for her she still had not been mentioned and that was all to the good. She kissed LeeVonne good-bye and promised to write.

  They took her out a private entrance while the press had been directed to another and wearing sunglasses and a scarf over her head she stepped into a taxi and gave the driver the address. If the driver recognized her he didn’t show it. Against the possibility that he or anyone else might Sherry had dyed her hair brown and lost fifteen pounds so that she was thinner than she’d been since she was a teenager and wore hardly any makeup at all.

  “Sixteen thirty-three Rosewood,” she said.

  Sixteen thirty-three Rosewood was not her parents’ house though despite everything she knew she was welcome there. But the house would be mobbed by reporters. What she needed now was anonymity.