by Jack Ketchum
“What do you mean have I got a gun? Gloria, are you kidding?”
He listened, half smiling at first. They watched him. His voice got quieter.
“Can you give me any idea why?” he said. “I see. All right, we’ll try it. But I’m not sure it’ll do a whole lot of good. There’ll be somebody there if we? . . . Okay . . . Thanks, Gloria. Take care, all right?”
He hung up, walked to the table, sat down, and drank his beer.
“That was truly strange,” he said.
“What,” said Amy.
“Gloria says that Vic and most of the sheriff’s office are out investigating a murder. The state police are involved, too. They’re strictly skeleton staff over there. I told her what we had and she said that, in the first place, they can’t do anything until Steven actually arrives—which I guess I expected—but that if he insists on seeing Claire to call them, and that they’d ‘try like hell to find somebody to send over,’ was the way she put it. She said not to let him in the house if I could possibly help it, to try to talk him into turning around and going home again.”
“What was that bit about the gun?”
“That was the weird part. Gloria’s a bit flaky sometimes god knows and I don’t know if she was just playing Miss Melodrama or what, but she actually suggested I order him off at gunpoint. Or anybody else I didn’t know personally who came around tonight. Could you see me standing on the porch ordering Steven out of here, pointing a shotgun at him like . . . like Elvis in Flaming Star? Who the hell owns a gun? And even if we did . . .”
The screen door slammed. Claire jumped.
It was Luke. Beaming.
“Hey! Look, you guys! Look what I got!”
He was holding out his hand, coming toward her, and she might have scolded him for interrupting, some other time she probably would have, but somehow she wanted to be interrupted at the moment, with all this talk of guns and murder and with Steven coming and calling the police in the first place, so she smiled at him, what she hoped was a bright normal smile, and looked down into his hand at the tiny white bones that chance had arranged almost to correspond to his bones, to the bones of the palm of his hand splayed toward the fingers, as though she were looking inside him, into his flesh. At him, really. At frailty.
At mortality.
PART III
EVENING
5:35 P.M.
Steven Carey saw her on the bridge, backpack on the ground in front of her, just beyond the Kennebunk entrance to the highway.
It was rare you saw a girl hitching alone these days. He was in the slow lane doing sixty-five. His reactions were still very good. He pulled over.
Through the rearview mirror he saw her haul the heavy pack up onto her shoulder and run awkwardly toward the car. The weight of the pack made her run at an angle. It threw her balance off. She looked like the cat he’d run over one night after a high school dance. He’d been driving his father’s old Pontiac. He’d stopped the car in the street to watch the cat in the headlights. The cat was leaking brain fluid and trying to run away, running at an angle.
He used a switch on the panel of the Mercedes’ armrest to unlock the back door and another to roll down the window on the frontseat passenger side. The girl appeared at the window and looked at him.
She looked wary. But you could see that she was impressed by the navy blue Paul Stuart suit and the darker blue Mercedes.
Blue was the color for inspiring trust in juries.
“Hi,” he said. He smiled. “Put the pack in the back. Hop in.”
The girl did as she was told. He watched her through the rearview mirror. She wasn’t particularly pretty—nose a little too sharp, face a little too round. Eighteen or so and about ten pounds overweight. Thin brown hair. The usual jeans. And a pale green washed-out T-shirt that read, “Where the hell is Montserrat?” on the front and gave you a map of the Caribbean on the back.
She was strong. She handled the backpack well. And well mannered. She was careful not to slam the door.
She wore a bra.
They all did these days.
She got in front and he pulled away from the shoulder. He punched in the cigarette lighter and drew out a Winston.
“How far are you going?” she asked.
Her voice was breathy. He was disinclined toward breathy.
“Pretty much all the way up the coast,” he said. He laughed. “Some godforsaken place called Dead River. You?”
“Portland.”
He nodded. “There’s an exit right off here.”
“I know,” she said. “Thanks.” And finally she smiled. “Nice car,” she said.
“Thank you.”
There wasn’t much traffic. He drove easily, carefully, edging it up to sixty-five again and no further.
The lighter hadn’t popped. He pulled it out and it wasn’t even warm. The goddamn thing was broken. He felt like throwing the goddamn thing out the goddamn window. He took a pack of matches out of his jacket pocket and lit the Winston.
It was getting on to dusk, and though he had no need of them yet, he switched on the headlights.
“What’s in Portland?” he asked her.
She was biting at one of her fingernails. “My boyfriend goes to school there.”
The girl had a boyfriend.
The girl was getting laid.
The girl took off the bra and the boyfriend sucked her nipples.
“You’re a student too?” he asked.
“I quit for a year. I wanted to work for a while. I go back in September.”
“Sure. Plenty of time for work,” he said.
She nodded. “I guess.”
Plenty of time, he thought. I ought to know. Military academy to college to law school to practice practice practice . . .
She bit her nail again.
Marion did that.
A very bad habit.
He had caught her doing it this very morning, sitting in bed with the sheet up over her lap, leaning down squinting at her stocks listed in the morning paper so that her long thin breasts lay over the roll of fat in her middle and her tousled black hair hung over her face. She was chewing at the nail of the index finger of her left hand, and when she bit it off she put it in the ashtray next to her Virginia Slim Menthol Light.
He saw her doing this just as he stepped out of the shower, and he was already wondering what to do with her by then, in fact he’d been wondering since the night before when she told him they would no longer be able to use him at the firm past the end of the month, either on or off the books, that the plan to rehire him was scotched now once and for all because Linfield had seen him in the office last week and Linfield was complaining to her as senior partner that here was this person still working for them who had lost him a fucking bundle, and what in the hell was he doing there. He would not forget. He would not be convinced or mollified and Mr. Cocksucker B. Linfield was their third fucking biggest client. Sorry.
He was thinking what to do about her—about someone who wanted his cock in the dark of night but had no allegiance and no honor while the cigarette burned and the fingernail smoldered in the ashtray. He could smell it. The smell of burning flesh. She was naked and fat and checking her stocks in the newspaper.
His hands gripped the steering wheel. He eased them, flexed the fingers.
The girl was frowning.
“You know? I think I know Dead River,” she said. “Isn’t that up near Lubec? Way up near the border?”
“I don’t know about Lubec, but it’s nearly all the way to Canada, all right. Actually I’ve never been there. I just looked at the map and figured you could take Ninety-five up to around Brunswick and then cut over to Highway One, past Boothbay Harbor on up.” He flashed her a grin. “Sound about right?”
She nodded. “I have an older cousin who used to work the fishing boats up that way every summer. Earned himself some money for college. That’s why it’s familiar.
“It’s pretty nice country. Why didn’t you just f
ly?”
“Fly?”
“Sure. I mean, it’s a really long drive. You could have flown to Machias. At least that far. And I think there might even be a little airport around Lubec. I don’t remember.” She smiled shyly. “I mean, you don’t look like you’d have a whole lot of trouble affording it, you know?”
He laughed. He stubbed out the Winston.
“The problem is I’m a nervous flyer. I hit a downdraft coming home into Kennedy one time that scared the hell out of me. Once burned, twice shy, you know? That kind of thing.”
They like it when you appear vulnerable, he thought. Even though in this case the downdraft story was true.
“Kennedy? You’ve come all the way up from New York?”
“Connecticut, actually. I was visiting . . . a friend there.”
“Oh.”
He had to be careful. He was giving her too much information. He was already memorable. The suit, the red silk tie, the Mercedes.
He probably should not have picked her up in the first place. He’d wanted the company.
It gave him an idea.
“Listen. Maybe you could help me out here.” He smiled his most disarming smile and shook his head. “The thing of it is, I really don’t know where the hell I’m going and I’m hopeless reading road signs at night. What would you say to driving up with me? Ride shotgun. Just get me up there. Then I’d drive you over to the airport at Machias or Lubec or wherever and put you on a plane back to Portland.” He laughed. “That is assuming you aren’t afraid of flying too. On my tab, naturally. And I’ll give you fifty, seventy-five dollars for your trouble. It’s going to get dark in a couple hours. You’d really be helping me out. What do you say?”
The girl just looked at him, caught completely by surprise. Well, he was a stranger after all. He guessed she would be.
“I . . .”
“What time are you supposed to be there? Is there anybody you could call to say you’d be a little later than expected? Your boyfriend? We could stop at a pay phone somewhere. Call’s on me of course. I’d really appreciate it. You said it was pretty country.”
“But how could I . . . ? I mean, Portland’s less than an hour from here.”
“So?”
“Dead River has to be two hundred miles up the coast. More, probably. It’ll be nine or ten o’clock before you even get there. By the time I got a plane back to Portland, even if I was lucky it’d be midnight!”
He laughed. “Think of it as an adventure.”
She stared at him.
Staring was rude. The girl wasn’t as well mannered as he’d thought.
He honestly couldn’t see why it should be such a terribly big deal to her. It was only a couple of hours. A nice pleasant drive in the country. He’d picked her up, hadn’t he? Given her a ride? Didn’t she owe him a little something?
“Make it a hundred,” he said. “Think about it.”
She flinched as he reached abruptly across her lap to the glove compartment and pulled out the bottle. Her flinching amused him.
Skittish little thing.
He offered her the vodka. He smiled.
“Let me buy you a drink,” he said.
She shook her head.
“Oh, come on. You don’t want to force me to drink alone, do you? What’s your name, by the way?”
He unscrewed the cap on the bottle.
“S-Susan.”
“Susan. That’s a nice name. Suzie. Suzie Cream-cheese. Lazy Susan. Suzerain. Suzerain means feudal lord, did you know that? Someone to whom allegiance is due. Let’s see. Oh Susannah. Sweet Sue. He ever call you that? Your boyfriend? Sweet Sue?”
He drank.
“I . . . I think I’d like to . . . get out now,” she said. “Stop anywhere, okay?”
“Out?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to Portland, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“You want to get out?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You’re drinking.”
“That’s true. I am.”
He drank again. Fuck her, he thought. She was either going with him or she wasn’t, and either way she was going nowhere.
It had been a very bad day, he reflected. And obviously it wasn’t getting any better because the goddamn fucking girl was giving him trouble and would probably continue to give him trouble and the lighter didn’t work.
The day had been very bad in one way. And very good in another.
It had been a long time, he thought. A real long time indeed.
Not since Jimmy whatsisname. Over on Livingston Avenue.
They’d been playing in the apple orchard, a bunch of them he recognized from school. What was it, third grade? Right. They’d been playing soldier, using the little green apples fallen from the trees for grenades, tossing them and falling flat into the tall grass, hiding, crawling toward one another like troops in combat. Nobody had heard him approach and nobody had seen him. And at first nobody knew that the rocks he was throwing were not just the same little green apples they all were using. Not until one of them hit Jimmy in the head and he went down bleeding.
And died in a coma. They never knew that he was the one throwing the rocks and he never told them. He was good at secrets. And there was no point in them knowing anyway because Jimmy was dead.
And now there was no good reason for them knowing about Marion either because Marion was dead too, the victim of a prowler who in the early-morning hours had strangled her with the cord of her hair dryer and had then stolen her stereo and CD player, her television and jewelry—all of it smashed and scattered in a dump outside of Hartford, Connecticut.
Again, nobody had seen him.
Her cleaning lady had been there the day before and she was very thorough so he had no particular worry about fingerprints. He knew the routine. He’d wiped off everything he touched. He had a very good memory for incidentals.
And they’d kept their affair quite secret.
Marion had insisted on it. A matter of office decorum.
He had done it very calmly. Not so much out of anger as because she had deserved to die for feeling free to so easily betray him. And because he wanted to.
She was fat and her breasts were long and ugly and he wanted to.
That was the good part of the day and it was very good indeed.
There had been no slipups, he was sure of that. No police would be knocking at his door. He had gone to work in the usual way with the television and jewelry and all the rest of it in the trunk of his car and accomplished much, and only became agitated when Claire’s lawyer served him the papers, right there in full view of most of the staff.
It was completely normal, unremarkable behavior. You were being divorced, you got agitated.
No one would suspect him of a thing.
He wondered if they’d found her yet.
He’d been careful to rape the body afterward, just for authenticity’s sake. He’d been surprised, actually, at the size of his hardon. Better than she’d managed to do for him in life as far as he could remember. But it was really the one-two-three punch he was after. Assault, theft, rape. You saw it every day. The police would be looking for a thief with priors of sexual offense and they wouldn’t tend to look much further.
“So what do you think?” he said.
“About what?”
“About driving with me.”
The girl’s voice had gotten smaller, even breathier. He liked that. It meant she respected him.
Claire’s voice was deep, almost masculine.
He was going to see Claire. He was going to have to talk to her.
“I’m visiting my wife and son, if that’s your problem. I’m a married man. Look.”
He showed her the ring.
“I . . . I’ve got to get to Portland. I’m expected, you know?”
“When?”
“In . . . in about an hour.”
The girl was lying. She was
hitching. The time would depend on the rides. They wouldn’t know when to expect her.
He drank from the bottle.
“So you don’t want to go with me? You won’t do me a favor?”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can. You just don’t want to. Might as well say it. Go ahead. Tell me you just don’t want to.”
“I . . .”
“Say, ‘I just don’t want to.’ “
“I . . .”
She was scared now. Really scared. The girl was shitting her pants over there.
“Say it!”
“I don’t want to!”
He smiled. “That’s better. Now you’re telling me the truth. Okay. Get out.”
It was getting on to dusk. There was one car well ahead of him and another far behind. He checked the speedometer. He was still doing a little under sixty-five.
“Go on,” he said. “Get out.”
“You have to . . . you’ve got to pull over.”
“No I don’t. Get out. Go on. Get the fuck out.”
He was calm, smiling. He took another drink of the vodka. He glanced at the girl. The girl was crying. That was okay. At least she wasn’t being too noisy about it.
“I . . . can’t . . .”
“Okay. Throw your pack out, then.”
“Huh?”
He used the button on the armrest to unroll the rear passenger-side window.
“Throw your pack out the window and I’ll pull over. I promise.”
“Why? . . . Why do you want to do that?”
“I just do. You want me to pull over? Then throw it out the window.”
At first he thought maybe she was too scared, that she wasn’t going to do it, that all she was going to do was sit there looking at him. But then she must have thought better about it because she leaned over the seat and started to haul up the heavy pack and finally she had it halfway out the window and was pushing at it to get it through when he reached over and cupped her breast and squeezed it, not too hard, and she froze there, still holding on to the backpack, eyes squinted shut, crying.
He squeezed harder.
“Push it,” he said quietly. And the girl did push, and the pack spilled out the window.
He released her.
Through the rearview mirror he watched it tumble, bouncing high behind them, its aluminum frame crumbling, the pack exploding open on the shoulder, her clothes, books, papers—whatever—flying everywhere.