The Monster Novels: Stinger, the Wolf's Hour, and Mine

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Six hundred’s enough,” Didi said. “Take the money, Bonnie. Got to get us to Michigan, doesn’t it?” She took the automatic from Laura as Didi pocketed the cash. “Anybody else in here?”

  “Wanda Jane’s in the back. She’s the bookkeeper.”

  “Okay, go on through that door real nice and slow.”

  The man started to walk, but Laura said, “Wait. Take the diamond. You bought it.” Didi flashed her a glance of disapproval, and the scared clerk just stood there not knowing what to do. “Take it,” Laura said, and at last he did.

  In the office, a wizened woman with butch-cut gray hair was smoking a cigarette, sitting in a smoke haze and talking on the telephone as she watched a soap opera on a portable TV. Didi didn’t have to speak; the man’s face and the pistol did all the talking. Wanda Jane croaked, “Jumpin’ Jesus! Hal, I think we’re bein’—” Didi put her hand down on the phone’s prongs, cutting the connection.

  “Wanda Jane, you keep your mouth shut,” Didi ordered. “You two strip naked.”

  “The hell I will!” Wanda Jane thundered, her face reddening to the roots of her hair.

  “They’ve already killed somebody!” the clerk said. “They’re both crazy!” He was already unbuttoning his shirt. When he unbuckled his belt, his huge paunch flopped out like the nose of the Goodyear blimp.

  Didi hurried them up. In a couple of minutes they were both nude and lying on their bellies on the concrete floor, and an uglier two moons Laura had never been so unfortunate to see. Didi tore the phone out of the wall and scooped their clothes up. “You lie here for ten minutes. Bobby’s watching the front door. If you come out before ten minutes are up, you’re dead meat, because Bobby’s even crazier than Bonnie. Hear me?”

  Wanda Jane grunted like a bullfrog. The man with horse teeth gripped his new diamond in his fist and bleated, “Yeah, we hear you! Just don’t kill us, okay?”

  “See you next time we come through,” Didi promised, and she pushed Laura out of the office in front of her.

  Outside, Didi dumped the clothes in a trash can. Then she and Laura ran to the Cutlass, which was parked down the street a few doors from the pawnshop, and Didi took the wheel again. In five minutes they were heading back toward I-80, and in ten minutes they were on their way west again, six hundred dollars richer and minus a diamond that had become to Laura only a dead weight.

  Didi kept checking the rearview mirror. No flashing lights, no sirens. Yet. The speedometer’s needle showed a little over sixty, and Didi left it there. “From shoplifting to armed robbery in less than a day,” Didi said, and she couldn’t hold back a wicked grin. “You’re a natural.”

  “A natural what?”

  “Outlaw.”

  “I didn’t steal anything. I left him the diamond.”

  “That’s right, you did. But didn’t it feel good, making him look at that gun and bust a gut?”

  Laura watched the wipers fight the spits of snow. It had been thrilling, in a way. It had been so alien to her normal sense of propriety that it had seemed like someone else holding the gun, wearing her skin, and speaking in her voice. She wondered what Doug might think of it, or her mother and father. One thing she realized was true, and it filled her with gritty pride: she might not be an outlaw, but she was a survivor. “ ‘Strip naked,’” she said, and she gave a hard note of laughter. “How’d you think of that?”

  “Just buying time. I couldn’t think of any other way to keep them in that office for a while.”

  “Why’d you keep calling me Bonnie? And you said we were on our way to Michigan?”

  Didi shrugged. “Pigs’ll be looking for two women on their way to Michigan. One of them has a southern accent and is named Bonnie. They may be traveling with a male accomplice named Bobby. Anyway, the pigs’ll look in the opposite direction from where we’re going. They won’t know what to make of somebody trading a three-thousand-dollar diamond for six hundred bucks at gunpoint.” She smiled faintly. “Did you hear what I said? ‘Pigs.’ I haven’t said that and meant it in a long time.” Her laughter bubbled up, too. “Did you see Wanda Jane’s face when I told them to strip? I thought she was going to drop a fig!”

  “And when that guy’s belly came out I thought it was going to flop right to the floor! I thought Des Moines was about to have an earthquake!”

  “Guy needed a girdle! Hell, he couldn’t find a girdle big enough!”

  They were both laughing, the laughter taking some of the edge off what they’d just done. As Laura laughed, she forgot for a precious moment the pain in her hand and in her heart, and that was mercy indeed.

  “He needed a whale girdle!” Didi went on. “And did you see the butts on those two!”

  “Butt and Jeff!” Laura said, tears in her eyes.

  “The Honeymooners!”

  “Two moons over Des Moines!”

  “I swear to God, I’ve seen bowls of Jell-O with better—” Muscle tone, she was about to say, but she did not because of the flashing blue light that had suddenly appeared in the rear windshield. The scream of a siren came into the car, and the hair stood up on the back of Laura’s neck.

  “Christ!” Didi shouted as she jerked the Cutlass over into the right lane. The patrol car was roaring up in the left lane, and Didi’s heart hammered as she waited for it to swerve on their tail. But it kept going, sweeping past them in a siren blare and dazzling blue lights, and it sped away into the murk of swirling sleet and snow.

  Neither woman could speak. Didi’s hands had clamped into claws around the steering wheel, her eyes wide with shock, and Laura sat there with her stomach cramping and her bandaged hand pressed against her chest.

  Four miles farther west, they passed a car that had skidded off the highway into the guardrail. The patrol car was parked nearby, the Smokey talking to a young man in a sweatshirt with SKI WYOMING across the front. Traffic had slowed, the afternoon had darkened to a plum violet, and the pavement glistened. Didi touched her window. “Getting colder,” she said. The Cutlass was a laboring, gas-guzzling beast, but its heater was first rate. She cut their speed back to fifty-five, grainy snow flying before the headlights.

  “I can drive if you want to take a nap,” Laura offered.

  “No, I’m fine. Let your hand rest. How’re you doing?”

  “Okay. Hurting some.”

  “If you want to stop somewhere, let me know.”

  Laura shook her head. “No. I want to keep going.”

  “Six hundred dollars would buy us airline tickets,” Didi said. “We could catch a flight to San Francisco from Omaha and rent a car to Freestone.”

  “We couldn’t rent a car without a driver’s license. Anyway, we’d have to give up the gun to board a plane.”

  Didi drove on a few more miles before she spoke again, bringing up a subject that had been needling her since the incident at the lumberyard. “What good is a gun going to be, anyway? I mean…how are you going to get David back, Laura? Mary’s not going to give him up. She’ll die first. Even with a gun, how’re you going to get David back alive?” She emphasized the last word.

  “I don’t know,” Laura answered.

  “If Mary finds Jack Gardiner…well, who knows what she’ll do? Who knows what he’ll do? If she shows up at his door after all these years, he might flip out.” She glanced quickly at the other woman and then away, because the pain had crept back onto Laura’s face and latched there in the lines. “Jack was a dangerous man. He could talk other people into doing his killing for him, but he did his share of murders, too. He was the mind behind the Storm Front. The whole thing was his idea.”

  “And you really think that’s him? In Freestone?”

  “I think that’s him in the photo, yeah. Whether he’s in Freestone now or not, I don’t know. But when Mary gets to him with David as some kind of a…love offering, God only knows how he’ll react.”

  “So we’ve got to find Jack Gardiner first,” Laura said.

  “There’s no telling how far Mary is ahe
ad of us. She’ll get to Freestone before us if we don’t go by plane.”

  “She can’t be that far ahead. She’s hurt, too, maybe worse than I am. The weather’s going to slow her down. If she gets off the interstate, it’ll just slow her down more.”

  “Okay,” Didi said. “Even if we do find Jack first, what then?”

  “We wait for Mary. She’ll give the baby to Jack. That’s why she’s going to Freestone.” Laura gently touched her bandaged hand. It was hot enough to sizzle, and throbbed with a deep, agonizing pulse. She would have to stand the pain, because she had no choice. “When my baby is out of Mary’s hands…that’s why I might need the gun.”

  “You’re not a killer. You’re tough as old leather, yeah. But not a killer.”

  “I’ll need the gun to hold Mary for the police,” Laura told her.

  There was a long silence. The Cutlass’s tires hummed. “I don’t think Jack would like that,” Didi said. “Whatever identity he’s built for himself, he’s not going to let you call the police on Mary. And once you get David back…I’m not sure I can let you do that either.”

  “I understand,” Laura said. She’d already thought about this, and her thoughts had led her to this destination. “I was hoping we could work something out.”

  “Right. Like a presidential pardon?”

  “More like a plane ticket to either Canada or Mexico.”

  “Oh boy!” Didi smiled bitterly. “Nothing like starting life over in a foreign country with zilch money and a K-Mart sweater!”

  “I could send you some money to help you get settled.”

  “I’m an American! Get it? I live in America!”

  Laura didn’t know what else to say. There was nothing else, really. Didi had started her journey to this point a long time ago, when she’d cast her lot with Jack Gardiner and the Storm Front. “Damn,” Didi said quietly. She was thinking of a future in which the fear of someone coming up behind her suffocated the days and haunted the nights, and everywhere she walked she carried a target on her back. But there were a lot of islands in the waterways of Canada, she thought. A lot of places where the mail came in by seaplane and your closest neighbor lived ten miles away. “Would you buy me a kiln?” she asked. “For my pottery?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s important to me, to do my pottery. Canada’s a pretty country. It would be inspiring, wouldn’t it?” Didi nodded, answering her own query. “I could be an expatriate. That sounds better than exile, don’t you think?”

  Laura agreed that it did.

  The Cutlass passed from Iowa into Nebraska, following I-80 as it snaked around Omaha and on across the flat, white-frosted plains. Laura closed her eyes and rested as best she could, with the wipers scraping across the windshield and the tires a dull roar.

  Thursday’s child, she thought.

  Thursday’s child has far to go.

  She remembered one of the nurses saying that, at David’s birth.

  And she hadn’t thought of this before, but it came to her between the scrape and the roar: she’d been born on a Thursday, too.

  Far to go, she thought. She’d come a long way, but the most dangerous distance still lay ahead. Somewhere on that dark horizon, Mary Terror was traveling with David, getting closer to California with the passing of every mile. Behind Laura’s eyes, she saw David lying in a pool of blood, his skull shattered by a bullet, and she shoved the image away before it took root. Far to go. Far to go. Into the golden West, dark as a tomb.

  3

  He Knows

  THREE HOURS AHEAD OF the Cutlass, the snow was whirling before Mary’s headlights. It was coming down fast and heavy now from the solid night, a blowing snow that the wipers were straining to clear. Every so often a gust of wind would broadside the Cherokee and the wheel would shudder in Mary’s hands. She could feel the tires wanting to slew on the slick interstate, and around her the other traffic—which had thinned out dramatically since nightfall—had slowed to half the posted speed.

  “We’re going to be fine,” she told Drummer. “Don’t you worry, Mama’ll take care of her sweet baby.” But the truth was that the ants of fear were crawling under her skin, and she’d passed two pileups since she’d left a McDonald’s in North Platte, Nebraska, twenty minutes before. This kind of driving shredded the nerves and shot the eyes, but the interstate was still clear and Mary didn’t want to stop until she had to. Drummer had been fed and changed at the McDonald’s, and he was getting sleepy. Mary’s injured leg was numb from driving, but the pain in her forearm wound woke up occasionally and bit her hard and deep just to let her know who was really in charge. She felt feverish, too, her face moist and swollen with heat. She had to go on, as far as she could tonight, before her suffering body gave out on her.

  “Let’s sing,” Mary said. “ ‘Age of Aquarius,’” she decided. “The Fifth Dimension, remember?” But of course Drummer did not. She began to sing the song, in a voice that might have been pleasant in her youth, but was now harsh and incapable of carrying a tune. “ ‘If You’re Going to San Francisco,’” she said: another song title, but she couldn’t recall the artist’s name. She began to sing that, too, but she knew only the part about going to San Francisco with flowers in your hair, so she sang that over and over a few times and then let it go.

  The snow blew against the windshield and the Cherokee trembled. The flakes hit the glass and stuck there, large and intricate like Swiss lace, for a few seconds before the wipers could plow them aside and the next ones came.

  “ ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime,’” Mary said. “Sly and the Family Stone.” Except she didn’t know the words to it, all she could do was hum the tune. “‘Marrakesh Express.’ Crosby, Stills, and Nash.” She knew almost all of that one; it had been one of Lord Jack’s favorites.

  “ ‘Light My Fire,’” the man in the backseat said in a voice like velvet and leather.

  Mary looked into the rearview mirror and saw his face and part of her own. Her skin was glistening with fever sweat. His was white, like carved ice.

  “‘Light My Fire,’” God repeated. His dark hair was a thick mane, his face sculpted with shadows. “Sing it with me.”

  She was shivering. The heater was blasting, she was full of heat, but she was shivering. God looked just like he did when she’d seen him up close in Hollywood. She smelled the phantom aromas of pot and strawberry incense, the combination like an exotic and lost perfume.

  He began to sing, there in the back of the Cherokee, as the snow flailed down and Mary Terror gripped the wheel.

  She listened to his half moan, half snarl, and after a while she joined him. They sang “Light My Fire” together, his voice tough and vibrant, hers searching for the lost chord. And they were on the part about setting the night on fire when Mary saw red flames erupt in the windshield. Not flames, no: brake lights. A truck, its driver stomping on the brakes just in front of her.

  She wrenched the wheel to the right and felt the tires defy her. The Cherokee was sliding into the rear of a tractor-trailer rig. She made a choked noise as God sang on. And then the Cherokee lurched as the tires found traction; the vehicle went off onto the right shoulder and missed slamming into the truck by about two feet. Maybe she had screamed; she didn’t know, but Drummer was awake and crying shrilly.

  Mary put the emergency brake on, picked up Drummer, and hugged him against her. The song had stopped. God was no longer in the backseat; he had abandoned her. The truck was moving on, and a hundred yards ahead blue lights spun and figures stood in the sweeping snow. It was another wreck, two cars jammed together like mating roaches. “It’s all right,” Mary said as she rocked the child. “It’s all right, shhhhhh.” He wouldn’t stop, and now he was wailing and hiccuping at the same time. “Shhhhh, shhhhhh,” she whispered. She was burning up, her leg was hurting again, and her nerves were raw. He kept crying, his face squeezed with anger. “SHUT UP!” Mary shouted. “SHUT UP, I SAID!” She shook him, trying to rattle his crybox loose. His breath snagge
d on a series of hiccups, his mouth open but nothing coming out. Mary felt a jolt of panic, and she pressed Drummer against her shoulder and thumped his back. “Breathe!” she said. “Breathe! Breathe, damn you!”

  He shuddered, pulling the air into his lungs, and then he let out a holler that said he was through taking shit.

  “Oh, I love you, I love you so much!” Mary told him as she rocked him and tried to quiet him down. What if he’d strangled to death just then? What if he hadn’t been able to breathe and he’d died right here? What good would a lump of dead baby be for Jack? “Oh Mama loves her baby, her sweet sweet Drummer, yes she does,” Mary crooned, and after a few minutes Drummer’s tantrum subsided and his crying ceased. “Good baby. Good baby Drummer.” She found the pacifier he’d spat out and stuck it back in his mouth. Then she laid him on the floorboard again, snuggled deep in a dead man’s parka, and she got out of the Cherokee and stood in the falling snow trying to cool her fever.

  She limped away a distance, picked up a handful of snow, and rubbed it over her face. The air was wet and heavy, the snowflakes whirling down from a heaven as dark as stone. She stood watching other cars, vans, and trucks go past, heading west. The cold made her head clear and sharpened her senses. She could go on. She had to go on.

  Jack was waiting for her, and when they were joined again life would be incense and peppermints.

  Back behind the wheel, Mary repeated the three names over and over again as the night went on and the miles clicked away. “Hudley…Cavanaugh…Walker…Hudley…”

  “Cavanaugh…Walker,” God said, returned to the Cherokee’s backseat.

  He came and went, at his whim. There were no chains on God. Sometimes Mary looked back at him and thought he favored Jack, other times she thought there had never been another face like his and there never would be again. “Do you remember me?” she asked him. “I saw you once.” But he didn’t answer, and when she glanced in the rearview mirror again the backseat was empty.

  The snow was getting heavier, the wind rocking the Cherokee like a cradle. The land changed from flat to rolling, a preview of Wyoming. Mary stopped at a gas station near Kimball, twenty-five miles east of the Wyoming state line, and she filled the Cherokee’s tank and bought a pack of glazed doughnuts and black coffee in a plastic cup. The brassy-haired woman behind the counter told her she ought to get off the interstate, that the weather was going to get worse before it got better, and there was a Holiday Inn a couple of miles north. Mary thanked her for the advice, paid what she owed, and pulled out.