Once they’d finally gone, he sat there in the darkness of the lounge, feeling figures moving about outside, saw the shadows pressed against the windows. He went to the bedroom and opened the bedside cabinet and took out the revolver they kept there in case of intruders, placed it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He saw the light leave his body as his head snapped back and he dropped into the corner and out of sight.
He killed her and then he killed himself, while you were outside, said the detective.
I didn’t hear a gun go off, he said.
The detective looked squarely at him and tapped the folder’s spine on the desk.
Maybe you missed the suicide then, he said, we didn’t find those bodies for days. The autopsy said she was still alive, for a few hours more at least, we might have been able to save her. Then he stood up and without looking back he opened the door and left.
That night, wretched and drunk, he called up his estranged wife, but she wouldn’t take the call, he got her machine three times and then on the fourth someone picked up and then slammed down the receiver and the next two times he called it was busy. He gave up after that and went back to his seat in the bar. At one point he slid his ring off his finger (now he didn’t need it he wore it almost constantly) and approached a group of women sat at a table, but he misjudged the space around them and dipped his head in to their circle too fast with a slurred, exultant, Ladies! One girl’s wine sloshed into her lap with the impact and he skulked away as they regarded him in silence. Knowing he shouldn’t but not caring, he picked up his car and started the drive home to the new apartment that he hated. He felt queasy and parched. He wound down his window and navigated the darkened streets with a determination that saw him sat low in his seat, hands clenching the steering wheel. His mouth was so firmly set that his jaw hurt.
The black and yellow house came at him out of the darkness.
Police line, do not cross, he said quietly to himself as he stepped over the tape and up the steps towards the door. He stood there a moment, swaying slightly and looked in through the glass pane where Mr Raven had once looked back when he wasn’t choking and beating his wife to death. He felt sadness and shame engulf him, felt the weight of his misguided lust settle firmly on his shoulders and he began to sag, he felt his spine buckle and his knees begin to give. The police tape crossed the door in an X as if the occupants were stricken by plague and he pushed against it and felt it move slowly open. Inside the room was dark and he moved clumsily to the sofa and sat down heavily. He looked around in the gloom and wondered where her body had lain as she choked slowly to death on her own blood. How many feet away had he been staring lustily at Julie Ledger as Mrs Raven had coughed and swallowed her life away? He moved to the window that looked out on to the garden at the back of the house and wondered what he would have seen that day if he’d had the wherewithal to enter the yard and peer into their lounge. Would Mr Raven have been bent over his fading wife, his fingers reaching into her mouth or would he have left the room by then in search of his destiny at the end of a handgun? He moved to the bedroom, eyes adjusting to the darkness, hands holding onto the walls. Their bed was unmade and the sight of it made him unspeakably sad, he crumpled against the dresser, catching her hairbrush and knocking it to the floor. Suddenly he felt the warm flush of tears. A voice came from the next room.
Come out of there with your hands up, this is a crime scene, said the policeman from the living room. His gun was drawn and when the weeping figure rushed at him, a shadow among all the other shadows suddenly shouting, I was here, I was here, I was here, he panicked and fearing for his own life he shot into those shadows and the shadow disappeared as quickly as if daylight had suddenly filled the room. The policeman holstered his gun and stood over him feeling for a pulse where there was none. His head was turned to one side and there were still tears on his cheek. The policeman called it in and shaken sat back on the sofa and tried to slow his breathing and the incessant thumping in his chest while he waited for the ambulance and help to arrive.
Out in the yard, Death yawned solemnly, pulled back the heavy folds of his long coat and scratched absently at a gleaming rib; soon, he thought, it’ll be time to go.
Chorus
The emergency phones dotting the road towards Las Vegas were powered by compact, spidery-looking solar panels attached like black antennae to their frames, peering upward and reaching out to the sky above them.
Good luck if you break down out here, said the driver to himself. It’s like the surface of fucking Mars.
He retuned his radio again and again only to come back to a quasi country music show with religious overtones and redemption in every zealous link that the DJ made. He’d start out sounding like he was pitching a sale and then you’d realise that he was selling only one thing: salvation. It made the driver feel creepy, as if he had an unwanted guest in the car; a hitchhiker suddenly determined to save his soul even if that meant taking it. He pushed the image from his mind and let the brimstone and fire wash over him. It was the only signal he could find out there in the Nevada desert, though he couldn’t imagine where they were broadcasting from or the power of their antennae, maybe from the sky itself. He turned the radio off and listened to his wheels turn.
His darkened windows muted the daylight and he felt removed from his surroundings in the plush interior of his Lexus. The car, black inside and out, was something he’d bought not long after he’d come into his father’s money. He wanted something that was somehow expressionless, but that also said stay away. His driver had laughed when he told him this, when did you start thinking that a $50,000 car was expressionless? he asked. It screams, Steal me, take me joyriding, leave me burning at the edge of a deserted road somewhere. Though no one ever had. He barely drove it into the city and at night he had his driver lock it securely away. Not that anyone ever intruded on his property, the house and its grounds still inspired intimidation and fear in people just like his father once had.
He’d had a blow-out on the outskirts of town, his back right tyre bursting into and out of life, sending his car spinning around in a half-circle to face the way he’d just come. The explosion it made caused him to duck involuntarily as if there were suddenly gunfire zipping over his head. He got out and stood at the side of the road. He was beyond the desert now, but still had some way to go. Sweat gathered at the small of his back as he stood there.
He was on his knees working the wheel off, the spare propped against his thigh, when he saw the shadow cast across the car. He instinctively tightened his grip on the wrench and got ready to rail around and strike out. His jaw was set so tightly that his teeth hurt.
Need a hand? said a voice.
He glanced around. The stranger looked both confident and cocky, hands set on his hips as if he were about to use his body to form giant letters of the alphabet. His sunglasses were impenetrable, his mouth tight. He seemed to regard the driver, sizing him up.
I’m good, said the driver. It’s almost fixed.
He indicated the deflated tyre that was very far from almost fixed, no matter how you looked at it.
I’ve got a car, said the stranger, I could drive you into town or to the nearest garage. His car sat at the side of the road, one door open like a wing.
How didn’t I hear him pull up? thought the driver.
The stranger stood there, unmoving, a slight breeze playing around the edges of his jacket. He was utterly silent then, cool and remote, but he looked like he wanted something, as if there was something on his mind.
I’m good, said the driver firmly. He glanced in at the shadowy interior of his car and wondered where his gun was. He had vague memories of throwing it from the car, then he imagined dropping it on the highway and watching it bounce away, but it all felt hazy and dreamlike and he wasn’t even sure that it wasn’t just stuffed under the seat or in the glove compartment. He patted his back pocket and was reassured to feel his knife. He chose to wave the wrench around a little in order to make his
point.
They stood there silently for a moment like two gunslingers waiting for someone to make the first move. Then the stranger stepped quickly forward and the driver took an involuntary step backwards, the wrench rising in his fist again. The stranger smiled and laughed a little, then walked back to his car.
He pulled up next to the driver, the engine bubbled quietly and the stranger raised his sunglasses and stared with dead, featureless eyes a little longer than was comfortable.
Last chance, said the stranger. You could be in town in no time at all. He waved his sunglasses at the faint promise of Las Vegas somewhere over the next hill.
Cold beer, he said, air conditioning, dancing girls. He smiled widely and the driver thought briefly that if he were close enough then this stranger might lean forward and bite him on the face. The smile turned to a leer. Whatever your pleasure may be, the stranger said.
The driver laid the wrench on his car roof with a clatter and regarded the stranger across the rooftop.
I’m good, really, he said evenly and watched the stranger shrug and pull onto the road and away, his car wavering and indistinct in the waves of heat rising up from the highway.
He changed the wheel as quickly as he could, his thoughts never far from the road he was on. Waiting for the sound of a car returning, pulling up next to his. Death stealthy and sudden at the hands of the stranger, strangling the life out of him, his legs dancing as he was pulled sharply backward into oblivion. He got behind the wheel and pushed the car on, offering up a silent prayer for the spare tyre to hold. He’d bypass Vegas, he thought. Hadn’t that been where the stranger was heading back to? He passed the city in daylight, its silver and glass beacons standing in the distance and thought about what sort of terrors lay there. He wondered if that was how Oz looked and if Dorothy must have thought the same thoughts herself as she approached the turrets and towers in fear and wonder.
The circles of cross ramps carried him towards and then away from the city. He thought he’d taken the wrong road at one point and felt the panic rise inside him as he found himself being pulled towards the Strip and into downtown, but the road curved and then straightened out and the city was suddenly climbing skywards to one side of him, reflecting his speed in its shimmering blue windows as he gathered momentum and pulled away to the west. He cracked a window and felt the warm air filling the car. Even with his sunglasses on he found he was starting to squint.
How long do you think it’ll take for us to get to the coast? his passenger asked. He knew the voice before he turned to look at the seat next to him. He pushed his sunglasses up onto his head and let the sun stream into his eyes, hoping that the white light would burn through the heart of the car and leave only their ashes on the seats, like the black blossoms left behind on the walls of Hiroshima.
Think you can make it without getting lost? his passenger said. He checked in his mirror and then forced himself to look to his right. His father was staring out of the window, one foot up on the dashboard; he was wearing an old pair of Aviator sunglasses that the driver remembered his father losing one summer in the sea while they were vacationing in Florida. His father removed them and turned to look at him.
I thought you lost those, said the driver.
Nah, said his father, twirling them around between his fingers. What made you think that?
Down in Florida, he started and then stopped. Was he talking to a ghost? Were the approaching cars passing him and wondering who he was speaking to?
They were where I always left them, said his father, and pushed them back up onto the bridge of his nose. Look at these crazy fuckers living out here in the desert, his father continued, indicating the suburban houses that had attached themselves in strips to the city.
I know we lived out of town, but we had a little space, you know, he said. Then he set both feet up on the dashboard and eased his seat back.
Who the fuck would choose to live in a desert, what are they, fucking towel heads? All other people are crazy, he sighed, looking across at his son, never forget that.
He stared hard ahead wondering how something so unreal could be so tightly bound up in his reality.
Do you remember when you rescued me? he asked his father, but his father remained mute, stony-faced. He’d put his glasses back on and now it looked as though he were hiding behind them.
Are you sleeping, Dad? he asked. But his father just shushed him and told him to keep his eye on the traffic that was slowing up ahead. He shifted down a gear and forced himself to focus, his eyes drifting occasionally to the right only to dart quickly back into place when he realised that his father was still sitting there and sometimes he was staring right back.
Song 8: Holiday
His holiday mementoes – one for every time he’d killed – filled the shelves of his bedroom. The snowglobes were collected in neat rows, the floor lamp in the corner positioned so that it backlit the glass and plastic domes, bringing the floating silver flakes to life when he shook them and quickly set them down to capture the effect. Like a showman spinning plates on poles he’d frantically run the length of the room, grabbing and shaking the globes as he went, then throwing himself down on the bed to watch the snow settle on the tiny vistas and landmarks magnified in their slowly glittering worlds.
The first time he killed a man he was surprised by how long it took. He stood over him, slick with sweat, panting, gripping the hammer tightly in one hand, a piece of piping in the other. He noticed that his fingers ached, his hand felt like a claw for hours afterwards. He’d rattled a tattoo of blows along his victim’s skull and shoulders, but the man had remained firmly on his knees, his arms across his head to shield him from the blows. He’d got him down with the first swing, the hammer glancing off his temple, but he’d been resilient after that as if staying hunched on one knee would finally set him free. The first woman, slight, blonde, drunk and compliant, up to a point, had been much quicker. By the time her face had changed from heated excitement to furious panic and fear it was too late. He left her marvelling at the fact that strangulation did cause the eyes to bulge and the tongue to poke out and turn blue. Like a lizard, he’d thought, or an alien. Nothing was set in stone though. He stabbed one man under the heart and he’d sighed as something popped sagging against him like a drunk at a Christmas party, falling slowly to the floor. One woman – the clear plastic bag over her head sucking frantically, forming a clear shroud against her features – staggered and swung her fist even as her body bounced off the hotel door. He’d written the words struggle and instinct to survive in his journal that night, still feeling profoundly moved by her display of strength. He hadn’t thought about letting her live though. That would have defeated the object of the holiday, he would have gone home disappointed, as if it had rained all week or if he’d twisted an ankle jumping into the sea.
He liked hunting in cities, Seattle, Chicago, New York. In places like those he could relax and enjoy the sites too, depending on when he struck. He’d once killed on the first night that he’d landed, an opportunistic murder on a Californian beach down from the hotel. It was late and she’d been walking along the shore, her jeans were rolled up and she was barefoot. He’d fallen into step with her, she was drunk and had argued with her friends, she told him. She was clinging to his arm as they walked away from the harbour lights, leaning into him as he pointed out distant constellations, most of them imagined. He picked up pieces of wood and pebbles and flung them out over the dark waters until they dropped toward the horizon and out of sight. They were both listening for the splash when he scooped up the fist-sized rock at his feet and swung it upwards to strike her in the face. He caught her as her head snapped back and her nose broke. He let her drop into the sand and then sat across her chest and stove in her head with the rock, glancing over his shoulder as his arm crashed down with a sure rhythm. His heart was racing as he dragged her body into the surf and under a nearby pier. He pulled her body under the water and jammed it in against the wooden leg of the
pier and weighed it down with rocks. He studied her face beneath the water as the tide washed the blood from her shattered features; she was, he thought, still very beautiful. He pulled off his shirt to hide the blood and wrapped it around his hand, he walked up the beach towards the hotel’s welcoming glow, thinking that if he hurried he might catch last call at the bar after he’d towelled off. He was whistling something, but he couldn’t be sure what. He bought the snowglobe at the hotel’s gift shop on his last day there; a plastic shark, swimming above the name of the resort picked out in starfish in the sand. He gave it a shake, held it up against the sunlight and admired the colours swirling around as the driver loaded his luggage into the cab.
Cross Country Murder Song Page 12