Kiss Them Goodbye

by Joseph Eastburn

  “What happened?”

  Janine was still gasping for air. She looked up at him. “I’ll—tell you—about it—let’s just—get away from him.”

  They started running again, this time around the practice fields, along a dirt road that split away and swerved into the woods. They found a path that wound up through a stand of pine. The path was covered with brittle orange needles. Janine didn’t even look down.

  “Don’t you have any shoes?”

  “I had flip-flops and a towel—but I dropped them,” she said, holding a branch back so it wouldn’t hit him.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just wait.”

  The path curved out from under the shelter of the pines into a small meadow. They jogged on the dirt path through waist-high yellow thistles. On the other side of the meadow, Janine climbed up over some boulders, down onto a small mossy patch of ground. She threw herself down on the moss and it gave with her weight as her lungs rapidly caught air. Her breathing began to slow. Ballard just kept panting, looking at her, then back over the rocks and out at the meadow.

  “I used to come here when I was little,” she said, taking a deep breath.

  “Good hiding place.”

  “Yeah,” she said, hoisting her upper body onto her elbows. “If you listen, you can hear any cars on the road down below us. You can see the meadow.”

  Ballard sat down on the moss next to her. He didn’t know what to say. He just looked around, panting.

  “I haven’t brought anyone here in a long time. It’s . . .”—she pulled her knees up to her chest—“. . . special. What happened to your face?”

  “Gluckner did a number on me.”

  “And you still helped me?”

  “I—I don’t know what came over me. Why do you hang around with him anyway?”

  “I don’t. I came down to sunbathe by myself. Had my suit under my jeans. He just came up behind me, started pushing me, pinching me. He stuck his hand down the back of my bathing suit.”

  “Bastard.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “I was on the bluff on the other side. I saw him chasing you.”

  She looked in his eyes and took hold of his arm. “Thank you.”

  She pulled her arms back, suddenly embarrassed, and lowered her eyes as they both fell silent. Ballard just kept looking down, pulling little tufts of moss away, letting his racing mind still.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said finally.

  “Well, is that my fault?”

  “No,” Ballard stammered. “I’ve just been caught up in something.”

  Janine pulled her bare feet in and sat cross-legged. “What?”

  “The murders.”

  “What does that have to do with you?”

  “It keeps looking like I did it.”

  Janine’s eyes got larger as he talked. He told her about all the evidence building up against him. He told her about the lieutenant, the tie around Crawford’s neck, the gloves on Finkelstein’s body. She stared in wonder, her mouth falling open, her eyes getting softer, her limbs shivering. As he talked, he realized he had broken free of some of the fear. He knew he was on a journey out of a nightmare.

  Ballard caught something in her eyes that tugged at him. He kept looking at her eyes. She was smiling shyly from under her tousled hair. He didn’t know why he reached forward. It was just one of those moments when everything about her was conspiring to send him out of his mind—her tough yet soft features, her fear, her sadness. The way she looked in that blue bathing suit. He took her face in his hands and kissed her lightly on the lips.

  She looked at him carefully and blinked. “That’s not why I brought you here,” she said quietly.

  He leaned back. “I know.”

  She pulled her knees up again and wrapped her arms around them, looking off at the meadow. “It’s not true, you know.”

  “What?”

  “What they say about me up at the school.”

  “I haven’t heard anything.”

  “Don’t lie.” She shook her hair out defensively.

  “All right, I’ve heard things, but I didn’t believe them.”

  Janine shuddered, her mouth crimped bitterly at one end. “I got in some trouble one time, but . . . they’ve never let me forget it. They started lying, I mean, spreading lies you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Suddenly her eyes welled up. “I can’t help it. I didn’t even like guys that much. They were like aliens to me. Nonpersons, you know? But they kept coming after me. ‘Come here, sugar, here, babe,’ making kissing sounds, shit like that. I wanted to prove something, I don’t know, I . . . wanted to . . .” She started to cry.

  Ballard took her in his arms, rocked her back and forth and stroked her hair. After she stopped crying, she lay down. He dropped down next to her and after a while they both went to sleep.

  Ballard dreamed he heard a car approaching. First he heard the car in the distance, then it got closer and louder. He dreamed he was floating inside the hub of a racetrack. Then he realized the roar of the gasoline engines were his breaths, hot and furious, as he was kissing Janine and she was holding his face in her hands, kissing him back. They were half asleep, moaning, rocking against each other, awkwardly kissing faces, shoulders, arms.

  Ballard found himself kissing down her blue bathing suit, gently biting her breasts through the elastic, until her tiny nipples began to harden. His mouth began to press into her belly, wondering as he touched her hips if she was part swan. Then he remembered a swan could break your leg if she wanted to. He edged his mouth down below her belly button, looking for feathers, when he felt her warm fingers come down and grab a hold of his chin. She pulled him back up. He landed on her lips again. He kissed her face, closing his eyes and opening them to see her skin sink beneath his mouth. He kissed her lips again and again, as a burning sensation shot through his stomach and legs, a feeling that set his insides on fire.

  Janine flung her head out toward the meadow. Through a swirl of branches and hair, Gluckner’s face loomed up behind her. Ballard shrieked and lurched back. With a knuckleful of hair, Gluckner snapped Janine back against the rocks and knocked the wind out of her. She began to gasp, her lungs clutching for air. He brought his other hand down hard against her face to stop her breaths. She tried to scream and kicked her legs up and down.

  Ballard picked up a stone and hit Gluckner in the side of the head with it. There was a loud yelp as he fell to the side, letting go of Janine, who jumped away from him, still grunting, trying to get her breath. Ballard swung wildly at him.

  “Run, Janine!” he yelled as he punched Gluckner on the shoulders and head. All he remembered was hearing her cry, yelling savagely toward the road for help. He glimpsed the blue bathing suit disappearing through the trees as Gluckner’s fist came around and smashed him in the jaw. He looked up at the sky and thought it was blue elastic. He saw Gluckner tower over him as he felt a sneaker kick into his stomach. He was starting to pass out.

  One of the last things he saw was a strap holding books fly up in the air. It appeared over Gluckner’s head and came down hard, the bindings striking his head. After Gluckner slumped forward onto the rocks, the quick crack of a baton. A tall schoolboy was standing there behind him, in buckle-down shoes, shorts, a white shirt and school tie, a beanie. Cary saw a large jaw, white face makeup, a pair of clown lips painted on—but he couldn’t forget the same burning eyes, as a black cloak swooped around the body. He thought he saw a syringe flash into Gluckner’s arm.

  He dreamed he was carrying a great weight and yet he seemed to be falling. He thought he stumbled down the hill, through trees, holding Gluckner’s arm. At one point, beside a car, he remembered reaching wildly out for the schoolboy’s face, was pushed against the car, then felt a sting on his arm. He was thrown back with vinyl slapping up against his bare arms. A door slammed. Then darkness.

  42

  FOWLE
R WAS SITTING in his car down the hill from the crime van. He had driven back down to Ravenstown out of curiosity, or so he told himself. He had called ahead to Bill Rodney, who assured him Sergeant Cole was out in the field, but now that he was here, he wondered if he should have come at all. He was lucky Weathers hadn’t put the cuffs on him—but it didn’t matter—he knew something was driving him back here. He heard a young girl’s bare feet slapping the pavement near the van.

  He recognized the girl from the descriptions Marty had given him. Fowler flung open his car door and yelled at her.

  “Janine?”

  “Are you Fowler?”

  “Yes. You all right?”

  Janine stopped in the middle of the road, shivered from head to toe, and blurted out. “Come quick, Gluckner is gonna kill Cary, I know it!”

  Fowler stared at her a second as if not understanding. “Where is Cary?”

  “Up in the woods. I’ll show you.”

  Fowler hesitated, then ran toward her. “Get in the car,” he said.

  Fowler’s Dodge skidded through the dirt and fishtailed out onto the old tar road. They drove up the hill. On the way Janine kept looking up into the trees, glancing wildly over the dashboard. They passed one car, a new Ford. A boy in a cap with a white clown face was driving. Nick saw an Alamo tag on the back fender through the rearview. That was strange.

  They drove another mile up the ascent. Janine suddenly pointed to a path that led up the embankment.

  “How long ago did you leave here?” Fowler asked as he jumped out of the car.

  “About fifteen minutes,” she said, still shivering.

  Fowler led Janine carefully through the undergrowth beside the path so as not to disturb the heel marks he kept seeing in the dirt. By the time they climbed the hill and got to the moss beside the meadow, there was no one there. Fowler asked Janine to sit down for a moment while he looked around. Near the rocks, he found a clear green plastic tip that looked like the cap to a ball-point pen. He picked it up with his handkerchief and put it in his pocket. He saw some blood on a rock, kept it, noticed the impressions on the moss, then started following the footprints back down the hill through the trees.

  “There’re three sets of prints here,” he said over his shoulder to her.

  “Three? That’s impossible.”

  “Come on, let’s go. I’ll have a team come back to take casts.” Then Nick remembered he was off the case. Funny he should have forgotten that.

  They worked their way down beside the path. He found another clear green tip in the leaves beside the road. They got back in his car. While he was speeding back down the hill, he thought he always wanted to go private. He could do that and still work the case without a conflict of interest.

  It was still light out when he drove by the van. He didn’t stop. At the bottom of the hill in town, he pulled into the first gas station and asked the kid pumping gas if he had seen any cars come down the hill. The kid scratched his head. “We don’t get much traffic.”

  “Well, I passed a Ford going up, I know that,” Fowler said.

  The kid squinted at him. “Oh yeah. That was a Mercury, though, wasn’t it? The silver one. Came by about forty-five minutes ago.”

  “Probably.”

  The kid twisted the gas cap on the tank of a car in the full-service lane. He slapped the nozzle back onto the pump.

  “Where did it go?” Fowler said. “You remember?”

  The kid took several dollar bills through the driver’s window, paused, pushed his John Deere hat back off his blond hair, and stared at Fowler. He glanced over at Janine sitting in the front seat of the Buick. “Who wants to know?”

  Fowler flashed his ID. The kid stared at it—he didn’t know it had expired. He looked back at Fowler, walked to the road, and stared off to the other side of the small town. “He drove that-a-way, I think.”

  “Which way did he turn on the highway?”

  The kid furrowed his brow. “Neither. Took the service road across the highway.”

  Fowler looked off in the direction of the highway. “What’s up there?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Woods?”

  “Yeah . . . and the old railroad station. Closed it down years ago.”

  Fowler stared at the kid blankly, then suddenly threw the car in gear, tromped on the accelerator, and squealed rubber out of the gas station, running a tire up over the curb. Janine looked back and saw the blond kid shaking his head.

  “What is it?” Janine asked, turning around with panic.

  Fowler was shaking his head almost incoherently. He pulled a photocopy out of his glove compartment as he ran the red light, gunning the car across the highway onto the service road.

  Janine held the copy of a letter from Arthur Murray in her lap. Fowler just kept repeating the postscript: “. . . another enemy kissed out in nature, where time no longer runs.”

  The road to the abandoned railroad station was steep and wound through several switchbacks as it climbed the grade of the mountain on the other side of town. Janine watched Fowler press the accelerator. The Dodge was clambering around a blind corner when a silver car appeared in the middle of the road straining toward them down the hill.

  There was an instant where Fowler saw it all happening in slow motion. The Mercury went into a skid. The white face behind the wheel was expressionless as the car hunted them. At the last instant he wrenched the steering wheel away. Fowler plowed his car into the weeds on the side of the road to avoid being hit. There was an instantaneous squeal of tires, a grinding of gears as the cars swiped each other—just missing a head-on collision—the sound of peeling metal everywhere as fenders scraped against each other. Fowler’s car spun away, tearing through the brush, lopping down small trees, as leafy branches grabbed at them through the open windows. He tried to regain control of the car as it skidded down an incline. Janine screamed when the car finally slammed against the trunk of a tree.

  Fowler helped Janine out of the car, and she lay down on the ground, crying, shaking with fright. Her knee was bloody. He made sure she was all right, then stood up to shake his head at the car. He saw that the damage was not that serious: The grille was mashed, yes, he would need a new hood, a new headlight, and there was that healthy scrape on the side.

  He had installed a used police radio in his car when he first arrived in town, and now he was praying that it still worked. He turned it on. When he heard the familiar crackle, he barked into the microphone, identifying himself, the Mercury, a description of the person driving, and the direction the car was traveling. He said he thought it was the killer. He requested a wrecker.

  A HALF HOUR later, it was dusk. Fowler was sitting on the side of the road with Janine cross-legged in the dirt next to him. From his medicine kit he had applied iodine to her cut and bandaged it.

  The wrecker came chugging up the hill, followed by a squad car, with Bill Rodney behind the wheel. Fowler pointed out the position of his Dodge to the driver of the wrecker, handed him a credit card, signed a claim, then asked Janine to get into the second car.

  Rodney was staring at Fowler in bewilderment. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’ll explain, Bill. Let’s take a drive.”

  “Don’t you have any sense? Weathers finds out you’re back here, messed up in this case, out of your jurisdiction, he’ll not only arrest you, he’ll probably sue the living hell out of you.”

  “Let him sue.”

  “You’re lucky I was on duty. Nobody else would touch you with a long-distance phone wire.”

  “Give me a few minutes, and they’ll be even more delighted. Drive me up this hill.”

  Bill Rodney gave him a look. “What’s up the hill?”

  “An abandoned railroad station.”

  They sat down in the car. Rodney put the car in gear and pressed the accelerator. “You’re unbelievable.”

  “Anything on the person in the Mercury?”

  “Nothing.”

  �
��If you check every rental place in the area, I’m sure you’ll find one with a nasty dent on the side.”

  Rodney nodded in silence.

  Three miles up the road, they rounded a bend and saw the deserted station. The brown cement structure looked like it had been shelled by F-1 bombers. Several of the uprights had caved in. The platform was buckled and slabs of pavement pushed up into the air. Rodney pulled his squad car up into the gravel parking lot. His headlights reflected in the broken windows.

  Fowler turned around to Janine in the backseat. “Janine, we’ll lock the doors. I’d rather you stay here just in case.” She nodded. He turned to look at Rodney and they both got out of the car.

  They shone their flashlights into the windows first. Fowler immediately saw footprints in the layer of dust on the floor, steps on top of oblong spirals, droplets, smudges of dust and blood. The place of death. He pointed at them, and Rodney nodded slowly that he also saw them. As they raised their flashlights, they thought the walls were covered with paint. There were streaks, great swaths of color.

  They walked around the side through an open door. The putrid smell of fresh blood and excrement. Drops of blood on the door glass. The colors on the wall, smeared later?

  Close now with the flashlight. Not just color, texture. Chunks of flesh pressed into the dusty plaster. A long snake, dripping red, black, splattered up at an angle. Rodney, choking, his handkerchief out, stumbling outside. Nick, one hand covering his nose, his flashlight up close on a long intestine. Nick, choking too, stepped outside. They were both dry-heaving, waving hands in front of their faces, clearing their heads, both coughing. Both looking up to take big draughts of fresh air.

  That’s when they saw him. Gluckner’s feet had been noosed together, then he had been hoisted up the flagpole. He was hanging like a marionette. His upper body was swaying forward in the air, his limbs flying at angles. Their flashlights revealed he was strung up by small-gauge wires to different sections of the rope. The wires were wrapped around his neck, wrists, under his shoulders, around his waist. His eyes were bugged out.