B004XTKFZ4 EBOK

by Conlon, Christopher

Not much business this late. Ain’t seen a car come by in an hour. ’Bout to close up.

  That’s okay.

  Hey…if you got nothin’ to do, we could shoot some pool.

  Really?

  Sure.

  At your house?

  Sure.

  No: if it had happened like this, Lucy would have known enough to be suspicious of such an invitation. It must have come from her.

  Not much business this late. Ain’t seen a car come by in an hour. ’Bout to close up.

  That’s okay. Hey, maybe we could play pool.

  Why, now, that’s an idea. Sure. Your mom know where you are, lovely lady?

  Nah. I go out like this all the time. She doesn’t care.

  Well, then, sure. Why don’t we toss that bike of yours in the back of my truck?

  The bike would be found in the riverbed later.

  It was still difficult for me to picture. Would Lucy have been so naïve as to go out to McCoy’s isolated shack in the middle of the night—at the very time two girls had been found dead nearby?

  Hi, lovely lady.

  Mike. Hey, you scared me. Don’t sneak up on people like that.

  Didn’t mean to. Sorry. Whatcha doin’ out at this hour of the night?

  Nothin’. Thinking about stuff.

  Right here on the street corner? This late?

  Yeah, well. I dunno.

  Better be careful. Pretty girl like you hangin’ out on a street corner in the middle of the night…Some guys might get ideas.

  What kind of ideas?

  You know. Don’t tell me you don’t know.

  Well, maybe I do, maybe I don’t.

  You do. Pretty girl like you knows a lot, don’t you? You know all about things like that.

  Hey, Mike, you’re acting kind of weird.

  Think so?

  Yeah.

  Well, maybe I’m weird.

  Mike, what are you doing?

  Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talkin’ about, lovely lady.

  Mike, hey, c’mon. Let go.

  How did he get her in the truck? Did he threaten her? Hit her? Did he knock her unconscious? And the bike: he must have thrown it in the back. What a chance he must have taken, that someone would see it right there in the truck bed. But then they could have seen Lucy, too, in the passenger seat. Unless she was unconscious and shoved down under the line of the window.

  I wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe that everything ended for Lucy Sparrow on a street corner in Quiet late one night, ended with a single blow that she never even felt, a blow so hard that her lights went out instantly and forever. I knew she hadn’t been dead: she was alive in that basement. That much was known. Alive, yes: but unconscious: blacked-out, unaware. Please, God.

  And yet I didn’t believe it.

  Where are you taking me?

  To my house. Remember? I promised we’d shoot some pool together.

  Really? That’s what we’re going to do? Play pool?

  Sure. C’mon, lovely lady, relax. We’re gonna have us some fun.

  It’s just that—it’s kinda late, you know? Maybe I should just go home.

  Nah, c’mon, it’s early. Shank of the evenin’.

  No, it’s late, Mike. My mom will wonder where I am.

  It won’t take long. Then I’ll drive you right back. I’ll take you right to your front door.

  You promise?

  Sure, I promise.

  Would she have known then, or suspected? If so, why didn’t she jump out of the truck? But it was the middle of the night. The road to his house was a dirt path in the middle of nothingness. And he was an adult, an adult she knew and liked, telling her that she was fine, calling her a lovely lady, assuring her that everything was okay. She was twelve years old; she may even have believed him. After all, despite the warnings we’d heard from the grown-ups in our lives, the story of the recent killings hadn’t really permeated our minds; they seemed to have happened in another world, a world of older girls in high school whom we didn’t know and who had nothing to do with us.

  Sure is dark out here.

  Don’t worry about it. Nothin’ to be afraid of out here.

  I’m not afraid of the dark, Mike. I’ve never been afraid of the dark.

  She’d seen the house before; we’d ridden past it on one of our lengthier Saturday-afternoon jaunts. How different it must have looked at night.

  C’mon in.

  Hey, crazy place you got here, Mike. This is messier than my room.

  I’m not much of a housekeeper. Need me a woman to do that. Maybe you could.

  Nah. I’m terrible at cleaning things up. I’m the one who makes the messes, not the one who cleans ’em up.

  Yeah? I’ve made a few messes in my life.

  I can see, yeah. So where’s that pool table?

  It’s downstairs. Right through here. Careful on the steps.

  When would she have realized?

  Hey, Mike, it’s dark in here.

  Well, I’ll turn the light on.

  Why’d you close the door?

  Here’s the light switch. Take a look. It’s a special place.

  I don’t see a pool table.

  Well, head down the stairs. I’ll show you.

  What’s all this stuff, anyway?

  Just some toys I got. Let’s play a game.

  Mike, I think I’d better leave.

  What’s your hurry?

  What is this thing? This isn’t a pool table.

  It’s a dissecting table. Know what that is? It’s where they cut up dead bodies.

  Mike, I’ve got to go. Really. I have to leave. My mom—

  Let’s play a game, lovely lady.

  Mike, the door’s locked. Why is the door locked? I have to go home.

  C’mere, lovely lady.

  I have to go home, Mike.

  She would have fought him. He would have been surprised at her strength. Maybe he even complimented her on it.

  Wow, you’re a tough one! You got some muscles, lovely lady!

  She would have tried punching him just as she’d punched Melissa Deaver. She would have clawed at the door. Maybe she screamed; maybe she never had a chance to. What would she have thought as he tore at her clothes, as he hit her again and again so that he could push her up onto the table, strap her down? What did he think when he beheld all her scars?

  Looks like somebody’s been workin’ on you already.

  Let me go. Please let me go. I won’t tell anybody. Really. I promise.

  Who did this to you, lovely lady?

  Really. I—

  I said, who did this to you?

  My dad did.

  Even Mike McCoy would have been surprised to hear that. Did he hesitate then, even for an instant? Did he think that perhaps he’d chosen the wrong girl? Or did her scars only make her seem that much more right?

  They make you look like shit. I thought you were a lovely lady. But you look like shit.

  No. Perhaps:

  Your dad must be a terrible person, to do something like that to his own daughter. I think that’s just awful. But don’t worry, kiddo. You’re still a lovely lady to me. Really.

  Then, even then, would a small part of her have been encouraged by the compliment, would she have sensed a softening in him, had a moment’s hope that his sympathy would lead him to release her, apologize, help her with her clothes, drive her back to her house, say gently as she got out of his truck, Now remember, you promised—this is our little secret, right?

  Sure, Mike. I promise.

  When he began his preliminary work with his knives and sharpened screwdrivers, did he carefully avoid her scars? Or did he deliberately seek out each one, open the old wound again, watch it bleed?

  Stop. Please stop. It hurts, Mike.

  You’re a lovely lady. Lovely lady…

  It hurts. It hurts, Mike. Oh my God.

  But God wasn’t listening to Lucy Sparrow that night.

  Or perhaps He was.


  She’d said to me: There are just some people that God hates.

  I drove all night.

  —Twelve—

  MY CHEEK WAS against Lucy’s back when I woke, sometime before dawn. She’d turned over in the night and I was behind her, spooning her, our bodies smoothly interlocked. I peeked out behind one of the van’s curtains and saw a deep brown color beginning to glow at the horizon, far off. It was still dark but the sun was coming, I knew. We had to decide what we were going to do, where we would go. And I had a fierce need to go to the bathroom.

  I shook her gently. “Lucy?”

  “Go ’way,” she muttered.

  “Lucy, wake up.”

  “Mmm…why?”

  “Because the sun is coming up soon. We can’t just stay here.”

  I saw her eyes open slowly. She sniffed, swallowed, cleared her throat. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re probably right.” Turning over toward me, she pushed the blanket away.

  “Lucy, I have to pee.”

  “So, go.”

  “I can’t go like this.”

  “Well, put your clothes on, then.”

  “But it’s still dark out there.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t make fun of me. She just said, “Okay.”

  Silently we sorted through our clothing. I took out the fresh things I’d brought and Lucy put on one of my shirts; it was too small for her, but at least it was dry. Our pants and shoes were still damp, but there was nothing to be done about it; we slipped into them. My eyes stung, my mouth tasted bad. My neck still throbbed slightly from the accident. My shoulder hurt from sleeping on the hard floor.

  Finally we emerged from the van, the predawn breeze cold in our faces.

  “Do you think we can still drive it?” I asked, looking at the big dent at the back of the vehicle. One of the taillights had been crushed.

  “We don’t have any gas, Fran. Remember?”

  “Well,” I said, “what are we going to do? We can’t stay here. People are bound to come soon. The person who owns this snack booth will come.”

  “How do I know what we’re gonna do? You think of something. You’re smart.”

  “Well—I have to go first,” I said.

  “Yeah. So do I, actually. Do we have any toilet paper?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got a couple of paper napkins.”

  “Well, that’ll have to do.”

  We tromped through the sand, toward one of the ominous-looking dunes. When I looked back I realized that I couldn’t see the van anymore. I was suddenly frightened and took Lucy’s hand.

  “It’s okay, Fran,” she said.

  We found a place. I gave her one of the napkins. When each of us was finished we stood and zipped up. But as we moved toward the van again I thought I heard a faint sound.

  “Lucy—wait. Listen.”

  We stood completely still. The ocean rumbled. For a moment I wasn’t sure; then I was. It was a car.

  We looked at each other. Then we hustled behind a small pile of sand, a kind of mini-dune. We peered up over the top.

  There was a pickup truck pulling into the parking lot. It drove straight over to the snack stand, stopped, and a Hispanic-looking man with a mustache got out. He looked at the van, looked at the side of his building.

  “Shit,” we heard him say.

  He moved to the van, to our van. He studied the damage in the rear and then peered through the windows. Then he looked around quizzically. We saw him shake his head. He moved to the little stand then, unlocked the door at the rear. We could see him standing in there in the darkness, picking up a phone.

  “Crap,” Lucy said. “He’s calling the cops, I bet.”

  “Maybe we could make a run for it,” I suggested. “Jump into the van and take off before he knows what’s happening. We must have enough gas to get us a little ways.”

  “Then what?” She dropped down behind the little dune. We hid against the wall of sand. “No, we need to get farther away. Up there.” She pointed to a larger dune somewhat further back which had some scrubby bushes at its top. She grabbed my hand. “C’mon, while he’s in there!”

  We ran, the sand sucking at our shoes. I was out of breath by the time we reached the dune, ran around to its far side, and began climbing it. Finally we reached the top, peered over between the bushes.

  In a few minutes a police car rolled into the parking lot. I’d thought it might come at top speed, with lights flashing and siren blaring, but it didn’t. It pulled easily up to the snack shack and a big cop got out. The Hispanic-looking man greeted him. The breeze took their words, but it was obvious what they were saying to each other as they looked at the damage to the building, looked at the van. The cop surveyed the area carefully, as if through his sheer power of vision he would root out the evildoers.

  We dropped behind the dune.

  “What now?” I asked, shaking sand out of my shoes. I was thirsty.

  “Maybe,” she said, “we could head off past the dunes into those hills.” She pointed.

  I looked. “And go where? Do you know where we are?”

  “No,” she admitted. “Not really.”

  We sat there glumly. We could hear the cop’s car radio squawking as he spoke into it. Dawn began to glow on the horizon, past the dunes. The brown sky slowly turned a deep red and then began to lighten to a soft pink. Soon it was morning, a beautiful early-spring morning. We didn’t move except to brush sand off ourselves and to occasionally look over the rise of the dune. I wished we could go walking on the beach, barefoot, splashing each other with the water. I wished we could walk up to the snack bar and ask the man for two hot dogs and two ice-cold Cokes. I wished we could punch the tetherball at each other at Soames Elementary. I wished we could do anything but sit here motionlessly, waiting for doom to come.

  “What are we going to do, Lucy?”

  “I don’t know. Stop asking me.”

  After a time there was the sound of more cars coming into the parking lot: another police car and a car I recognized immediately. It belonged to Frank and Louise.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. “Look.”

  We looked. Two cops were in the police car, but we hardly noticed them. Instead we both watched the other car as it pulled in and Frank and Louise stepped out of the front. Ms. Sparrow came out from the back.

  “Oh crap,” Lucy whispered.

  Again we watched the discussion in pantomime: showing them the van, looking inside (we hadn’t locked the doors—they just opened it and looked, which made me feel somehow abused, violated), studying the damage at the back and on the building. When the breeze changed direction we could hear scraps of their words: Where did they. How. Must be around. Run away?

  “Frances?” my aunt called. “Frances!”

  “Lucy?” shouted Ms. Sparrow. “Where are you, Punk? Lucy?”

  “Frances! Frances!”

  Everyone there peered in different directions, stepping tentatively this way and that. The cops joined in: “Lucy? Frances?” called their rough, unfamiliar voices.

  After a minute or two of this they gathered together again. I saw one of the cops gesturing down toward the beach and two of them moved off toward the shore. The rest stood there talking. Haven’t gone far. Couldn’t just. Stuff still here.

  The sun rose in the sky, bright and hot on my face. A headache had begun to pulse behind my eyes. I was itchy and sore, hungry and thirsty. Lucy sat close to me, morose, not meeting my eyes. At last, frustrated, frightened, I started to cry.

  “Aw, crap,” Lucy said disgustedly. “Fran, shut the hell up.”

  “You shut up. You’re the one who got us into this.”

  “Nobody forced you to come.”

  “You said we were going to Malibu. To Hollywood.”

  “Yeah, well, that didn’t work out, did it? Sorry. Excuse me for living.”

  “Lucy,” I said through my tears, “we have to give up. You know we do.”

  “Give up, nothin’. We can hide in
these dunes for a long time.”

  “And eat what? And drink what? Where do we go when it rains?”

  She chuckled sadly. “Maybe we’ll find a cave.”

  I chuckled too. I would have loved to find a cave to stay in with Lucy. Just to stay there together, forever and ever.

  “Just…stop crying, okay?” she said.

  I wiped my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe,” she said flatly, “you shouldn’t have thrown away my razor. You know?”

  I glanced at her. “Maybe.”

  “Do you think,” she asked, a speculative look in her eyes, “they’ll let us go home?”

  “I don’t know. We stole a car. And we wrecked it.”

  “Yeah, but we’re, like, little kids. We’re not even teenagers. Well, I almost am.”

  “I don’t know, Lucy.” Home or jail cell or cold dank dungeon, I wanted to say, I didn’t care, as long as we could be together. But we had to leave here.

  “Okay,” she sighed.

  It was mid-morning, the sun high in the sky now. We stood.

  “I’m afraid,” I said.

  “Don’t be. It’ll be okay.”

  I sniffed, nearly began crying again, but managed to hold it back.

  “Lucy—”

  “Look,” she said impatiently, “if we’re gonna go, let’s go, okay?”

  I swallowed, nodded. “Okay.”

  With that, we climbed down the dune and walked, separately, hands in pockets, toward the waiting cars.

  We weren’t allowed to go home—at least not right away. In fact, we were arrested, and for a few moments one of the cops dangled a deadly-looking pair of handcuffs in front of my eyes. They glinted in the morning sun, terrifying me, yet, staring at them, I couldn’t help but wonder if they could actually hold my wrists. They were so big that it looked as if they might fall off completely.

  No one really seemed to know how to proceed. There was talk of putting us in one of the police cruisers, but Ms. Sparrow said, “For God’s sake, officers, we can take them to the station in our car. These aren’t hardened criminals here.”

  Discussion. Much radio communication. At last it was agreed that we would follow the police cruiser directly to the station.

  Lucy and Ms. Sparrow sat in the back; I was in front, between Frank and Louise. The drive was slow, miserable, like a funeral procession. Not a single word was spoken during the ride. I hoped I wouldn’t start crying, and I didn’t. What was happening seemed bigger than tears.