“Who else would know it?” Lamont said.
“He knows it,” I said. “The manager handles all the money.”
Outside, the family in the T-bird were leaving. The guy in the Tempest had a book open.
The Order-Matic let out a blast of static. “Excuse me,” the blonde said, “can I get that number three without tomatoes?”
“No tomatoes on that three,” I said, like I was saying it to someone. “No problem, ma’am.”
“Thank you.”
“Bring one of them over here,” Lamont called, and Natalie grabbed Kim Zwillich by the arm and broke her away from Margo Styles. Victor Nunez and Reggie Tyler just laid there, draining.
“How long is this going to take?” I said. “Should I get this lady’s order?”
“Can you get it?” Lamont said.
“I can try,” I said.
Not all the burgers on the grill were burnt. I fixed a number three, got a large fry from under the heat lamp and ran a rainbow slush. The machine dribbled cause it had been hit; I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough, but there was. I tried not to look at the ice cream machine. I put the lid on and got the straw and the napkins. When the tray was ready I set it on the counter.
“Take your shirt off,” I told Margo Styles, and she did.
It was warm, the armpits sopping. The headband of her visor was damp. I took her change apron and fastened the strap behind my back. It wasn’t until I was outside that I remembered the no tomato.
“That’s all right,” the blonde in the Camaro said. “I can pick them off.”
It was a beautiful car, I said, and she told me how she liked it, what it could do. I could feel the guy in the Tempest watching us. I thought how I’d like to get in and just go, hit the interstate and just motor.
I made change and started walking away when she called, “What about those little candies, don’t I get one?”
Heading for the door, I saw my shoes had left bloody prints on the walk.
When I went back inside, the bodies were gone, just a big smear of blood on the tiles, the lines left by their heels. Natalie was herding Margo Styles toward the back with a big kitchen knife in one hand and the gun in the other. Margo Styles was crawling on her hands and knees and Natalie was kicking her. Lamont and Donald Anderson were still working on the safe; Donald Anderson was sobbing and bleeding from one ear. Beside them, Kim Zwillich was lying on the floor with her eyes closed and blood all over her front. The tip of one of her fingers lay on the floor like a dropped Tater Tot.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“It’s not,” Lamont said. “He says he can’t remember it. I’m beginning to think he really doesn’t.”
“He’s scared.”
“And I’m not,” Lamont said.
From the back came a scream, then pleading, then another scream. Everything on the grill was smoking now. I grabbed a handful of peppermints and checked the clock.
“Three more minutes,” I said. “It’s coming up on lunchtime.”
In the back Margo Styles was screaming. It was good to get outside in the fresh air.
“Thank you,” the blonde said.
“You’re very welcome, ma’am,” I said. “It sure is a beautiful car.”
I looked around the other corner to make sure the Roadrunner was okay, and it was. A yellow Coronet pulled in, and right behind it a Ranchero with a pinball machine in back.
“Forget it,” I told Lamont. “We’ve got to get going.” In a way, it wasn’t really me; it was the speed and the situation. Everything was just clicking. It was like work, I was just doing what I had to do.
Lamont hauled Donald Anderson up from his knees. “Get her,” he told me, so I did.
I’d like to apologize to the Zwillich family for what I’m going to say next, even though I know they heard some of it at the trial.
I couldn’t lift her so I dragged her by her wrists. Her hands were all chopped up. She was missing two fingers, and there were cuts on the backs that were still bleeding. In the middle of dragging her past the grill, her eyes opened. She was already slippery and she started fighting me, twisting out of my grip. I grabbed the first thing I could find—a metal spatula—and hit her across the face with it. I got a good grip again and hauled her through the mess and past the ice machine. Up front, the Order-Matic came on, some lady saying, “I’d like a Supersonic with cheese, onion, mayo, and that’s it.” Another guy said, “I need a corn dog and a medium Dr Pepper.” While I was dragging Kim Zwillich back toward the freezer, I tried to keep the orders separate in my mind, because I thought I’d have to stall them. It was easier that way, having something to think about. God knows what Natalie and Lamont were thinking.
88
I’m not sure if it was Lamont’s idea or Natalie’s. It wasn’t mine. I’ve worked in enough restaurants to be afraid of getting trapped in one of those things. I’d never do that to someone else.
Part of it was because of the noise, I guess, that and they’d be harder to find.
We didn’t use the walk-in fridge because it was full of lettuce crates and boxes of cheese and gallon jars of mayo and pickles; there wasn’t enough room for all five of them.
In the freezer they kept long white boxes of burgers with the Mach 6 logo on them, and chicken patties. The whole thing was no bigger than the cell I’m in right now. If you touched the walls, your finger would stick to the metal for a second and leave a print. There were steel racks on both sides of a center aisle; on the racks were those plastic baskets strawberries come in, except they were filled with Tater Tots. You had to count out just the right number. When someone ordered them, you’d just dump a basket in the Fry-o-lator.
They went in in this order: first Victor Nunez and Reggie Tyler, then Margo Styles, then Donald Anderson, and finally Kim Zwillich. The only one fully conscious was Donald Anderson, and he was crying. Margo Styles had passed out from the cuts on her front. Kim Zwillich was mumbling something, a prayer or maybe just gibberish.
“Put that away,” Lamont told Natalie, and she threw the knife across the room into a sink. Her one fist looked like she’d dipped it in a bucket of red paint. Her eyes were dilated, just a ring of color left, like the sun during an eclipse, and I looked at her and I thought, how did she keep from getting it all over her?
89
I didn’t stab any of them. I didn’t have the knife. And I didn’t have the time to stab Margo Styles eighty-nine times. I was taking care of everything else.
Part of why I might die tonight is the eighty-nine times. I know this is going to sound cold, but it doesn’t matter if it was eighty-nine times or just one. It doesn’t matter that Natalie cut off Kim Zwillich’s fingers. Mr. Jefferies disagrees with me; he says that’s exactly what matters to a jury. While that might be true, I don’t think it’s right. Dead is dead.
But I understand all your readers will want the nasty details. That’s what makes it fun for them. I mean, I love the thing in The Gunslinger where he goes into the town and the people turn on him and he just slices them up in that big battle. I like those big battles. You get to go way overboard with those little gross-out details. I figure that’s what you’ll want to do here. I’m not sure how you’ll do that with real people because it would be hard on their families, but if it’s fiction I guess it doesn’t matter. You can just change their names. Nobody believes the people in your books are real anyway. That’s what makes it fun.
90
To get the combination—at least that’s what happened with Kim Zwillich. With Margo Styles, I couldn’t tell you why. I know being in there right then made me feel like everything had gone crazy, like I couldn’t be part of this even though I knew I was. It was a weird kind of high, like when you’re driving and you realize you’re driving and have been for a while. I don’t know why she did it. Maybe because she’s a crazy, evil person.
And you know who does it in her book, don’t you? She has me looking at her the whole time too, like I wanted to do
the same things to her. And people believe it because it makes sense, there’s some kind of motive behind it. Why she did it is just a mystery.
We were all angry about Lamont getting shot, but that didn’t stop me from feeling bad for the girls and for Reggie Tyler and even for Victor Nunez, who kind of started it all. I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. I just wanted to lock them in the freezer and get the heck out of there.
91
Lamont shot them, but first something really funny happened. The sprinkler system went off.
I guess the smoke was bad enough to trigger it. We were standing at the door of the freezer, and it nailed us. I knew that when it went off, it automatically called the fire department.
“Great,” Lamont said, and stepped into the freezer. This is where I gave him my gun because his clip was empty. This is where the prosecution said I was lying and called on Natalie to prove it. All right, I’ll admit that I did use the knife a little—after Natalie had—and that maybe I hit Mr. Close for trying to run over Lamont, but I never shot anybody. Never.
First Lamont shot Margo Styles and then Kim Zwillich. I guess he was hoping Donald Anderson would remember the combination. He didn’t. Lamont shot him in the face and then the chest to make sure.
Water was pouring from the ceiling, hissing on the grill. Up front, the Order-Matic was going nuts. I grabbed my shirt and my purse and on my way out a plastic cup with the morning’s tips in it. We walked out the front door, soaking wet, Lamont bleeding, like no one would notice.
92
They were dead when we left, I’m positive. In court they showed pictures of them frozen together from the water, and none of them had moved. I’m sure a bunch of guys had to pick them up and take them out of the freezer so they’d thaw. Either that or they chipped them out with an ice pick. Either way it’s a lousy job, and I feel sorry that people had to do that.
93
I’d say we got about fifteen dollars from the register, ten from Margo Styles’s changemaker, and another two from the tip cup. So about twenty-seven dollars. It was enough to buy us some gas and a diet Pepsi for everybody.
In the paper they always call the murders senseless. They were messed up maybe, but there was a reason at least.
Another thing is they call us serial killers. That’s just inaccurate—a serial killer kills one person a whole bunch of times. The other thing that bugs me is spree killers. I don’t think that’s right either. Spree makes it sound like it was a good time, like we were happy-go-lucky or something, like we were having fun, when really it was the exact opposite of that.
94
The Roadrunner was fine, except a Satellite pulled into the stall beside it, so we had to wait to get in. Gainey was asleep, still holding the spoon in his hand. He’d slopped his ice cream all over the seat and Natalie sat right in it; I’d forgotten to get napkins. Lamont’s one arm wasn’t working and he had to close his door twice. The engine kicked over on its first try, like always; there wasn’t any suspense.
I checked my mirrors and looked through the Satellite to see if anyone was coming, then I eased out and rolled around the back of the building. It had a door with a square window with chicken wire in the glass, but I couldn’t see anything. The sprinklers must have taken care of the smoke; I didn’t hear any fire engines yet. We coasted past the blonde in the Camaro and the guy still reading in the Tempest. When I stopped to turn left across traffic, I had to wait for a Jimmy to pull in. The bank clock across the way said it was eleven-thirty. We’d only been in there fifteen minutes.
I slid into traffic. It didn’t look like we were going to make the light, so I changed lanes and pulled a right on red and headed east on 66. Natalie leaned over the front seat to check on Lamont. She lifted his shirt. I had to watch the road.
“How’s he doing?” I said.
“It hurts,” Lamont said.
“He’ll be okay,” Natalie said. “It went all the way through but I don’t think it hit anything important. There’d be a lot more blood.”
“We should get him to a doctor,” I said.
“Maybe in Texas,” she said.
“Why are we going this way?” Lamont said, a little out of breath.
“I just wanted to get away from there. I’ll turn up here in a little.”
I looked over and Natalie had taken her shirt off and was dabbing at his ribs, swabbing the blood off. It didn’t look so bad when it was clean; it had almost stopped bleeding.
“How’s that?” Natalie said.
“Thank you,” he said, like after we made love, like he was glad to be that tired.
I looked back to the road and sped up, thinking it wasn’t right. He was my husband, I thought. That should have been my job.
95
Traffic was light for the most part. We turned north on Coltrane, then headed west again.
We did see one Edmond cop going into a Braum’s for lunch, a big old black-and-white Caprice. Natalie sat back so he wouldn’t see her in her bra. You could make a big deal of it, like we were nervous, but we were just glad to be out of there. We were feeling lucky, kind of high because everything had been so crazy. The day was nice and we had enough money to get us to New Mexico. We passed the Braum’s and made the next light, and Lamont laughed, and then Natalie, and even I started in then. That’s in Natalie’s book too, but she makes it sound like she was shocked, like me and Lamont were bloodthirsty or something, which isn’t true. It was just good to be moving.
96
We stopped at a Phillips 66 just over the tracks by the Purina grain elevator. I pulled up to the far pump so no one would see us. For a minute I thought of pulling a drive-off but we didn’t want any attention.
Lamont always got the premium, like it made a difference.
“You guys want anything to drink?” I asked while it was filling. I figured Gainey would want some juice when he woke up.
I don’t remember what the total was, but we had enough if you included the change. I went to the booth to pay and the guy behind the counter was drawing something in a notebook, bending over it so his nose was an inch away from the paper. It was a picture of the planets lining up. It was Mister Fred Fred.
I didn’t want him to recognize me, so I turned my head sideways and tipped it so I could hide behind my hair. I slid the bills with the change on top into the trough and he punched up the sale. He didn’t even look he was so far gone. It was too easy, old Mister Fred Fred.
“Bye!” I said.
He didn’t even look up from the page. It was disappointing. I went around the side and got some Pepsis from the machine.
“Hey,” I said in the car, “guess who that was,” but neither of them remembered him. I wondered if anybody had ever listened to me.
Mister Fred Fred—that’s it for him. I thought they’d call him in to ID me to put me at the scene, but they never did. They probably wouldn’t of believed him even if he did remember me. I have no idea what happened to him, whether the space rays got him or not. In a way, I think they already had.
We also stopped at a rest area off U.S. 270 to wash Lamont and get him into some fresh clothes. We cleaned the seats and threw his bloody jeans and Margo Styles’s shirt into a trash barrel. I tried to light it on fire but the wind was too strong. Lamont said it felt like a stomachache or just a bad stitch. He could make a fist, but it hurt to raise the arm.
“You don’t mind driving,” he asked.
“You think I’d let her?” I said, and he smiled. There were still some things we agreed on. Maybe not enough, but some.
And we stopped in the lot of a drugstore just over the Texas line in a little town called Higgins. I changed Gainey and gave him his juice and a few saltines and we pooled the money left to buy Lamont a bottle of peroxide and a big gauze bandage. Me and Natalie fought over who got to go in, and finally I did.
Nowhere else close to Oklahoma though, we were very careful. I don’t know if Lamont had a plan, or Natalie, but I didn’t. I guess we were jus
t hoping things would go our way. We had no money, Lamont was shot, and we’d been awake for two days. The only thing going for us was we had a fast car and a good-sized bag of crank. We were dumb to think that might be enough.
97
Why did we go west? I don’t know. It was never a question. I guess we figured the land was big enough to hide us, or that there might be something better out there, a new start. Isn’t that what the old Okies hoped for? In school we had to read The Grapes of Wrath. This wasn’t much different. There wasn’t anything going on in Kansas or Arkansas, and being from Oklahoma, we’d go to Heck before we went to Texas. West was really the only choice.
Sometimes I’ll sit down with my atlas and follow the roads we took, and I’ll think, there, that’s where we should of split off south, or maybe if we’d taken the route through the mountains, or that dirt road across the desert. It doesn’t do any good, but I do it. And I see all the sights again—the tumbleweeds caught in the guardrails, the Navajo trading posts with rugs hanging from the porch rafters, the hippie hitchhikers with jugs of water yoked around their necks. I see the wind-bent trees around broken-down homesteads, and the sagging beehives out back, I see the armadillos crushed on the road and the green bridges advertising their height. But when I try to see all of us in the car, it’s always those last few miles outside of Shiprock, the dust filling the back window. It’s sad—I’ve got all of Texas and most of New Mexico, but all I remember is Shiprock.
Here’s something you’ll like. If we’d have kept going on that road we would have ended up at the Four Corners, where the states come together at a plaque. Here’s the choice I would’ve had: Utah still shoots people; Arizona and Colorado have the gas chamber; at the time, New Mexico electrocuted you, now they’ve changed to lethal injection. The state police say I was less than thirty miles short of it. Mr. Jefferies would have had one tough decision to make.
Why west? It’s the way you go out here. It’s like “Route 66,” the song—it winds from Chicago to L.A. No one goes the other way. It would be stupid.
The Speed Queen Page 17