Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: A Suspense Magazine Anthology

by Jeffery Deaver

“Hal. Hal Benson.”

  “Is that your real name, or a made-up one?”

  He had to laugh. “My real name is Harvey. Horrible name.”

  They drove on, the headlight beams cutting swathes of light through the darkness. The girl dozed off. He glanced at her from time to time, looking incredibly young with her long dark hair falling across her cheek, clutching her backpack as if it was a stuffed teddy bear. And for a moment he felt a tenderness toward her—the daughter he’d never had. He had never married. Too easy to find women without being tied down to one.

  The first streaks of dawn were in the sky when he pulled off into a deserted rest area. The girl woke up as cold wind swept into the car.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “A couple of hours from Tucson, I think. Rest area. I need to visit the restroom. You might want to use it too.”

  “Okay.” She got out, taking her backpack with her. He noticed she never said thank you. Badly raised, he thought.

  When she returned from the restroom she stopped, finding a blanket on the ground beside the car. “What’s this?”

  He had a strange, predatory smile on his face. “You didn’t think you’d get to ride with me without paying your fare, did you? Come on. You’ve done it before.”

  She took an involuntary step back. “I haven’t, actually.”

  “A virgin. How delightful. That is a bonus. And you’re going to thank me for it. I’m an expert, you know. It won’t be with one of those clumsy and panting boys. Now take your jeans off.”

  “It’s cold out here.”

  “Well, there’s not enough room on the back seat. Come on. Let’s do this before we freeze.”

  She looked around. He sensed her panic.

  “I wouldn’t think of running away. There’s nothing for miles.”

  “I wouldn’t leave my guitar, anyway.” She started to unzip her jeans, then tried to pull them down. They were tight. “I usually have to sit on the ground to get them off,” she said. “Aren’t you going to take your clothes off too?”

  “Like you said, it’s cold.”

  “What if I refuse?”

  “Simple. I drive on. Leave you here. Hope someone finds you before the coyotes. Or I get impatient and rape you.”

  She struggled with the last of the jeans. He sank to his knees on the rug beside her. In the first light of dawn his face was hard with desire. “You’re wasting my time. Come here, you little bitch.”

  He grabbed at her ankles and brought her toppling down onto the blanket. He laughed as he tried to pin her in place. She grabbed his hand, sank her teeth into it. As he cried out, she scrambled to her feet.

  “Oh, I love a good fight,” he said, getting to his knees.

  “Stop. You might want to hear this,” she said.

  He frowned. “No pleading to spare you because of your aged mother!” And he laughed.

  “Not aged. Just dying.” There was a sudden silence with only the whispering of the wind through sagebrush. “I didn’t go to Nashville to be a music star,” she said. “I went to find my mother. She dumped me with my grandma when I was born. I never met her. I was curious.”

  “Oh, spare me the sob story,” he said.

  “You need to hear this,” she said. “I found her. She’s pitiful. A heroin addict. Skin and bone. Stringy hair, hollow eyes. But she told me about you.”

  “Me?”

  “How you promised to make her a star, then you got her hooked on drugs and then you got her pregnant. And you wanted nothing more to do with her. Denied I was your baby.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Her name is Jolene, not mine. I’m Carrie, actually. Remember that Jolene you knew? The one who was the good singer? Oh, I’ve been learning all about you. And I made it my mission to find you. I’ve followed you this far. And I don’t think you want to rape your daughter, do you, Daddy?”

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” he said, but he sounded unsure.

  “Why do you think I was sitting beside your car, waiting for you tonight? I wanted to see for myself if you were the rat my mother said you were. And you are.”

  “Now listen you little…” He was trying to get to his feet when she picked up a rock and brought it crashing down onto the back of his head. He gave a grunt and pitched forward. She stared at him, feeling horror mixed with triumph. Then she turned him over. He wasn’t breathing. For a moment she had a wild fantasy about driving off in his car, leaving him for the vultures and coyotes. But decided against it. That would be stupid. They’d track her down and accuse her of murder. Instead she retrieved her jeans and put them on again, finding it hard with her hands shaking from cold and emotion. Then she turned her attention to him and carefully removed his trousers.

  She took out her cellphone and was pleasantly surprised to find a signal.

  “There’s been a horrible accident,” she gasped when the 911 operator answered. “A man gave me a ride in his car. He stopped and tried to rape me. I pushed him away. He tripped over a rock and fell and hit his head. I think he’s dead.”

  The operator was kind and soothing. Carrie sat in the car until state troopers arrived half an hour later. They, too, were kind and understanding. They took in the sprawled body, his trousers lying neatly on the driver’s seat. “Come on, honey. Let’s get you home,” one of them said.

  She drove off in the squad car without looking back.

  * * *

  EASY PEASEY

  JOHN LESCROART

  Carrie McKay’s cellphone alarm went off at midnight and after taking a moment trying to figure out where she was and what she’d set the darn thing for, she rolled over and killed the noise, which sounded far louder than it had ever sounded before in the daytime.

  She lay back down, holding the now blessedly silent phone and listening for any other sounds it might have roused in the house. Her mom and dad were just across the hall in their bedroom, hopefully still deep in slumber. Her brother Kyle’s room was adjacent to hers, with just the one wall separating them. But she knew that he usually slept like a rock and probably wouldn’t have heard the alarm. Probably.

  Still, she waited, listening, making sure.

  After a minute that seemed like a half hour, she finally decided that the alarm hadn’t awakened anyone. She threw back her covers, turned and sat up. Her stomach growled as though she was hungry; she put her hand flat on her belly and tried to breathe out the tension. But she knew that it wasn’t lack of food roiling her insides.

  It was nerves.

  She was starting to realize, because she really wasn’t cut out for it, that she never should have told Dawn and Emily that she’d be part of the raid to TP Jason Trent’s house tonight. After all, he was Dawn’s boyfriend. Carrie didn’t think she’d ever even said hi to him. But you didn’t say no to Dawn if she wanted you to do something with her. She was definitely the leader of the cool kids at school, and Carrie had been aching to be one of them herself, always just not quite making it.

  She was afraid that she wasn’t really a natural for something like this, actually sneaking out in the middle of the night. It had been bad enough when she went into Target two days ago to buy the Super-Size pack of twenty-four rolls of Charmin’, waiting in the checkout line, hoping and praying that she wouldn’t run into somebody she knew, especially one of her friend’s mothers. But no big deal, she’d told herself. Everybody had to buy toilet paper. She could always say she was just running some errands for her mother. Nothing sinister going on. She was one of the good kids, after all, and nobody would think anything about it.

  And in the end, nobody had seen her.

  Hiding the actual package of rolls was another issue altogether. Carrie had to keep them out of sight somewhere for two days. Why had she gone down and bought it so early? What if her mother checked the car’s trunk in the next two days and wanted to know what this cache of toilet paper was all about? There would be no guarantee that her mother wouldn’t open the trunk, and no fooli
ng her if she did. So Carrie couldn’t put them there where her mom could find them.

  Or, really, anywhere in her own house.

  In a panic she’d called Emily from the Target parking lot, which she hated to do because she knew from TV that it would leave a telephonic record of when they’d talked. If anybody, like the police for example, did some kind of real investigation for this crime of trespass—or was it vandalism? Or both? …Whatever, they’d be able to put it together that she and Emily were planning something.

  But what else could she do?

  She had not planned on this degree of subterfuge holding onto the TP. She hadn’t even thought of it as an issue. Before Emily picked up her own phone, Carrie actually considered throwing the evidence away in one of the dumpsters behind the Target. But if she couldn’t even score and hold onto a few rolls of TP, that would surely betray her pathetic personality flaw.

  Gutless and fearful, that’s what they’d say about her.

  There was a really thin line between being one of the good kids and one of the cool kids, and so far Carrie had managed to fool most everybody as fitting into both camps.

  But Emily, like Dawn, was all the way cool. She actually thought that Carrie’s worries about where to hide the toilet paper were legitimate. And Carrie’s suggestion that they stow the TP in Emily’s Tuff Shed in her backyard (which Emily’s dad almost never used anymore) was actually a great hiding place and a pretty brilliant idea.

  Sucking in a breath, pushing with the flat of her hand on the continual churning of her belly, Carrie stood up. She was still mostly dressed. She’d left her socks on and worn her jeans and her black high school logo sweatshirt to bed. It wasn’t like her mom and dad came in every night to tuck her into bed anymore. The unspoken personal space barrier for the past year or so was her door: if closed, everything was fine and there was no need to come in and check on her. So tonight she had left it closed. Her parents trusted her and she was, here at home at least, definitely one of the good kids.

  Using the flashlight from her phone, she found her tennis shoes and put them on. Then, with the flashlight still on, she crossed the room to the windows that faced out at the front of the house. Pulling open the plantation shutters, she unlocked and then raised the right-hand window, and stepped out into the night.

  If the quiet in her room had been comforting, the quiet outside was all but terrifying. Standing on the dewy grass, she listened to nothing.

  Then suddenly she realized that she still held the lit-up phone and that the window was open. She tip-toed back to the house, closed the window and turned off her light. Now it was pure dark. None of their neighbors even seemed to be watching television. There was no moon. She checked her phone; it was 12:08. She was seven minutes early. Squatting behind one of the low bushes that grew in the front of her house, she settled down to wait.

  Seven minutes…yikes!

  At last, at long last, car lights up at the corner turned onto her street. She checked her phone, exactly 12:15. Standing up from where she was hiding behind the bushes, she ran across the lawn and out to where Dawn’s car was pulling over to the curb.

  Dawn, driving, let her window down. “Hey,” she whispered. “Way to go. Perfect. Hop in the back seat but don’t close the door all the way. Just hold it. No noise.”

  Carrie, her heart beating so hard she was surprised that they couldn’t hear it, followed these instructions to the letter. As soon as she was in, Dawn got the car rolling again and caught Carrie’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Is this awesome, or what?” Dawn asked.

  “Totally,” Emily said from the front passenger seat.

  Carrie wracked her brain searching for the right answer. “Easy peasey,” she finally said in the calmest voice she should muster.

  “Easy peasey, so cool. We knew you’d be down with us, Car,” Dawn said, then giggled and added, “Jason’s going to just shit.”

  * * *

  For a while, Chris Duke believed that he was friends with Jason Trent. After all, they’d played on the same football teams for eight years, Pop Warner on up, with Trent always the quarterback and Chris usually a linebacker on the D-squad, although he’d had some luck last year transitioning to fullback and had even taken a few snaps at that position last Spring. Things had been looking up. Chris was large, strong and fast. Maybe he could become an impact player.

  He and Jason had always gotten along well enough, not that they talked much or anything like that. But they were teammates and that’s all that needed to be said. Then they became a little more than that after grades came out at the end of Chris’s junior year and he hadn’t made the academic cutoff with his 2.0 GPA, when he needed a 2.5 to stay on the team; he’d gotten a damn C-minus in geometry, like he was ever going to use geometry in real life.

  But Jason—though himself not the sharpest tool in the shed—was in the summer school tutoring program and the two of them spent a couple of days a week at Jason’s fancy house on the golf course trying to make sense out of triangles and circles, proofs and space, and the areas of figures. Total waste of time, Chris thought, since what was that stuff ever going to do with him? And ultimately he didn’t understand it anyway.

  But he and Jason had broken up the tedium and failure of the geometry lessons with computer games and working on Jason’s passing and handoffs and Chris’s receiving. They had laughed a lot. Jason was rich—well, his parents were—but basically he seemed like an okay guy. When they checked in back at summer camp, Chris knew that Jason put in a word to Coach to let him try out in the backfield again.

  But then his final summer school grade, another C-minus, came in and the coach told him he had no choice. It wasn’t his decision to make. Chris didn’t make the academic cut and therefore he couldn’t be on the team.

  Jason, who went off to football practice after school every day like he always did, simply dropped out of Chris’s universe. He obviously couldn’t have cared less about whether or not Chris was still on the team. He’d given it his best shot to help him, sure, but now that was over. It hadn’t worked, and the two guys had nothing left to say or to do with each other.

  A couple of times, Chris had nodded to Jason passing in the hall and though he’d nodded back, it was obvious that his former tutor did not know for sure exactly who he was.

  Jason probably meant no offense, of course, but life was life, fair was fair, and he was still the quarterback after all, while Chris was nothing.

  Oh, except a loser.

  He only accidentally heard about Jason’s parents’ vacation to Cabo when he’d been sitting at the next table in the cafeteria and heard Jason telling his current babe girlfriend Dawn that he’d be alone in the house starting Thursday and through the weekend, so she could come over any time and…

  …and she’d stopped him there, although there had been a lot of laughing.

  Now it was Friday morning, about twenty-five minutes after midnight, and Chris had made his way past the backs of four houses down the Sixth fairway, to Jason’s place. Two houses in, there’d been some dim lights on inside, and across the fairway, a few more, but otherwise generally it was dark, dark, dark.

  Chris was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt. The September night was warm. He hadn’t figured out exactly what he was going to do or how he was going to do it, but the general idea was that he was going to even out the playing field of their lives, at least a little. The way it was now, Jason had everything and Chris had nothing. That just wasn’t right.

  Several times over the summer, Chris and Jason had taken the shortcut through the parent’s bedroom on their way out to the pool, which was just a few steps outside the floor-to ceiling glass French doors. The room was about half the size of Chris’s whole house, with a king-sized bed and a dresser on the top of which Cheryl Trent kept an enormous array of her jewelry, taking up almost the whole top of the dresser, neatly laid out or hanging on display—bracelets, necklaces, rings and earrings. Everything appeared to be made out
of gold, diamonds, and other gemstones in every color and shape.

  Chris didn’t know the actual price of any of that stuff, but he couldn’t imagine it would be less than fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. Maybe way more. As if that kind of money had any real meaning for him.

  The plan to even things up was coming together.

  How about if all that jewelry went missing when the Trents were on vacation down in Baja? First off, the parents were going to have to consider the possibility that their own dear son Jason was the thief. And even if they didn’t go far down that road, their trust in him would have to be shaken, and they’d still be out all of that jewelry, stolen while Jason was supposed to be watching the house.

  Nice job, kid. We thought you were responsible and could take care of things while we went away for a few days, but we guess not now. It’s sad but there it is: we just can’t trust you completely anymore.

  But even without that, even if they bought Jason’s story about his complete innocence, the house wouldn’t feel safe and impregnable any longer. And that alone would be a huge payback.

  Okay, Jason, Chris thought, welcome to my world. This is what it feels like when you get cut and your parents don’t have money to bail you out and you’re not important to anybody anymore. Get used to it. The rest of your life starts tonight.

  * * *

  Thunk.

  Jason Trent woke with a start and sat up, fully awake.

  What the hell was that?

  His heart pounding, he swung his feet over and down and crossed his room in the dark to his closet where his jeans hung off the peg on the back of the door. Pulling them down and putting them on, stepping into his topsiders, he crossed back to the bed, moving as quietly as he could, the lights still off.

  Feeling around, he opened the door to the bedside table where he’d stashed the gun he’d taken from his father’s office after his parents had driven off to the airport.

  He probably should have told them, or asked them about wanting to have the gun in his own room next to his bed, just in case something weird happened—which it never did, not in this Neighborhood Watch community—but he didn’t want them to know that he was even a little tiny bit uncomfortable about staying alone in the house for the weekend.