Big Driver (7 page)

She put on flannel pajamas and shuffled to bed, where she lay with all the lights on and the Lemon Squeezer .38 on the night table, thinking she would never sleep, that her inflamed imagination would turn every sound from the street into the approach of the giant. But then Fritzy jumped up on the bed, curled himself beside her, and began to purr. That was better.

I'm home,
she thought.
I'm home, I'm home, I'm home
.

- 19 -

When she woke up, the inarguably sane light of six AM was streaming through the windows. There were things that needed to be done and decisions that needed to be made, but for the moment it was enough to be alive and in her own bed instead of stuffed into a culvert.

This time peeing felt almost normal, and there was no blood. She got into the shower again, once more running the water as hot as she could stand it, closing her eyes and letting it beat on her throbbing face. When she'd had all of that she could take, she worked shampoo into her hair, doing it slowly and methodically, using her fingers to massage her scalp, skipping the painful spot where he must have
hit her. At first the deep scratch on her back stung, but that passed and she felt a kind of bliss. She hardly thought of the shower scene in
Psycho
at all.

The shower was always where she had done her best thinking, a womblike environment, and if she had ever needed to think both hard and well, it was now.

I don't want to see Dr. Hedstrom, and I don't
need
to see Dr. Hedstrom. That decision's been made, although later—a couple of weeks from now, maybe, when my face looks more or less normal again—I'll have to get checked out for STDs . . .

“Don't forget the AIDS test,” she said, and the thought made her grimace hard enough to hurt her mouth. It was a scary thought. Nevertheless, the test would have to be taken. For her own peace of mind. And none of that addressed what she now recognized as this morning's central issue. What she did or didn't do about her own violation was her own business, but that was not true of the women in the pipe. They had lost far more than she. And what about the next woman the giant attacked? That there would be another she had no doubt. Maybe not for a month or a year, but there would be. As she turned off the shower Tess realized (again) that it might even be her, if he went back to check the culvert and found her gone. And her clothes gone from the store, of course. If he'd looked through her purse, and surely he had, then he
did
have her address.

“Also my diamond earrings,” she said. “Fucking pervert sonofabitch stole my earrings.”

Even if he steered clear of the store and the culvert
for awhile, those women belonged to her now. They were her responsibility, and she couldn't shirk it just because her picture might appear on the cover of
Inside View
.

In the calm morning light of a suburban Connecticut morning, the answer was ridiculously simple: an anonymous call to the police. The fact that a professional novelist with ten years' experience hadn't thought of it right away almost deserved a yellow penalty card. She would give them the location—the deserted YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU store on Stagg Road—and she would describe the giant. How hard could it be to locate a man like that? Or a blue Ford F-150 pickup with Bondo around the headlights?

Easy-as-can-beezy.

But while she was drying her hair, her eyes fell on her Lemon Squeezer .38 and she thought,
Too easy-as-can-beezy. Because . . .

“What's in it for me?” she asked Fritzy, who was sitting in the doorway and looking at her with his luminous green eyes. “Just what's in that for me?”

- 20 -

Standing in the kitchen an hour and a half later. Her cereal bowl soaking in the sink. Her second cup of coffee growing cold on the counter. Talking on the phone.

“Oh my God!” Patsy exclaimed. “I'm coming right over!”

“No, no, I'm fine, Pats. And you'll be late for work.”

“Saturday mornings are strictly optional, and you should go to the doctor! What if you're concussed, or something?”

“I'm not concussed, just colorful. And I'd be ashamed to go to the doctor, because I was three drinks over the limit. At least three. The only sensible thing I did all night was call a limo to bring me home.”

“You're sure your nose isn't broken?”

“Positive.” Well . . .
almost
positive.

“Is Fritzy all right?”

Tess burst into perfectly genuine laughter. “I go downstairs half-shot in the middle of the night because the smoke detector's beeping, trip over the cat and almost kill myself, and your sympathies are with the cat. Nice.”

“Honey, no—”

“I'm just teasing,” Tess said. “Go on to work and stop worrying. I just didn't want you to scream when you saw me. I've got a couple of absolutely beautiful shiners. If I had an ex-husband, you'd probably think he'd paid me a visit.”

“Nobody would dare to put a hand on you,” Patsy said. “You're feisty, girl.”

“That's right,” Tess said. “I take no shit.”

“You sound hoarse.”

“On top of everything else, I'm getting a cold.”

“Well . . . if you need something tonight . . . chicken soup . . . a couple of old Percocets . . . a Johnny Depp DVD . . .”

“I'll call if I do. Now go on. Fashion-conscious women seeking the elusive size six Ann Taylor are depending on you.”

“Piss off, woman,” Patsy said, and hung up, laughing.

Tess took her coffee to the kitchen table. The gun was sitting on it, next to the sugar bowl: not quite a Dalí image, but damn close. Then the image doubled as she burst into tears. It was the memory of her own cheery voice that did it. The sound of the lie she would now live until it felt like the truth. “You bastard!” she shouted. “You fuck-bastard!
I hate you!
”

She had showered twice in less than seven hours and still felt dirty. She had douched, but she thought she could still feel him in there, his . . .

“His cockslime.”

She bolted to her feet, from the corner of her eye glimpsed her alarmed cat racing down the front hall, and arrived at the sink just in time to avoid making a mess on the floor. Her coffee and Cheerios came up in a single hard contraction. When she was sure she was done, she collected her pistol and went upstairs to take another shower.

- 21 -

When she was done and wrapped in a comforting terry-cloth robe, she lay down on her bed to think about where she should go to make her anonymous call. Someplace big and busy would be best. Someplace
with a parking lot so she could hang up and then scat. Stoke Village Mall sounded right. There was also the question of which authorities to call. Colewich, or would that be too Deputy Dawg? Maybe the State Police would be better. And she should write down what she meant to say . . . the call would go quicker . . . she'd be less likely to forget anyth . . .

Tess drifted off, lying on her bed in a bar of sunlight.

- 22 -

The telephone was ringing far away, in some adjacent universe. Then it stopped and Tess heard her own voice, the pleasantly impersonal recording that started
You have reached
. . . This was followed by someone leaving a message. A woman. By the time Tess struggled back to wakefulness, the caller had clicked off.

She looked at the clock on the night table and saw it was quarter to ten. She'd slept another two hours. For a moment she was alarmed: maybe she'd suffered a concussion or a fracture after all. Then she relaxed. She'd had a lot of exercise the previous night. Much of it had been extremely unpleasant, but exercise was exercise. Falling asleep again was natural. She might even take another nap this afternoon (another shower for sure), but she had an errand to run first. A responsibility to fulfill.

She put on a long tweed skirt and a turtleneck
that was actually too big for her; it lapped the underside of her chin. That was fine with Tess. She had applied concealer to the bruise on her cheek. It didn't cover it completely, nor would even her biggest pair of sunglasses completely obscure her black eyes (the swollen lips were a lost cause), but the makeup helped, just the same. The very act of applying it made her feel more anchored in her life. More in charge.

Downstairs, she pushed the Play button on her answering machine, thinking the call had probably been from Ramona Norville, doing the obligatory day-after follow-up: we had fun, hope you had fun, the feedback was great, please come again (not bloody likely), blah-blah-blah. But it wasn't Ramona. The message was from a woman who identified herself as Betsy Neal. She said she was calling from The Stagger Inn.

“As part of our effort to discourage drinking and driving, our policy is to courtesy-call people who leave their cars in our lot after closing,” Betsy Neal said. “Your Ford Expedition, Connecticut license plate 775 NSD, will be available for pickup until five PM this evening. After five it will be towed to Excellent Auto Repair, 1500 John Higgins Road, North Colewich, at your expense. Please note that we don't have your keys, ma'am. You must have taken them with you.” Betsy Neal paused. “We have other property of yours, so please come to the office. Remember that I'll need to see some ID. Thank you and have a nice day.”

Tess sat down on her sofa and laughed. Before
listening to the Neal woman's canned speech, she had been planning to drive her Expedition to the mall. She didn't have her purse, she didn't have her key-ring, she didn't have her damn
car,
but she had still planned to just walk out to the driveway, climb in, and—

She sat back against the cushion, whooping and pounding a fist on her thigh. Fritzy was under the easy chair on the other side of the room, looking at her as if she were mad.
We're all mad here, so have another cup of tea,
she thought, and laughed harder than ever.

When she finally stopped (only it felt more like running down), she played the message again. This time what she focused on was the Neal woman saying they had other property of hers. Her purse? Perhaps even her diamond earrings? But that would be too good to be true. Wouldn't it?

Arriving at The Stagger Inn in a black car from Royal Limo might be a little too memorable, so she called Stoke Village Taxi. The dispatcher said they'd be glad to run her out to what he called “The Stagger” for a flat fifty-dollar fee. “Sorry to charge you so much,” he said, “but the driver's got to come back empty.”

“How do you know that?” Tess asked, bemused.

“Left your car, right? Happens all the time, specially on weekends. Although we also get calls after karaoke nights. Your cab'll be there in fifteen minutes or less.”

Tess ate a Pop-Tart (swallowing hurt, but she had lost her first try at breakfast and was hungry),
then stood at the living-room window, watching for the taxi and bouncing her spare Expedition key on her palm. She decided on a change of plan. Never mind Stoke Village Mall; once she'd collected her car (and whatever other property Betsy Neal was holding), she would drive the half a mile or so to the Gas & Dash and call the police from there.

It seemed only fitting.

- 23 -

When her cab turned onto Stagg Road, Tess's pulse began to rise. By the time they reached The Stagger Inn, it was flying along at what felt like a hundred and thirty beats a minute. The cabbie must have seen something in his rearview mirror . . . or maybe it was just the visible signs of the beating that prompted his question.

“Everything okay, ma'am?”

“Peachy,” she said. “It's just that I didn't plan on coming back here this morning.”

“Few do,” the cabbie said. He was sucking on a toothpick, which made a slow and philosophical journey from one side of his mouth to the other. “They got your keys, I suppose? Left em with the bartender?”

“Oh, no trouble there,” she said brightly. “But they're holding other property for me—the lady who called wouldn't say what, and I can't for the life of me think what it could be.”
Good God, I sound like one of my old lady detectives
.

The cabbie rolled his toothpick back to its starting point. It was his only reply.

“I'll pay you an extra ten dollars to wait until I come out,” Tess said, nodding at the roadhouse. “I want to make sure my car starts.”

“No problem-o,” the cabbie said.

And if I scream because
he's
in there, waiting for me, come on the run, okay?

But she wouldn't have said that even if she could have done so without sounding absolutely bonkers. The cabdriver was fat, fifty, and wheezy. He'd be no match for the giant if this was a setup . . . which in a horror movie, it would be.

Lured back,
Tess thought dismally.
Lured back by a phone call from the giant's girlfriend, who's just as crazy as he is.

Foolish, paranoid idea, but the walk to The Stagger Inn's door seemed long, and the hard-packed dirt made her walking shoes seem very loud:
clump-clud-clump
. The parking lot that had been a sea of cars last night was now deserted save for four automotive islands, one of which was her Expedition. It was at the very back of the lot—sure, he would not have wanted to be observed putting it there—and she could see the left front tire. It was a plain old blackwall that didn't match the other three, but otherwise it looked fine. He had changed her tire. Of course he had. How else could he have moved it away from his . . . his . . .

His recreational facility. His kill-zone. He drove it down here, parked, walked back to the deserted store, and then off he went in his old F-150. Good thing I didn't
come to sooner; he'd have found me wandering around in a daze and I wouldn't be here now.

She looked back over her shoulder. In one of the movies she now could not stop thinking about, she surely would have seen the cab speeding away (
leaving me to my fate
), but it was still right there. She lifted a hand to the driver, and he lifted his in return. She was fine. Her car was here and the giant wasn't. The giant was at his house (his
lair
), quite possibly still sleeping off the previous evening's exertions.