CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (19 page)

He found his turn for Highway 88 north just as the rain let loose. At first it was rain. Big splattering drops that split open on his windshield like fat grapes. Five minutes after he had the windshield wipers going the rain turned to hailstones. The pummeling sounds on the roof, hood and trunk of the car sounded like a truckload of hard-boiled eggs being dumped over them. Cruise got his window up in time, but Molly was making little squeaky noises as she brushed off the hail while trying to get her window cranked shut.

That was when the wind picked up. The trees covering the slopes of the mountains began to dance insanely in the headlights. The hail was slanted straight at them, missiles in the cones of the car lights, striking the windshield with enough force to make Cruise wince and hunch his shoulders over the wheel. There were no other cars on 88. They might as well have been alone on an alien planet where the weather had turned mean and meant to beat the shit out of any machine that dared move about in it.

Cruise slowed, drove snail-like on the narrow two-lane until he reached the Theodore Roosevelt Lake. It gleamed black as an oil slick to his right. The wind had kicked up frothy white crusts of waves that beat on the shoreline. Hail pockmarked the water.

"I'm pulling over," he said.

"What is this? What's happening? Is it a tornado?"

He heard Molly, but he didn't want to talk to her. He thought perhaps it was a tornado, but he couldn't understand it. The tornadoes he'd been acquainted with in his cross-country travels were experienced from inside motel rooms or restaurants. He heard reports on the radio of that kind of bad weather looming, he always got off the road. He knew a tornado wind could pick up a car and send it flying through the side of a building or dump it down in a cornfield smashed flat as a dime. If this was a tornado, he'd be goddamned if he was going to drive through it. They'd have to wait it out.

Molly had her seat belt off. She was turned to her window, hands flat against the glass. With the motor stopped, the headlights off, the world outside took on a nightmarish quality. They could hear the wind shrieking in a multitude of infernal voices, low, high, harsh, whispery. The lake waters slapped angrily against the shore. The hail had stopped, but now rain again poured down hard and fast, sheeting the windows with gray. Lightning still sparkled and snapped to light up the scene. Once, in the light of lightening strikes, he saw the lake foaming and boiling like a caldron over a hot fire. Once he saw trees on a mountainside leaning almost parallel to the ground. The Chrysler rocked on its tires. It shook them in their seats and had Cruise's top teeth rattling against his bottom molars.

"Jesus Christ," he whispered.

"What're we gonna do?" Molly repeated over and over.

Cruise didn't know. They were at the mercy of the storm. If a wind came down and plucked them from the roadside and hurled them into the lake, they probably wouldn't know anything until they were sucking water. He leaned forward and tried to see out the top of the windshield. He wanted to sight the motherfucking tornado before it got them, but the rain was falling too hard, he couldn't see anything but streaming water. His imagination took over. He thought he saw a funnel reaching down out of the blackness to snatch them from the earth. He thought he heard a freight train and that's what they always said preceded a tornado touching down.

The girl was nuts, trying to open the passenger door. What was her name? Molly! Irish girl, red hair, that was the one. He was more and more confused as the wind raged around the car and shook him where he sat.

He knew he couldn't let the girl out of the car. That was absolutely out of the question. A big negatory. The wind would take her away from him. The lake would cover her over and he'd never see her again.

He bounded across the space between the blue cloth bucket seats and grabbed her shirt with both hands. Fabric ripped at the seams. He held on as she opened the door now and wind and rain sliced into the car wetting his hands, his forearms. He grappled with her and had her around the neck, hauling her back inside. The door slammed shut from the force of the wind. The bang of it made the pressure in his eardrums close. He swallowed hard to clear them. He held her back against his chest, her head in the crook of his arm. All he had to do was snap it. Easy. Be rid of the nuisance of her. She'd been trying to escape. It wasn't the storm she wanted to flee. It was him, of course he knew that.

He heard her weeping. "Do that again and I break your fucking neck." When she didn't say anything he said, "I should do it anyway. Save myself trouble later on."

She gasped as his arm tightened down. "No!"

He let up a little, but not much.

"I won't do it again!"

"I know you won't." He pushed her away and reached behind him to the back floorboard. He felt the loops of rope he'd brought along. He found one end of the rope, brought her hands together, and began tying her securely. He passed the rope through the hole in the door armrest. She wanted to get out again, she'd have to take the goddamned door with her. The whole goddamned car.

While he was busy with Molly the wind dropped and the rain fell to a soft shower. The sound of the freight train was gone and in its place was an eerie stillness with the gentle patter of raindrops as punctuation on the roof.

"It passed," he said, breathing heavy, fear in his voice.

His arms were still damp from the rain. Molly sat quietly subdued, roped into submission. The windows had fogged from their breathing.

A rap came at Cruise's side window. He jerked away and stared out. Molly let out a yelp of surprise.

The rap came again and someone had hold of the door handle trying to open the door.

"What the fuck?" Cruise rolled down the window while holding the door closed by grasping the armrest.

A face swam forward out of the dark. It was wet, the hair plastered in bangs across the broad forehead. It was a frantic red bloated face with a double chin beneath it belonging to a man who needed to lose at least a hundred pounds. His eyes were dark circles, his nose small and pointed. His lips worked long before anything came from them. He was like an actor in a foreign movie, his words dubbed in and not synchronized with his lip movements.

"My car!" he screamed. Rain sluiced down his cheeks like tear tracks. "My car turned over! I stopped! But the wind turned us over. My wife...my wife's caught...can't get out..."

Cruise pushed open the door and crawled from the bucket seat. He stood several inches taller than the fat man. "Where?" he asked, feeling the first droplets of rain soaking into the back of his shirt.

"Down here. I saw your car lights, saw you pull over just before that wind hit. Please help me--we have to get her out."

Cruise followed behind the waddling fellow. He looked like a duck in his proper element. Cruise noted he wore a sloppy suit in a dark color. It was soaking wet. The cuffs of his pants dragged the ground and his heels stepped on them. When he turned back once to gesture, Cruise saw he wore a diamond ring on his right hand.

The car was just around a bend in the road, hidden from view by the forested mountain. It was on its side in a steep ditch, the undercarriage facing the highway.

"I don't know how to get into it," the man was saying. Screaming. The wind had stopped, the rain was gentle, the clouds were parting and letting through the moon, but this man was out of his head and he couldn't stop screaming.

"She's on the other side!" He went around the front-end of the car and pointed at the ground.

"Let's try to push it back on its wheels," Cruise suggested.

He and the fat man put their shoulders to the roof of the car. It was a white Ford Escort. New. Light.

The car moved, tilted, fell with a resounding crunch into the gravel lining the roadbed. The windows on the side they faced were broken into spiderwebs. The fat man rushed to the wedged door and tried to open it. He couldn't. He was screaming still when Cruise went to the driver's side door and opened it. He leaned in. A small woman, dark hair thin as spaghetti swirling around her face, lay with her torso on the seat, her legs and hips crumpled into the floorboard area. She looked dead to him and he'd seen a lot of dead people. She wasn't moving or making any sound. He thought her eyes were open. Her mouth was. Her bottom denture lay on her unmoving chest.

Cruise felt the man behind him, trying to pull him out of the way. Cruise backed off. Stood watching while the man crawled into the car on his hands and knees. His tremendous belly got stuck between the steering wheel and the seat back. He was still screaming and crying and Cruise knew then the woman was lifeless.

Cruise felt beneath his hair for the knife. He pulled it gently from the Velcro patch. He stood with it in his hand until the fat man extricated himself from the wrecked car. What did this man have to live for now? When the grieving husband turned to face him, that's when Cruise took a few steps to circle him, got behind his wide back before he could move again, grabbed the wet hair of his head, jerked him backward until the throat was exposed.

The screaming turned to a coughing, a gurgling. The little hook on the end of the sharp blade had severed the carotid artery and a few fatty neck muscles. The man jerked in Cruise's big arms. His blood warmed Cruise's skin where he'd caught him around the chest to hold him up. He held him until life drained out and the man was dead weight. He dropped him unceremoniously to the pavement. Stooping, he reached inside the coat pocket and slipped out the wallet. Took the cash. Wrenched the ring from the man's thick finger. Kicked him out of the way. Inside the car Cruise searched the front seat for the woman's purse and couldn't find it. Finally he gave up and shut the car door.

He'd have to wash himself in the lake. He thought maybe he'd do it right at the edge of the shore near the Chrysler so that Molly could see him naked.

He'd have to hurry. Another car might come along anytime. Cruise thought that would be a definite inconvenience. He also thought he felt much better with the fat man dead. The ice that earlier encased his brain had warmed and melted, leaving him able to think.

Molly was safe for a little while longer.

#

Molly's wrists were rubbed raw where the thin yellow nylon rope circled them. She tried like hell to get herself loose when Cruise left the car to help the fat man. Had she been successful, she could have disappeared into the dark, wet woods where Cruise would never have found her.

She tried everything she could think to do. She twisted her arms until her elbows groaned, trying to get her fingers on the knots in the rope. She jerked and hauled, yelling out each time when the rope burned into the flesh of her wrists. She even scooted from the seat and knelt on the floorboard to face the armrest trying to get a hold on the knots, but nothing she did worked. She merely succeeded in tearing up the skin on her wrists and crying until she felt sick to her stomach.

She was just able to get back into the seat before Cruise reappeared by her window. He scared her, standing there in the dark, the moon over his shoulder. She didn't know what he was doing, what he wanted. She reached up tentatively and wiped the fogged window. She was afraid suddenly that he wanted to rape her and was screwing up his courage to do so. But after a short time he stepped away from the window, walked toward the lake while shedding his clothes in the moonlight. Rain still came down, but it was nothing like the storm earlier. This was a light drizzle that sent trails of water slipping quietly down the windshield.

Molly watched, hypnotized by Cruise's actions. He stripped right to the skin. She saw his white buttocks, his wide muscled shoulders. She saw him walk right into the water until it was up to his knees. He turned then and began dipping the water over himself with his hands. Splashing himself. It had to be cold. What was he doing? He was too distant for her to see his face. He looked like a nature god of the wilderness with his long hair dripping onto his broad shoulders, swinging free around his face as he bent to dip the water. What sort of bizarre ritual this was she could not possibly imagine. He had been wet from the rain, so why was he bathing in the lake?

God, what was she going to do to get away from him? She'd made that one effort during the height of the wind and rain when Cruise seemed most vulnerable. She thought she could get the door open and be gone before he could react. The stunt almost got her killed. She had felt her wind being cut off by his thick arm. Black dots appeared before her eyes from lack of oxygen. Her neck still ached from the strangling she took. She knew she was lucky to be alive.

Then they'd both been stunned by the rap on the window and the appearance of the fat man. He was bellowing about his car being wrecked, something about his wife being trapped. Cruise wasn't gone long. Molly wondered if the woman was okay. If they'd gotten her out.

She saw Cruise starting back up the slope to the car. He picked up his clothes as he came, held them modestly in front of himself. He circled the trunk, opened the driver's door, withdrew the car keys. He went again to the trunk and Molly watched out the rear window until minutes later the trunk lid was lowered. Cruise was dressed again. He had gotten into dry clothes.

She waited as he climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine. He had brought a wet scent into the car--rainwater, lake water. His hair still dripped. "Did you get the woman out all right?"

"She was dead."

Molly bit her lower lip. They drove slowly around the curve in the road and she saw the white Escort in the car lights. She also saw something--was it a body?--on the gravel lining the road next to the car.

She turned her head, looking back, trying to be sure.

"He's dead too," Cruise said.

"What...why...did you...?"

"Yes," he said simply.

Molly couldn't look at him any longer. She stared instead ahead at the white dividing lines in the road. "I don't know how you can do that," she said when she was able to speak.

"Why not? He wouldn't have been happy without his wife anyway."