CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (20 page)

"How do you know that?" She spoke in a dull monotone. She thought all her indignation had been sapped; thought she might be losing touch with her deepest emotions, or at least losing touch with the necessity to express them.

"It's a gift I have. Knowing."

Molly couldn't stand hearing what he had to say anymore. Everything he said was a torture to her. He was playing God, the God of Death. Being crazy was worse than dying, she thought. Cruise was already crazy and now she feared she might be losing her mind too the way she kept thinking of him as a nature god, a death god. There was only so much shock she could endure before she turned into an inhuman being who couldn't be shocked. Someone just like him.

Despair at her situation set hooks into her brain and deadened it the way Novocain killed all the pain in a rotten tooth. She didn't want to feel anything. Maybe that's what going crazy meant. You stopped feeling. The appalling truths became commonplace. The heart shriveled to a lump smaller than the tiny nubs that were her breasts.

#

Mark Killany was nearly to the outskirts of Tucson with the car radio tuned to a local station when he heard the first reports.

Man robbed and murdered, found beside his wrecked car near Theodore Roosevelt Lake. His wife was dead too, apparently from being thrown forward into the windshield when the car overturned in a ditch during tornado weather. It was the couple's son, eleven-year-old Brian Delham, who had been relatively unhurt in the back seat who found his father. He told the police about the man who came to help them. The man with long hair, a beard, and mustache. The man who killed his father. Hiding on the floor of the car, Brian had watched the murderer drive away, heading north. It was a blue Chrysler, the boy said. He was positive. It was old. Big. He didn't get the license plate number, but he'd never forget the killer's face.

Mark sped to the next exit ramp and made a U-turn that took him east again on I-10. He had trouble breathing. He cranked down the window, drank in great heaving drafts of fresh air. The radio announcer said the murder occurred on Highway 666. Mark had seen the exit for it miles back. He had to get there. He had to get in touch with the Arizona highway patrol. He wanted to tell them about Molly. That she might be with the killer. If it was the same man he'd been following across country, the same man the hooker in Mobile identified, then he might still have Molly with him.

Or worse yet, he might
not
have her with him. He could have...murdered her too. The boy didn't say anything about a girl being in the car.

"Shit," he wailed. "Dammit to hell, shit, shit, shit."

The speedometer needle rose past eighty, ninety, hovered there. Mark didn't care if he was stopped for speeding. He had to get to 666 and Roosevelt Lake. He had to tell someone about the danger Molly was in. His girl. His baby. The blue Chrysler.

#

Lannie Lavanic Reed lived in a modest three-bedroom house on a dead-end street in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was a working-class neighborhood where some of the people couldn't find work or else they made a salary that didn't cover all the expenses. Oil drip spots from worn-out cars marred the driveways. The Big Wheels and bicycles of the neighbor children were broken or rusted and lying forlorn in the weedy yards. Plastic garbage cans sans lids were stacked at the curbs where wandering packs of wild dogs knocked them over for the sparse loot they contained.

Some of the homes were empty, windows broken or boarded over. Blue cardboard HUD warning signs were taped to the windows of sagging garage doors.

Cruise pulled into his sister's driveway. He parked next to a twelve-year-old brown Chevy station wagon with ripped seats and a dented front fender. Once the engine was off, ticking away its heat in the early morning hours, Cruise began untying his witness. She moaned as he slipped the rope from her wrists.

"I'll have to hobble you once we're inside, but for a few minutes I'll let you stay free so you can go to the bathroom. I'll get Lannie to feed you too."

Molly grunted. She hadn't talked to him since the lake incident. She was an unsatisfactory companion the way she'd argue with him, get her smart mouth running, then suddenly clam up and give him the silent treatment. Her presence was wearing thin, so thin he thought he'd made a mistake not leaving her floating face-down in the lake back on Highway 666.

"C'mon," he ordered, pulling himself wearily from the car. She tried to make a break for it, he'd still be able to catch her before any harm was done. She could scream around here for an hour and not more than two people would look out their windows to see what was going on. No one wanted to get involved. Too many of the residents had speed labs in the kitchens and marijuana gardens in the bedrooms.

It made Cruise sad that Lannie had to live in a place like this. There were lots of neighborhoods in Flagstaff where decent people lived, but it cost too much, more than Lannie could afford. Still, it wasn't right his sister lived this way. Broke his damned heart. Sometimes he sent her money he scored. It was never enough.

Molly came around the car, a docile little sheep. He marched her before him to the recessed doorway. In the cement entry lay a black plastic machine gun and a boy's cap made of camouflage material. One of Lannie's kids left his junk out. There wasn't any way to make them mind. Lannie had given up trying a long time ago. She had five kids, stepping stones, from Sherry, who was the toddler in diapers, to Wayne, who was ten. Wayne, the eldest, was the probable owner of the gun and cap.

Cruise tried the doorknob, found it locked. Didn't blame her. The street was a war zone what with the druggies, the teenage burglars, the unemployed. They'd lift their grandmother's girdle if they thought there was any money in it.

Cruise tried the doorbell. He listened, couldn't hear it ringing inside. He pounded finally on the door.

"Let's wake them all up," he said to Molly. "Get those little toads of Lannie's into high gear before sunup."

It took a while, but eventually the door creaked open on a safety chain. A woman wearing a red chenille housecoat looked out.

"Don't frown. It's me," Cruise said. "And a friend."

Lannie shut the door, lifted the chain, then opened up to them. She stood back in a dark hallway, one hand holding closed the robe. Her glasses had slipped down on her nose and she peered over them like a schoolmarm.

"You look like shit, Lannie'" Cruise moved past her down the hall, pulling Molly behind him. They came out into a living area stuffed with Salvation Army and garage sale furniture, toys scattered on the matted dirty carpet, clothes draped everywhere. Old newspapers teetered in stacks on every conceivable surface.

Cruise wrinkled his nose. "Home sweet home,' he said.

"I don't need your bullshit, Cruise. What do you want?"

Lannie slouched into the room and cleared a place on the stained and worn orange upholstered sofa.

"Don't you want to meet Molly first? Molly, this is my sister, Lannie. Lannie, Molly. She's Irish you can tell by her hair. She doesn't want to stay with me now, so watch her."

"Goody. Another one of those."

"Where's Daddy?" Cruise moved toward another hallway that led to the bedrooms.

"He's sleeping, what do you think? We don't usually get up around here before dawn in case you forgot."

Cruise paused, his back to the room. "Is he worse?"

He heard Lannie sigh the way she might with one of the kids when they asked too many unanswerable questions. "He's not going to get better, Cruise. You already know that."

Cruise nodded. He moved on down the hallway until he came to the door of his father's bedroom. This is where his father had slept for the past ten years. Lannie wouldn't put him in a home. She knew Cruise would have killed her if she tried.

He opened the door slowly, his fist swallowing and squeezing the doorknob. Breathed in the smell of age that bathed the room with its aroma. Old clothes, old skin, old air going in and out of old lungs.

Feeble light from the one window in the far wall made the bedroom appear watery and insubstantial. There was too much furniture in the room. An iron bedstead, unpainted and gray as lead. A bedside table covered with a lamp, a Bible, bottles of vitamins, tubes of salves. A standing wardrobe made of dark cherry, the mirror on its front cracked right down the middle. A stuffed easy chair, torn on the arms. A metal tube-legged kitchen chair, seat in canary-yellow. Rips in the vinyl. There was more, so much more. A battered chest of drawers, flaking white paint, the top stacked with newspapers and folded clothes.

Cruise approached his father's bed. He stared down at the old man. Here lay the monster of his dreams, the master of his past, the fearsome right hand that so often struck him low. He didn't look much changed except for the skin on his face and hands that lay atop the sheet. The skin had been ruddy and weathered and tough as oiled leather. Now it was papery white and thinly veined with blue. His father still retained his thick brown hair, tinged gray on the sides. He still had the massive forehead, the large nose that dominated his features, the narrow mean lips.

Where the real change had come with age was in the old man's brain. He'd been diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer's disease the week Lannie took him into her home to care for him. His mind was a quicksand pit where you could throw in anything and get nothing back. He forgot his name. He forgot to go to the bathroom, how to hold his dick to take a piss, how to wipe himself. He forgot how to feed himself, forgot where he was, who he had been, and all of what he had done.

Cruise reached out a tentative hand and touched his arm. The old man woke immediately, eyes swiveling to the side of the bed without moving his head. "Who?" he asked.

"Hi, Daddy. It's Cruise."

"Who?" The old man came up onto his elbows to squint at Cruise. "Who are you?"

"Your son. Herod, remember?"

"I don't know you. Who are you?"

Cruise reached behind him and caught the back of the kitchen chair. He dragged it close to the bedside and sat in it. He held his father's hand in both his own.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "I know you, that's enough, isn't it?"

"Where am I?"

"You're at Lannie's house. You've been here for years, Dad."

"I'm hungry." He smacked his lips.

"Lannie will cook breakfast soon. Why don't I sit here and tell you about a few things while she does? Wouldn't you like that?"

The old man stared at him the way he would a stranger. Cruise began to tell him about his latest trip across country. He told him, in detail, about the Lot Lizard who called herself Minde. How she'd almost gone with Dirty Old Man and how he, Cruise, got to her first. How he'd already prepared a shallow grave outside of Charlotte. How fiercely Minde had fought for her life. Then he told him about Molly, picking her up at a truck stop in Mobile. What a pretty girl she was, so naive, so young, so trusting. He told him how much it meant to him to have company along. How lonely he got without someone at his side.

He told his father about Riaro, about the visit to the cemetery after he killed him. He told how Molly tried to call her father, how he'd almost missed finding her in time. He brought the old man up-to-date on his life since the last time he'd seen him. He ended with the story of the tornado, the rap on the window, the way it felt to kill the frantic fat man who jiggled and struggled as he died in his arms.

When he finished, Cruise reached into his pants pocket and withdrew the diamond ring his last victim had been wearing. It was the first time he'd really looked at it. There were six big diamonds encircling a round center stone. It was a beauty. He slipped it onto his father's hand. "Here, this is for you. Isn't it nice? A real diamond, I think."

The old man held it up to his face, inches from his nose. "What is it?"

"A diamond ring. Lannie said you lost the other one I gave you. It doesn't matter. You can lose it. I'll get more."

"Pretty," the old man said, admiring the sparkle as he turned the stone back and forth on his finger. For long seconds he was lost in the glitter of the material world.

"Yeah. I knew you'd like it."

"I'm hungry."

"All right. Get up and I'll take you to the kitchen."

"Where is it?"

"I'll take you." Cruise helped him from the tangle of covers, brought the slippers from beneath the bed for his feet. He guided him to the door and down the hall.

Molly sat in a rocking chair across from Lannie. Her eyes were red. Crying. Always crying. They did that so much at Lannie's house. Why would they think she'd help them escape? She knew better.

"This is my father." He smiled as he showed off the old man to Molly, but it was a wisp of a smile, a shadow. And it made him ache in his chest. The smile cost him the limit of what he was able to pay.

#

Molly had begged her. "You have to help me. Your brother's crazy. He's killed people. He'll probably kill me."

Lannie pursed her lips and shook ash-blond hair from the frames of her glasses. "Don't waste your breath. I can't do a thing."

"Why not? You know what he's doing. He has to be stopped. He
kills
people!"

"He won't be stopped by me. I never could stop him. Daddy couldn't stop him. The only thing that will end it is a cop's bullet."

"Are you afraid of him, is that it? He wouldn't have to know..."

"He'd know the second I touched the telephone."

"But why haven't you told before? When he left, why didn't you call the police the first time you knew for sure?"

"You don't understand. Cruise is like a flood or an earthquake. He won't be stopped by me turning him in. They'd never catch him. He's too smart. He's been doing this for half his life."

Molly tried to think.
Half his life.
If he was about forty, that meant twenty years of killing and he hadn't been caught.

She couldn't believe it. "Twenty years?" she whispered.

"Longer."

"But if you don't do something, he's going to...he'll..."