CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (21 page)

Lannie turned away her face. She picked at lint on the red chenille robe. "I can't help you," she said. "I won't. He helps pay for Daddy's care. I couldn't do it without him. I work like a dog just to pay the mortgage on this dump. Who's going to take care of my kids if I don't? Who will feed them and give them a place to live? I have to have someone come in when I'm working. My no-good bastard of a husband left me when the last one was born. I can't leave Daddy alone. It takes money; living, by God, takes money."

"You're no better than he is," Molly said. Her cheeks flamed and tears rushed to her eyes. "Those aren't excuses. There is no excuse for what you're doing. You're as much a killer as he is if you don't try to stop him. They'd make you an accessory; you'll go to prison."

"So I'll go to prison. It can't be much worse than what I'm in now. Look the fuck around you."

Cruise walked the old man into the room and Molly turned to face her executioner. He proudly introduced his father. When she saw Cruise smile, she said boldly to the old man, "Your son's a murderer."

She waited for him to react. She expected him to turn on his son. Instead he blinked stupidly and murmured, "I'm real hungry."

Molly's mouth dropped open. Lannie stood from the sofa. She stepped over the laden coffee table and made her way to the kitchen. Molly heard her opening the refrigerator door.

Cruise placed the old man carefully on the sofa where Lannie had been sitting. He patted his shoulders, settling him in. When he turned back to Molly he wasn't smiling.

"He's got Alzheimer's," he said. "Leave him alone."

"No wonder you come here. No one hassles you. No one cares enough."

She flinched when Cruise moved across the room and grabbed her by the arms. He spoke into her face, spittle flying. When she tried to turn her head, he shook her until her eyes rolled in their sockets. "They care!" he shouted. His green eyes darkened to a drab hazel color. "My father loves me!"

He dropped her into the rocker, turned on his heel to his father. "You love me, don't you, Daddy? Tell her!"

"I don't know,
I don't know
. Who is she? Where am I? I'm so hungry.."

#

Cruise lay on Lannie's unmade bed unable to sleep. Molly was bound to the faucets in the second bathroom at the end of the hall. She sat in the tub. He told her she wanted to pee, she'd have to do it in her clothes, he wasn't coming to see about her until he was ready to leave. It was his way of saying
fuck you
. He thought she probably got his drift.

He reflected that Molly was right, he liked it in this house. He came back because no one cared enough to do anything about him. Even Lannie's kids didn't give a damn. They got up, the three oldest ones dressed for school, ate breakfast, and were out the door to catch the bus. Said one word to him,
hello
, that was it. The two little ones, Sherry in diapers hardly knew him, and Judy, the three-year-old, didn't think much of him one way or the other. Unca Cruise, Judy could say. But she never came to him or hugged his neck. She talked to her baby doll and poured water from a toy teapot.

Then there was Lannie. Broken like an aggressive dog you kick until it hides under beds when you walk in the room. She had about as much spirit as a June bug.

That left Daddy. Brain like grapefruit pulp. Who did he love? Who had he ever loved? It sure wasn't Cruise or Lannie or any of the others, not even his mother. His father hadn't known how to love anyone, hadn't the capacity. He made a living, he fucked his wife, he raised his children to fear him. That's all his life amounted to. A duty to persevere, never mind having any fun, feeling any joy, experiencing any hope. That made him one of the strange imposters who could never live by society's rules. Cruise grew to love him if only for that reason. He wasn't like other men. He viewed the world one way while other men saw it another. Cruise thought if his father really knew what his son had done with his life, he would have admired it. Before he came down with Alzheimer's he made no remark to dispute Cruise's feelings. He never made any remark at all. Cruise took that for approval.

Cruise always felt belittled and powerless as a kid, but he didn't blame Daddy. Nothing in a young person's world was under his control. His father had that iron fist, that razor strap, those chains. That's what fathers were supposed to do. That was the job entrusted to them.

Cruise wanted more than anything to possess the same power his father wielded. He thought for a while he'd never find a way. It wasn't enough to get some woman and raise kids the way his father had done. He wanted to go beyond that narrow scope, break out into the wider world where his actions determined whether men would live or they would die. His father was satisfied with punishment. Cruise wanted to wipe out the lights behind the eyes, take away the years people had coming to them, rob them of the future. In the hierarchy of control, his chosen way was at the pinnacle. He was at the top, man, he was at the zenith, no one was above him.

He was a man made in his father's image.

He could sleep if he honestly believed that.

#

Molly thought her bones were going to rub holes through her skin. If she had more padding she wouldn't be in such horrible pain. Cruise tied her wrists to her ankles before looping the rope around the faucet handles of the tub. He ended by taking the rope up from them to the shower head. Even if she managed to get herself undone from the many knots around the stainless-steel faucet handles, she'd still be fastened to the shower head.

The bath cloths Cruise had wrapped around her wrists and ankles to take some of the friction off her skin were beginning to slip loose. The yellow nylon rope dug into her flesh like a hundred stinging wasps. She cried for a while, cried until she started getting sick to her stomach and had to quit.

She cataloged her surroundings. There was a Rorschach blotch of rust around the lever in the tub that closed off the drain. As she stared at it the shape brought to mind an airplane, a bouquet of flowers, a casket, and a baby in a crib.

There was a bathtub ring. Lannie wasn't any too meticulous in her housework. The tub looked as if it hadn't been scrubbed in a month or more.

The caulk sealing the tub into the wall and the caulk around the square egg-yolk-yellow tiles were growing patches of mildew. A douse of Clorox would cure that, Molly knew, but maybe Lannie didn't. From her biology class study on fungus, Molly remembered how the mold looked under a microscope. Thin and furry like little thousand-legged insects. Truly unappetizing.

There was a constant drip from the tub faucet. It had no recognizable rhythm. Not enough beat, couldn't dance to it. Just an irritating
drip, drip, drip
that kept the drain wet.

After a while, Molly stopped even hearing it, but she could smell the faint chlorine scent that rose from the drain, and there was a dampness that hung in the air of the tub area.

Around noon Lannie came into the locked bathroom and offered her a drink of water from a coffee mug that had red hearts all over it. Molly drank the tepid fluid gratefully. She begged to be freed so she could use the toilet, but Lannie just shook her stringy hair and left again.

"Are you really going to let me wet all over myself?" Molly yelled.

She heard the key turn in the door. They must have used the bathroom as a holding cell before. She suspected it was Cruise who had put in the new burnished silver doorknob with the outside locking mechanism. Or maybe Lannie locked the old man in here so she could get some peace and quiet. She wouldn't put anything past this family. They were all bent in some unimaginable way.

The next time Lannie came with water, Molly refused to drink. Already her bladder was full to aching and they obviously weren't going to let her out of the tub until Cruise woke. She'd be damned if she'd soil herself. So she wouldn't drink. Or eat. Not that food had been offered her since the burned bacon and scorched eggs Lannie served

up at breakfast.

Molly had another day to think. While Cruise slept in Mexico she'd decided she must be careful or she'd get herself killed. She still thought that, even more so now. The murder of the man at the lake horrified her much more than the Mexican's death. She could still lie to herself about the Mexican. Try to believe Cruise was in his seriously warped way protecting her. But when he killed the fat man at the side of the road, she knew for certain that her first suspicions were correct. Cruise killed without motive, randomly, whenever he felt like it, and it meant no more to him than if he were snuffing out a bee crawling over a summer picnic.

Sitting all day in the rub, shifting her weight from one bony hip to the other, she had time to think over everything after she had finished noting the grime around the toilet bowl, the mildew in the caulking, the dead bugs caught in the cover over the fluorescent bar light that hung above the bath mirror.

She dissected her decision to leave home. No use lying to herself. She loved her stodgy father with his old-fashioned ideas of discipline. What a spoiled baby she was for not trying to cooperate with the counselor who advised her to go easy on her dad, try to understand his position, that although he was tough on her it was because he loved her. And because she was all he had left.

She hadn't tried to work it out with him. She thought, well, her life was set into stone, it would never change. She wasn't stimulated by any of the subjects at school, she didn't have any really close friends, she pitied herself for not having a mother, and she gave her father hell for being who and what he was as if he could change more easily than she. She saw now that people probably didn't change once they were adults. Her father was a Marine, and although he had retired, he would always be a Marine, a lifer. He thought kids no different than his boot-camp trainees. They had to be whipped into shape. They had to learn duty and responsibility and how to take orders. Now she knew that was a mistake he'd made, but from the perspective she had in the bathtub of a strange house, captive of a killer, she figured her father's method of child raising, mistaken as it was, seemed highly preferable to the present situation she found herself in. She realized only now how self-centered and selfish she had been. How...immature.

She'd suffer boot camp any day compared to one night on the road with Cruise Lavanic.

And if adults never changed, that meant Cruise was locked into murder as a way of life. His sister was imprisoned by her own circumstances and her deathly fear of her brother. Even the old man was lost, his mind held hostage by deterioration of his brain cells.

But
she
could change. Molly Killany was not an adult, not by a long shot, she realized the truth now. She was a kid who though she knew it all, thought she could get out in the world and create a brand-new life for herself. Thought she could take care of herself, stay out of danger's way.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
She was about as stupid as a bag of rocks.

The first thing she had to do--and she thought this the most mature idea she might have ever had--the first thing was to admit to her helplessness and ignorance. She didn't know anything about killers or how to keep one from taking her life. She was not wise, not experienced, not smart enough to be on her own. She needed help from somewhere or she was doomed.

Okay. She admitted to those sins. But what could she do about finding help? Lannie wasn't going to do anything for her. Not one single thing. If she was sorry for her, she hid the fact pretty damn well. Molly thought something had gone wrong with Lannie's emotions. They had jumped the track to disappear into a dark muffled place where she didn't feel anymore. Whereas Cruise's emotions were always at the edge, ready to explode into enough rage to take a life, Lannie admitted nothing to faze her.

So the sister and the father were out, as far as helping her went. That meant Molly had to stay alive until she got close enough to someone else who might help her. A gas station attendant. Another motorist. A waitress in a cafe. A passing patrol car. She must gain the attention of someone along the way who could come to her aid.

There was just one problem. She didn't know how long she had left. If Cruise had killed for all those years, had he also taken kids like her on his many death trips? If he did, what happened to them? Easy to answer that, but she tried to keep the thought at bay. It was too terrifying. Since none of them had ever turned him in, they must be unable to.

They were dead.

That's what she was going to be if she didn't get lucky real soon.

She hung her head, rested it on her upraised knees. It didn't matter that much anymore about her physical discomfort. The tub was cold, but it wasn't as cold as a grave. The mildew, the chlorine scent, the steadily dripping faucet--they were just slight irritations. The ropes hurt, but they weren't going to kill her. Her bones ached, her muscles were cramped, but she was young, strong, healthy. None of these discomforts were so unbearable. She was hungry, but she wasn't starving.

She'd find someone. She'd stop giving Cruise a hard time. She'd keep her mouth closed, her smart-ass comments to herself. She'd do exactly what he wanted. She'd try to enter into conversations when he wanted to talk. She wouldn't say anything to upset him.

There had to be help somewhere if she lived long enough to find it.
She was too young to die, God , please.
She hadn't done anything so wrong that she deserved to die.

She would make her own luck and get out of this alive.

The other alternative was unacceptable. Dying wasn't on Molly Killany's agenda this year.

THE SIXTH NIGHT

Cruise woke clammy cold with sweat. He smelled a sweet stench rising from his body as if he had perspired all the Cokes he had consumed over a lifetime.

He had been tortured by one of those nightmares that were flashbacks from his childhood. This one had been so vivid that even now he brushed his arms to get off the dirt.