CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (23 page)

"Her heart soured the same way grapes ferment in a stone crock. It turned black as night and shriveled to a tight little ball. She wouldn't come out of the house or let anyone in.

"She died one night in her bed. They found stacks of old cloth and clothes she'd worn fifty years before--all this stuff piled on the bed with her. Scattered around her were boxes of photographs and shoe boxes of old shoes, even a tin coffeepot on the bed with her, all this stuff leaving a tiny space for her to curl up on the mattress to sleep her last sleep.

"I guess since she didn't have anyone to monitor her behavior, she collected things around her to keep some kind of watch. Her house was stuffed with junk, we could hardly wade through it to her bedroom."

He remembered the sharp smell of collected and forgotten things. The old dried grape smell of his aunt lying in the bed, molting like a snake losing its skin.

"That's one way to die," he concluded the narrative. "Mad a headless chicken. All alone in the world, living out some kind of dream you think might save you."

Cruise waited for Moily's response to his story. When she didn't say anything he said, "You're too young to know what it's like being alone in the world."

She glanced at him, saw him waiting for a reply. "I guess so," she said.

"I mean, you
think
you're alone now, taking this hitchhiking trip across country, but you see. you've got me. Before me you had your dad. Real loneliness is the killer."

"Is that why you wanted me along?"

He liked her tone. She had dropped the smart-ass sarcastic comebacks and seemed to really be listening to what he was saying.

"That's one reason," he said. "I have someone with me, I don't figure I'll wind up like my Aunt Maddie. Or Lannie."

"Lannie works hard."

Cruise made a sound of disbelief. He rested his left arm on the window. The wind pressed against his shirt sleeve, against the bandage, reminding him of the slits in his skin. It wasn't unpleasant. "Lannie," he said, "turned into a fucking zombie. She used to sing."

"She did?"

"Like an angel."

"She doesn't sing anymore?"

"Only to herself. She could have done something with her voice. She could have been somebody."

"Not everyone can be somebody important," Molly said. "We can't have a world full of VlPs, can we?"

Cruise looked at her. Sometimes the kids knew more than he gave them credit for. "Everyone could try," he said. "Don't they owe it to themselves to at least try?"

Molly wouldn't answer him. She stared forward, her hands lying palm up on her lap as if she were airing the raw places on her wrists.

"We got us a world full of zombies," he said, trying to find the words to explain his thinking. "There's more people who are just like Lannie than not. They don't give a goddamn anymore. They don't give a ratshit. They let themselves get beaten down. If they'd follow their instincts, if they'd listen to their desires..."

"Like you?' Molly asked abruptly, interrupting him.

"Yeah, like me, you're fucking right like me. Even like you."

That got her attention. She shook her head slowly.

"People need to do what they feel they have to do. Like you did. Like I do. But most people, they're all tied down with fears and they keep these unspoken rules and regulations in their heads. They get an impulse, they don't follow up on it. Someone told them it was wrong, or it would ruin their reputation, or they'd suffer from it. People will look and point, they think. People will call them names. People will laugh. So they'd rather play it safe, take no chances. They end up like Lannie, stuck in a two-bit job where the paycheck won't cover the expense of living, no husband, five kids crawling all over the broken-down furniture."

"And your father to take care of," Molly added.

She'd left him wordless at last. Was she trying to tell him something?

"Someone," Molly said, "has to take on the burdens. Lannie's doing that. If she were a real zombie, she'd walk out on the kids and the job and your father. She wouldn't care about protecting you."

Cruise thought about it. Thought about it so hard he noticed he was squinting his eyes at the lines in the road. It didn't fit in with the way he thought of Lannie, how he blamed her. It made her sound heroic, but who could ever picture his sister as a heroine? She'd asked for the burdens and accepted them. She let them wear her down until she was devoid of any personality of her own. Was Molly trying to say something about him? Was she razzing his ass for not living up to some debt the world said he owed? Well,
fuck that
. What did a sixteen-year-old kid know about anything?

"Some of us know how to live a life," he said, defending himself. He sounded fierce, couldn't help it. He felt the kid was criticizing him. "You have to stay free. You stay free, you remain outside the rules. You can do anything you want and get away with it."

Again she didn't respond. He thought she was acting in a mysterious manner. She should be arguing with him and she wasn't. Just about everyone disagreed with him when he said you could get away with murder if you wanted to--even though he was irrefutable proof that you could.

Molly seemed to be trying to point out flaws in his opinions without making him angry. Trying to manipulate him? He didn't like that. He
hated
that. No one
ever
manipulated Cruise Lavanic.

He didn't have to listen to her. He didn't have to let what she said raise doubts in his mind. His beliefs weren't dictated to him by stupid fucking teenagers.

He drove to Phoenix without speaking again. The crusty wounds on his arms itched. He thought they might be bleeding a little. He hoped so. He felt tight all over the way he had felt after waking from the nightmare.

An urgency filled him with the jitters. It felt just like a horde of roaches crawling from his innards out to the muscle sheaths covering his bones. They wanted out. He needed to lessen the tension so that he wouldn't burst and fly off in a million pieces.

He guessed he'd have to kill someone after all.

#

Mark Killany spoke to the homicide detective on the case.

"What makes you think this is the same man?" the detective asked.

He wasn't very cooperative. Mark pegged him right off as a man who had trouble dealing with authority. He had taken those types into boot camp and turned them every-which-way-but-loose until their brains were settled into place. This man probably hadn't been in the service. He was too young to be out of diapers when Mark was kicking butt all over Vietnam. He was too young to be detecting more than the smell of his own bad wind. He was a fucking know-it-all with an attitude.

"I'11 tell you again," Mark said wearily. He hated repeating himself. If people didn't get the drift the first time what was the point? "The kid at the wreck said the guy was driving a blue Chrysler. My man was driving a blue Chrysler." Mark was ticking off the common elements on the fingers of his right hand. Square in the detective's face.

Next he'd punch out his lights if he didn't get no satisfaction as Mick Jagger would say. "Second. Kid said the guy had long hair, down to his shoulders, and a beard, and a mustache. Guy picked up my kid in Mobile was described to me the same way, had a beard, mustache' Third. I've been following this bozo across country. If he took the turnoff at 666, he'd have been at the scene about the time your killer was there."

"Hey, there's a million blue Chryslers. There's ten million guys with long hair." The detective wasn't convinced. "Besides. The kid didn't say nothing about a girl in the car he saw leave."

"It was dark! That kid was sitting in a car that had just been wrecked and his parents were dead! His fucking mother was sprawled out in the front seat with a broken neck. What do you expect, a detailed book report from that kid?"

"Look here now. We're searching for this son of a bitch. We've got roadblock checkpoints. We've got out APBs, we're running some checks on the MO, and if we find him and we find your girl with him, we'll be careful to try to get her out of it unharmed. More than that I can't promise you. Meanwhile I suggest you go cool off somewhere and let us get on with our jobs."

Mark itched to slug him. Slug him hard right in the pink snout in the middle of his face. He was a piggy-eyed young man with a layered haircut, tassels on his loafers, and a row of four, count 'em, four pens in the pocket of his fashionably starched pastel shirt. He wasn't going to be any help.

"I'm leaving right now," Mark said, going for the door. "And when I call back from the road, you're going to tell me what's happening, isn't that correct? You're going to let me know if you pick up any suspects or you see my daughter?" He stood with his hand holding open the door, looking back.

The detective glared. He took a pack of Marlboro from the desk and shook out a cigarette, lit it as if he had all the time in the world.

Mark waited. Wanted to kick the door shut and throw the chairs through the wall, but he just waited while the nerves jumped in his neck and the veins throbbed in his temples.

"I guess we can accommodate you that much. But keep this in mind." He dragged deep on the Marlboro, blew out the smoke across the desk. "You get in the way, you can be hauled in on charges of obstructing law officers from performing their duty. We even stop you for speeding, they're gonna know your name, Mr. Killany. We don't hold with former Marines who want vigilante justice here in Arizona. Not even a smidgeon."

Mark wanted to tell him he didn't "hold with assholes" either, but thought it best not to let the words slip past his lips. He left the door open and stalked through the Globe, Arizona, police station without looking at anyone. Outside at the curb where his car was parked he couldn't keep his anger under wraps any longer. He slammed the parking meter with his open hand, marched to the car, and jerked open the driver's side door with enough force to make it bang back shut so he had to open it again.

It took everything he had not to squeal his tires as he backed into the street.

He was going to Flagstaff. They were headed north. They might be in Flagstaff. He'd find Molly if he had to scour the state for the next six months.

The frightful image of the dead man alongside the road in the rain superimposed itself on the windshield. He hadn't seen the man. He'd been told by one of the investigating patrol officers what the scene looked like. Fat man, obese really, a three-chinner. Slumped onto the pavement next to his car, the door standing open. Neck sliced wide, "looked like a can opener did it," the officer said. Rain coming down, not bad, just enough to keep washing off the blood so they could see the raw neck muscles in their flashlights. The man's son sitting on the trunk when they drove up. Little kid, about ten. "Wet as a duck-hunting dog." Wore glasses and they were shattered, but he still wore them. Couldn't see his eyes. Boy talked in snatches.

"He killed my dad," he said. "Didn't look in the back seat. I was in the floorboard just coming to. I felt the car fall down, I guess they turned it back on its tires. It made my head hurt. I was looking for my glasses when I heard my dad screaming and crying. He was inside the car, but I couldn't get up from the floorboard yet. Then when I did...I saw out the side window this man...and...he grabbed my dad from behind...and he caught his hair and jerked his head back...and..."

Mark cringed as the patrolman repeated the boy's story. He shook his head now to clear it of visions of dead men.

He had to keep the radio on, tuned to local stations. He'd call back to Globe every four hours. They were going to get tired of his harassment before this was over. They were going to know he meant business.

But
no
body was going to stop him.

#

It was just east of the outskirts of Yuma, Arizona, that Molly saw a chance to signal for help. During the long, tense night Cruise had driven them down from the forested mountains of Flagstaff to Interstate 8. It was two-thirty in the morning. Molly had stayed awake without any trouble. She'd slept as much as she could when tied in the bathtub the day before. She couldn't sleep anymore when Cruise was awake. He might decide to get rid of her, and she'd never know until he had the knife to her throat.

They hadn't talked much all night. When first leaving Flagstaff Cruise told her about his Aunt Maddie. When he began berating his sister, Molly spoke up on her behalf, and that's when she noticed Cruise was in trouble. He kept feeling his arms as if something were crawling on him. She didn't know why he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt. It was a mild night and they had driven out of the storm area long since. They had to keep the windows rolled down for fresh air or they would have suffocated.

Molly thought Cruise might be keeping something from her, some secret he didn't want her to know about his arms. He began driving one-handed, touching, caressing the other with his free hand. Then he'd shift hands on the steering wheel and rub and caress the other arm.

She was too afraid to ask him what was the matter. She could tell he thought she wasn't noticing his actions. But she watched him from the corner of her eyes, watched his every move, fearing that he would pull the knife from where he kept it hidden in his hair.

Now she'd not yet figured that out. How did he keep the knife there? She knew he had it; she'd seen him whip it out when in the fight with the Mexican. Did he glue it or something? Did he tie it there with string? Beat the shit out of her. The important thing was that she knew about it. She watched for it.

She
didn't
know what was wrong with his arms. Maybe they ached. Maybe he was having the first symptoms of a stroke. Didn't the arms hurt before a person fell down clutching his chest? That's what they did in the TV shows and the movies.

God, she wished he'd have a stroke. She wished he'd zonk out and die at the wheel. She was ready to take over driving if that happened. She kept herself taut, ready to spring across the Igloo cooler and grab the wheel if he lost control.