CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (25 page)

The first time he had murdered someone,
two
someones, he had to throw himself in the creek to make the blood disappear. It was the first and last time he had killed people he knew. He waited until he was sixteen. He had suppressed the urge for seven years. He had waited patiently since he was nine-almost-ten years old, since the day Orson and Edward tried to run over him with the lawn mower in the backyard.

He toyed with the idea of murder the way a cat toys with a mouse. He dreamed of it. Planned and plotted. Giggled over his secret at inappropriate times.

Since his brothers were older than he, his murderous thoughts were not carried out until he was sixteen and had come into his growth. The muscles of his arms and legs thickened and grew strong; he had reached most of his adult height of six feet four inches. He was just as much a man as either of his brothers. He knew he could take them.

His method was the knife, even then. He could have sneaked his father's shotgun from the bedroom closet. Or he could have put rat poison in his brothers' food. Or he could have burned them alive. No, dead. Burned them
dead, dead
. But in all his years of planning the deed he had never considered any method more just, more intimate, than a knife to the throat. With a gun you had to stand away from your victims. With poison you never laid a hand on them. With fire you had to manipulate too many elements, gasoline and matches. These were all oddly impersonal ways to take a life when a knife was a handy weapon, when it afforded him close contact, when it demanded that he really
meant
it. You could accidentally shoot, poison, or torch a person.

There was nothing accidental about cutting a throat.

He talked Orson and Edward into a fishing trip. Orson was nineteen, Edward twenty-one. They were both working at the sawmill, bringing home paychecks and paying their father room and board. They had girlfriends and cars and they thought Cruise--
Herod
--had long forgotten the little trick with the lawn mower. Cruise knew what they thought. That because they were children at the time it didn't matter, it didn't count. They thought he'd believe they wouldn't have hurt him anyway, even if Lannie hadn't intervened. It was a joke. A prank. A scary bit of nonsense.

Harmless play.

But Cruise knew he had escaped death by inches, by centimeters, by seconds. He had seen their faces. Their expressions from that day were forever emblazoned on his memory.

They meant it. It was not a childish impulse gone awry. They would have killed him while he struggled to free himself of the homemade grave.

Cruise had the knife stolen from his mother's cutlery drawer in the kitchen. It was the sharpest five-inch blade in the house. The handle was made of a dark wood dulled by years of use. There were three shiny steel rivets in the handle that he often covered over one by one with the pad of his right thumb.

They set out on a Saturday on another summer day much like the one when Cruise thought he was about to die. They threw fishing rods and two boxes of tackle into the rear of Orson's truck, an old 1965 black Ford. They drove to a favorite fishing spot on the river, the truck bounding down a narrow back lane through the thick Arkansas woods.

Cruise let his brothers josh him about being "a squirt who grew into a giant." He let them horse around the way they aways did, popping the tops on cans of Budweiser, and talking about the pussy they were going to get off their girls that night at a dance being held in town.
How sorry
they were Cruise was just a kid yet and didn't know diddly about fucking girls.
How sad
it was he didn't seem to have the same kind of luck they did in attracting the opposite sex.

"You
even got
a pecker?" Orson asked, giving Cruise a knock on his arm to send him off-balance.

"Sure he does," Edward chimed in. "He's got a
wood-pecker
."

They thought that was hilarious. They thought they were stand-up fucking comics.

Cruise let them make fun of him. He let them bait their fishing lines and throw them into the gently flowing brown river. He let them lean back with their Lucky Strikes trailing smoke above their heads. And then he went to the truck to feel under the seat for the knife he had hidden there before the fishing trip.

"Where's Herod going?" Edward asked his brother.

Orson looked over his shoulder, frowned, turned back to the river. "Fuck if I know. Take a piss maybe. How should I know what the kid's doing?'

"Hey, Herod, you jerking off, all this talk of pussy?" Edward laughed like a jackal.

Cruise pretended not to hear. The hate now was so great it was like a barbed-wire fence around his heart. It squeezed and pierced him. He bled inside, the hate turning his blood black and rich as the dirt they had scooped around his neck in the backyard when he was a trusting naive boy.

He came from the truck, keeping the knife out of sight behind his right thigh as he walked toward them lounging on the riverbank.

A pair of redbirds flew down and rested on a bush near the water. A slippery bed of pine needles carpeted the incline to the water's edge, and Cruise had to walk carefully to keep from falling. A cooling breeze wove through the treetops, making the leaves and limbs sing in soft chorus. He drew in a deep breath of the green pines. Shifting spots of sunlight blinked through the forest and shone like a sheet of hammered bronze from the river surface.

"You gonna fish or what?" Orson asked, not bothering to turn to look at Cruise.

"He can't catch any goddamn fish, Or. He ain't got the co-or-din-ation," Edward said, laughing at the fun things he knew how to say.

Cruise had Orson by the neck, arching out his chest in struggle, before Edward knew what was really happening on the riverbank. Orson dropped his rod and grabbed for Cruise's strong, choking arm. "Fuck!" he screamed and that was all. He was holding his throat to halt the flood.

Edward scrambled onto his knees, moving toward them, hands out, Lucky Strike dropping from his wet lips, when Cruise finished with Orson and turned to bury the knife in Edward's stomach.

"Ah..." he said.

"What...?" he said.

And Cruise was on him, knocking him backward to the ground. Redbirds fled with a flashy rustle of wings while the sunlight played over the tussling figures on the slick bank as they rolled thunderously toward the dun-colored water.

Cruise had a time with Edward. He was older, he wasn't taken by surprise, he wanted very much to live and catch a fish and go to town for the dance and feel his girlfriend's breasts beneath her dress.

In the end Cruise half drowned, half cut his brother to death. Once they rolled down to the river, he pushed Edward's face under the water while cutting frenziedly at his exposed Adam's apple. Edward sucked in water and blood instead of air. He groped blindly, his fingers pressing over Cruise's face, trying to find a way to stop the killing, the cutting, the cover of water.

Cruise muttered insanely, "Die, you bastard, die, you son-of-a-bitching fuck, die..."

When it was done Cruise climbed to his feet and looked down at his clothes. The T-shirt he wore was soaked scarlet. Mud and blood and pine needles covered him from the cuffs of his jeans to the roots of his hair. He thought there could be no greater hell than to spend another moment covered with the evidence of his crimes.

He dived headfirst into the river. He swam out to the center where the whirlpools formed. They carried him down-stream. When he climbed onto the bank, he had to push his way through tangled undergrowth to where his brothers lay silent and staring upon the muddy, bloody bank.

He buried them quite a ways from where they died, in the woods where no one ventured save a few deer hunters during season. He took their rods and the fishing gear to the truck. Then he found a place where he could drive the truck truck over the side into the water. He stood in fascination, watching it float out like a black ship to the river center before it plummeted under.

He walked home. His clothes dried on the way. It was late afternoon when he walked into the house. When his parents began to wonder where his brothers might be he told them the first whopping lie of his life. "They said they were going to town early for the dance."

When Orson and Fdward were never seen again Cruise's father inquired in town. No one had seen the truck. Or the boys.

The family fretted for a few days, but they didn't call in the police or fill out a missing person's statement. They had heard rumors that Orson's girlfriend was pregnant. They decided that was reason enough to abscond. Cruise thought they didn't much give a damn or they might have even decided, in their quiet talks in the bedroom at night, he had something to do with the disappearances. Either way no one made him pay for murder. It amused him to think, in the coming days before he left home for good, that killing was such an easy way to get things done. If the blood that covered him didn't bother him so bad, he thought he could probably do it again.

Later he found that he could.

He opened his eyes to the stars and felt a slap of vertigo that made him sway on his bare feet. He was standing in mud that squished between his toes, the empty water jug in his hand. He panicked, wondering how long he had been standing there dreaming of his brothers.

He dropped the jug and hurried around the car to Molly's side. She wasn't there.

He turned in a circle, looking for her outline on the desert. He saw a dark stick figure moving toward the west, toward the ranch houses.

Cursing his lapse, he ran to the trunk, threw in his soggy clothes and shoes, slammed it shut. He grabbed the keys from the fender and slipped into the car wearing only his wet undershorts.

He ought to run her down.

He ought to hurt her.

The cuts on his arms bled onto his thighs as he drove across the bare land toward the girl speared in his headlights.

#

Molly thought her lungs would burst. She could hear the car behind her, closing in like a bumblebee aiming at the lush heart of a flower. She ran harder, her feet slapping the firm sand with a flat crunching sound. She was too far from the houses! She'd never make it!

Oh, God, oh, God, he'd run her over.

She stumbled on the thought and fell flat on her face, knocking the wind from her belabored lungs. She gasped, trying to get air again. She heard the engine of the Chrysler roaring in her ears. It blocked out the world. She brought her fists to each side of her face, sucking in air finally, closing her eyes and her mind to what might happen to her in the next few seconds. She couldn't think of it, couldn't get her mind to conjure the image beyond the one of her lying helpless on the ground while the car sped across the sand straight at her body.

She screamed out, pressing her fists into the sides of her head, legs automatically pulling up to her groin, toes curling in her shoes, feet tucking toward her buttocks to present the smallest possible target.

She might have lost consciousness for a while. She couldn't remember hearing the car braking or the sound of the car door opening and closing or the touch on her arm. The first thing she did hear was Cruise's voice demanding...

"Get into the car."

She couldn't get up. She expected to be run over and that expectation had become real in her head so that now she didn't believe she was still whole. She lay there, exhausted, not enough air in all the sky for her to breathe right again.

She felt herself lifted, taken into his arms. Her head hung down and she still couldn't breathe, her chest sucking up and down like a bellows.

She was put into the car, but she kept slipping from the seat, her legs Jell-O, her arms like strings attached to her shoulders. He shut the car door and the sound rattled her teeth.

Shouldn't the third try have been the charm? she wondered idiotically. She tried to leave him in Mexico. In Yuma. This time she should have succeeded. Third time a charm--was that a superstition?

When she had run this time, he had been in some kind of trance. He had stood behind the car after pouring the water over his head, stood so long she thought he had fallen asleep. He didn't even move an eyelid when she opened the door and began sprinting away.

Shouldn't she have made it? Was her luck so bad or did she have any? But yes, she had luck left. He hadn't driven the car over her prone body. She had lots of luck, but it just wasn't sufficient to get her free.

Strength returned to her limbs. She was able now to lift a hand to her face and brush the sand from around her eyes. She spit. Sand granules were in her mouth, grating on her tongue. She stuck out her tongue and wiped it on the back of her hand. She wiped her hand along the leg of her jeans.

She turned in the seat a little and saw the trunk lid open again. Soon it lowered and she saw Cruise dressed in fresh clothes. A sky-blue shirt, long sleeves. Navy trousers. When he sat in the driver's seat, she cringed, and moved closer to the door on her side.

"We're going into Mexico again," he said.

He turned the car around and returned to the bumpy road they had taken into the desert.

'"This time there's no hotel room for you. I'll leave you tied in the car."

She almost wanted to thank him. Being bound seemed an infinitesimal annoyance compared to being run over by a big blue Chrysler.

They drove past the tired border guards without a hitch. Cruise showed them his driver's license, his car insurance. Molly sat with a docile look on her face, though her red curly hair was all in disarray, and there was sand on the front of her shirt.

In Mexicali, Cruise drove to the far side of town where he found cantinas open all night. Molly saw that he knew the people in this section of town, knew them as well as he had in the other Mexican town east of Juarez. They called to him as he drove up. "Senor Cruise! Amigo!"

They came to the car windows and watched curiously as he tied her with the yellow nylon rope. He looped it through the armrest, making it fast. Even if she could get out of the car, she was hobbled, ankles tightly tied together, and she wouldn't get anywhere. She'd be back on her belly again, in trouble and out of luck.