CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (37 page)

Before Sully could utter a word, the doorbell began to shrill. He looked at Carla's haunted face, tied the sash of his robe, and went to answer it.

"Mr. Sullivan Torrance?"

"Yes."

"I'm a reporter from the
Atlanta Journal
. Could I ask you a few questions?"

"If this is about Martin Lansing and those killings last night, I don't want to talk about it." Glancing behind the reporter, he could see a photographer waiting, camera in hand. Turning into the driveway was a highway patrol car. Right behind them was Mike Dalamas in his yellow Duster. The three-ring circus was beginning all over again.

"But Mr. Torrance..."

Carla nudged Sully aside and faced the stranger at the door. "I'll talk to you," she said, "what do you want to know? Lansing killed my sister and got away with it. Now he's done it again. I'll tell you anything you want to know."

"Carla, please." Sully placed a hand on her arm. He hoped she would look at his face, let him warn her. She shook him off and gestured the reporter inside. Sully waited at the door for the patrolmen. Now the bright summer sun failed to warm him. He felt a chunk of ice melting away inside his guts. He shivered and wrapped his arms around his waist. He would have to tell the police how he had chased Lansing and lost him. It seemed no one could catch him or stop him. He was like a force of nature, a disaster on the prowl that no man could control.

#

Lansing heard the first reports on the truck radio before he ditched it. He didn't care this time if they found his car and knew he had killed the old couple. The law was ineffectual. They never had and never would find him. He was just about to switch off the radio when Carla's familiar voice stopped his fingers from twisting the off knob.

"He thought he got away Scot-free, but it's only beginning for him," she said. "This time they'll get fingerprints, and they have his car abandoned at the house where he killed people. I hope the state won't let him go the way they did after he killed my sister. I want him to suffer what we've suffered. If the police don't get him,
I will
. He'll never be free to do this again if I have anything to say about it."

Lansing lifted his upper lip in a nervous grimace. He switched off the radio, then drove the white Ford deeper into thick woods. He left it and hiked back the way he had come. He could not go home to Burdock Mountain yet. He was a long way from Jamison and Carla, but he would find another way back. It was more important than ever for him to carry out his plan. Carla and Sully would hurt him if they could. The girl didn't know how to give up.

He would show her.

#

Sully wandered the house alone.

Carla did most of the chores and checked on the store, saw that the books were being kept the way he wanted them. She spent each morning with hardware salesmen and instructing Butch, Sully's manager.

It was June already, a sultry hot month in Georgia, and Sully had been to Frannie's grave and found the white rose bush bristled with new buds. Frannie. God, each time he thought of her his heart ached as if a load of rock had been dumped on top to squeeze it dry as ashes.

He walked across the den to her photograph. He had taken it on Stone Mountain with the wind lifting her hair and flattening her blouse against her breasts. She was laughing, head back, white teeth shining, a hint of shadow in the center of her delicate throat.

Sully turned away before he reached the picture and moved toward the wing chair facing the French doors. He could not seem to live his life the way he had before losing Frannie. He had to ask Carla to take over the hardware store for a while until he could recover his lost equilibrium. All he could ever think about was Frannie, the Bunsun couple, and Lansing. Although a month had passed, the authorities had not been able to find a trace of him. Eventually the murder stories slipped from the front page of the newspapers to page four, then to a two-inch recap on page ten. The public quickly lost interest in a story that offered an unsatisfactory ending. The police were baffled. They were assuming Lansing had absconded and might turn up in some other state.

Sully grabbed the door handle and pushed open each side of the French doors to let in the summer sun. He sat that way with his legs soaking in the heat, half-dozing in the wing chair, until a shadow crossed his face to jerk him awake.

"Who is it?" His pulse jumped like a live wire down on a wet street.

Silence. He listened and searched the green empty lawn. The breeze softly rustled through the tree leaves. A bird sang a strange, choppy medley.

"Is anyone there?"

The shadows were where they were supposed to be. Beneath the trees, the bushes, the birdbath in his back lawn. He must have dreamed it. One more nightmare to add to the scores of nightmares he had night after night. He no longer slept in the bedroom where Frannie was murdered. The room was locked and he didn't venture inside. He slept in the spare room. Carla insisted he take her room after Frannie's funeral, but he demurred. A young girl needed more space than a grown man. Besides, she had lived in that bedroom for almost ten years. Enough of their lives had been changed and destroyed without the further upheaval of changing rooms.

Perhaps he should send Carla on a vacation. Get her away from the house, the scene of the... Send her to Acapulco or the Bahamas, let her buy some frilly girl things, and meet a nice boy.

He chuckled low.
Carla with a boyfriend
. Frannie said she was "delayed." Not immature, she assured her husband, just a little "delayed" about things of that sort. She had never dated, did not even claim a good friend among the girls she had known in high school. She spent her spare time studying Hebrew and going to temple in nearby Macon. She was not sincerely religious, but serious about her Jewish heritage. She often teased Sully about being Gentile and how grave a code her sister broke by marrying him.

Carla was a good girl. Studious, bright, imaginative. Brave. She was braver than he thought she had any right to be. If all Israeli soldiers possessed her heart, her passion, her courage, they must be unbeatable.

The front door slammed and Sully turned his head.

"That you, Carla?"

"Sure it's me, you think maybe you deserve Santa Claus in June?"

He grinned, stood with care. He had never thought about age before, but now it seemed he creaked when he moved. He wasn't old enough for that, but that sure was how he felt.

"How's Butch running the store?"

"He's running it."

"Cryptic, Carla, very cryptic."

"He over-ordered on the two-inch washers, but we'll sell 'em. In ten years maybe. No big investment."

"l should have made you manager."

"No, thank you, Mr. Torrance. I'm not into American free enterprise. I plan to fight for the freedom of God's people."

"You don't want to hear again how the Jews crucified Jesus Christ, do you?"

She tossed her blue bag onto the sofa and kicked off her sneakers. "No, I'd rather hear the sermon you have mapped out for the Sunday crowd."

He cuffed her on the ear and sat down beside her. "You and Frannie," he mused. "You always knew what you wanted, didn't you?"

"Frannie..."

Sully waited patiently. They had not talked about her since the trial.

"Frannie only wanted you, Sully. I'm glad she had that. I'm glad she was happy for her last seven years. I don't think you know how much you meant to her."

Sully swallowed hard and looked out the open doors to watch a cardinal bathe in the bird bath. "I know how much she meant
to me
," he said when he could speak.

Carla tucked her head into his arm and closed her eyes. They sat in the sunlight resting, sharing the peace and quiet of the pastoral scene of Sully's back yard until hunger for lunch drove Carla to the kitchen to cook.

#

His feeling of power grew in proportion to how close he could get to Torrance without being caught. Today, for example. While Sully dozed, he was able to move from the wood-line behind the house onto the back lawn and crossed no more than two feet away from him. He could easily have slit Sully's throat before he ever opened his eyes.

It was so easy, it was downright unappealing. What he really wanted was to get both of them at once.

His hands broke out in sweat, and he wiped them on his shirtfront. He looked at his palms. The scars were there, little white pits crisscrossing the life, head, and heart lines. By scorching his hands, the old witch had set his fate. What would a palm reader be able to tell him now? The jagged, broken lines spelled out years of murder, misery, loneliness, and the deepest well of despair. He knew that without the help of a fortuneteller. If his lifelines had not been deformed, would he have been someone else? Could he have become a fine, upstanding Republican with a fat wife and two-point-three first-class kids? Could he have had a home and two cars and college funds accruing in the bank?

He giggled and clapped his hands together. Birds took flight in the trees, squawking in distress. Two hundred feet away the rear of the Torrance house sparkled white in the sunshine, French doors standing wide open to the summery breeze.

Lansing moved into the woods quietly as dead-fall flaking into decay. He had some of the things he needed in the lean-to he had built in the woods. Other things were just as easily acquired. While homeowners were away at work, he slipped into their houses and took what he needed. He had not gone to this much trouble in years to extract revenge. It made his blood pump fast, and the lightheadedness spurred him onward.

What else did he need? Duct tape, that wide gray stuff that could hold an elephant. Some electrical extension cords with plug ends removed if he could not find rope...

He would not need a vehicle for a while. He planned to kill Torrance and the girl. Teach them lessons and then kill them slowly. He would then take Sully's brand new Cadillac away from Jamison and disappear as if he had never been, as if he were a blast of wind moving on.

One more day, he concluded, was all he needed.

He rubbed his month-old beard in anticipation and veered down into a ravine. From this houserobe his cleverly disguised lean-to resembled nothing more than a section of humpbacked earth covered with dead limbs and leaf mold. Lansing thought he might even miss it when it had to be abandoned. For a month he had called it home.

CHAPTER 7

Sully poured Mike Dalamas another shot of Irish whiskey from the decanter on the coffee table. "So you think we should take it serious, huh?"

"I do, too," Carla agreed. She wore pink pajamas beneath a plain pink cotton houserobe. With her long hair freshly washed and hanging damp around her small face, she looked no more than twelve years old.

"Sully, I've got his record going back to when he was a boy. He's crazy as Ted Bundy ever was. Crazier. I don't think people like him ever learn. You can jail them, punish them, take away their rights, and nothing works."

"The electric chair. That would work," Carla said bitterly. She was too young to be so hard. Sully thought it put something into her eyes that shouldn't be there.

Mike gave her an admonishing stare. "You're too young to keep talking that way."

"It was her sister, the only family she had left," Sully gently reminded his friend. He sipped his whiskey. "Tell me, Mike, I know you're the district attorney for the prosecution and officially your stand is on the side of law and order, but tell the truth--off the record--would you have let him walk out free and keep going if it had been your wife he had killed?"

Mike contemplated the drink in his hand. "If I had a wife...and she was like your Frannie, and I loved her..."

Sully held his breath and wished his heart would not race this way when he talked about Frannie.

"...and if Lansing did to my wife what he did to yours..." He took a quick drink of the whiskey. He looked up at Sully. "Yeah, I'd go after him. I'd shoot him in both legs and let him crawl. Then I'd blow his brains out."

"Even when you knew your actions meant life imprisonment or the death sentence?" Sully asked.

Mike nodded. "l couldn't help it. I'd have to do it. I know the idea of personal revenge has been blown all out of proportion in the Hollywood movies, but when it comes right down to it that's the way the human animal's made. It's lodged in the psyche. If struck, you strike back. I'm no different than anyone else, Sully."

Carla sniffled and went to the kitchen for a Pepsi. While she was gone, Sully lowered his voice and asked, "You really think Lansing's coming back for us, don't you?"

"Don't you? He's totally disappeared, dropped out of existence. There are APB's out for him all over the south, and he hasn't been spotted, not once. He's holed up. Then Carla went public saying she'd get him if the cops failed. He might return if he heard her threaten him that way. At least it's a possibility I wouldn't want to overlook. He could be out there anywhere right this minute." Mike

waved at the blank darkness beyond the den windows. "I'm telling you, Sully, you need dead bolts on the doors, an alarm system, hell, maybe barred windows. If it was me, and Carla was my responsibility..."

"I'm thinking about sending her on a vacation, get her out of here for a while."

"That's good, but what if Lansing doesn't come until she returns?"

"What can I do, Mike, hole up like him? Make this place a fortress?"

Carla padded barefoot past the two men and resumed her seat in a big upholstered rocking chair. "I'm not going on any vacation."

"You were listening," Sully accused. "Frannie taught you better than to eavesdrop."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"What about Israel? I could probably swing that."

"You can't bribe me, Sully. I'll go when this is over, maybe, not now. I won't leave you alone."

Mike looked from one to the other of them and shook his head. "He's suspected in over thirty-five murders in six states over a period of ten years. That doesn't scare you?"

Carla ignored his question. "Next time I'll pull the trigger. I had him cold in that Holiday Inn restaurant, and I let the opportunity pass. Next time I won't." She smiled to herself as if the vision she saw amused her.