Cujo (41 page)

The State Police detective had run a make on Kemp's van. It was a 1971 Ford Econoline, Maine license 641-644. The color was light gray, but they knew from Kemp's landlord—they had routed him out of bed at 4
A.M.
—that the van had desert murals painted on the sides: buttes, mesas, sand dunes. There were two bumper stickers on the rear, one which said
SPLIT WOOD, NOT ATOMS
and one which said
RONALD REAGAN SHOT J.R.
A very funny guy, Steve Kemp, but the murals and the bumper stickers would make the van easier to identify, and unless he had ditched it, he would almost certainly be spotted before the day was out. The MV alert had gone out to all the New England states and to upstate New York. In addition, the FBI in Portland and Boston had been alerted to a possible kidnapping, and they were now running Steve Kemp's name through their files in Washington. They would find three minor busts dating back to the Vietnam war protests, one each for the years 1968–1970.

“There's only one thing about all of this that bothers me,” the A.G.'s man said. His pad was on his knee, but anything Vic could tell he had already told them. The man from Augusta was only doodling. “If I may be frank, it bothers the shit out of me.”

“What's that?” Vic asked. He picked up the family portrait, looking down at it, and then tilted it so the shattered glass facing tumbled into the Hefty bag with another evil little jingle.

“The car. Where's your wife's car?”

His name was Masen—Masen with an “e,” he had informed Vic as they shook hands. Now he went to the window, slapping his pad absently against his leg. Vic's battered sports car was in the driveway, parked to one side of
Bannerman's cruiser. Vic had picked it up at the Portland Jetport and dropped off the Avis car he had driven north from Boston.

“What's that got to do with it?” Vic asked.

Masen shrugged. “Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Maybe everything. Probably nothing, but I just don't like it. Kemp comes here, right? Grabs your wife and son. Why? He's crazy. That's reason enough. Can't stand to lose. Maybe it's even his twisted idea of a joke.”

These were all things Vic himself had said, repeated back almost verbatim.

“So what does he do? He bundles them into his Ford van with the desert murals on the sides. He's either running with them or he's holed up somewhere. Right?”

“Yes, that's what I'm afraid—”

Masen turned from the window to look at him. “So where's her car?”

“Well—” Vic tried hard to think. It was hard. She was very tired. “Maybe—”

“Maybe he had a confederate who drove it away,” Masen said. “That would probably mean a kidnapping for ransom. If he took them on his own, it was probably just a crazy spur-of-the-moment thing. If it was a kidnapping for money, why take the car at all? To switch over to? Ridiculous. That Pinto's every bit as hot as the van, if a little harder to recognize. And I repeat, if there was no confederate, if he was by himself, who drove the car?”

“Maybe he came back for it,” the State Police detective rumbled. “Stowed the boy and the missus and came back for her car.”

“That would present some problems without a confederate,” Masen said, “but I suppose he could do it. Take them someplace close and walk back for Mrs. Trenton's Pinto, or take them someplace far away and thumb a ride back. But why?”

Bannerman spoke for the first time. “She could have driven it herself.”

Masen swung to look at him, his eyebrows going up.

“If he took the boy with him—” Bannerman looked at Vic and nodded a little. “I'm sorry, Mr. Trenton, but if Kemp took the boy with him, belted him in, held a gun on him, and told your wife to follow close, and that something might
happen to the boy if she tried anything clever, like turning off or flashing her lights—”

Vic nodded, feeling sick at the picture it made.

Masen seemed irritated with Bannerman, perhaps because he hadn't thought of the possibility himself. “I repeat: to what purpose?”

Bannerman shook his head. Vic himself couldn't think of a single reason why Kemp would want Donna's car.

Masen lit a Pall Mall, coughed, and looked around for an ashtray.

“I'm sorry,” Vic said, again feeling like an actor, someone outside himself, saying lines that had been written for him. “The two ashtrays in here were broken. I'll get you one from the kitchen.”

Masen walked out with him, took an ashtray, and said, “Let's go out on the steps, do you mind? It's going to be a bitch of a hot day. I like to enjoy them while they're still civilized during July.”

“Okay,” Vic said listlessly.

He glanced at the thermometer-barometer screwed to the side of the house as they went out . . . a gift from Donna last Christmas. The temperature already stood at 73. The needle of the barometer was planted squarely in the quadrant marked
FAIR
.

“Let's pursue this a little further,” Masen said. “It fascinates me. Here's a woman with a son, a woman whose husband is away on a business trip. She needs her car if she's going to get around very well. Even downtown's half a mile away and the walk back is all uphill. So if we assume that Kemp grabbed her here, the car would still be here. Try this, instead. Kemp comes up and trashes the house, but he's still furious. He sees them someplace else in town and grabs them. In that case, the car would still be in that other place. Downtown, maybe. Or in the parking lot at the shopping center.”

“Wouldn't someone have tagged it in the middle of the night?” Vic asked.

“Probably,” Masen said. “Do you think she herself might have left it somewhere, Mr. Trenton?”

Then Vic remembered. The needle valve.

“You look like something just clicked,” Masen said.

“It didn't click, it clunked. The car isn't here because it's at
the Ford dealership in South Paris. She was having carburetor trouble. The needle valve in there kept wanting to jam. We talked about it on the phone Monday afternoon. She was really pissed off and upset about it. I meant to make an appointment for her to get it done by a local guy here in town, but I forgot because . . .”

He trailed off, thinking about the reasons why he had forgotten.

“You forgot to make the appointment here in town, so she would have taken it to South Paris?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He couldn't remember exactly what the run of the conversation had been now, except that she had been afraid the car would seize up while she was taking it to be fixed.

Masen glanced at his watch and got up. Vic started to rise with him.

“No, stay put. I just want to make a quick phone call. I'll be back.”

Vic sat where he was. The screen door banged closed behind Masen, a sound that reminded him so much of Tad that he winced and had to grit his teeth against fresh tears. Where were they? The thing about the Pinto not being here had only been momentarily promising after all.

The sun was fully up now, throwing a bright rose light over the houses and the streets below, and across Castle Hill. It touched the swing set where he had pushed Tad times without number . . . all he wanted was to push his son on the swing again with his wife standing beside him. He would push until his hands fell off, if that was what Tad wanted.

Daddy, I wanna loop the loop! I wanna!

The voice in his mind chilled his heart. It was like a ghost voice.

The screen door opened again a moment later. Masen sat down beside him and lit a fresh cigarette. “Twin City Ford in South Paris,” he said. “That was the one, wasn't it?”

“Yeah. We bought the Pinto there.”

“I took a shot and called them. Got lucky; the service manager was already in. Your Pinto's not there, and it hasn't been there. Who's the local guy?”

“Joe Camber,” Vic said. “She must have taken the car out there after all. She didn't want to because he's way out in the back of the beyond and she couldn't get any answer on the
phone when she called. I told her he was probably there anyway, just working in the garage. It's this converted barn, and I don't think he's got a phone in there. At least he didn't the last time I was out there.”

“We'll check it out,” Masen said, “but her car's not there either, Mr. Trenton. Depend on it.”

“Why not?”

“Doesn't make a bit of logical sense,” Masen said. “I was ninety-five percent sure it wasn't in South Paris, either. Look, everything we said before still holds true. A young woman with a child needs a car. Suppose she took the car over to Twin City Ford and they told her it was going to be a couple of days. How does she get back?”

“Well . . . a loaner . . . or if they wouldn't give her a loaner, I guess they'd rent her one of their lease cars. From the cheap fleet.”

“Right! Beautiful! So where is it?”

Vic looked at the driveway, almost as if expecting it to appear.

“There'd be no more reason for Kemp to abscond with your wife's loaner than there would be for him to abscond with her Pinto,” Masen said. “That pretty well ruled out the Ford dealership in advance. Now let's say she takes it out to this guy Camber's garage. If he gives her an old junker to run around in while he fixes her Pinto, we're back at square one right away: Where's the junker? So let's say that she takes it up there and Camber says he'll have to keep it awhile but he's got nothing he can give her to get back to town in. So she calls a friend, and a friend comes out to pick her up. With me so far?”

“Yes, sure.”

“So who was the friend? You gave us a list, and we got them all out of bed. Lucky they were all home, it being summer and all. None of them mentioned bringing your people home from anywhere. No one has seen them any later than Monday morning.”

“Well, why don't we stop crapping around?” Vic asked. “Let's give Camber a call and find out for sure.”

“Let's wait until seven,” Masen said. “That's only fifteen minutes. Give him a chance to get his face washed and wake up a little. Service managers usually clock in early. This guy's an independent.”

Vic shrugged. This whole thing was a crazy blind alley. Kemp had Donna and Tad. He knew it in his guts, just as he knew it was Kemp who had trashed the house and shot his come on the bed he and Donna shared.

“Of course, it didn't have to be a friend,” Masen said, dreamily watching his cigarette smoke drift off into the morning. “There are all sorts of possibilities. She gets the car up there, and someone she knows slightly happens to be there, and the guy or gal offers Mrs. Trenton and your son a ride back into town. Or maybe Camber runs them home himself. Or his wife. Is he married?”

“Yes. Nice woman.”

“Could have been him, her, anyone. People are always willing to help a lady in distress.”

“Yeah,” Vic said, and lit a cigarette of his own.

“But none of that matters either, because the question always remains the same: Where's the fucking car? Because the situation's the same. Woman and kid on their own. She has to get groceries, go to the dry cleaner's, go to the post office, dozens of little errands. If the husband was only going to be gone a few days, a week, even, she might try to get along without a car. But ten days or two weeks? Jesus, that's a long haul in a town that's only got one goddam cab. Rental car people are happy to deliver in a situation like that. She could have gotten Hertz or Avis or National to deliver the car here or out to Camber's. So where's the
rental
car? I keep coming back to that. There should have been a vehicle in this yard. Dig?”

“I don't think it's important,” Vic said.

“And probably it's not. We'll find some simple explanation and say
Oy vay, how could we be so stupid?
But it fascinates me strangely . . . it was the needle valve? You're sure of that?”

“Positive.”

Masen shook his head. “Why would she need all that rigamorole about loaners or rental cars anyway? That's a fifteen-minute fix for somebody with the tools and the know-how. Drive in, drive out. So where's—”

“—her goddam car?” Vic finished wearily. The world was coming and going in waves now.

“Why don't you go upstairs and lie down?” Masen said. “You look wiped out.”

“No, I want to be awake if something happens—”

“And if something does, somebody will be here to wake you up. The FBI's coming with a trace-back system to hook up to your phone. Those people are noisy enough to wake the dead—so don't worry.”

Vic was too tired to feel much more than a dull dread. “Do you think that trace-back shit is really necessary?”

“Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it,” Masen said, and pitched his cigarette. “Get a little rest and you'll be able to cope better, Vic. Go on.”

“All right.”

He went slowly upstairs. The bed had been stripped to the mattress. He had done it himself. He put two pillows on his side, took off his shoes, and lay down. The morning sun shone fiercely in through the window.
I won't sleep,
he thought,
but I'll rest. I'll try to, anyway. Fifteen minutes . . . maybe half an hour . . .

But by the time the phone woke him up, that day's burning noon had come.

•  •  •

Charity Camber had her morning coffee and then called Alva Thornton in Castle Rock. This time Alva himself answered. He knew that she had chatted with Bessie the night before.

“Nope,” Alva said. “I ain't seed hide nor hair of Joe since last Thursday or so, Charity. He brought over a tractor tire he fixed for me. Never said nothing about feeding Cujo, although I'd've been happy to.”

“Alva, could you run up to the house and check on Cujo? Brett saw him Monday morning before we left for my sister's, and he thought he looked sick. And I just don't know who Joe would have gotten to feed him.” After the way of country people, she added: “No hurry.”