Fool's Ride (The Jenkins Cycle Book 2) (7 page)

B
ack in the Great Wherever
, with nothing but time on my hands, I counted my blessings: a few museums, aching feet, rest stop ice cream, cardboard pizza, foul beer, okay sandwiches, a twisted book, and a sick movie. And though I’m normally a fan of naked women, Denise and Lana didn’t actually count—for a number of complicated reasons having to do with morality and my self-respect. Then, after all this
way cool stuff,
when I’d had the temerity to ask for a little help, the Great Whomever had flipped me some steam about it.

One good thing though: the world wouldn’t be subjected to any more legalized snuff from Ernest and his agent. I knew it wouldn’t last. Hollywood abhors a vacuum, and there’d be other writers ready to take up Ernest’s bloody mantle. I hoped moviegoers and readers would be appalled when they learned the truth about where the stories came from, but my guess was they’d convince themselves
they
weren’t the sick ones, and that everything was still ketchup and tapioca, just like before. In fact, when the story finally broke, my guess was Ernest’s publishers would sell more books than ever.

But at least I’d saved Denise and her baby. Actually, that was only partly true. In her mind, she’d had a hand in saving herself—a good thing, psychologically. Thin gruel feeds the peasants and carries them to and from their labors.

Hello
, I thought into the void, and waited.

There are no days or nights in the Great Wherever. There are seconds and minutes and hours, yet no clocks to track the time. If it had a clock, I wouldn’t have been able to look at it because I didn’t have a body. So I had to guess at time’s passage without even a steady pulse to guide me.

After about five minutes of nothing happening, I tried again.

I was thinking, what with your powers and all, why can’t I have a body when I come here? Maybe a couch and a TV and some video games? Anything except Atari would be a big improvement.

I waited for a moment. Nothing happened.

Also, the whole suicide-goes-to-hell business? Shouldn’t I be burning or something if it’s really a sin? What does killing myself have to do with all these bad guys?

These were things I’d thought before but had never deliberately articulated. Gift horse in the mouth kind of thing, but I was over that now. I couldn’t imagine the Being credited with the creation of the universe could be the same Great Whomever who’d threatened me with that horrible smokestack of death. As signs from the heavens went, that one seemed more petty than divine.

I was about to ask more questions, interspersed with some great accusations when, out of nowhere, a portal opened within the no-dimensional nothingness. It waited patiently in the void, hunched near my consciousness like a coat on a chair in a dark room.

Normally I’d hope for a good ride and enter the world with both fingers hypothetically crossed. This time, I had a better idea.

That last ride sucked,
I projected.
I’m not saying I don’t want to help people, but you need to pepper in the good rides in-between the psychotic dominatrix snuff horrors and guns rides, that’s all I’m saying.

Seconds later, for the first time ever, a second portal appeared in the void. But unlike the first one, this portal had a strangeness about it. As if I’d somehow be limited if I went through it—like being a guest in someone’s house with a responsibility to take care of things. Another one-off doorway, like I’d had with Nate Cantrell and later with Peter Collins. If I reached for it, I’d come into the world in the body of someone who wasn’t a violent criminal. And though those other rides had turned out okay, I’d come close to getting them both killed.

I saw what he was doing. Rather than working with me, the
Great
Who Gives a Shit
had thrown my very reasonable request for a little reprieve back in my face. This time by upping the ante and sticking all the responsibility on me. If I chose the bad guy portal, whatever happened to the good guy was
my
fault. And if I chose the good portal, I’d get the double whammy of having to keep him alive and unhurt, along with the guilt from whatever the bad guy did.

Sigh
, I projected, because I couldn’t actually sigh.
I get it. You have more information than I do and I should back off. A little old fashioned with the requirement for blind faith, but maybe that’s your thing? I give up, okay? I’m not choosing between them—you win.

Just like that, the second portal faded from my awareness like it had never even been there, leaving the first portal alone with me in a frustrating place I called “square one.”

This time, I kept my imaginary mouth shut, crossed my nonexistent fingers, and reached for the metaphorical portal.

I
was sitting naked
on the edge of a king-sized bed. A television was on, playing a commercial for a product guaranteed to enhance my natural virility or my money back.

The room had a coffee table, a thin blue rug, no paintings, a padded wingback chair, a small desk with a phone and a lamp, and heavy hotel curtains. Not a fancy room, and it smelled faintly of lighter fluid and sour milk.

I stood up and looked in the big mirror next to the television and saw a man spilling over with fat, late sixties or early seventies. About six feet tall, he had short white hair and an unimportant face.

A large suitcase lay sprawled open on the floor. I walked over and poked through it: men’s clothing, a shaving kit, nearly half a bottle of bourbon, and a rolled-up sleeping bag.

I looked in the mirror and grinned experimentally at my reflection.

“Hello,” I said, letting each syllable roll around my mouth. “This is my voice. I’m talking with my voice and it’s loud, loud,
loud
. I’m
loud
in my room with my voice.”

“Are you crazy or what?” came a raspy reply from the bathroom.

I tensed in surprise and said, “Who’s there?”

“What do you mean who’s there?” it said.

I fell back a step, preparing for whatever belonged to that horrible voice. But when it stepped around the corner…

“Jesus!” I shouted.

“Oh screw you,” it grated from behind cracked lips and a mouthful of rotting teeth. Four teeth, and they were attached loosely to a scantily clad female figure draped in leathery hanging skin. From the neck down, she looked somewhere in her thirties, but her meth-ravaged face was positively Jurassic.

The woman shambled forward and lay back on the bed with her legs spread and a Halloween smile on her face.

“I’m bored,” she said. “We gonna do it or what?”

My flabby stomach tightened in a dry heave.

“What’s wrong with you now?” she said, glaring at me.

“Nothing, I …
Oomuai …
Just my … Something I ate. Sorry.”

She laughed.

“You ain’t eat nothing yet, sugar,” she said. “And you better pay me. If you don’t, my ol’ man’s gonna cut you open.”

“Just a minute,” I said.

I went to the bathroom, turned on the sink, and washed my face with a tiny little bar of hotel soap. It went in my eyes but I didn’t care. I needed time—and I felt skeevy.

“Don’t think you’re getting out of paying me!” she yelled from the other room.

After drying off, I returned to find her perched on the bed with her back against the wall smoking a bent cigarette and watching me through angry bloodshot eyes.

“Where’s my drink?” she said, breathing smoke out with each word.

“Your drink?”

“You said you would. I don’t like liars.”

“Sorry, what drink?”

She rolled her eyes. “You gonna gimme it? You’re supposed to act like a gentleman.”

Then it dawned on me what she was talking about.

“Hold on.”

I stepped over to the suitcase and found the whisky bottle. When I turned back, she was pointing at something. I followed her bony arm to the television and saw it on the stand: a glass of something the same shade of amber as the liquid in the bottle.

“Right,” I said, and put the bottle down beside it.

I picked up the glass and handed it to her. She took her drink—touching me in the process—and then swallowed it down quickly. The glass had been filled almost to the top, but she finished it between a drag from her cigarette and her next exhale of smoke.

“Tastes funny,” she said, making a face.

There was a wallet on the nightstand. I opened it and pulled out some bills: a few tens and twenties. Biting my lip, I tried to figure out how much she charged and hoped it wasn’t too high. I held out hope for a box of doughnuts sometime in the coming days, because I’d earned it.

“Here you go,” I said, and handed her two twenties.

She accepted the money without looking at it, as if anything I gave her would be acceptable.

Rats.

“You sure you don’t wanna take a stab?” she said, arching an eyebrow. “You can close your eyes. I won’t mind.”

I shook my head like it was the hardest decision ever.

“Nope,” I said. “Too tired. So uh, guess you should, you know,
get
going
now. Good seeing you, though.”

I stepped back and glanced pointedly at the door. Kind of bopping my head that way and looking at it, then back at her. Just kind of bopping my head that way again.

“I ain’t going nowhere!” she shouted, beginning to cry. “It’s raining! Wouldn’t have come with you if I knew you was gonna toss me so fast. I ain’t leaving, I don’t care what you do!”

She seemed the type that could fly off the handle at any moment, start throwing things and cause a scene. The last thing I wanted was someone calling the police and learning my ride had warrants out on him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s your name again?”

“Sally,” she said, wiping her eyes.

“Okay, Sally. Do you need me to help you find your clothes?” Helpful. Polite.

“It’s raining!” she said, pointing at the window.

I walked over and pulled the curtains partially open. Rain pelted the window, blurring my view of the nearly empty parking lot. The closest vehicle was a large minivan. I felt the glass with my hand—too cold to send anyone out in the rain.

When I turned around, Sally was standing with the bottle of whisky, pouring another drink for herself.

She blinked at me and said, “You want some?”

“No, thanks,” I said, shaking my head. “You go ahead.”

She didn’t nod or smile or say thank you back. She drank it down fast and poured another, grimacing as she did it. I hoped it’d knock her out. She probably did too.

I got the sleeping bag from the suitcase and flattened it, then looked for an extra pillow in the closet and smiled when I found one.

“What are you doing?” Sally said, eyeing me suspiciously. Her voice had changed. Deeper now, more careful.

“I think I’ll sleep down here tonight,” I said.

“For what?”

“I’m being a gentleman.”

She didn’t say anything at first. Then she started to laugh.

“You do that,” Sally said, and didn’t bother with the glass as she finished off the rest of the bottle in a single, long pull. She steadied herself briefly against the wall and sat back down on the bed. Her cigarette lay smoldering on the rug, so I took it and flushed it. When I came back, Sally’s eyes were closed in peaceful slumber. The poor thing. In sleep she looked almost ghastly.

Ever the gentleman, I covered her with the blanket.

I found clean underwear in the suitcase and put it on. Then I sat back on the chair and flipped through the channels on the TV.

The hotel had cable, but it didn’t have good cable. My eternal curse. There was a rerun of the Brady Bunch on—one of the Cousin Oliver episodes from season five, after the show had officially jumped the shark.

“How fitting,” I said.

When I got tired, I turned on the light by the door, shut off the TV and the light in the main room, then crawled into the sleeping bag and closed my eyes. It took me a while to fall asleep, and it felt like no time had passed when my eyes opened again in response to my full bladder. Eventually I got up, checked the clock and saw it was a little after two in the morning.

When I finished my business and tried to fall back asleep, I wondered:
Why does he have a sleeping bag?

After that, I couldn’t fall asleep no matter how much I tossed and turned. Also, the ground was a little too hard for comfort. I considered slipping up onto the bed, but only for a moment. Instead, I went and sat in the soft chair.

Listening.

Other than my breathing, the room was very quiet.

I got up, walked over, and leaned down over Sally, straining to hear something.

“Sally,” I said, shaking her gently. “Hey, wake up.”

She didn’t wake up like I wanted. Her scrawny arm was as cold as the surrounding room, and she wasn’t breathing. Whatever was in the whisky had been in the bottle first and not slipped into the glass. By finishing the bottle, Sally had sealed her fate.

I
found
five bottles of Zolpidem Tartrate zipped in an inside pocket of the suitcase. Though invented to treat insomnia, it was also a popular date rape drug. Strong stuff. Each bottle was prescribed to a woman named Harriet Evans, of New Haven, Connecticut.

Though I felt sad for Sally, I was realistic about my part in her death. Nobody could have known what was in that bottle. But for once, the Great Whomever had come through: I’d finally caught an easy ride. There wouldn’t be any evil henchmen this time around, or leather-clad literary agents wielding machine guns. Sally would be alive if this guy hadn’t tried to drug her, and that’s all I needed to know.

I rooted through the suitcase for a cell phone but didn’t find one. Sally had a pink-covered phone in her purse. If the date was correct, it was early April 2008. Almost a month had passed since Denise had shot me, though it only felt like a couple of hours.

“Thanks for that,” I said to the Great Whomever. He could have made me wait out every boring second of it in real-time, or made it seem longer, but it only felt like a few hours had passed.

I worried about Sally’s phone. Everyone had friends, and someone was bound to miss her. Maybe her
ol’ man
. So I turned it off. Whatever happened, I silently promised Sally her death wouldn’t go unsolved.

I found my ride’s license in a green nylon wallet: Fredrick Evans of New Haven, Connecticut. Same address as Harriet Evans.

Provided the rules for occupying scumbags hadn’t changed in a month, I had a good three weeks—my arbitrary lease on life—in Fred’s skin before those telltale kicks threatened to let him walk free. It was my job to make sure that didn’t happen—within reason, and not necessarily right away. No more book signings, extreme sports, or drinking beer. I planned to have fun this trip.

I dressed myself in jeans and a red T-shirt with faded writing on it, then packed everything except for the sleeping bag into Fred’s suitcase.

“Sorry, Sally,” I said, and laid the bag next to her.

The next few minutes reflected poorly on me. Through a series of tugs and pulls, I managed to get Sally’s lifeless body into the sleeping bag and then zipped it up. I felt lightheaded, and noticed I’d been holding my breath.

Stepping quickly away from the bed, I forced myself to breathe deeply. My ride was old and overweight, and I didn’t want to faint.

I checked the covers and the nightstand for the money I’d given her but didn’t find it. And it wasn’t on the floor or under the bed. Frowning, I unzipped the bag again and found both twenty-dollar bills clenched tightly in her fist, now stiffening through the early stages of rigor mortis. After I got her zipped back up, I washed my hands to banish the lingering memory of her icy fingers.

Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I wondered what had gone so terribly wrong with this guy that he enjoyed drugging women more than romantic dinners, fresh flowers, and quiet conversation.

I smiled at my reflection and saw my unfamiliar face smile back. Normal smile, nothing sinister. Fred could have been a retired mailman or an executive or just some guy at the grocery store. What he needed was a thin black mustache to match his inner monster to his outer coupon clipper.

I stepped outside for a quick recon. It was a cloudy moonless night, the landscape rural and quiet. A Motel 8 sign and a few evenly spaced safety lights warded the gloom from the civilized world.

Directly outside my room was a shiny blue minivan. It had been backed into the space hatch-first to the room. A click from Fred’s keys confirmed it was
his
shiny blue minivan. As luck had it, the nearest cars were way down at the other end of a long stretch of rooms. Likely my ride had requested something far away from anyone else so he could slip out easily with Sally’s body, unconscious or dead, hidden inside the sleeping bag. It was a good idea.

So that’s what I did.

Sally was light, and she tended to slide around in the bag as I labored her into the back of the van. After she was tucked away, I shut the hatch and checked to see if anyone had seen me—probably not—then went back inside to get Fred’s suitcase. After stowing it between the back seats, I got in behind the wheel. The CD player came on with the engine, breaking the silence with the soulful harmonizing of a gospel jubilee quartet. Old stuff, like maybe from the thirties. That was too creepy for words, so I hit random buttons until the radio kicked in. Then I flipped around until I found a boring and predictable classic rock channel.

Pulling up to a deserted two-lane road, I considered my options. To the left, the unlined road stretched into darkness. If I went right, I’d pick up a ramp to what looked like an interstate. It was cold out, still raining, so I could have been nearly anywhere in the lower forty-eight, subject to the vagaries of April weather. I’d purposely driven past a few cars to check license plates, and of course they were from a bunch of different states.

I went right.

As soon as I got onto the interstate, it became quickly apparent I was in Fred’s home state heading north on I-95 toward New Haven.

Though I hadn’t memorized the street maps of every big city, I’d gotten most of them, including this one. Still, it didn’t mean I knew how the house numbers were laid out.

I took Fred’s exit and found his neighborhood a few minutes later, then drove around squinting at faded numbers on mailboxes until I found one that matched his license: a large Tudor-style house with a double garage and no neighbors in sight, unless you counted the porch lights winking through the trees.

Earlier in the drive, I’d found Fred’s phone in the dash. When I opened it, it had a full charge. Probably only used it for emergencies or he would have carried it with him everywhere like most people. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to be interrupted while he did what he’d planned with Sally. Now I had two phones. Still no one to call, but that was fine.

The clock on the phone showed 3:52 a.m., while the clock in the dash showed 4:55 a.m.

“Typical,” I said.

I stopped the van and got out, my breath steaming faintly in front of me through the cold relentless rain. With the thick cloud cover and lack of streetlights, the world had never been so black.

For now, I left Sally’s corpse in the back of the van. The cool temperature would slow the rate of her decomposition, and the van would keep the animals from getting at her.

Fred’s front door was a longer walk than the side entrance next to the garage, so I opened the storm door and tried the keys until I found one that worked. On entering the house, I gave the air an experimental sniff. No tobacco, no decomposing bodies.

I wondered who Harriet was. His wife? A daughter, maybe? Whoever she was, I didn’t feel like dealing with her at such a late hour, so I stayed quiet and kept the lights off.

I used Fred’s phone to light the way, occasionally hitting a number on the keypad to keep it lit. By the dim light, I crept down a short hallway, past a staircase, and into the living room. Nobody was there. I found an office with books and papers and filing cabinets, but it was equally empty.

Suppressing a small shiver at the odd normalcy staring me in the face from everywhere, I stepped from a sparsely furnished bedroom back to the central hallway of the main floor.

I shuddered at the inexplicable feeling of something in the darkness reaching to snatch me away. As a child, I’d gotten that feeling at least several times a month. As if something were standing right behind me, and if I looked back, a corpse with red glowing eyes would smile at me with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. After that, I wouldn’t exist anymore. I’d either be eaten or possessed by the Devil. Or, when my family found me, I’d be stark raving mad, and parents everywhere would use me as an example of what happened to children who never finished their vegetables.

The moment passed, and my sanity remained unscathed. But Brussels sprouts still sucked.

The upstairs had three furnished bedrooms, each of them unoccupied. The last bedroom, the master, was surprisingly Spartan for a room so big. Like the other rooms, it had a bureau and a bed, though Fred’s was a king-sized bed. I opened a few of the drawers and found socks and underwear. In his closet were shirts and pants and nothing else.

Not a Harriet in sight.

I went back downstairs and searched more carefully. Just off the kitchen was a second set of stairs leading down to the basement. At the bottom was a heavy wooden door with throw bolts set into a steel frame.

“Now we’re talking,” I said.

After pulling back the bolts, I opened the door and stepped into an expansive basement, pitch black. I reached over and felt around until my fingers brushed a light switch. On flipping the switch, track lights flared to life from about ten locations, momentarily blinding my dark-adjusted eyes. Squinting, I saw a pole in the middle of the room with a chain looped around it, the end lying coiled on a ratty old mattress.

Approaching the mattress, I noticed the chain ended in a steel collar. I picked up the chain, lifted the collar to eye level, and examined it: about half an inch thick, locked and closed with a key sticking out of it. I turned the key and it came right out. I put it in and turned it the other direction and the collar popped open. I closed it again and locked it with the key, then put the ugly thing back on the mattress.

It’s a harsh thing to say someone’s better off dead, but if I’d picked the other portal and Sally had made it this far…

A quick check of Fred’s phone showed it close to four in the morning. His old, heavy body was tired, which meant I was tired. None of what I’d seen required me to do anything right now, so I huffed up the stairs back to the main floor, then the next flight to where the master bedroom was. By the time I got to the top, I was gasping and out of breath.

Fred’s bed was neatly made, the linen smelled clean, and I didn’t see any villainous dominatrices anywhere, which was great.

I took off my clothes and settled in to sleep.