House Haunted (13 page)

“I was going to wait until we got to my place and had a couple of drinks to ask, but I can't be bothered. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Son,” his father began, putting on his best meeting-the-constituency face. The face collapsed into a grin, also false and calculated. “I need something from you.”

“What do you need?”

Once again Ray had swerved too far to the right, and amid his father's curses, he had to interrupt their conversation to get away from a honking, light-flashing tow truck that roared past, throwing slush at them from huge chained tires.

When they had settled on the road again, his father said, “Son, I've always given you everything you needed—”

“Cut the shit.”

Senator Garver's face hardened. For the briefest time the mask dropped and showed the face of the man underneath. It was the face of every caveman with a weapon and no fear of his enemies; any spiteful little boy with no concept of reason or layers of sophistication, no boundaries of lawful behavior to restrict his impulsive and chaotic wish to destroy a balky toy or anything else that wouldn't bow to his will. It was the face of pure selfishness. The glimpse lasted only a moment—the senator quickly re-masked it with layers of sophistication, knowledge of law and punishment, and the hope that his wishes would be satisfied by subtler and acceptable means. “I've never asked much of you, Ray,” he said, his face still hard, but set in an altered hardness, to inspire guilt.

“You haven't given all that much, either.”

His father took a deep breath. “I don't want to get into any more of this now. I need you for something, and I expect you to do as you're told.”

Ray laughed. “As I'm
told
?”

His father held his hand up. “I'll rephrase that. I expect you to do what has to be done.”

Before Ray could reply, the senator added, “I'm running for president.”

The words hung in the air for a few moments, unreal, stopping somewhere between Ray's ears and brain. His initial instinctual reaction was to laugh again. But laughter did not come. His father's face precluded that: it was not a comical face, but a frighteningly powerful one—and though the power had at its root the absolute obsession by and passion for an attainment, it triggered in Ray the remembrance of the more primal power and fascination that his father had had over him from his earliest memories.

“You're serious?” he managed to get out.

“This wasn't my idea, Ray,” his father continued. “I was approached by Rafelson and Murphy and a number of others who did the scout work. They're positive it can happen. All the groundwork is already in place.” He shifted his weight, looking wistfully out the windshield for a moment—a gesture calculated for effect. “I'm not so sure myself, of course. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't want it.” He turned to look at Ray. “I do want it. But there is a problem, which I haven't told them about yet, and which I have to make absolutely sure won't bother me if I make the run.”

Everything became clear to Ray. A bone-numbing chill of remembrance went through him. Once again, the temperature in the Volvo increased. He felt the tiny prickling of fear that Bridget was with him. He could almost feel her breath on his neck, the outstretched, hovering caress of her fingers near his neck, and she leaned forward in the back seat

“You
do
know what I'm talking about?” his father said, studying his face.

Ray nodded. “Yes.”

His father leaned back, breathing deeply again. “Can't you get this goddamn foreign car to move any faster? Where is this place of yours anyway?”

“We'll be there in a half hour,” Ray said, his mind still lost in memory.

“I know it hurts to go over this,” his father said solicitously.

“It hurts me, too. But we've got to review it and gloss it up.”

“Gloss it up?”

Something settled on the back of Ray's neck and he cringed, waiting for Bridget's voice. But it was a droplet of melted snow, which fell into his collar and dissipated.

His father's face hardened again. “Yes, Ray, gloss it up. That's exactly what I mean. It could sink me right out of the dock, and you know it. Now, I didn't say hide it, which would be impossible, or even lie about it, which would be stupid because those goddamn media bastards would sniff it out anyway—you know they already know the basic facts from my second Senate run. This time, though, they'll go over it with a fine-tooth comb. They'll pull it every way, turn it upside down—” His voice was rising, and he paused to calm down. “Anyway,” he resumed, his tone businesslike again, “we've got to make it as good as we can without changing one little fact. We've got to . . . gloss it up.”

Without warning, tears sprung into Ray's eyes.

“Now, you know,” his father continued, “there are certain things we can't hide. We can't hide your stint in the . . . counseling center. We can't hide the fact that you tried to kill yourself. But we
can
put the right spin on these things, Ray. You were young; you'd just watched a horrible thing happen. We
all
saw it happen. But . . .” His father shook his head ruefully. “Ray,” he said, “there are some things we can't spin away. They just have to . . . disappear.” He waved his hand. “Like all this hideaway stuff, this recluse in the mountains business. Grief, the media can understand. Pain, they can understand. But nuttiness . . .” His father turned to him. “Ray, I want you to come back to the house in California. A reconciliation type thing. Happy son, happy father. Understand?”

He almost wished his father had torn him apart like a balky toy. This was much worse . . .

“I won't help you,” Ray heard himself saying.

“Now, Ray—”

The tears came and would not leave. Ray tried to blink tern back, to have hard thoughts, to make them go away. But hot knives of memory were scooping the water out of his eyes, pushing the tears down his face as he drove, eyes on the road.

“I won't help you,” Ray repeated.

“Son—”

Ray turned his face to his father, ignoring the tears that came on their own. “
Why the hell don't you just have me assassinated, if I'm such an embarrassment? Why don't you just fucking kill me?
”

But for the toiling push of the windshield wipers against snow, and the crunch of crushed snow beneath the tires, there was silence in the car. His father sat immobile, his face unreadable in silhouette. Ray turned his attention back to the highway; once again the car had wandered, and this time he pulled behind the offended sedan and stayed in the right lane. The guardrail off the service lane had reflectors; he could gauge his position by those. He drove for five minutes, and then his hand strayed toward the radio to turn it on, to have sound.

His father's hand was on his wrist, and for a foolish moment he thought there was tenderness in the touch. “Do what I want, Ray.”

He shook his hand out of his father's grasp. “Fuck you.”

“We'll go to your little cabin in the woods and talk all about it—” his father began sarcastically.

“I said, fuck you.”

“Turn the car around.”

Ray pulled over into the service lane abruptly and braked the car. His father sat motionless.

“Is that what you want—”

“Turn the car around,” his father repeated. “And when I'm through with you, Ray, you'll wish you were dead.”

The engine idled. Ray turned to stare at the rigid, tightlipped, unspeaking statue in the passenger seat, and then he put the car into drive and pulled back onto the highway. He began to search for an exit ramp.

As he saw a sign for an approaching exit, he felt a touch on the back of his neck. This time it was not a bead of water. He felt her fingers, thumb and forefinger, circle the back of his neck and squeeze, almost tenderly. He felt her breath close-by, felt her heat as she leaned over toward him.

“Ray,” she whispered into his ear.

He began to shiver. His tears had dried to salt on his face, and there was only fear now.

“Ray,” she whispered, tenderly kissing the back of his ear, “I'm going to help you.”

The exit ramp appeared, curling into darkness off the highway, thicker with snow than the traveled macadam. He felt Bridget lean over him to his left, between him and the door, and saw her grip the wheel in her hands.

Ray cried out, and his father stared at him. His eyes widened. Later, Ray was sure his father had seen her. She laughed and turned the wheel sharply. The car took the exit ramp in a curving skid.

Ray pushed his foot to the brake. Bridget laughed—it was not the brake but the accelerator pedal, which had switched places with it, that his foot hit. The car sped up and skidded sideways. The headlamps, piercing falling snow, picked up covered roadway and the lip of the exit roadway. Something indistinct was parked ahead, off to the side.

Ray jammed his foot from accelerator to brake, but there were two accelerator pedals. He alternated between them, screaming for one of them to be the brakes. He took his foot from the pedals, but it was too late; they had locked. The car continued to whine against the icy roadway, sliding sideways toward the thing parked on the side of the exit ramp. Through the snow and lights it resolved into a bed truck bearing a yellow, snow-covered bulldozer. The bulldozer had been thrown sideways, facing them, its shovel dropped over the side of the bed.

They glided toward it.

Senator Garver said, “Oh, my dear God,” as the white-black sky became filled with the curving hard metal solidity of the huge shovel. Ray ducked as he saw the straight bottom edge suddenly outlined starkly in the slipping beams of the headlights. They slammed straight into it. His father screamed and Ray turned to see him beheaded, and felt the crushing weight of the collapsing car against his mortal legs—

“Go back to your cocaine, Ray,” Bridget said. With the phone receiver clutched in his hand, he felt her grip on the back of his neck, pushing him toward the rest of the cut line of coke on the desk. She pushed his nose into it, and he felt the tickle of white powder against his nostrils. He dropped the phone on, the desk and began to cry, turning his head- sideways on the desk and closing his eyes. Her hand let him go with a departing caress, and he heard her voice, half distinct through the receiver.

“Here's what to do,” she said. “Here's where to go to destroy me . . .”

He listened, and in a while she had stopped talking and there was nothing but hissing on the line, and faint, unrecognizable laughter and screams, and soon Ray had turned his face to the table and found his tiny straw, and was pulling the medicine up into his nose to his brain and making himself strong for the journey.

Somewhere in Montreal, Peter Wayne got lost. First, the jerkoff at the border-crossing booth gave him the wrong directions, probably for fun (Peter had sensed his leg was being pulled—”You go about eighty miles west, hey?” the idiot had said, saying it in such a way, by going back to the paperback book he was reading, that Peter knew he wasn't going to get anything else out of him), and then when he finally got into Montreal and needed directions to Ottawa, the fog had rolled in so thick that he could barely see all the new construction going on around him (
What is it with these Canadians—they made of money?
), and the proprietors of the two 7-Elevens he'd stopped in had pretended they didn't know a word of English (
Bilingual bastard country
.). And by now he was lost good, and asked the last person he felt like asking anywhere, anytime, about anything, especially with an open cooler of beer on the floor behind the driver's seat, with empties scattered around it, a cop. But, to and behold, the cop had smiled and said, “Sure, what you want to do is ...” and had given him exact and precise directions to Ottawa, and then Laura's
building
, that had gotten him to the capital city in less than ninety minutes.

The upshot of which was it was two-thirty in the morning when he finally pulled into a parking spot in front of Laura's apartment complex, instead of ten o'clock as he'd planned. By this time he didn't give a damn if she wasn't expecting him; he just wanted to sit down and drink two or three more of the beers in the cooler behind his seat and then start yelling at her.

Pulling his jacket and the cooler from the back seat, and cursing when he banged his head standing up, he slammed the car door and trudged to the front lobby of the building.

He had to admit Ottawa didn't look too bad—at least at night. There was no fog here, as in Montreal, and the canal looked beautiful, a perfect river of dark, clean-looking water reflecting the pretty lights of the city from its cool surface. Everything in Canada looked clean and brand-new. It was as if America had opened for business twenty minutes ago.

He shrugged.
Maybe it looks shitty in the daytime.

Somehow, he doubted it.

The lobby had a new panel of lighted buzzers. He cursed when he couldn't find Laura's name. He knew she had moved in only five days before—exactly five days, since the last time he'd spoken to her had been Thursday, when she had hung up the phone on him and started mumbling garbage about that jerk Brennan and all that poltergeist stuff being real. Peter's drinking jag had started the next day, which he had been unlucky enough to have off (or lucky, if you considered drowning your sorrows in Coors good medical treatment), and by the time Monday morning had come around, he'd been in no shape to go to work. He'd had a little time coming to him anyway, and when he'd called in sick, he'd sounded sufficiently lousy that there would be no questions. “What the hell good are you to me on the floor if you're going to puke on the customers?” Charles had said, and when Peter said he'd take the whole week off because he'd felt run-down anyway lately, Charles had just said, “What the hell, it's slow now anyway.”