Joyride (10 page)

“What about them?”

“I want you to go over. Ask for a smoke or something. Get them to talk to you. Get them over here to the table.”

He slurped at the ice and the dregs of his tea through the bent straw. His eyes skittered.

So that she saw, long before she heard, what he had in mind.

“No,” she said.

She had to preempt him. To draw the line. To stop this freezing feeling suddenly clutching at her insides.

Not them. Never. Not this poor sad lonely girl.

I’d kill myself first.

But it was as though he hadn’t heard her. And she knew then that she was not out of the woods here by a long shot. She had never been, not for a second. Telling him what he’d wanted to hear had meant nothing. A minor test of obedience. And fear.

Good doggie.

His voice was cold and hollow.

“I want them,” he said. “And you are going to get them for me. So finish your scotch. Finish your cigarette.

“And go over.”

The visit was illegal, strictly informational. He hoped Covitski was being neat about it downstairs. Ideally it should look like nobody had been here at all.

So far there wasn’t much anyway. Prescription downers in the medicine cabinet. Men’s clothes in the drawers and closet in two distinct sizes—they’d be Lee’s and Howard’s. So she was slow getting rid of his clothing. So what.

Then he opened the drawer to the night table.

And
this
was interesting.

He walked downstairs. Covitski was standing in the living room.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” he said.

Rule scanned the room.

“Clipboard,” he said.

“You got it.”

He walked over. The clipboard looked out of place on the polished glass table. It was the only thing sitting there. There were three sheets of unused lined yellow paper clipped to it, and on top of it, a yellow number-two pencil. He focused on the pencil. Covitski was looking at it too.

“Either of them strike you as the kind who chews his pencils?” Covitski asked him.

“No. In fact I can’t even figure the clipboard. You could say she maybe uses the board, jotting down specs on
houses, land measurements, that kind of thing. Okay. But only three sheets of paper? Just three? She’d have a whole pad there or else the remains of one. Plus there’s no writing.”

“His, maybe. Edwards’s.”

“Same problem. Plus it’d be in the briefcase, wouldn’t it?” The briefcase was still standing in the middle of the room. Definitely a man’s. Thick, bulky, and showing wear. A woman would pick something lighter, narrower. And she’d probably take care of it better. Nobody had touched it, apparently, since he’d noticed it through the window.

“So we got us a third party,” said Covitski. “Hired gun?”

“Could be.”

It was possible. He wondered if Lee and Carole would be stupid enough or desperate enough to involve somebody else in their killing. If they had done the killing in the first place. He guessed that smarter people had done dumber things.

Twenty-one years ago you had Watergate.

“I don’t suppose you came across a .357 Magnum,” he said.

Covitski looked surprised. He shook his head.

“Hell, no.”

“There’s a box of shells in a drawer up there, maybe a dozen rounds missing. But no weapon.”

“You tossed the room?”

Rule nodded.

“There’s nothing down here. I been everywhere. She’d probably keep it up there anyway, wouldn’t she? With the cartridges.”

“Probably. You know what?” he said. “I keep thinking
about the highway. Your shooting. The red Volvo. The guy’s description of the male and female.”

“What, you figure they’ve gone loony or something? Out on the highway shooting up the populace? Hell, Joe, I can see them doing Howard but…” He shook his head again.

“Anyhow, a .38 did that one. Not a Magnum. You really think there’s a connection?”

“I don’t know what to think. You found nothing at all in the kitchen?”

“Nope.”

“She was taking prescription downers. The bottle’s half-empty. Dated less than a week ago, so she was popping quite a few of them. It might indicate problems.”

“Unless Edwards was taking them too.”

“Possible.”

Two cats, one black and one tabby, were sitting in the middle of the room about three feet apart looking back and forth from Rule to Covitski. Studying them. Like,
Are these guys friends or enemies?
The black one was Beast. He forgot the name of the tabby.

He sighed. “I’ll tell you, the thing that bothers me, that brings me back to the Volvo, is the two cars parked out front. That and the clipboard. They both say visitor to me. If they’re not home, there has to be a third car somewhere. With them in it.”

“We’ll check the cab companies. But it’s unlikely they’d have problems with two cars on the same day. My guess is that we’ll find that nobody picked up anybody at this address. Not today.”

“So then we’re looking for a third car. Probably with three people in it. So why not the Volvo? I mean, how
often does it happen that this town gets two homicides in less than a week?”

Covitski shrugged. “Never.”

The last violent death—if it even qualified as violent death—that Rule had seen was over three months ago. A guy had swallowed his dentures. He was a tourist from New Jersey whose wife had read him a wrong turn on the map. The guy threw such a fit about it that he’d simply inhaled the dentures. They’d thought it was a heart attack all the way to the autopsy.

“I think we should go see how the computer’s moving on that plate ID. Also if we can get handgun registrations for Gardner or Edwards.”

“Aw hell, Joe. It’s damn near ten. Mae’s gonna kill me.”

“I’ll drop you off. No problem.”

They headed for the door.

“Did she feed the cats?”

“Huh?”

“In the kitchen. Did the cats have food and water?”

“I dunno.”

Rule turned and walked back into the kitchen. Covitski followed. There was a half inch of water in the bottom of a white glass bowl. The food dishes were empty. Like most cats these two were sloppy eaters. The remains of their last meal were scattered all over the floor. The food was old and crusted. Probably the morning feeding. There were pop-top cans of Friskies on the counter.

He opened one.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to be here,” said Covitski.

“The cats won’t tell.”

They were rubbing at his ankles now, the tabby giving
him her backside and the side of her mouth where the scent glands were located.

He split the can between them.

The cats dug in.

“She should have fed them,” he said. “You got the cars, you got the clipboard, you got the cats. Something’s wrong.”

They walked to the door.

“You still want me to drop you?” he asked.

“Nah. The hell with it,” said Covitski. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll get a life. Maybe Mae won’t ax me. I read somewhere that women find men who are dedicated to their professions very sexy.”

Rule laughed. “I wouldn’t know.”

“I mean, you got to figure Albert Schweitzer got some, don’t you?”

“I suppose you do.”

Covitski came back from the men’s room, drying his hands on a paper towel. Rule was at the computer.

“We got it,” he said.

Covitski leaned over his shoulder and read aloud. Rule took a pad and started writing.

“Red ‘93 Volvo, Vermont State driver’s license number GO2333J6, registered to Wayne Philip Lock, 4183 Gastonboro Road, Barstow. Jesus, look at this! They pulled the guy’s license on a DWI!”

“Get on the phone to the State Police. Tell them we need an APB, possibly armed and dangerous. Give them the DWI case number. One to three occupants of the vehicle. Give them descriptions of Lee Edwards and Carole Gardner. Meantime I’m going to punch in a request
for handgun IDs on Edwards, Gardner, and this joker. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He had a pretty good feeling on this. It was why he loved the job those times he didn’t hate the job. It was why he put in the hours and took the suits to the cleaners and shaved every morning and maybe why Ann was gone.

He figured that in every cut of meat there was something spoiling.

He looked at Covitski.

“Would you want to bet that somebody here owns a .38?” he said.

Somebody did.

By ten forty-five a smart, ambitious, and very-easy-to look-at lady named Pamela Donelly who was the Assistant DA on call that night was working on a search warrant, the auto ID and the .38 constituting to her mind sufficient probable cause, and they were back in the car headed for Wayne Lock’s home on Gastonboro Road.

Covitski drove. Rule sat on the passenger side watching for the Volvo even though he knew the chances were ridiculously slim that Lock would still be in the area. Sometimes you got lucky.

The road was narrow, winding, nearly empty of traffic at this hour. Lock lived in the old part of town bordering Woolcott, the houses set close together, built mostly after World War II and built badly for the most part so that half of them had begun to lean as they settled, an inch or two this way or that way, and it gave them a slightly drunken look that the sparse starving shade trees curbside didn’t much enhance.

It was an ugly, gnarled neighborhood surrounded by mountains, rolling hills and beautiful farmland. An insult to all that, a gob of spit in the tourist’s eye. Nothing graceful or even interesting anywhere.

Until you got to Fort Ticonderoga here.

The fence began along the cracked sidewalk, turned an asymmetrical corner on each side along the driveway and the neighboring yard and then marched down the lawn like an invading army of white birch pickets stabbing massively at the thin, pitiful grass. The numbers 4183 looked to have been burned into the birchwood of the hinged door with a soldering iron and then colored in with bootblack. The pickets looked to Rule to be ten feet tall.

On the left-hand side in front, one of them was missing. A gap in Lock’s wooden suit of armor. Other than that, the thing looked impregnable. Of course, that was just an illusion, all you had to do was open this swinging hinged door here and…

…hope to hell that he wasn’t waiting with the .38 on the other side.

He wasn’t.

They walked to the door and knocked. The house was dark inside, the blinds pulled. He knocked again. Nothing. The driveway had been empty when they came in. No Volvo.

Somewhere a dog was barking.

The search warrant wouldn’t arrive for another couple of hours yet. For the moment they were stuck here.

“What do you want to do?” said Covitski.

“Let’s go talk to the neighbors, see if one of them spoke to him today, maybe saw him drive on out of here. Maybe knew where he was going.”

The house with the dog was easy to find—it was right next door past some hedges, and the dog was still yapping. Its owner was a six-foot unshaven sixty-year-old hulk of a man with a belly pouring over his dirty brown slacks and straining the thin white T-shirt. He stood on his ragged wooden porch plucking at his red suspenders.

The dog was on a leash by his side, and it was pacing passionately.

Rule was glad of the leash. The dog looked to be half mastiff and half rhino and didn’t seem too thrilled to have them there.

“You want Lock?” the man said.

“That’s right,” Rule said. He opened his wallet and showed the man his badge.

He didn’t even glance at it. His face broke open into a big wet grin.

It was not a pretty thing to see.

“It’s Wayne Lock you’re looking for?” he said.

“Yes, sir. That’s correct.”

His smile got even broader. He laughed and shook his head and plucked at the suspenders.

“Son,” he said, “in that case ol’ Happy here and I are gonna have to invite you in.”

Lock was raging.

Lee’d seen it from the moment he pushed her through the door, then stomped over and ripped the tape off his face. He spit out the cotton pads.

She was sitting on the bed now, rigid, her hands gripped tight together and staring at Wayne while he paced back and forth from door to sink, slamming at the sink with his fist, turning and kicking the chest of drawers, turning again toward Lee. Gazing wildly back at her reflected image in the mirror, but never at her directly, only through the mirror. And apart from ripping off the tape, never seeming to notice Lee down there at all.

He could smell the sour stink of the man.

Something unraveling.

“I ask you
one thing,
Carole! One fucking little thing. One miserable little favor, but no. Oh no!

“What? Are you too
moral
for me, Carole? To help me out here? Are you
better
than me?

“You think you are
better
than me?

“I don’t know what in the hell to do with you. I don’t know what to do! I have given you a lot of fucking slack, Carole, you know? A lot of fucking slack. Because I liked you. Because I wanted to help you. But I’m telling you, you are on the top of my shit list now, baby! You are at the fucking
pinnacle!

“You
bitch!”

Lee watched the words slam into her like body blows. There wasn’t much he could think to do to deflect them. But then he saw Wayne turn walking toward her finally looking at her directly with his hand going to his back pocket where the gun was and he knew he had to try.

“Wayne.”

Softly. Go easy now.

“Wayne. What’s the problem. Maybe I can help here.”

He whirled. Walked over and kicked the pipes just below his hands.

“Your
bitch!
Your bitch is the fucking problem!”

“Whatever it is, Wayne, we can deal with it.”

“Oh really?
Deal with this!”

He saw the kick coming and had time to move his head but not enough time. He smelled dirt and shoe leather and felt the sharp crack at the back of his neck that sent his forehead smashing against the pipe. Looked up and saw Wayne’s face, the grim thin set to the mouth, lips pulled down and back almost comically thin and wide, a parody of somebody’s little-boy pout except that the eyes were furious and crazy and the foot was coming up again.

He threw himself to the side.

The foot thudded against the sink.

“You
fucker!”

Then Carole was up off the bed shouting
leave him alone
and coming toward them—no,
going for the Magnum on the dresser!
—just as the foot was drawing back again and Wayne saw her in the mirror, righted himself, turned, took one step toward her and she walked right into the blow, right into his fist. It took her low in the stomach. It doubled her over and sank her to her knees.

And someone was pounding on the wall.

“Hey! You! Enough in there for chrissake!”

He looked up and Lee thought of some animal abruptly smelling smoke, some distant brushfire. Wayne stood frozen. Poised, silent, scenting the wind and crouched to run. The mad eyes suddenly cunning. Instantly deciding. Snatching the gun off the dresser.

“Not a sound!” he hissed. “You, move away. Back on the bed. I swear I’ll use this. I don’t care, you understand me?
I don’t care.”

Carole clutched at her belly and hauled herself up.

He shoved the gun into Lee’s face, reached in his pocket and took out a key and held it out to him.

“Here. Just the left wrist. And don’t you fuck with me.”

Lee took the key and fumbled it into the keyhole. The cuff snapped open, dangling.

He massaged the red chafing. His skin was torn, raw, burning.

“Untie yourself.”

He worked at the knots. Feet first and then across the legs, the blood pouring into them, making them throb, making him aware of his pulse inside them.

“Okay. Up.”

He stood. His knees were shaky, his right leg still half-asleep for being bound up behind him for so long. He had to urinate and the mere fact that he did unmanned him. So that was what he’d come to. Wayne was literally scaring the piss out of him now.

Christ!

“You too.”

She stood up.

“Okay, now out the door,” he said. “We’re checking out.”

He pushed the gun hard into Lee’s back and he
grunted, the sound forced out of him. The sound was to make sure that Carole knew the gun was there. He pulled open the door. He turned off the light behind them and took the suitcase off the bed and they stepped outside into the warm night air.

They crossed the dimly lit concrete landing. He walked them down the stairs.

The Volvo stood facing them.

“Around back,” he said.

They walked to the rear of the car. Lee scanned the windows of the motel, scanned the doors. The doors were all shut, the windows curtained. No faces peered out. The lot was quiet.

Wayne set the suitcase down and opened the trunk.

“Get in,” he said to Lee, “you first.”

“Wayne…Jesus Christ, Wayne…people…
die
in these things!”

He heard the quiver in his voice. He hated the fact that it was there but he couldn’t do a damn thing about it and he felt the urge to piss again. He tasted bile in his mouth.

He thought,
That was what fear tasted like.
Bile.

Wayne was smiling.

“Look closely, Lee. I’ve already taken care of that.”

There were two small holes punched into the lid of the trunk just above the logo.

“God knows I love this car,” said Wayne. “It was really very unpleasant for me having to make them. But you had to think this through and prepare for all contingencies, and I used the drill so they’re neat enough, don’t you think? I mean they hardly show. I’ll have to do something eventually about rust, though.

“Actually I expected to be putting somebody else in here. But now I guess it’s you.”

He lifted the gun.

“So you do it or you fucking die, Lee. Personally I don’t give a shit either way.”

He climbed in, shifted his weight toward the back, curling his legs over the jack beneath him to make room for her and waited for her to climb in. It felt like they were being buried alive in some communal grave, just the two of them. In a grave that smelled of grease and metal and gasoline, and then suddenly the scent of her, the woman smell. Almost its echo, barely perceptible. The scent of flowers.