Joyride (11 page)

Susan pulled up across from Wayne’s house and saw the car in front and thought,
Okay, now who is this?

She’d called the bar three times over the course of two hours and he still wasn’t there. Mikey, the floor manager, made it clear to her that a fourth call wouldn’t be necessary. That if he came in now, he could just go the hell back home again.

She’d called his house half a dozen times and there wasn’t any answer.

She was worried.

Wayne was responsible. Punctual. She’d tried to tell Mikey that—that if something weren’t really wrong with him, he’d at least have called in—but Mikey couldn’t have cared less. Said he was a piece-of-shit bartender anyway, which wasn’t fair, and that he’d already filled his spot with a part-timer who was looking to go full-time and that was that. Told her to call the cops if she was so damn worried.

She hadn’t called the police—she wasn’t family, after all. Or married to him or anything.

But she had decided to drive over.

And now here was this strange car in front and…

…two strange men walking toward her from the Roberts house next door.

She rolled up the driver’s side window.

The taller of the two men bent down and looked at her through the window and smiled. She wasn’t reassured.

Not until he opened his wallet and showed her the badge inside.

And then she was reassured and scared at the same time.

She rolled down the window.

“Y…yes?”

The man was still smiling.

“I’m Lieutenant Rule and this is Lieutenant Covitski. May I ask for some ID, please?”

She got her wallet out of her purse and handed him her driver’s license. The man angled it up so he could read it in the moonlight—the streetlight was out again, just like hers was going—and then handed it back to her.

“Do you know the gentleman living at this address? Wayne Lock? Are you a friend of his, Miss Olsen?”

She felt herself blushing. She looked away.

“I…I guess you could say I used to be his girlfriend.”

“Not anymore?”

“We had a kind of fight.”

“A fight?”

“A disagreement.”

“Have you seen him at all today?”

She shook her head. “Not since Saturday.”

“Talk to him?”

“No.”

“Not since Saturday?”

“No.”

He looked at her. Studied her. For some reason the way he was looking at her made her feel guilty. She hadn’t done anything.

“Why are you here, then?” he said.

His voice wasn’t unkind, she thought. Just curious.

“I was worried about him. He works tonight. He’s a bartender over at the Black Locust Tavern. And he hasn’t shown up or called in and that’s not like Wayne.”

“I see. So you drove over.”

“Yes.”

“Any idea where he might be?”

“God, I don’t know.”

She thought that there really wasn’t any place in particular. And any place was possible. She really did want to help the man. She wanted to ask him what was wrong and why they were looking for Wayne but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do that. She didn’t know why but she couldn’t.

And then it was like he read her mind.

“We’re going to want to talk with you about a few things, Susan. All right? And I’m sure you have questions too. But right now I want you to think. It’s very, very important. Can you come up with any place he might go? If he were in trouble or had some sort of problem maybe?”

“Problem?”

“Uh-huh.”

She thought about it. There just
wasn’t
anywhere.

If he had a problem he’d have come to her, wouldn’t he? Even after…what had happened.

“I know it’s late,” said the man, “but might he have gone to see his mother?”

“His
mother?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean? His mother’s dead.”

And for a moment the man just looked at her. She
thought that his eyes were very nice, very pretty for a policeman’s eyes and sort of sad looking. Sort of lonely.

“According to his neighbor over there,” the man said quietly, “Wayne’s mother is a quarter of a mile away, at Sweetwood Retirement Home over on Barstow Road. He said she’s been there for about three years now. I guess Wayne didn’t tell you. Sorry.”

And she realized, then, why the eyes were sad. And just who it was he was sad for.

The nurse was not pleased at all.

She was a redhead in her early thirties and unmarried—no ring—and Rule would have liked to have made her much happier, but that was not going to happen. He regretted this as he watched her long, lovely legs move ahead of them down the oak paneled hall past the sunny, painted landscapes on the walls and the hard institutional chairs placed just outside the rooms.

He regretted it deeply.

Dorothy Lock’s room was the last one over on the right, she said. From here you could see into what the nurse had told him was the library. To Rule it looked more like a midpriced hotel lobby than a library, with more oak paneling, more bright vistas on the walls, plush imitation-leather easy chairs and sofas and only a smattering of books on the shelves. Mostly paperbacks.

At this hour, of course, the library was empty.

The nurse had made it very clear that lights-out was ten o’clock sharp.

And here it was past eleven thirty.

She opened the door and turned on the overhead lights. The room was wallpapered, a pretty, light floral print design. There was an easy chair, an inexpensive dresser with a mirror, a writing desk with a spindle chair, an overhead TV mounted on the wall facing the bed, one small window
with a screen, a rotary-dial wall phone, a bathroom and a single closet.

The dresser and desktop were bare.

No books. No pictures. No perfume bottles.

Nothing.

Rule could get no sense of habitation. Whatever the woman owned, whatever possessions might indicate her personality or identity were somewhere tucked away.

She was facing the window, a tiny huddled body covered by a sheet.

The nurse walked over and touched her lightly on the shoulder, then drew back instantly. As though touching a hot stove or something charged with current.

“Mrs. Lock.”

He realized then that the nurse was not just annoyed with them because of the hour.

It was this particular patient or resident or whatever you called them. Something about the woman bothered her.

Something about the woman
scared
her.

He began to see why. The old woman turned so abruptly it was almost shocking. Suddenly wide-awake, her milky blue eyes taking in Rule and Covitski at a glance.

He had the sense of being swallowed.

The nurse took one step back. The woman ignored her and swung her legs off the bed. The legs were thin and naked, webbed with ropy blue veins, the skin dry and cracked as the dry bed of a stream.

Her lips were thin. They pulled back in a sly smile that looked surprisingly glad to see them.

“You’re police,” she said. Her voice was low. It seemed much younger than the rest of her. Her long, gray, stringy hair had billowed out in sleep.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Rule. “My name’s Rule and this is Lieutenant Covitski. We understand from Miss…”

“Maitland,” said the nurse.

“…Miss Maitland, that you had a call tonight. We’re wondering if it might have been from Wayne, your son.”

“My son?”

“Excuse me,” said the nurse. “If you don’t need me anymore…”

She was already moving past them through the door. To Rule it seemed like a getaway. A whiff of spicy perfume elbowed its way past the fusty old-woman smell in the room.

“That’s fine. Thanks,” he said.

She closed the door behind her.

The woman was watching him.

“What about my son?”

“We need to ask him some questions, ma’am.”

Her eyes narrowed. He noticed that the flesh around the eyes was deeply lined. The lines ran all the way down through the hollow depressions of her cheeks. Her mouth, on the other hand, was almost without them and none of the lines were deep. As though the accustomed expression of the mouth was no expression at all.

He felt Covitski shift uneasily beside him.

“My son,” she said.

Her low voice filled the room completely, hung there, as though the room were empty of all furnishings, even of life.

She was staring straight into his eyes. He had to resist the impulse to look away.

“You want to know if he called me.”

“Yes.”

“Today.”

“That’s correct.”

She leaned forward on the bed.

“My son is a cunting little coward,” she said. “Did you know that?”

The voice was as empty, flat and desolate as her dresser top. Despite the words, he did not sense hatred there. He sensed no emotion at all. Only statement of fact. Her son was a cunting little coward. End of story.

He wanted out. He needed some fresh air.

The nurse was right.

This one was better left asleep.

“Do you know what I suffer from?” she said. “Fainting spells. That’s right. They happen sometimes once a week, sometimes twice a day. It’s my blood pressure. Otherwise my health is perfect. I get fainting spells. And they are what has allowed my son Wayne to gain custodianship over me and put me into this place so that I can smell the shit of the dying all day. My son cannot take care of me in the home I lived in for thirty-five years, he says, he has to go to work and is afraid to leave me alone, he says. Do you know what the shit of the dying smells like, Officer Rule? I doubt that you do.”

Rule glanced at Covitski. He saw he was not alone in wanting out of there. Covitski couldn’t have looked worse if it were his own mother sitting in front of him talking this way.

There was poison in the room and it was lethal. Quietly leaking out of the empty walls and closet. Leaking out of the bed. It all belonged to her.

Poison was what she owned.

It filled the empty room.

“Old onions,” she said. “The shit of the dying smells like old rotten onions. There is shit in the halls even as
we speak. Did you know that? There is shit in the sink. They have to diaper them here but it doesn’t help. They empty it into the sinks, into the toilets. They walk in it through the halls. No, my little baby boy did not call me tonight. The call I received was from an old admirer. Who is dead now. I have many who are dead.”

Poison. Madness.

Wayne had lived with this.

Covitski touched his sleeve.

He was right. They weren’t going to gain anything more here tonight than what they’d already gotten. Which was plenty. It didn’t excuse Lock but it went a distance toward explaining him.

“If he were in trouble, where would he go?” he asked.

The question was pro forma at this point but you never knew.

“I have no idea,” she said.

“And when was the last time you saw him?”

The woman smiled. The bed began to shake.

He realized she was laughing.

It was soundless, eerie.

She stopped. Her face went dreamy.

“When I had him in my mouth,” she said.

And then she was lost, remembering.

“Three years ago. July or maybe August. It was a very warm day. I made him come. I always do. I had him in my mouth and I swallowed. I sucked him dry.”

She laughed. The laugh of an evil, sly young girl.

And god help him, he believed her.

He was a bee. The world was his flower.

He was pollinating the world, carrying the seeds of life with him in the broad wide circle of his flight, dropping the seeds into the ground where they would roil and decay and finally burst open, their flowering the turbulence of maggots, the birth of flies, the endless chain of life.

Route 89 South to 2 North to 93 South at Saint Johnsbury, down through the White Mountains, in New Hampshire again, down through the national forest, dark empty highway, barely a car on the road, trees looming. He could hear Carole and Lee bumping around in back when the roads got rougher. They could die in there or not. Like everybody else, all they wanted was to hurt him. It wasn’t going to happen. His book was filling up with them. He could feel it press against his chest, weighty, massive.

Down through Compton and Blair and Livermore Falls to 3A and Plymouth, cruising south through the latenight, dimly lit college town, yet another fucking college town, passing the Trolley Car Restaurant twice and passing yet again, nobody on the streets but a stumbling drunk old man. Not enough. Not good enough.

Driving.

North on Route 3—
buzzing
—a long steep road sliding gently down into an open valley and up again, the occasional house, lights on in the window, forest on all sides
and then a left at Avery’s General Store, dark, deserted at this hour and driving the winding mountain road to Ellsworth, past the Chapel of Saint John of the Mountains, bone white in the moonlight, perched old and tiny like a skeleton on the side of a hill, Rev. Roger Pecke Cleveland, Minister. Onto a narrow dirt road, climbing.

This was going nowhere.

Turning, kicking up dust—he could taste it in his mouth, feel it in his teeth.

How you doing back there?
He could feel them bumping around pretty good now.

Back down the road past a small country graveyard, a beaver pond, over a bridge, back to 3A, back toward Plymouth and the state college.

He was about a mile and a half from town when he saw them in the valley by the side of the road.

And oh, he was young. Oh, she was pretty.

He pulled over.

It was farmland all around here. A wide-open field down below. A barn and a silo. Deserted.

He reached into the backseat. Into the open suitcase.

This made up for so much.

The boredom. The endless days of being and yet…
not being.
The unfairness of all the people around him. The traps first his father, and then later his mother, had set for him.

This was what he was meant to do. To be.

The night wrapped him in rich destiny and its cloak was soft and warm.

“Need a hand?” he said.

The girl was standing over the boy with one small thin blue-veined naked hand on her hip and the other resting
on the roof of the car. She looked up and smiled as he got out and slammed the door. The girl was wearing cut-off jeans and a white tailored shirt many sizes too big for her, rolled up at the sleeves. The girl was trusting.

The boy glanced over his shoulder. He was working on the lugs with the lug wrench. The boy smiled too. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” he said. The boy had done this before. He was competent.
We’re fine.
“Not really,” said Wayne, and produced the gun.

Lynn Naylor had considered her luck debatable.

At the age of ten she was riding her cousin’s bike down a neighbor’s driveway. The driveway was newly paved—it looked smooth and inviting.

The bike was much too small for her. In fact they’d only recently taken off its training wheels. And it didn’t have hand brakes. Only foot brakes. And her legs were so long it was hard for her to get the proper leverage.

So that when the driveway wound around the back of the house and plunged suddenly down a long steep hill she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t get the leverage. She dragged her bare feet along the fresh macadam until her toes were bloody but it didn’t help.

At the bottom of the hill was a dome-shaped granite boulder over ten feet high at its jagged peak, twenty-two feet long, and she tried to steer toward the narrow space—just a path, really—between the boulder and the thick grove of pines surrounding it.

By the time she reached bottom, the bike was going much too fast for her to manage.

She clipped the edge of the rock at over thirty miles an hour, that was what the police had told her. The borrowed
bike was a twisted ruin. At the moment of impact she had thrown her arm straight out in front of her. And that had saved her life. Her forearm snapped—she could still remember the sound of it snapping—but it also vaulted her over on top of the rock instead of headfirst into it.

She came away with eighteen stitches in her back, ten scarred toes, a mild concussion and a broken arm.

On the one hand she supposed that was pretty lucky.

On the other hand you had to factor in the driveway itself and its particular allure for her on that day. You had to factor in the blind sudden plunge. The too-small bicycle. And the rock.

Not so lucky.

A year ago she and Ben had totaled his Ford. They were driving a rain-slick road on a hot summer day and another car—a Pontiac—was passing, its rear tires sliding over no more than a foot or so, just enough so that the rear of the Pontiac kissed their left front bumper and sent them flying off the road over an embankment. The next thing she remembered she was sitting inside the roof of the car and Ben was already coming around the other side, opening the door and pulling her out.

They emerged without a scratch.

But in this as in the other incident her luck had to be considered debatable. You had the fact that she had lived through it at all balanced by the fact that it had happened in the first place, and for her the two seemed to cancel each other out. The coin had flipped—and amazingly, had twice now landed on its edge. It proved nothing to her except that against the wildest odds, she was still alive.

Ben Stillman
knew
he was fortunate. No question.

His proof was simple.

He had college, he had work, he had a future, and he had Lynn. Not necessarily in that order.

College had been hard to come by because it was hard to afford. His father was a Paterson, New Jersey, stonemason, union all the way, and when the union said sorry, you don’t work his father didn’t work. Which was often. But Ben had held down his own jobs since he was fifteen. He’d saved and he’d studied. His mom worked as an office clerk and that had helped some too. But mostly he was making it on his own. He made sure his grades were fine in high school and now here he was with a working scholarship to Plymouth State, well on his way to a master’s in business at an even better school two years down the line.

He was not going to be some union man. He was not going to work with his hands when he did work and drink and sit in front of the tube all day when he didn’t. He would not grow a gut. He
would
have money.

Then there was Lynn.

Back in Paterson a girl like Lynn would never have looked at him. He wasn’t even sure they
had
girls like Lynn in Paterson. She was subtle, funny, educated—private schools, mostly. With one year in public school “for seasoning.” She was lovely as any woman he’d ever met and she was probably going to be wealthy one day in her own right. Her family had old Boston money. She’d been lazy gradewise through high school but she wasn’t anymore, not since meeting him, she was going after her own master’s and they were looking at the same schools together—Stanford, Wharton, Harvard—the top of the line all the way.

In bed she was responsive fire. Heart and brains. Controlled and measured unpredictability.

He felt that there was nothing he wanted that he either did not already have or could not someday reach.

There would be children. Vacations. Leisure.

Between them they could do anything.

They could even change a tire.

So he didn’t need this guy in the slightest but thought it was nice of him to offer. It was the sort of thing he liked about New Hampshire. People were really neighborly. It was too bad a person couldn’t generate much money living here. For that you needed cities. New York or L.A. or Washington.

But you could certainly consider retiring here someday. Homes could be had for a song and taxes were among the lowest in the nation.

It almost amazed him. That here he was as
young
as he was looking that far down the road.

So that when this fellow
crossed
the road he didn’t give him a thought, just kept working on the lugs—and he never saw the gun or the big claw hammer, one in each hand, until the hammer came down on him once and then a second time, and he could hear Lynn screaming into the silent warm void of the night that seemed to trickle down over his forehead, his cheeks, and into his eyes.

Blinding all that vision.

He used his foot to shove the boy’s body under the car.

The road’s grading made it easy. The boy rolled under.

“You know how to use a jack?” he said.

The girl nodded, looking not at him but at the gun.

He liked the way she cried. No sobbing. No sound at all. Just a steady wash of tears.

“Jack it down. Then throw everything into the trunk. Got that?”

The girl went to work.

Two cars parked a few feet away from one another on opposite sides of the road, both safely off to the shoulder. Nobody would give them a thought. With the car jacked down you wouldn’t see the boy.

Which meant he’d have some time here.

She stared up into moonlight.

The trees were black and gray and maggot white. The man in front of her was black. A silhouette. She could smell the damp earth beneath her, smell the chafed bark of the tree, the sharp hot metallic smell of twisted, abraded wire.

She was lying on her back. Old leaves soft beneath her. A pillow of moss and lichen lumpy beneath her head.

He had wound the length of bailing wire around the slim trunk of the birch tree and then around her wrists, twisting the wire off tight over each wrist with a pair of pliers.

She could taste the thick salt of snot and tears.

She could not stop trembling. It was electric. A low steady hum.

“
I think I’ll let you live
,” he said.

He knelt beside her and lifted off her sandals one by one and set them carefully down behind him. The gun never left his hand. Nor the pliers in the other.

“I’m going to fuck you, though,” he said. “You understand that?”

She couldn’t see his eyes. But his voice was almost mild. She nodded.

“Lift up.”

She raised her hips. The man unzipped her cutoffs and pulled them off her. Folded them once and placed them beside her sandals.

“Lift again.”

Then suddenly the man was a blur of tears.

But she did as she was told.

The leaves, the ground were cold and damp.

He folded the panties and placed them next to the cutoffs. Sandals and clothes in an even line directly behind him.

He unbuttoned her shirt starting with the top button and moving slowly down—and only when he was finished did he part it, revealing her.

“Beautiful,” he whispered.

He leaned closer, black, blotting out the moon and sky. The gun moved to her lips, its barrel cold, parting them.

“Please”
she tried to say. It came out
“preesss.”
The barrel stayed there, pressed against her teeth. She felt the chill of metal, the pliers, circle over the flesh of her breast and then spiral slowly inward, teasing her toward mute horror. She felt them open and embrace the blossoming ridge of flesh. Closing. Gently squeezing. Cold, jagged. Terrible.

Then grasping, lifting.

Her body arched.

“
I could use these on you
,” said the man.

It was as though he were reciting something he’d learned. As though he’d got it somewhere and the words weren’t even his.

He laughed. The jaws released her.
“But I won’t,”
he said.

She fell back against the leaves.

He didn’t know. He didn’t understand.

He already had.

And then later she was wet with him, wet between her legs, breasts slick with his sweat. Smelling of him. Droplets from his forehead sliding down across her cheeks.

He dropped away from her next to the line of clothing and stood and buckled his pants.

She hurt.

He had used his fingernails, his teeth. She hurt everywhere.

“You got to change it,” he said. “You got to change it every time.” His breath was coming in gasps. He was not strong. She had learned that. Not without the gun. His arms and legs were thin and bony. He did not have too much stamina.

She thought of Ben and pushed the thought away.

Pushed it all away.

He was tucking in his shirt, looking down at her.

“Your MO, I mean. You know what that means? That means
modus operandi.
The way you do things. If you don’t change it then they catch you.”

She realized that he was talking about her death.

“Which is why I used the hammer. Smart, you see? First they’re looking for a .38 and then a .357 and now a hammer. Three different people, right?”

No,
she thought.
Four.

When he leaned over again she noticed that he was still short of breath. Another, shorter length of wire was in his hand. He wound it once around her neck and grasped hold of the ends.

She didn’t struggle. There was only one possible way to live through this. There had never been another.

The coin had to come to rest on its spinning edge, neither heads nor tails.

“You’d just go after me,” he said. “You’d call the cops. I know you hate me. I know you hated this.”

He entered her again through his open fly.

She stiffened as the wire tightened around her neck, felt his left hand shudder with the effort of pulling it taut, felt the blood slide down her neck and pool in the hollow of her shoulder blades.

The night went bright with flashes of yellow fire and then went dark. Her breathing stopped. Her head fell back against the moss, her body against the damp cool leaves.