Joyride (12 page)

Somewhere far beyond her, a man stood up and turned toward the road.

They were driving again and the nausea had returned, compounded of the smell of gas and auto exhaust and blind, dark, vertiginous motion. And fear. She was getting used to feeling sick. Nausea like a condition, like being pregnant, like a morning sickness.

Like a hangover.

Nausea. Weakness.

Lee’s arms around her weren’t enough—insufficient to take her beyond herself, out of herself, or to bring her closer to him. And she wondered if they had ever been truly close, this man she had slept with and killed with and had every intention of marrying—if they lived to marry.

It seemed they had. And then it didn’t.

But they must have. Otherwise it was all…everything was…

…meaningless.

And there was the fear again.

Not of Wayne this time, but of sheer futility. That all this had led nowhere. Or could have led nowhere else. Her life from childhood to this moment seemed to hang over her like some sort of curse. She realized that emptiness, that lack, could be terrifying. As much as physical threat.

She wondered if this was what it felt like to be homeless, on the streets and cut adrift in the world, friendless,
hopeless, alone. If this was what hostages felt like. A political prisoner held far away from home and loved ones. She felt homeless now, locked in a prison she had been making for herself her whole life long. Starting long ago, when she and her sister where just little girls.

And Lee’s arms didn’t help.

How could she have ever expected them to?
A man’s arms. Only that.

She was a fool.

She remembered when they’d met at Howard’s club. Memory like a vision. Had something really passed between them? Between both of them? Or had she simply sent a message and he received it?
Help. I’m vulnerable. I hate this. Take me out of here and I’m the most available woman you’ll ever want to meet.

He was not a member of the club, of course. He was there courtesy of Howard, his new boss. Presumably the idea was for him to lose to Howard at eighteen holes of golf. Instead, Lee whipped him soundly. Maybe he was already sick of Howard. It was possible. It didn’t take a lot of people very long. Three weeks later they had met again in the parking lot of the Food Emporium and he asked if she’d had lunch yet. He was dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans—it was a Thursday, his day off. He looked nothing like Howard nor anybody who would even work for Howard, and by two in the afternoon they were in bed in his condo and by four she had told him everything.

She could feel his breath stirring her hair. His thighs pressed to her buttocks, his legs pressed to her legs.

Why wasn’t it helping?

She felt abandoned.

Oh for chrissake stop feeling so sorry for yourself,
she thought.

You thought you knew the risks. You didn’t. So what. It means nothing. The problem is Wayne now. Not Lee, not Howard.

Think. Concentrate.

You can live through this.

It was as though she had said it aloud.

“We have to do something,” Lee said. “When he opens the trunk. He’s going to have to help you out. You’re all cramped up. I mean, even if you’re not cramped up, you are—you know what I mean?”

His voice sounded raspy, his breathing shallow. He did not sound good.

“But what…?”

“The jack’s here. Maybe I can…use it. You’ll have to distract him. Stumble. Something. I don’t know. Get him off balance. Give me enough time to…get the son of a bitch.”

She nodded. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay,” he said.

For a while no one spoke.

“You think he killed her?” she said. “The girl?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“I think he…took her away. Just try to give me a second where he’s not looking, all right?”

“All right. Lee?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t we just leave?”

“Leave?”

“Why didn’t we just move away from Howard. Out of Barstow. Why did we kill him?”

“I think…”

The car took a jolt. The jack dug into her side.

“I think we were sort of crazy,” he said. “I think he made us crazy. For me, anyway…leaving, going away wouldn’t have been enough. After what he did to you…I wanted him dead. I think…I think I maybe talked you into it. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t talk me into it, Lee.”

His arms tightened around her.

He’s trying,
she thought.
Even trying to take the blame for her. Trying to be strong.

He didn’t feel or sound strong and neither did she. Something in here was getting to them. The air holes weren’t working. They weren’t enough.

She wondered about the jack. If he could handle it.

This was the part, she thought, when they were supposed to say something. They were supposed to affirm something now between them. They were supposed to say I love you and that somehow it had all been worth it.

He relaxed his embrace. They rode in silence.

The girl, Susan Olsen, had wanted to know what the mother was like.

Rule hadn’t the goddamn words.

The girl was out in one of the cars now with Lieutenant Neal, who had brought over the warrant. He was going through her story again. He wouldn’t get much. The girl didn’t know much. Lock had kept her in the dark about a lot of things.

Like this closet.

Rule knew she had no idea.

Lock had a hobby.

He made collages. The walls of the big walk-in closet were lined with them.

Most were about two feet by three feet, photos glued to oak tag. He had cannibalized the books piled on the floor. There were a lot of them.

Torture Through History, Bloodletters and Badmen
in three volumes,
Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs.

One of his favorites seemed to be a British import called
Crimes of Horror.
He’d cut out pictures of his heroes.

Manson, Bundy, Dr. Crippen, Capone, Ed Gein, Albert Fish, the Vampire of Dusseldorf, Lucky Luciano.

He had photos of Jayne Mansfield’s dead dog, of Bugsy Siegal shot in the head, of Paul Bern lying naked and dead in Jean Harlow’s bedroom, and two different angles
on Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia—lying neatly bisected at the waist, drained of blood and her torso mutilated lying nude in the grass, all cut from Kenneth Anger’s
Hollywood Babylon
numbers One and Two.

He had a book called
Violence in Our Time
that divided itself into black-and-white police and news-photo chapters on child abuse, murder, rape, suicide, genocide, execution, assassination, terrorism, race riots, war and revolution.

There were hardly any pages in this little number left at all. They were all up there on the wall.

Dead babies—tied, beaten, burned, strangled. Shotgun blasts to the face. Self-immolations. Stabbings. Torture crimes. Castrations. Piles of the dead at Belsen, Nordhausen, Weimar. Chinese beheadings. KKK lynchings. The hanged, stomped bodies of Mussolini and his mistress. The bodies of Cuidad Trujillo, of Nhu and Diem. A fire-blackened corpse seeming to rise from the blasted earth at Hiroshima.

Then there were the polaroids. Color shots interspersed with the black-and-white photos from the books. Some of them taken from his bedroom window, apparently, down onto the street—Rule could see the lace curtains in the foreground. Others blurred as though snapped in a hurry, furtive, surreptitious. Fugitive and without the subject’s knowledge.

Kids. Old ladies. Men and women.

An equal opportunity shooter.

He recognized only two of them.

One was the man next door, Roberts, walking his dog down on the street below.

The other was Susan Olsen.

She’d posed for this one. She was standing in a car dealer’s lot next to a highly polished red Volvo. Leaning
on it, wearing jeans and a yellow tank top and smiling into the camera.

She was pasted right next to the Dahlia.

You didn’t have to be a genius to catch his drift. Rule was looking at a hit list in living color.

He wondered what Susan had done to him.

He supposed he’d have to ask her.

On the book shelf were an open box of straight pins, a pair of wooden clothespins, and a box of tissues, half-empty, and a round hand mirror on a stand.

These, too, left a pretty clear impression.

There was nothing much else of interest either in here or in the rest of the house so far. They’d been through most of it by now. It was neat. Even tidy. So much so that you’d think a woman still lived here.

It was sexist but too bad.

He walked down the stairs to the two Mutt-and-Jeff uniformed officers standing in the living room.

“Where’s Lieutenant Covitski?”

The taller one pointed toward the kitchen.

“Basement,” he said.

The kitchen was tidy too. Not a dish in the sink. The sponge looked like he’d never used it.

Covitski was just coming up the stairs. He was smiling.

“He’s got a freezer down there. You know what’s in it?”

“You mean what? Not who?”

Covitski laughed. “Spinach, asparagus, and broccoli. That’s all. Nothing else. Must have thirty boxes each in there.”

“He likes his veggies.”

“And doesn’t like variety.”

“Take a look in the bedroom closet,” he said. “It’s interesting.”

“But no gun, right?” said Covitski.

“No gun.”

“He’s got it with him. We’re not gonna find a thing here.”

“Looks that way. Listen, I want to talk to the girl again. I don’t expect much, but why not. Then, unless she surprises me, I think maybe we should go home and get some sleep. Let Neal and the uniforms handle interviewing the neighbors and stake out the house. He’s fresh. I’m feeling a little brain-dead here. Two hours on the sofa would feel like a miracle. What do you say?”

“I say Jesus, fine. Great.”

They’d been on for sixteen, almost seventeen hours and they’d done whatever it was they could do here. It was definitely time to call it quits a while.

“Check the closet,” he said.

Covitski grinned. “Get to know your rabbit, huh?” he said.

“We damn well better get to know this one,” he said, and went out to the prowl car where the girl was sitting in the backseat looking anxious and bewildered, Jack Neal sitting beside her glancing down at a pad that was practically empty.

He decided that if she asked him what they found in there he’d tell her. She had the right of any victim to know. He thought a moment of Ann in California and opened the door opposite Neal and sat down beside her, the girl between them smelling of fresh tears and faint cologne, and started going through it all again, the litany of emptiness that was the woman’s life with a man who had her photo pinned to his wall surrounded by death and who she’d thought she loved.

It was possible to turn to her left and get to her knees.

The forest swam. Her body ached and stung.

She began by using her fingernails on the twisted wire around her wrist. It was sticky with blood. The wrist was swollen and the wire had cut deep.

When the first wrist was free, she worked at the other one until finally the wire dropped away gleaming wetly in the moonlight, coiled around the birch tree. She reached up for the second length wrapped around her neck and pulled it gently free.

The bleeding immediately began anew. She could taste it in her mouth. There was no way to know how badly he had hurt her. She could feel the blood roll down across her collarbone. She found she could painfully swallow.

She didn’t try to stand. She was still too weak for that. Instead, she reached for her clothes, leaned back against the tree, and put on her sandals and cutoffs and panties and slipped her arms into the shirtsleeves.

She rested. She buttoned the shirt.

She stood slowly, using the tree for balance until her legs felt strong enough to support her, and then moved off through the forest.

She was going to survive again.

Her luck, whatever it was, was holding.

And she wondered for a while, before she found her anger again, why it felt so bad, so terrible to know that.
Until the feeling bled away into the heat of her living body, into a grim determination to stop him, cancel him, to make him pay. She would do what she could to make him pay.

She stumbled through the forest toward the moonlight shining bright across the empty road ahead and sorted through every moment, every word, since he’d pulled up across the road from them and began what she—not he—would finish.

That this took courage did not even occur to her.

She embraced his image like a lover, and remembered.

Wayne’s was not anyone’s notion of a mind at peace. It had never been.

His mind was always busy devising, sorting, cataloging, planning, and unplanning—despite what was going on, despite what he happened to be doing or who he happened to be with, despite flu or headache or sleepless nights. It churned all day long. Sorting and sifting, even through his dreams. As though his mind ran on its own tenacious frequency regardless of the presence of all that which composed him yet which was
not
mind. Regardless, in other words, of his physical self.

He was rarely to be found exactly
inside
his experiences.

Still, now, driving the deserted two-lane Governor-something Highway to Lake Winnipesaukee and Wolfeboro, he felt a kind of peace. Perhaps mind and body had found a link they had not had up to now. Perhaps they were finally in synch.

Perhaps his dick had at long last caught up with his brain.

He cruised close to the waterline, a happy man…

Buzzing.

“Jesus, Rule, it’s what? Two thirty in the morning? Go back to bed!”

“I haven’t been to bed. I fucked up, Marty.”

“What?”

Rule could hear his therapist sigh at the other end and then the bed creaking and the match lighting and the sharp intake of breath.

“I fucked up. With Ann.”

Three beers and he was a little drunk. Even to himself he sounded maudlin.
You’re a cop,
he thought.
Jesus, stop whining.
He couldn’t help it.

“I don’t know why I know that, but I do,” he said. “I fucked up. I just thought I’d tell you.”

“This couldn’t wait for our session?”

“It’s the nature of the business, Marty. There might not be a session. You never can say. I thought you’d want something to remember me by. Introspective breakthrough. Just in case.”

“Bullshit, Rule.”

“Not necessarily. There’s a very mean man out there with a gun.”

“Mean men with guns are your business, Rule. You like your business. What’s so special about this one?”

“He’s involved somebody else, I guess. Somebody who reminds me of Ann every which way, every damn time I turn around and look at it.”

“So this is sort of personal.”

“In a way. Yeah.”

“And it’s not supposed to be personal. Personal could be dangerous.”

“It could be.”

“So you want my advice.”

“I don’t know about that. That’s not why I called.”

“You wanted to tell me something about Ann.”

“Right.”

“So go ahead. I’ve got no worries about the other thing. You’ll depersonalize this when you have to. You’ll live.”

He let that go.

“I just figure I fucked up, Marty. I could have gone with her. Or else I could have created a situation so she’d stay. What I mean is, I could have affected things. Instead I just let it drift and then I cut her loose, I left her all alone out there. I threw the whole damn thing into the fireplace. After seven years, I left her and Chrissie all alone because I had to be alone to really feel secure for some reason and if they don’t hate me for it, then they damn well ought to. She could be the best thing that ever happened to me, Marty.”

“She could be. But it seems to me that Ann had some say in this, too, didn’t she?”

“Sure she did. She said she wanted me. Only not on the same old idiotic terms. And the old terms were the only terms I could offer. At the time.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m not so sure.”

Marty sighed. “Rule, go chase your bad guy. You’re in the middle of something here, am I right? So go and finish it. Then we’ll talk, and we’ll see if anything’s changed, okay?”

“Yeah. All right.”

“And Rule?”

“Yeah?”

“You want my opinion, I think you’re still afraid you’ll lose her. That’s a little perverse, Rule. Because—we already talked about this—you’ve already lost her. Accept it. She has.”

He didn’t know what to say. He just seemed to melt down into the bed like it was some weird sort of relief to hear Marty tell him that, but it was also like the clap of doom.

“And Rule?”

“Yeah?”

“When I want something to remember you by, I’ll ask for it. You know?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Good night, Lieutenant.”

“Good night, Marty.”

He went out to the garage. He lit a cigarette in the dark and stared at the dollhouse for a while. He could probably finish it off in two or three weekends, if he gave it a try, pack it up, and send it off to them.

He wondered if he’d do that.

He finished the smoke and lit another. Thinking that the dollhouse looked really good there.

Ten minutes later, his phone rang.

He didn’t suppose it was Marty phoning him back.