Joyride (15 page)

He wrapped another towel around her head. He didn’t want to stain the couch.

He took the top button of her dress between thumb and index finger and slid it slowly through the buttonhole. And the next. And the next. He took his time.

He parted the dress away. The thin pale lavender bra hooked in front. He snapped it free.

“You lied,” he said.

She had said there were no scars, yet there were scars. In particular, a thin white line that ran from the center of her chest across her right breast and through the nipple, disappearing down the slope of the breast on the other side.

He slipped off her shoes and put them next to Lee, lying slumped against the couch at his feet.

The panties matched the bra. They were thin and lacy. He slid them down off her hips, folded them once, and placed them beside the shoes.

Dawn was breaking.

Her skin seemed to glow in its pale light. There was virtually no tan line. It was possible to think, looking at her flesh, that she was already dead. He could see her shallow breathing and knew this wasn’t true. But the notion delighted him. He thought that even with the towels and the clotted blood on her face that she was very pretty.

So pretty the dead. So vulnerable.

He unbuckled his belt. Unzipped his pants and slid them off.

To fuck the dead and dying.

He lowered himself down.

Her skin still felt so warm. It spoiled the illusion. It was good skin, soft. Smooth as Susan’s had been though Carole was probably ten years older. But he had expected a coolness from all that loss of blood. Some slight chill at least. More of an approximation.

He wasn’t hard.

Not nearly hard enough.

It surprised him.

That bitch back off the road in Plymouth, he thought. That bitch’s fault.

She’d drained him.

He bit at the scar to make himself hard.

Her body never stirred.

In that respect at least it was almost as though she
were
dead.

And thinking that he finally began to rise. He tried to push himself inside her but she was much too dry so he licked the palm of his hand until it was slick with spit and rubbed himself and tried again.

It wasn’t working.

Goddammit!

It was Carole who was doing this. Carole doing this to him. Not the Plymouth whore.

Fucking Carole.

Fucking Carole on his case again.

Let us go. No no. You can’t do that. I
won’t
do that.

Bitch!

He bit down at the scar until he could taste her blood
but it didn’t do his cock any good at all, the bitch was just lying there doing nothing for him, nothing, there was no excitement, no thrill, no pleasure in her anywhere. It was no goddamn good.

He wasn’t stupid. He knew she was trying to defeat him again the same way she’d tried to defeat him at the bar, refusing to go over to the couple at the table next to them but he’d shown her then, he’d blown away six or seven people since then yes it was seven counting Lee and he could damn well show her again.

Show everybody.

“Fuck
you
,” he said. “Fuck all of you!”

He shoved himself off and stood over her and slapped her hard across the face. Her blood splattered the sofa, a red mist across the faded chinz pattern.

She made no sound.

It was frustrating that she could be so unaware of him after all this time. He realized that scaring the hell out of her and Lee had been tremendous fun. Tremendous fun.

He almost missed them.

Christ! Look at the goddamn
mess
she was making!

He pushed back the coffee table, lifted her off the couch and dumped her on the floor. It would be easier to clean up the floor than the couch later after he was through.

Fuck her, he thought.

Let her lie there and just drop quietly dead.

He didn’t need to see. It would have been nice to see her die but he had other priorities.

She was nothing.

Lee was nothing.

There were others.

He didn’t even need to consult the book. He had it all
in his head. He always had. The book was just to remind him.

RETAL.

He pulled up his pants and belted them. He took the .38 off the table and checked the load and the load was down so he opened the suitcase and took out a fresh clip, inserted it and stuffed six more clips into his pockets. It was too bad he didn’t have more shells for the Magnum but he had used them sparingly and by his count he had six rounds left in that gun too.

He looked at himself in the living room mirror.

Here I am friends and neighbors.

Mister Disaster. The guy who lives to blow your ass away. The guy who loves you, blood and bone.

It’s payback time.

One holy hell of a
good
time. Was had by all.

Here I come.

He laughed and then stopped laughing. He opened the door and stepped out into the dawn, stood for a moment in the warm morning breeze scented with dew already baking off the grass, gazed around him at his home, at his white birch castle walls and then walked toward the street.

“Burkeman and Treat,” said Rule. “They haven’t made their half-hour call-in and we can’t pick them up on the radio.”

He stood in front of Covitski with his hands on the desk, and Covitski couldn’t tell if it was just the lack of sleep that was making Rule’s eyes that red or something else but the eyes were wild whatever it was.

“Something’s going down. We’ve got an all-cars out to Wayne’s place. Let’s go.”

Covitski was already on his feet.

Outside, they saw Susan Olsen waiting for her cab. They’d offered a ride earlier, but she’d turned them down. Now it was just as well. Every car they had was the car that might just get there first.

She’d noticed them, too. Covitski nodded stiffly, but she didn’t respond.

She looked a little like his niece, he thought, his brother’s eldest daughter. He’d noticed that right away. Not a lot, but a little. They had the same coloring and they both had that same sad look around the eyes.

He had no idea where his niece had gotten that look, but it was there as long as he remembered.

When they pulled away out of the driveway Covitski looked at her again and she was turning in the other direction. Away from them.

It was early. There was no one on the street. He passed the Roberts house and considered stopping in.

He heard the dog barking.

He passed Ed Schorr’s place where the car with the two dead cops was parked and would be parked for quite a long time, and then the Crocker place, and he was almost to the house where the twins lived—he didn’t know their names or the names of their parents because they were relatively new there—when he saw one of the two spinsters across the street come out with a bag of garbage.

He guessed she was an early riser.

He pointed the Magnum and fired.

The woman went down with a big red hole in her apron and the sound was huge and he guessed that would wake up the neighborhood all right, people would be locking their doors pretty soon and he’d better get on this right away.

He walked up the porch to the house where the twins lived and opened the door and saw the little boy coming through the living room in his pajamas rubbing the sleep from his eyes and he shot him once in the head with the .38. He walked down a hall to a bedroom. The man and woman were startled and they were just now getting out of bed.

The woman put her hands in front of her face when
she saw the gun so he shot her in the stomach. The man hunched down trying to hide behind the bed. He walked over and shot the man once in one leg and once in the other leg. The man squirmed and cried out so he shot him in the chest and then walked out of the bedroom down the hall through the living room and out the door.

He heard the little girl, the other twin, saying Mommy Mommy somewhere back behind him.

The spinster’s sister was bent down over her body on the lawn. She was crying and shaking her as though she were trying to wake her. He didn’t want to use the Magnum. There were so few bullets. He shot her in the back with the .38 instead and then crossed the street and over across the lawn and even though he was pretty sure she was dead he shot her in the head for good measure.

He jogged down that side of the street, the side opposite his house, past the Crocker, Schorr, and Roberts places and past his own house and the Murdoch place on this side of the street to the house where the Leigh kids lived, the ones who had stolen the pickets off his fence. He walked up to the porch and tried the door and since it was locked he used the Magnum. The Magnum punched a hole in the door two inches wide and the lock was gone completely. Its roar moved away from him down the street like a raw wind. He had four rounds left.

He opened the door and walked inside. He listened. The house was silent. He heard a noise upstairs, something moving, so he climbed the stairs. The noise was coming from a closet in one of the bedrooms, so he walked in and fired through the closet and then he opened the door. The older of the two boys slumped out across his feet wearing nothing but a pair of briefs. The boy was still alive. He stepped back and aimed carefully and shot him.

He heard someone running down the hall and into the next bedroom. He trotted out the door and saw that Leigh, the father, and the younger boy had opened the bedroom window. The boy was already out on the sloped shingled roof, trying to work his way down, but the father was only halfway out the window. He waited until the father got both legs over the windowsill and then shot him in the back and watched him tumble off the roof onto the cracked white sidewalk below. He heard the boy screaming down on all fours trying to cling to the roof, and looking back at him. He left him there and went back to the stairs and down.

The woman was on the phone in the kitchen and he knew it was the police she was trying to call. He shot her once in the face and she fell across the breadboard and he hung up the phone.

He walked outside. He didn’t know how many bullets were left in the clip, so he popped it and tossed it on the curb and inserted another.

He crossed the street.

He saw a car coming down the road and waited and watched, standing on the sidewalk under a tree until the car pulled by, gliding past him, and then turned and tracked the car with the Magnum. When he fired, he saw the back window shatter and glass explode out of the windshield and saw the vivid splash of blood across what was left of it as the car went over the curb and into a tree across the street in front of Bobby Dimmit’s house who he had known all his life since he was just a boy. He had no idea if the driver was a man or if it was a woman.

There were three rounds left in the Magnum.

He walked up the steps to Roberts’s house.

The dog was barking. He looked through the window
but he couldn’t see the dog. He tried the door, but it was locked. He shot at the lock with the Magnum.

He tried the door again, but either the lock had somehow held against all expectation or there were other locks he couldn’t see. He fired a little higher and tried the door again. Nothing.

There was only one round left in the Magnum.

He decided to let it go at that. Roberts was a busybody. At some point when he thought it was safe to do so, Roberts would stick his head up in one of the windows and he could use the .38.

He could hear the Leigh boy up on the roof, still crying and screaming.

He walked to the Schorr house.

There were sirens in the distance. He would have to make it fast.

He knew this house. He had played here as a kid with whatsisname who had moved to Delaware or something and the back door was practically paper.

He went around back, watching Roberts’s window just in case and then turned and went around the sloping, padlocked, trapdoor entrance to Schorr’s cellar, stepped over a garden hose, and went to the door. He opened the screen. He didn’t even bother to see if the door was locked. He just kicked it in and walked inside into the kitchen and there was Schorr standing there with a knife in his hand from the open drawer.

He really didn’t mind Schorr and was annoyed to find him there. Schorr was efficient at the post office and he had a pleasant manner. But it annoyed him so much that the man was in his way now because it was his wife he was really after that he shot him in the right leg with the .38 and then when he went down placed the gun to his
temple and fired again, brains and blood all over his pants leg and shoes, and walked past him through the kitchen.

She was hiding behind the couch in the living room.

Ohmygodpleasedon’t
she said like it was all one word.

When he shot her the first time she moved, tried to fling herself away, so that instead of hitting her in the chest the bullet caught her in the throat and it was probably the bloodiest thing he’d ever seen, her trying to stop it up with her slippery hands. He shot her in the heart. The blood pumping from her neck began to ebb.

The sirens were much closer and it sounded like there were a lot of them so he knew he had to hurry so he went out past Schorr’s body through the back door and jogged around past Roberts’s house where the dog was still barking like it could smell the blood in the air and was going completely crazy now around to the front of his house and through the picket gate.

He heard cars screech to a halt, their sirens still going to the right and to the left of him in the street in front of his house, and he threw the door shut behind him and threw the locks, slapped the clip out of the .38 and reached into his pocket for another.

He was home.

Among friends.

In his fortress.

It was the very best day of his life.

The squad cars and ambulances were all over the street like flies on shit, parked in front of the house all the way up and down the street, and Rule was on the bullhorn.

Lock was at the front window, or near the window, being careful not to show himself.

“I don’t like that…goddam thing there!” he yelled. “I don’t want you to use that anymore. You want to talk to me, you use the telephone!”

Okay. You got it,
he thought. He turned to Covitski. “The shooters in place?”

Covitski nodded. “Both doors, every window.”

He went to his car.

“Patch me through to an open line,” he said. “And get me Lock.”

It took a moment, and then he heard it ringing. Lock picked up on the second ring.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Wayne.”

“This is Wayne. What’s the last name of the party you want to speak to?”

“Lock.”

“Okay. Who are you and what do you want?”

“My name’s Rule. I’m just outside here. How are things going in there, Wayne?”

“Fine.”

“Are you all alone?”

“I have a Mrs. Carole Gardner in here with me and a Mr. Edwards.”

“And how are they doing?”

“They’re dying. Dead. I don’t know.”

“Which?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“It’s pretty important, Wayne.”

“I said I don’t know.”

“Okay. Is there anything you need? Anything we can do for you?”

“No.”

“How about them? Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Gardner, I mean. They’ll need a doctor, right?”

“They’re fine.”

“You said they were hurt.”

“They’re fine. No doctor.”

“You’ve been pretty busy tonight.”

“I know.”

“So why don’t you come outside—leave the guns in there—come on out and we’ll talk about it. I bet you’ve got a lot to say, Wayne, and I’ll tell you, I’d really be interested to hear.”

“Oh sure.”

“I mean it. No one’s going to hurt you if you do. You have my word on it. We’ll just talk. That’s all.”

“What’s your name again?”

“Rule.”

“I don’t know you, do I.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

“You’re with the police.”

“That’s right. I’m a lieutenant with the Barstow police.”

“Lieutenant Rule.”

“That’s right.”

There was a pause on the line.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m kinda busy right now. I’ll have to talk to you later, okay? ‘Bye.”

He hung up.

Busy with what, Rule wondered. If Gardner and Edwards were already dead.

“Well?”

Covitski was at his side leaning into the car.

“He won’t say if they’re dead or not but they’re in there and you can at least figure they’re hurting. This guy talks like I’m trying to sell him a subscription to
Better Homes and Gardens.
No affect at all.”

“No what?”

“Affect. His voice. It’s flat. Totally flat.”

“He’s not scared.”

“No. He’s not.”

“Did he say what he wants?”

Rule shrugged. “He doesn’t want anything.”

Covitski thought about it.

“You’re gonna try him again, right?”

“Yeah. Let’s give him a minute, though. I don’t want to push him.”

He glanced over his shoulder. A few houses down, they were hauling a boy up through a window off the edge of a roof. A pair of uniforms were leading Roberts and his dog to the police line down the block away from there. The dog seemed stunned by all the activity. For once it wasn’t barking.

He took a cigarette off Covitski and lit his own from its tip.

“Weird what you think of,” he said and handed it back to him.

“What?”

“If Howard Gardner had left his wife alone, we wouldn’t be here.”

Covitski gave him a look. Like he ought to have his head examined.

“We’d be here, Joe,” he said. “Sooner or later. We’d be here.”