Michael R Collings (16 page)

Then without realizing what he was doing or where he was heading, he found himself in the garage and jerking open the door to Daniel’s Corvette. He sank into the seat, numbly registering the icy coldness of leather against the blistering heat of his naked back and legs. In the darkness his right hand scrabbled in the storage compartment between the seats, blindly, frantically, for a long moment before he felt a flood of relief as his hand struck something small and oblong, with two studs protruding from one end. He grabbed it and aimed it over his shoulder and hit the left stud, grateful that Daniel had at least taught him that bit of technological magic.

The garage door whined as the heavy plywood doors ascended on their well-oiled hinges. Cold night air billowed into the garage. There was no fog, not even any clouds. The sterile stars prickled coldly, malevolently against a midnight sky.

The boy jabbed the key viciously into the ignition and cranked it so hard that the key nearly broke in his hand. The engine turned over once, twice, coughed ominously, then with a screaming roar, caught. He jammed the gear into what he hoped was reverse and hit the gas pedal, hoping against hope that all of the time spent watching Daniel manipulate the gears would help him now. The engine roared unevenly and the car jackrabbited out of the garage, tires squealing against the concrete driveway as the boy struggled with the wheel, finally managing to spin the car around on the circle of pavement directly in front of the house, until the ’Vette was facing directly down Oleander.

He jammed the gear shift into another position and depressed the accelerator again. The car jumped forward a dozen feet, shuddered, then jumped forward again. All the time the engine roared as if it were a mob of hungry lions. Or merely an echo of the bloody
thrummm
behind Miles’ eyes. His head ached horribly, and he felt as if he were going to throw up all over Daniel’s genuine leather sport seats.

In one of the houses just down the street, a light went on and a curtain wavered, but the boy paid no attention to the face that appeared, stared, then abruptly disappeared again. The light flickered out.

The boy slammed the accelerator again, and the car leaped forward. He didn’t try to shift gears—he was in second, which was why the car had started with such difficulty, but at least he could keep going. He let gravity take its course, and the car rolled faster and faster down Oleander. At the far end, where the street dead-ended onto Mariposa, he swung wide, barely trying to see through eyes almost blinded by blood and tears.

He didn’t know if any other cars were coming or not; he didn’t care. He was beginning to chill now. The heat was evaporating from his body in great waves that steamed over the windows, cutting his visibility even more.

A stuttering left onto Reynolds, then a quick right onto Bingham. He grappled with the gears and the clutch again, just enough to jump from second into fourth. Again the car almost stalled, but he managed to keep it going, building up speed as he slipped through the night.

Thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty, sixty, sixty-five.

The speed limit was a well-posted thirty in this part of town. He didn’t care. He slammed through two red lights without braking. Neither time was there another car in the intersection, but Miles didn’t bother to look. He was escaping at last. He had the man’s car. He wore the man’s blood (and his own—and his
mother
’s) crusting on his body like a badge of honor…or disgrace. Like armor inviolable and protective, seamless and corrosive. He wore the man’s life encasing his own. And he was escaping at last.

The car slowed slightly as it began the final ascent out of Tamarind Valley toward the north. From there, Reynolds Boulevard’s four wide lanes shrank suddenly to two, pitted and badly in need of repair. What had been a major artery became instead little more than a twisting, rutted roadway that connected Tamarind Valley with the Santa Reina Valley on the other side of the foothills. That part of the road was known simply as Norwegian Grade.

He took the crest of the hill at seventy—somewhere around fifty miles too fast for safety, fifty-five too fast for comfort. For an instant, the front tires left the pavement, then the ’Vette was flat on the roadway again, squealing as Miles yanked it to the left, then sharply to the right in a frantic attempt to keep on the asphalt.

A quarter of the way down the grade, his right front tire slipped off the splintered tarmac and slewed through loose gravel. Prickly pear cactus with spines six inches long scraped the side of the ’Vette from bumper to bumper. The sound touched something deep in the boy, something that had been suffocating and lay nearly dead. He grinned wildly. Then he blinked—and in an instant of horrifying clarity, understood that he was naked and bleeding and shivering with cold and with shock, and in a car he could not drive, hurtling down Norwegian Grade at impossible speeds, fleeing through the night from....

He remembered everything. His mind froze. And with it, his hands.

The steering wheel twisted like a captive serpent beneath his grasp as the roadway dished up on a nearly ninety-degree curve halfway down the grade. If he had jerked the wheel an inch, even half an inch, there might have been a chance.

But the images of what lay behind him stunned him. He held the vibrating wheel in a death grip and opened his mouth and screamed, long and piercing and desperate, as the ’Vette ripped through the woefully inadequate barbed wire fencing and arced over great patches of ghostly cactus. The car flipped once and almost completed a second flip before it smashed into an outcropping of ragged burnt-brown stone and with a soft
whuuump
that instantly became a hurricane’s roar, exploded into flames.

From the
Tamarind Valley Times
, 21 November 1997:

ANOTHER TRAGIC DEATH ON KILLER CURVE

The still-smoldering remains of a late-model sports car were discovered at four o’clock this morning by a passing motorist. The driver had apparently been racing down Norwegian Grade, notorious as one of the most dangerous roads in the entire Tamarind Valley. Because of the inaccessibility of the wreckage at the bottom of the canyon, police investigators were unable to reach the scene of the incident until well past seven o’clock. At this time, the identity of the driver has not been released.

The incident, the fifth fatality on that section of road in less than two years, will likely spur increased controversy in the City Council over whether or not to widen the pavement, at an estimated cost of....

From the
Tamarind Valley Times
, 22 November 1997:

NORWEGIAN GRADE MYSTERY
intensifies

In a bizarre twist, the driver of the late-model Corvette destroyed by fire along the Norwegian Grade two nights ago has been identified as an unlicensed fifteen-year-old, Miles Stanton, of 1066 Oleander Place. Attempts at notifying his parents led to the grisly discovery of the bodies of his mother, Elayne Stanton Warren (35) and his stepfather Daniel Warren (37), in the bedroom of their home on Oleander Place. Both had been stabbed repeatedly. One informed source reported unofficially that the circumstances surrounding the deaths were particularly vicious.

“It was like a slaughterhouse in there,” the source noted. Officers present at the scenes of both incidents refuse to make any additional statements, other than that a preliminary investigation suggests the youth first killed his stepfather, then his mother, and then attempted to escape in the car owned by his stepfather. Elayne Warren leaves no immediate relatives; Daniel Warren, owner of four automobile dealerships in the area, is survived only by his mother, Amanda Warren, of Woodland Hills.

Funeral services for all three are pending.

The Huntleys, February 2010

Cracks

The good news was, for several weeks after that night, neither Willard nor Catherine saw a single roach.

The bad news…in the middle of February, it began to rain.

The first few days of February were fortunately clear, relatively warm, and dry. The skies were the deep blue portrayed in the more touristy postcards that touted Southern California as a perpetually green, perpetually blooming paradise. One of the neighbors down Oleander Place even had a beautiful large tree in the front yard that was laden with bright, ripe oranges. From a certain angle it was silhouetted against the Coastal Range across the freeway and could itself have been the star of just such a post card.

Once school resumed, the neighbor kids—occasionally including the Huntley four—were able to play outside wearing only light jackets well into twilight. Not that Will, Burt, and Suze seemed drawn to any of the
pro tempore
, shifting gangs that formed and re-formed along the short street. The older three Huntleys stayed pretty close to home, satisfied with brief forays into the backyard for tag or wildly awkward attempts at badminton…played mostly without the benefit of nets—or rules.

Sams, however, seemed delighted by the limitless prospects from the front yard. His favorite Christmas present had been a brand-new, battery-powered, ride-on car. The thin plastic body was molded in bright-red with mock-chrome details, then finished in the general outlines of a classic 90s Chevy Corvette, sleek, low to the ground, looking like it was racing even when standing still, with the promise of infinite, lightning-fast speed.

Well, perhaps
very
slow lightning.

“Willard, he’s too little for something like that,” Catherine had protested when Willard caught her arm and guided her over to where a floor model sat gleaming on the top shelf in a Wal-Mart display. “He’ll get hurt.”

“Nonsense, he can probably walk faster than that thing can go, and anyway it has seatbelts. Safety first, you know.” He laughed and pointed at the specifications on one of the boxes.

“And it’s
way
too expensive,” Catherine responded, not willing to give up the battle just because of a little laughter.

“Yeah, it’s more than the bikes we got for the other kids,” Willard agreed, “but not that much more. And besides…”

“And besides, you always wanted something like that when you were a kid, didn’t you?” This time Catherine laughed.

“Okay, you caught me. But they didn’t make motorized cars then. The only thing we had were clunky, pedal-driven sedans and fire-trucks. One of the kids on my block had one when I was six or seven and it broke my heart that I didn’t.

“Of course, when he let me try once, I was almost too big and the pedals stuck and I ended up pushing it along with my feet, which wasn’t all that much fun. But it was the principal of the thing.”

Catherine was silent for a second before she sighed and nodded. “All right. At least we live in a safe neighborhood now. No one racing up and down the streets.”

The car came home with them that day.

The moment he opened the huge box on Christmas morning, Sams seemed possessed by the car. He sat in it through all the morning festivities, even though the battery hadn’t been connected and not even the horn would work. He sat in it mock-steering and making his own hooting horn sounds while the rest of the family trooped out to the garage to be surprised by their own sets of wheels, bicycles in a variety of styles, colors, and sizes. He wanted to sit in it when Catherine called everyone in for the traditional Christmas breakfast of freshly baked cinnamon rolls and hot chocolate.

“No you don’t, buster. No spilling on my brand new carpet,” Catherine had said, trying to sound stern but failing so miserably that both she and Sams burst out in hysterical laughter.

But he was allowed to take it outside right after breakfast and, while the other three pedaled up and down Oleander Place, occasionally joined by other small riders on other pristine bicycles, Sams drove his Vette in tight little circles on the driveway, beeping away and waving at Catherine every time he passed her standing by the garage door.

It had been a very good Christmas.

By early February, Sams was allowed to ride not only on the driveway but for three yard-lengths on each side of Oleander. At the end of the rose border on one side, he would dutifully turn around—staying carefully on the sidewalk—and ride back around, past his own driveway, and down the other side to where the white picket fence began, then turn around and repeat the process.

Left to himself, he would probably have been happy to putt around all day. Still, an hour or so in the afternoons usually satisfied him.

Willard was in a hurry when he backed out of the garage early that Friday evening.

He had just gotten home—a couple of hours before usual, as it turned out, since his current project had been abruptly cancelled. He wasn’t in a particularly good mood because of the interruption in his routine, but he was happy to be able to spend some more time with the kids. He wasn’t generally around in the afternoons when they arrived home from school.

He was just settling in to work on a jigsaw puzzle in the family room with Will, Jr., Burt, and Suze, when he heard Catherine yelp from the kitchen.

Roaches
was his first thought. But no elongated scream followed the short outburst, so he tentatively relaxed.

“Willard,” Catherine called. No terror in her voice, just the everyday we’ve-got-a-minor-crisis pitch that any parent of small children might recognize.

He rose, careful not to disturb the scattered puzzle pieces, and made his way through a small disaster area of roll-and push-toys that Sams hadn’t gotten around to putting away.

“What is it?” he called…just as he got the first whiff of smoke—thick, cloying, unmistakable. “What’s wrong?” This time there was more urgency in his voice.

“Oh, nothing. Just this da…this stupid waffle iron. Again!”

The family-sized waffle iron was a virtual antique, the final fossilized relic of their wedding reception. It was a gift from one of Catherine’s aunts, who gave one—identical in make and model—to each of her nine nephews and nieces as they married. Originally gleaming in chrome and black, the iron was now stained and streaked by spatters of ancient grease and the baked-on spilled-over remains of thousands of pancakes and waffles, all seemingly impervious to even Catherine’s meticulous close-inspection cleaning.