NIGHT CRUISING (22 page)

When he finished,
Cruise reached into his pants pocket and withdrew the diamond ring
his last victim had been wearing. It was the first time he'd really
looked at it. There were six big diamonds encircling a round center
stone. It was a beauty. He slipped it onto his father's hand. "Here,
this is for you. Isn't it nice? A real diamond, I think."

The old man held it up
to his face, inches from his nose. "What is it?"

"A diamond ring.
Lannie said you lost the other one I gave you. It doesn't matter. You
can lose it. I'll get more."

"Pretty," the
old man said, admiring the sparkle as he turned the stone back and
forth on his finger. For long seconds he was lost in the glitter of
the material world.

"Yeah. I knew
you'd like it."

"I'm hungry."

"All right. Get up
and I'll take you to the kitchen."

"Where is it?"

"I'll take you."
Cruise helped him from the tangle of covers, brought the slippers
from beneath the bed for his feet. He guided him to the door and down
the hall.

Molly sat in a rocking
chair across from Lannie. Her eyes were red. Crying. Always crying.
They did that so much at Lannie's house. Why would they think she'd
help them escape? She knew better.

"This is my
father." He smiled as he showed off the old man to Molly, but it
was a wisp of a smile, a shadow. And it made him ache in his chest.
The smile cost him the limit of what he was able to pay.

#

Molly had begged her.
"You have to help me. Your brother's crazy. He's killed people.
He'll probably kill me."

Lannie pursed her lips
and shook ash-blond hair from the frames of her glasses. "Don't
waste your breath. I can't do a thing."

"Why not? You know
what he's doing. He has to be stopped. He
kills
people!"

"He won't be
stopped by me. I never could stop him. Daddy couldn't stop him. The
only thing that will end it is a cop's bullet."

"Are you afraid of
him, is that it? He wouldn't have to know..."

"He'd know the
second I touched the telephone."

"But why haven't
you told before? When he left, why didn't you call the police the
first time you knew for sure?"

"You don't
understand. Cruise is like a flood or an earthquake. He won't be
stopped by me turning him in. They'd never catch him. He's too smart.
He's been doing this for half his life."

Molly tried to think.
Half his life.
If he was about forty, that meant twenty years
of killing and he hadn't been caught.

She couldn't believe
it. "Twenty years?" she whispered.

"Longer."

"But if you don't
do something, he's going to...he'll..."

Lannie turned away her
face. She picked at lint on the red chenille robe. "I can't help
you," she said. "I won't. He helps pay for Daddy's care. I
couldn't do it without him. I work like a dog just to pay the
mortgage on this dump. Who's going to take care of my kids if I
don't? Who will feed them and give them a place to live? I have to
have someone come in when I'm working. My no-good bastard of a
husband left me when the last one was born. I can't leave Daddy
alone. It takes money; living, by God, takes money."

"You're no better
than he is," Molly said. Her cheeks flamed and tears rushed to
her eyes. "Those aren't excuses. There is no excuse for what
you're doing. You're as much a killer as he is if you don't try to
stop him. They'd make you an accessory; you'll go to prison."

"So I'll go to
prison. It can't be much worse than what I'm in now. Look the fuck
around you."

Cruise walked the old
man into the room and Molly turned to face her executioner. He
proudly introduced his father. When she saw Cruise smile, she said
boldly to the old man, "Your son's a murderer."

She waited for him to
react. She expected him to turn on his son. Instead he blinked
stupidly and murmured, "I'm real hungry."

Molly's mouth dropped
open. Lannie stood from the sofa. She stepped over the laden coffee
table and made her way to the kitchen. Molly heard her opening the
refrigerator door.

Cruise placed the old
man carefully on the sofa where Lannie had been sitting. He patted
his shoulders, settling him in. When he turned back to Molly he
wasn't smiling.

"He's got
Alzheimer's," he said. "Leave him alone."

"No wonder you
come here. No one hassles you. No one cares enough."

She flinched when
Cruise moved across the room and grabbed her by the arms. He spoke
into her face, spittle flying. When she tried to turn her head, he
shook her until her eyes rolled in their sockets. "They care!"
he shouted. His green eyes darkened to a drab hazel color. "My
father loves me!"

He dropped her into the
rocker, turned on his heel to his father. "You love me, don't
you, Daddy? Tell her!"

"I don't know,
I
don't know
. Who is she? Where am I? I'm so hungry.."

#

Cruise lay on Lannie's
unmade bed unable to sleep. Molly was bound to the faucets in the
second bathroom at the end of the hall. She sat in the tub. He told
her she wanted to pee, she'd have to do it in her clothes, he wasn't
coming to see about her until he was ready to leave. It was his way
of saying
fuck you
. He thought she probably got his drift.

He reflected that Molly
was right, he liked it in this house. He came back because no one
cared enough to do anything about him. Even Lannie's kids didn't give
a damn. They got up, the three oldest ones dressed for school, ate
breakfast, and were out the door to catch the bus. Said one word to
him,
hello
, that was it. The two little ones, Sherry in
diapers hardly knew him, and Judy, the three-year-old, didn't think
much of him one way or the other. Unca Cruise, Judy could say. But
she never came to him or hugged his neck. She talked to her baby doll
and poured water from a toy teapot.

Then there was Lannie.
Broken like an aggressive dog you kick until it hides under beds when
you walk in the room. She had about as much spirit as a June bug.

That left Daddy. Brain
like grapefruit pulp. Who did he love? Who had he ever loved? It sure
wasn't Cruise or Lannie or any of the others, not even his mother.
His father hadn't known how to love anyone, hadn't the capacity. He
made a living, he fucked his wife, he raised his children to fear
him. That's all his life amounted to. A duty to persevere, never mind
having any fun, feeling any joy, experiencing any hope. That made him
one of the strange imposters who could never live by society's rules.
Cruise grew to love him if only for that reason. He wasn't like other
men. He viewed the world one way while other men saw it another.
Cruise thought if his father really knew what his son had done with
his life, he would have admired it. Before he came down with
Alzheimer's he made no remark to dispute Cruise's feelings. He never
made any remark at all. Cruise took that for approval.

Cruise always felt
belittled and powerless as a kid, but he didn't blame Daddy. Nothing
in a young person's world was under his control. His father had that
iron fist, that razor strap, those chains. That's what fathers were
supposed to do. That was the job entrusted to them.

Cruise wanted more than
anything to possess the same power his father wielded. He thought for
a while he'd never find a way. It wasn't enough to get some woman and
raise kids the way his father had done. He wanted to go beyond that
narrow scope, break out into the wider world where his actions
determined whether men would live or they would die. His father was
satisfied with punishment. Cruise wanted to wipe out the lights
behind the eyes, take away the years people had coming to them, rob
them of the future. In the hierarchy of control, his chosen way was
at the pinnacle. He was at the top, man, he was at the zenith, no one
was above him.

He was a man made in
his father's image.

He could sleep if he
honestly believed that.

#

Molly thought her bones
were going to rub holes through her skin. If she had more padding she
wouldn't be in such horrible pain. Cruise tied her wrists to her
ankles before looping the rope around the faucet handles of the tub.
He ended by taking the rope up from them to the shower head. Even if
she managed to get herself undone from the many knots around the
stainless-steel faucet handles, she'd still be fastened to the shower
head.

The bath cloths Cruise
had wrapped around her wrists and ankles to take some of the friction
off her skin were beginning to slip loose. The yellow nylon rope dug
into her flesh like a hundred stinging wasps. She cried for a while,
cried until she started getting sick to her stomach and had to quit.

She cataloged her
surroundings. There was a Rorschach blotch of rust around the lever
in the tub that closed off the drain. As she stared at it the shape
brought to mind an airplane, a bouquet of flowers, a casket, and a
baby in a crib.

There was a bathtub
ring. Lannie wasn't any too meticulous in her housework. The tub
looked as if it hadn't been scrubbed in a month or more.

The caulk sealing the
tub into the wall and the caulk around the square egg-yolk-yellow
tiles were growing patches of mildew. A douse of Clorox would cure
that, Molly knew, but maybe Lannie didn't. From her biology class
study on fungus, Molly remembered how the mold looked under a
microscope. Thin and furry like little thousand-legged insects. Truly
unappetizing.

There was a constant
drip from the tub faucet. It had no recognizable rhythm. Not enough
beat, couldn't dance to it. Just an irritating
drip, drip, drip
that kept the drain wet.

After a while, Molly
stopped even hearing it, but she could smell the faint chlorine scent
that rose from the drain, and there was a dampness that hung in the
air of the tub area.

Around noon Lannie came
into the locked bathroom and offered her a drink of water from a
coffee mug that had red hearts all over it. Molly drank the tepid
fluid gratefully. She begged to be freed so she could use the toilet,
but Lannie just shook her stringy hair and left again.

"Are you really
going to let me wet all over myself?" Molly yelled.

She heard the key turn
in the door. They must have used the bathroom as a holding cell
before. She suspected it was Cruise who had put in the new burnished
silver doorknob with the outside locking mechanism. Or maybe Lannie
locked the old man in here so she could get some peace and quiet. She
wouldn't put anything past this family. They were all bent in some
unimaginable way.

The next time Lannie
came with water, Molly refused to drink. Already her bladder was full
to aching and they obviously weren't going to let her out of the tub
until Cruise woke. She'd be damned if she'd soil herself. So she
wouldn't drink. Or eat. Not that food had been offered her since the
burned bacon and scorched eggs Lannie served

up at breakfast.

Molly had another day
to think. While Cruise slept in Mexico she'd decided she must be
careful or she'd get herself killed. She still thought that, even
more so now. The murder of the man at the lake horrified her much
more than the Mexican's death. She could still lie to herself about
the Mexican. Try to believe Cruise was in his seriously warped way
protecting her. But when he killed the fat man at the side of the
road, she knew for certain that her first suspicions were correct.
Cruise killed without motive, randomly, whenever he felt like it, and
it meant no more to him than if he were snuffing out a bee crawling
over a summer picnic.

Sitting all day in the
rub, shifting her weight from one bony hip to the other, she had time
to think over everything after she had finished noting the grime
around the toilet bowl, the mildew in the caulking, the dead bugs
caught in the cover over the fluorescent bar light that hung above
the bath mirror.

She dissected her
decision to leave home. No use lying to herself. She loved her stodgy
father with his old-fashioned ideas of discipline. What a spoiled
baby she was for not trying to cooperate with the counselor who
advised her to go easy on her dad, try to understand his position,
that although he was tough on her it was because he loved her. And
because she was all he had left.

She hadn't tried to
work it out with him. She thought, well, her life was set into stone,
it would never change. She wasn't stimulated by any of the subjects
at school, she didn't have any really close friends, she pitied
herself for not having a mother, and she gave her father hell for
being who and what he was as if he could change more easily than she.
She saw now that people probably didn't change once they were adults.
Her father was a Marine, and although he had retired, he would always
be a Marine, a lifer. He thought kids no different than his boot-camp
trainees. They had to be whipped into shape. They had to learn duty
and responsibility and how to take orders. Now she knew that was a
mistake he'd made, but from the perspective she had in the bathtub of
a strange house, captive of a killer, she figured her father's method
of child raising, mistaken as it was, seemed highly preferable to the
present situation she found herself in. She realized only now how
self-centered and selfish she had been. How...immature.

She'd suffer boot camp
any day compared to one night on the road with Cruise Lavanic.

And if adults never
changed, that meant Cruise was locked into murder as a way of life.
His sister was imprisoned by her own circumstances and her deathly
fear of her brother. Even the old man was lost, his mind held hostage
by deterioration of his brain cells.

But
she
could
change. Molly Killany was not an adult, not by a long shot, she
realized the truth now. She was a kid who though she knew it all,
thought she could get out in the world and create a brand-new life
for herself. Thought she could take care of herself, stay out of
danger's way.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
She was about as stupid
as a bag of rocks.