NIGHT CRUISING (24 page)

From the station he
drove to the turnoff for l7 south and took it. They'd go to Phoenix,
take I-l0 down to Eloy where he'd pick up I-8 to San Diego.

"You think getting
Alzheimer's disease is a bad way to go, right?" he asked Molly.

"It's pretty bad,"
she said softly.

"There's a
thousand ways to die. For most people first the heart goes bad."

"You mean they get
heart disease?" Molly asked.

"No, I mean when
the inside of a person changes, when the landscape gets all black and
stinking. I had an old aunt when I was a kid. My father's sister. She
was widowed and maybe that alone was too much, the overload that blew
all of her circuits, that blackened the landscape in her blood red
heart.'' Cruise maintained his speed at fifty-five heading down from
the mountains into the plateau where he'd find Phoenix. He repeated
in his thoughts what he'd said to Molly.
Blood red heart
. It
was a comforting vision that leapt to mind. The rhythm of the tires
on pavement lulled him as he told his story.

"My mother told us
Aunt Maddie was senile, but it was more than that. I saw the
deterioration happen over a period of years while I was growing up.
She wanted something. I think she needed someone to care about her.

"She had sons.
Four of them, all rotten apples, every one. Her husband had taken a
long time dying. It was Parkinson's disease, I think. He just got
weaker and more frail and disoriented. His hands shook so bad he
couldn't hold a glass of water, his head shook like it was a flag
blasted by a high wind. Maddie loaned him so much of her energy just
to keep him going that she didn't have any left over for her boys.
They were wild, always in trouble. One of them attempted suicide.
They found him in the chicken coop hiding underneath the hens' nests.
Maddie stitched his wrists herself and bound them in white gauze."

He paused and looked
down at his own arms. The bandages were hidden by the long-sleeved
shirt he wore. Molly didn't know about that. No one did. When Lannie
asked about the blood on her sheets he told her he had had a
nosebleed in his sleep.

"The boy who tried
to slash his wrists was never right again. Then the youngest one,
Randy, started stealing. Money from his mother's purse, the family
silver--what there was of it. Finally he was breaking into houses and
carting off the neighbors' televisions. Two of the boys joined the
army together. One was drunk on patrol in Vietnam and ate a Claymore.
The other one struck his C.O. and was thrown out of the service for
insubordination. He runs a junkyard in Jersey. Lives in a shack with
a pack of stray dogs last I heard of him.

"So Maddie finally
lost her husband to Parkinson, then the boys forgot her, and she was
left alone.

"Daddy tried to
check on her when he could, but she got to where she was hateful to
visitors. Once we moved to another house and he went by to see
Maddie. 'You want our new address and phone number?' he asked. She
wouldn't look at him. 'No,' she told him. 'You don't?' '
No
,'
she said. He just walked out shaking his head; there wasn't much he
could do with her by that time.

"After that Maddie
went down fast. She saved everything, turned into a damn old pack
rat. She had shelves of paper grocery bags. Empty jars and cans.
Newspapers. Buttons. Lace. Ribbon. Vases. Her house became a garbage
dump of useless things. Drawers overran, counter tops were heaped
with things; she couldn't walk through it all without tripping.
Roaches were so thick they scattered every time she made a move.

"Her heart soured
the same way grapes ferment in a stone crock. It turned black as
night and shriveled to a tight little ball. She wouldn't come out of
the house or let anyone in.

"She died one
night in her bed. They found stacks of old cloth and clothes she'd
worn fifty years before--all this stuff piled on the bed with her.
Scattered around her were boxes of photographs and shoe boxes of old
shoes, even a tin coffeepot on the bed with her, all this stuff
leaving a tiny space for her to curl up on the mattress to sleep her
last sleep.

"I guess since she
didn't have anyone to monitor her behavior, she collected things
around her to keep some kind of watch. Her house was stuffed with
junk, we could hardly wade through it to her bedroom."

He remembered the sharp
smell of collected and forgotten things. The old dried grape smell of
his aunt lying in the bed, molting like a snake losing its skin.

"That's one way to
die," he concluded the narrative. "Mad a headless chicken.
All alone in the world, living out some kind of dream you think might
save you."

Cruise waited for
Moily's response to his story. When she didn't say anything he said,
"You're too young to know what it's like being alone in the
world."

She glanced at him, saw
him waiting for a reply. "I guess so," she said.

"I mean, you
think
you're alone now, taking this hitchhiking trip across country,
but you see. you've got me. Before me you had your dad. Real
loneliness is the killer."

"Is that why you
wanted me along?"

He liked her tone. She
had dropped the smart-ass sarcastic comebacks and seemed to really be
listening to what he was saying.

"That's one
reason," he said. "I have someone with me, I don't figure
I'll wind up like my Aunt Maddie. Or Lannie."

"Lannie works
hard."

Cruise made a sound of
disbelief. He rested his left arm on the window. The wind pressed
against his shirt sleeve, against the bandage, reminding him of the
slits in his skin. It wasn't unpleasant. "Lannie," he said,
"turned into a fucking zombie. She used to sing."

"She did?"

"Like an angel."

"She doesn't sing
anymore?"

"Only to herself.
She could have done something with her voice. She could have been
somebody."

"Not everyone can
be somebody important," Molly said. "We can't have a world
full of VlPs, can we?"

Cruise looked at her.
Sometimes the kids knew more than he gave them credit for. "Everyone
could try," he said. "Don't they owe it to themselves to at
least try?"

Molly wouldn't answer
him. She stared forward, her hands lying palm up on her lap as if she
were airing the raw places on her wrists.

"We got us a world
full of zombies," he said, trying to find the words to explain
his thinking. "There's more people who are just like Lannie than
not. They don't give a goddamn anymore. They don't give a ratshit.
They let themselves get beaten down. If they'd follow their
instincts, if they'd listen to their desires..."

"Like you?' Molly
asked abruptly, interrupting him.

"Yeah, like me,
you're fucking right like me. Even like you."

That got her attention.
She shook her head slowly.

"People need to do
what they feel they have to do. Like you did. Like I do. But most
people, they're all tied down with fears and they keep these unspoken
rules and regulations in their heads. They get an impulse, they don't
follow up on it. Someone told them it was wrong, or it would ruin
their reputation, or they'd suffer from it. People will look and
point, they think. People will call them names. People will laugh. So
they'd rather play it safe, take no chances. They end up like Lannie,
stuck in a two-bit job where the paycheck won't cover the expense of
living, no husband, five kids crawling all over the broken-down
furniture."

"And your father
to take care of," Molly added.

She'd left him wordless
at last. Was she trying to tell him something?

"Someone,"
Molly said, "has to take on the burdens. Lannie's doing that. If
she were a real zombie, she'd walk out on the kids and the job and
your father. She wouldn't care about protecting you."

Cruise thought about
it. Thought about it so hard he noticed he was squinting his eyes at
the lines in the road. It didn't fit in with the way he thought of
Lannie, how he blamed her. It made her sound heroic, but who could
ever picture his sister as a heroine? She'd asked for the burdens and
accepted them. She let them wear her down until she was devoid of any
personality of her own. Was Molly trying to say something about him?
Was she razzing his ass for not living up to some debt the world said
he owed? Well,
fuck that
. What did a sixteen-year-old kid know
about anything?

"Some of us know
how to live a life," he said, defending himself. He sounded
fierce, couldn't help it. He felt the kid was criticizing him. "You
have to stay free. You stay free, you remain outside the rules. You
can do anything you want and get away with it."

Again she didn't
respond. He thought she was acting in a mysterious manner. She should
be arguing with him and she wasn't. Just about everyone disagreed
with him when he said you could get away with murder if you wanted
to--even though he was irrefutable proof that you could.

Molly seemed to be
trying to point out flaws in his opinions without making him angry.
Trying to manipulate him? He didn't like that. He
hated
that.
No one
ever
manipulated Cruise Lavanic.

He didn't have to
listen to her. He didn't have to let what she said raise doubts in
his mind. His beliefs weren't dictated to him by stupid fucking
teenagers.

He drove to Phoenix
without speaking again. The crusty wounds on his arms itched. He
thought they might be bleeding a little. He hoped so. He felt tight
all over the way he had felt after waking from the nightmare.

An urgency filled him
with the jitters. It felt just like a horde of roaches crawling from
his innards out to the muscle sheaths covering his bones. They wanted
out. He needed to lessen the tension so that he wouldn't burst and
fly off in a million pieces.

He guessed he'd have to
kill someone after all.

#

Mark Killany spoke to
the homicide detective on the case.

"What makes you
think this is the same man?" the detective asked.

He wasn't very
cooperative. Mark pegged him right off as a man who had trouble
dealing with authority. He had taken those types into boot camp and
turned them every-which-way-but-loose until their brains were settled
into place. This man probably hadn't been in the service. He was too
young to be out of diapers when Mark was kicking butt all over
Vietnam. He was too young to be detecting more than the smell of his
own bad wind. He was a fucking know-it-all with an attitude.

"I'll tell you
again," Mark said wearily. He hated repeating himself. If people
didn't get the drift the first time what was the point? "The kid
at the wreck said the guy was driving a blue Chrysler. My man was
driving a blue Chrysler." Mark was ticking off the common
elements on the fingers of his right hand. Square in the detective's
face.

Next he'd punch out his
lights if he didn't get no satisfaction as Mick Jagger would say.
"Second. Kid said the guy had long hair, down to his shoulders,
and a beard, and a mustache. Guy picked up my kid in Mobile was
described to me the same way, had a beard, mustache' Third. I've been
following this bozo across country. If he took the turnoff at 666,
he'd have been at the scene about the time your killer was there."

"Hey, there's a
million blue Chryslers. There's ten million guys with long hair."
The detective wasn't convinced. "Besides. The kid didn't say
nothing about a girl in the car he saw leave."

"It was dark! That
kid was sitting in a car that had just been wrecked and his parents
were dead! His fucking mother was sprawled out in the front seat with
a broken neck. What do you expect, a detailed book report from that
kid?"

"Look here now.
We're searching for this son of a bitch. We've got roadblock
checkpoints. We've got out APBs, we're running some checks on the MO,
and if we find him and we find your girl with him, we'll be careful
to try to get her out of it unharmed. More than that I can't promise
you. Meanwhile I suggest you go cool off somewhere and let us get on
with our jobs."

Mark itched to slug
him. Slug him hard right in the pink snout in the middle of his face.
He was a piggy-eyed young man with a layered haircut, tassels on his
loafers, and a row of four, count 'em, four pens in the pocket of his
fashionably starched pastel shirt. He wasn't going to be any help.

"I'm leaving right
now," Mark said, going for the door. "And when I call back
from the road, you're going to tell me what's happening, isn't that
correct? You're going to let me know if you pick up any suspects or
you see my daughter?" He stood with his hand holding open the
door, looking back.

The detective glared.
He took a pack of Marlboro from the desk and shook out a cigarette,
lit it as if he had all the time in the world.

Mark waited. Wanted to
kick the door shut and throw the chairs through the wall, but he just
waited while the nerves jumped in his neck and the veins throbbed in
his temples.

"I guess we can
accommodate you that much. But keep this in mind." He dragged
deep on the Marlboro, blew out the smoke across the desk. "You
get in the way, you can be hauled in on charges of obstructing law
officers from performing their duty. We even stop you for speeding,
they're gonna know your name, Mr. Killany. We don't hold with former
Marines who want vigilante justice here in Arizona. Not even a
smidgeon."

Mark wanted to tell him
he didn't "hold with assholes" either, but thought it best
not to let the words slip past his lips. He left the door open and
stalked through the Globe, Arizona, police station without looking at
anyone. Outside at the curb where his car was parked he couldn't keep
his anger under wraps any longer. He slammed the parking meter with
his open hand, marched to the car, and jerked open the driver's side
door with enough force to make it bang back shut so he had to open it
again.