Strip (41 page)

The man who came forward and stepped up onto the stage was not someone who seemed familiar, although a few in the audience had seen him before, in dim light from a distance. At that time his name had been Joe Carver. But the man they thought of when someone mentioned the name Joe Carver had always worn a ski mask, and this morning he was very far from Los Angeles.

Since he left Los Angeles, Jefferson Davis Falkins had been driving the black Trans Am with the window open and his left arm resting on the top of the door, so it was already acquiring a red-brown tan. The silky brown hair of Melisande Carr was blowing around her perfect ivory forehead, but that didn’t seem to bother her at all. Her expression was beatific as she reloaded the magazine with .45 ACP rounds, inserted the magazine, and pushed it home with the heel of her hand.

The three-thousand-dollar sound system mounted under the dash, in the doors, and behind them cried high and hummed harmonically in the foreground, and thudded in the background so deeply that it vibrated their teeth.

Carrie pressed the button on her armrest to lower her window all the way. The wind inside the car grew stronger, so her hair lashed about violently. She took a look behind the car at the long, empty road, then held her right arm out, gripping the pistol. As the little white metal sign with the number sixty-five approached, it seemed to be moving faster and faster, but as it came, she steadied her arm until she could hold the sight on it. She pulled the trigger, the big gun jumped and roared, and in the last second she could see the blue sky shining through the hole she had punched in the sign as it flashed by the car into the past.

“Did you get it?” Jeff shouted over the music.

“What?”

He lowered the volume. “Did you hit it?”

“Drilled it. That’s some dead signage.”

“That’s what—six in a row? You’re really improving.”

She put the safety on and slid the gun into her purse on the floor. “While you’ve got the radio off, we should talk about what we’re going to do before we get there.”

“Get where?”

“To the next place.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought we’d check into a nice hotel for a few days, to get over the stress and strain of being on the road all this time without stopping. We’ll eat some good food, drink some champagne, and hang around the pool. And we can catch up on all the sex we’ve missed.”

“What a surprise. Then what?”

“While we’re doing all that, we take a close look at the town and see what seems good to us.”

“How long does this go on?”

“Until we see something we like or see that there isn’t anything good and move on.”

“If there is, then I suppose you want to plunder it and then move on?”

“That’s the general outline of the idea. So what do you want to do?”

“That. Exactly that.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder as he guided the car down the long, straight highway. Far ahead he saw a car moving along in the right lane, a bright red dot on the gray ribbon. He was going fast, so after a minute or two he was gaining on it visibly. He could see now that it was a Corvette, and there were two heads in it. He could see for miles ahead, and no car was coming toward them, so he pulled to the left to pass the Corvette. The driver of the Corvette kept his speed constant instead of trying to race with him, and that was a relief. As he accelerated past, Carrie leaned away from him and straightened. He glanced at her in time to see her raise her right arm to the window. He drew in a breath to shout, but there was the loud report of the pistol, her hand jerked upward, and something terrible happened inside the Corvette.

On the Corvette’s windshield a hole had appeared in the center of a blossom of milky, pulverized glass. The driver’s head jerked against the headrest but didn’t come back. He slumped in his seat, and the Corvette wavered, then swerved, then bounced off into a field of alfalfa, grounded itself on some unseen obstacle, and stopped.

Jeff stood on the brakes of his Trans Am, guided it to a stop along the shoulder of the road, threw it into reverse, and backed up quickly. He swung open his door, pivoted out of the driver’s seat, and ran. He sprinted across the field to the car, and as he came, he could see the disaster through the windshield. The driver had been a man about fifty years old with a balding head and a pair of aviator sunglasses, but there was a perfect round hole in the left side of his forehead. The passenger beside him was a blond woman, a bit younger than the driver. Her face, hair, and blouse were spattered with tiny droplets of blood, and she was rocking back and forth, crying. It was a special cry, her red-lip-sticked mouth in a wide-open, unchanging “Aaaaah! Aaaaaah!”

Jeff went to her side of the car, opened the door, and tried to pull her out. “It’s all right. You’ll be okay,” he said gently. His words made as little sense as her cry. It wasn’t all right, and she wouldn’t be okay. The man beside her, who seemed to be her husband, had just had his brains blown out onto the headrest. Jeff wasn’t even sure why he wanted her to get out of the car. He looked past her and saw, through the driver’s side window, Carrie walking up. She still had her .45 pistol in her hand. She leaned in and looked at the dead driver. Then she walked around the car to stand by Jeff.

“Look at this,” he shouted. “Why did you do this?”

“Because it’s exciting.”

Jeff had no words.

“I told you I wanted to do it. I’ve been telling you for days. I guess you haven’t been listening to me—not really listening.” She shrugged. She looked at the woman, who had, at some point, lowered her scream to a quiet, sobbing moan. “I guess I’d better do this one too, huh?”

“No,” said Jeff. “What’s wrong with you? You can’t just kill people.”

She leaned close to the woman and spoke distinctly. “His name is Jefferson Davis Falkins, and I’m Melisande Carr.” She straightened and turned to Jeff, smiling. Her face was beautiful and perfect, but watching him from somewhere behind the big, liquid eyes was something that terrified him. “Well, what do you think, Jeff? Can I kill her now?”

He stood in silence for a few seconds, then turned and began to walk back the way he had come, through the tall alfalfa that whipped against his knees. He heard her yell after him, “You didn’t answer, Jeff. Can I?”

He kept walking, staring straight ahead at his car and at the immense empty landscape beyond it. He raised his head without looking back. “Yes!” In a moment, he heard the loud report of the gun again. A moment later he heard the whisper of Carrie’s light, graceful footsteps as she trotted through the alfalfa to catch up with him.

They drove on, the black Trans Am moving across vast, flat plains divided into squares of green or brown or gold so enormous that they were best discerned from the window of an airliner passing miles above.

After a few minutes, she said, “Somewhere dead ahead is a town whose luck is about to change.”

Jeff glanced at her, and she was holding the gun again, smiling. For the first time, he was really afraid of her. He could feel the hair on the back of his neck rising. He looked ahead at the road. She had him now. He was completely under her control. No matter what insane whim she had, she would find a way to make him go along with her, to say, “Yes, sure. It’s okay with me.” And one day, she was going to feel the urge to get rid of him too. Maybe she would decide she wanted to see a man die while he was having sex with her. Or she would decide he just wasn’t any fun anymore and have a few more seconds of amusement pushing him off a high place and watching him fall. He turned his head to look at her again.

She was staring at him, watching his face closely, and he felt as though she were reading his mind. “What’s the matter, Jeffy? Getting to be a bit of a pussy?”

“No,” he said. He kept his eyes on the road for a few seconds, then gave in to the urge to look at her. She was still staring at him, and she was holding the big .45 pistol again.

“What are you doing?”

She raised the gun and aimed it at his face, then said, “
Pow.
”

“Cut it out. That could go off.”

“
Pow.
Afraid?”

“Carrie, that’s enough.”

“
Pow.
”

He was overcome with a rage that was partly fear, partly shame at letting her bully him, and partly anger at her for murdering the couple in the Corvette. He swung his right arm to backhand her face. She bent down, both hands coming together over her bleeding nose. The gun was in her lap, and he snatched it. Part of him thought that all he was going to do with it was take it away from her, but part of him knew that wasn’t going to be enough. He fired it into the side of her head.

Instantly the inside of the car was coated with a film of tiny blood droplets. He could barely see out the windshield. His hands, his arms, his face were speckled with back-spatter. Carrie’s head lolled against the broken side window, and he could see the stream of blood already draining onto the upholstery and the rug. “Oh my God,” he said. He tried to clear the windshield with his hand, but the blood only smeared.

She seemed bigger and more frightening dead than she had been alive. What was he going to do with her? He couldn’t stop in the middle of this empty landscape and dig a grave. People would see him from ten miles away. And he had to get as far as he could from the two dead people in the Corvette before he did anything—a couple hundred miles, if he could. With his right arm he pushed her body so it was crammed onto the floor space in front of the passenger seat. He was in terrible trouble now. He would have to try to drive to a place where there was a ditch or a river, and dump her out. Then he would clean his car. He would have to strip off these clothes, wash himself, and put on clean ones.

Even looking innocent might not be enough. People had seen him with her. If she was found dead, the girlfriend she’d been with in the diner could describe him to the police. And Roger, the ex-boyfriend. He would just love to be able to show the cops all the places in his house where Jefferson Davis Falkins had left his fingerprints.

Jeff drove faster, staring out the clear space on the left side of the windshield. He would have to pass every car he saw before they could get a clear view of him and his car windows. If anybody saw blood, they’d call the police. It would have to be night before he stopped, and the right sort of place, where there was cover and there were no people.

He looked ahead and drove still faster. As long as he kept the car moving fast, he would still be alive.

K
APAK DROVE
the rental car to the office of his lawyer, Gerald Ospinsky. When he opened the door, the receptionist looked up and said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Kapak. He’s in the conference room waiting for you.” It was as though nothing had happened, as though this were his thousandth time here and there would be two thousand more.

Kapak smiled. “Thank you.” He walked through the big oak door into the back corridor, past the offices of the partners to the conference room.

Ospinsky saw him and stood, but remained a bit bent over, like a man who was expecting a blast of wind to blow his papers away, and he would have to slap them down and hold them. He looked, as always, pale and worried. “Hello, Mr. Kapak. Sit down.”

He shut the conference room door and moved to sit down across from Kapak.

“Well, Gerald” said Kapak, “is everything ready?”

Ospinsky’s eyes roamed the table. “Yes. I believe so. Yes.” He pointed. “First, here are the checks for your signature. Your accountants made them out according to your instructions. A hundred thousand to each of your closest … assistants and the managers of each of your clubs. Fifty thousand for each of the assistant managers, talent bookers, chefs, et cetera. Twenty-five thousand to each of the waiters, dishwashers, busboys, bouncers, and dancers.” Ospinsky paused. “I have to say, if what you’re trying to do is buy their love, then—”

“I’m not that stupid. I’m trying to make it go where I want now so the government can’t confiscate it later.” Kapak picked up one of the pens on the table and began to sign the checks in the stack quickly, moving them to another pile as he went. “And a hundred thousand to you. I hope you saw it. Oh, here it is.” He signed it and pushed it across the table to him.

“Yes. I thank you for that, but I don’t think it would be appropriate for—”

“Yours isn’t a present. It’s a retainer so you’ll still answer the phone on the first ring.”

“Well, okay. I’ll have to have you sign a standard agreement.”

“Put it at the bottom of the pile, and I’ll get to it in a minute.”

Ospinsky said, “I should bring up another slight problem. Or maybe it’s intentional. You’re transferring ownership of these assets but ignoring a few major ones. For instance, there are three liquor licenses. The going rate for a license this month seems to begin just north of two hundred thousand dollars. You can sell yours at auction or through a broker, or—”

“They go with the clubs. Each club goes with everything that’s attached to it—land, license, building, sound equipment, security systems, whatever.”

“That said, I have the transfer papers all ready, as you requested. My assistant, Harriet, is a notary, and I can sign as witness.” He went to the door and called, “Harriet? Would you mind helping us out for a while?”

The signing went on for forty minutes, with Kapak moving from one pile of papers to the next, and Harriet and Ospinsky following to notarize, countersign, and fold papers into envelopes.

At the end of an hour, Ospinsky smiled faintly, his eyes still terrified, as though he were in the presence of a dangerous madman. “That’s it, I believe. As soon as these are mailed, you’re a pauper.”

“Homeless, but not quite a pauper,” said Kapak.

“I certainly hope you’ve made the right decision.”

“It’s not as bad as that. I’ll be carrying half a million in cash.”

Ospinsky’s eyes nearly shut as he made his pained grimace. “In legal terms, I believe these bonuses and transfers are your best bet for avoiding confiscation. There’s never been a claim the money wasn’t yours.”