Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (23 page)

‘And what did she say?’

‘She said the same as you, that I was stressed. But I could
feel
it, Momma, I could feel it dragging me out of the house, and I can
still
feel it, just as strong.’

Sissy took hold of both of his hands. She looked into his eyes and for the first time she saw uncertainty, and magic.

‘You may look exactly like your father, but inside you’re just like me, aren’t you?’

Trevor nodded. There were tears in his eyes, and Sissy suddenly realized how much this was affecting him.

‘I didn’t think—I never had any idea that I could feel this way. It’s like I’m needed,
urgently
. It’s like I’m important to people that I don’t even know.’

‘Yes,’ said Sissy. ‘You are.’

‘But how
can
I be? I just want to lead a normal life, you know, and take care of Jean and Jake, that’s all.’

‘Trevor—we’re
all
important to people we don’t know, but not many feel it as strongly as you and I do. It’s like there’s a whole pool of consciousness, which everybody’s floating around in. For some reason, you and I can feel other people’s love, and other people’s distress, just as clearly as we can feel our own.’

Trevor sat down at the kitchen table. ‘I don’t know what to do about it. I can’t just ignore it. But it’s making me feel like an alcoholic who has to have another drink.’

Without a word, Sissy went through to the living room and came back with Le Cocher Sans Coeur. She laid the card on the table in front of him. ‘I turned this up last night. A man being killed on a moving vehicle, which doesn’t stop. With any luck, it hasn’t happened yet, but I seriously think it will.’

Trevor wiped his tears away with his fingers. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘I think it’s time to talk to the police. I didn’t want to do it yesterday, in case they thought I was nothing but a silly old fool, but yesterday I think I found the people who shot that woman.’

‘You
found
them? You’re kidding me.’

‘I don’t have any proof . . . only the cards, and the same feeling that you have. They live in Canaan, on the north side, just across the railroad track.’

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘How can I be sure? I might be mad, for all I know, and the cards might all be nonsense. But if this prediction comes true, and I don’t try to stop it, then I’ll never forgive myself.’

‘OK . . . let’s call the police.’

Sissy said, ‘No . . . I think we have to talk to them face-to-face. We have to show them this card, so that they can see it for themselves.’

Trevor looked up at her. ‘Were you as old as me—you know—when you first had this feeling? Or did you always have it?’

‘I guess I always had it, in a way. I can remember crying, when I was a small girl, because I knew that somebody was very sad, even though I didn’t know who it was. And I could always sense when two people really loved each other, even when they were pretending not to. But—’

She took out another cigarette, and lit it, but Trevor didn’t say anything, and did nothing to stop her.

‘—I have to say that it wasn’t until I met your father that I really began to develop any genuine talent for fortune-telling. It was your father who taught me not to be spoiled, and self-centered. He made me look at other people, and consider what
they
were feeling, instead of always thinking what was best for me.’

‘I can’t imagine you being self-centered.’

‘Oh, believe it. I didn’t give a hoot about anyone, so long as I was having a good time. I hurt a lot of people, along the way. But, well, most of them are dead now, and I don’t suppose the others can even remember. That’s one thing your father taught me: if you ever do anybody a bad turn,
they
might forget it, but
you
never will.’

Trevor stood up. ‘Let’s go, then. If this prediction is going to come true, then the sooner we tell the police, the better.’

‘You’ll drive me?’

‘I told you, Momma. I
have
to.’

Sissy put on her mother’s fur coat and her big furry hat and wound a long green angora scarf around her neck. Trevor helped her down the driveway to his Land Cruiser and then they set off down the steeply sloping road to Route 7. The morning was like a black-and-white photograph. The snow was fine and dry and it scuttled off the hood of the SUV in tiny pellets.

‘Don’t you think you ought to call Jean?’ Sissy suggested.

‘I’ll call her later. She didn’t really want me to come round to see you.’

‘I see.’ Sissy was silent for a while, until they reached the main road. Then she said, ‘You’re not nuts, you know, Trevor.’

Trevor looked at her and his face was very serious. ‘I know, Momma. That’s what I’m afraid of.’

Then he put his foot down and they headed north toward Canaan, on a highway so deserted that they felt as if they were the only people left in the world.

 

F
eely was still in the bathroom when he heard the car horn tooting outside. He continued to sit there, frowning at the dog-eared copy of
The Book of Lists
that he had found on the windowsill, but then it tooted again, and he knew that it was Robert.

He fumbled to finish, and pulled up his pants. He made sure that he flushed the toilet. That was one of the things about Bruno that had always disgusted him: Bruno would always leave his turds for other people to discover.

‘Feely!’ called Serenity, from her bedroom. ‘Touchy wants you!’

Feely hurried awkwardly downstairs, almost tripping on the cuffs of his borrowed chinos. He struggled into his shoes, and opened up the front door. Robert was standing in the driveway, next to his car, which had almost a foot of snow on the roof. The exhaust was smoking in the cold, so that Robert looked like a magician, surrounded by vapor.

‘Where the hell were you?’ Robert demanded. ‘I’m doing my best to be unnoticeable here. A ghost, remember. Instead of that, I have to wake up the entire neighborhood.’

‘You could have knocked on the door.’

‘You think I’d ever touch that knocker? That knocker is bad luck. Or maybe you don’t believe in bad luck.’ He held up his heavily bandaged left hand. ‘This is bad luck. I think it’s turning septic, in which case I will probably wind up with blood poisoning and everybody will get what they want. To you, Feely, I leave my CD collection.’

‘That’s OK, I don’t dig Bob Dylan too much.’

‘That’s because you were born at the wrong time. Not to mention the wrong place. That’s the trouble with being a baby, you don’t have any choice. You take your first look out of your mother’s muff and even if you don’t like what you see there’s no turning back. Come here.’

He beckoned Feely round to the back of the car. With a sweep of his right elbow he cleared most of the snow off. Then he opened the trunk and said, ‘There—what do you think of that?’

Inside, the trunk was lined with assorted cushions, some of them satin, some of them brocade, some of them plain chair-cushions filled with latex sponge. On one side of the trunk was a plaid traveling-blanket, carefully rolled up. Robert reached inside the trunk and unrolled it.

‘There,’ he said. ‘What do you think of
this
baby?’

Lying on the blanket was a black rifle, with black telescopic sights and a matt black stock.

‘You know how much this cost? Over ten thousand dollars. It’s a Remington 700 Sniper Rifle, .308 caliber. Actually it belongs to a friend of mine who is not yet aware that he lent it to me. He’s in Chile for nine months, on business.’

‘I couldn’t shoot that,’ said Feely, brushing the snow from his eyes.

‘Of course you can. It’s a beauty. It takes five .308 rounds, in a flush internal magazine, and you load each round manually, using the bolt. It’s very slow, but that’s not the point. It has a bullet velocity of 2,650 feet per second and the great thing is that the .308 bullet retains a significant amount of energy after passing completely through the human body, so it keeps on going for several hundred yards after hitting its target which makes it much more difficult for crime scene investigators to find it. It also has a stop percentage of ninety-nine percent. You know what a stop is? A stop is when you hit somebody when they’re trying to attack you, and they stop attacking you; or when you hit somebody when they’re running away and they fall down after ten yards. That’s the technical police definition of a stop.’

‘I still couldn’t shoot it.’

‘No?’

‘Categorically not.’

‘Not just not, but categorically not?’ Robert pulled a philosophical kind of face. ‘Well, that’s up to you. That’s entirely up to you.
I
can’t use it, even though I made myself the solemn promise that I would bring down one happy person every day seven days a week. With my hand all screwed up I couldn’t hold it steady. But there you are. Different people have different values, don’t they? I picked you up when I saw you thumbing for a ride in that blizzard because that’s the kind of person I am. I feel that I was put on earth to help my fellow men. But if you don’t want to help me, I can’t argue with that. Like I say, it’s entirely up to you.’

Feely said, ‘Don’t get me wrong, Robert. I really appreciated you picking me up. I can’t tell you how much gratitude that filled me with. But you’re asking me to foreshorten a person’s life.’

‘What are you talking about? You won’t be doing anything. You’re my
proxy
, that’s all. You may be holding the actual physical rifle, but it’s me who’s doing the shooting. If a puppet hits you on the head, it’s not the puppet’s fault, is it? You don’t punch the puppet, you punch the guy who’s got his hand stuffed up the puppet’s rear end.’

Feely looked dubious. He
felt
dubious. The snow fell on his black curly hair and on his eyelashes, and somehow he looked more Christlike than ever.

Robert said, ‘The great thing is, nobody will see you doing it. This is the
pièce de
resistance.
’ There was a large
STP
sticker on the rear of the car, which he peeled back to reveal two circular holes drilled right through the metal.

‘The back seats fold down, so that you can lie flat on your belly in the trunk. The muzzle protrudes about a half-inch through the lower hole and you can aim through the upper hole. You can take as long as you like to get a fix on your target, because nobody can see you, and when you’ve taken your shot, all you have to do is climb out of the trunk, push the back seat upright, and drive off, and nobody is any the wiser.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Feely. All the same, he was very impressed by this mobile sniper’s-nest. The idea of hitting back at the world which had treated you so badly, while comfortably lying on a pile of cushions, that appealed to him somehow.

Robert hung his left arm around Feely’s shoulders. ‘It’s up to you, Feely. Like I say, different people have different values. When I offered you that ride, I wasn’t thinking to myself, what can this guy give me in return? It’s like last night . . . I shared Serenity with you, didn’t I? I actually shared her with you. But did I think, what’s Feely going to do to repay me for being so generous? Of course not.’

‘I’m sorry, Robert.’

‘What’s to be sorry for? She really goes, that Serenity, don’t she? She really likes it. How do you say that in Cuban, she really likes it?’

‘I don’t know . . .
ella tiene furor uterino
.’

‘Is that it?
Ella tiene furor uterino
? She has a furious uterus? That’s terrific. That’s amazing. So what are you going to do, Feely? Are you going to shoot this rifle for me or not?’

Feely looked at him and even though he didn’t say anything Robert knew that he was going to do it. He winked, and gave him a giddyap click with his tongue, and then he slammed the trunk. ‘Let’s get some coffee with a slug of something in it, and then let’s drive out someplace and find ourselves a happy person. How about that?’

 

S
teve was staring out of the window in the interview room when they brought William Hain up from the cells. Snow was teeming into the parking lot, and the morning was so dark that it felt like the middle of the night.

William Hain was wearing a grubby green-and-white sweater with huge hexagonal patterns on it, and a worn-out pair of gray Levis. He hadn’t shaved, and he smelled as if he hadn’t washed for a while.

‘Sit down,’ said Steve.

William Hain sat down, and looked around the room, and coughed, and shuffled his feet.

‘You’re sure you don’t want a lawyer present? It’s your right.’

William Hain shook his head. ‘What do I need a lawyer for? I took the van, that’s all, and I already admitted to that. I didn’t murder nobody.’

‘Your van was seen opposite the Mitchelson house at the time that Ellen Mitchelson was shot dead. Directly opposite, parked in such a way that she was right in your line of fire.’

‘I don’t own no gun. You can’t have a line of fire if you don’t own no gun.’

‘But you admit you were parked there.’

‘I was only there for a couple of minutes. I needed a leak.’

‘Can you remember what time that was?’

‘I don’t know. Eight fifteen or thereabouts.’

‘So what did you do? You stopped, you relieved yourself, then what?’

‘I drove down to Danbury. I was collecting some termites from Paulie’s Aquarium.’

‘Termites?’

‘That’s correct. Rick Bristow got me some supplementary reproductives from North Australia.’

‘What the hell is a supplementary reproductive when it’s at home?’

‘If the king termite or the queen termite happens to die, they’re like sitting in the dugout, waiting to take over.’