Joyride

by Jack Ketchum

  It was an irony that there was so much pleasure.

  He didn’t mind. He forgave them all in a way.

  All the insects who had ever stung him.

  Bless you.

  He screamed out his love for Carole Gardner. “I love you I love you I love you!” he screamed again and again even though he doubted she could hear him over the gunfire.

  He meant it.

  Meant it even as he turned the gun on her and fired through the storm of bees the driving hailstones bringing her the gift as the bullets tiny comets slammed home into his body.

  She’d shown him the way.

  And as the man approached her, he fired once again, at him this time, at the man, and saw him raise his gun and knew in an instant how accurate the shot would be, sighted the trajectory of the man’s bullet even before it left the chamber. He knew it would be a perfect shot, an admirable shot, pinning him there to the door, like a butterfly to paper right between the eyes.

  This man, too, he loved.

  I was born to love, he thought. Just this way. His final thought before the bullet proved true to its word and Wayne rested.

  The street was a hall of echoes.

  It smelled like the Fourth of July.

  The bullet had passed through the meat of his arm just below his shoulder and exited through the other side. He wouldn’t be able to lift her. He didn’t try.

  He stayed on his knees and waited for Covitski and the paramedics.

  He felt for a pulse.

  He gazed down at her face, saw where the towels had slipped away and the soft-looking wound and realized suddenly that she didn’t look remotely similar to Ann. It wasn’t the wound or the blood disguising her. She never had. He wondered how or why he had ever thought so in the first place.

  Situational, he thought. A resemblance that was strictly situational. Abused women. Drunken husbands.

  Had he ever thought otherwise?

  The thought that he might have suddenly bothered him.

  He couldn’t find a pulse.

  Was that why he felt like crying?

  “Rule. Can you stand up? Come on. Stand up with me. Let the boys here do their jobs, Joe. Come on.”

  Covitski had his arm. He looked up and saw that he was surrounded by paramedics. They had the stretcher ratcheted down and were ready to lift her onto it but he was preventing them from doing so. He was gripping her wrist like his life depended on it.

  It was no way to feel for a pulse.

  He let her go.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  And he had no idea at that moment—whether it was Covitski or the paramedics or Carole Gardner—exactly who he was saying that to.

  THURSDAY

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “What time is it?” she said.

  Rule looked at his watch. “Nearly noon. Welcome.”

  It didn’t feel like noon. Noon was supposed to be hot and the room was cold. There was too much air-conditioning. Of course there was. She was in the hospital.

  The room seemed to darken suddenly. A shadow falling.

  She ran her tongue across dry, cracked lips.

  “What day?”

  “Thursday. You’ve been out for over twenty-four hours. You have a concussion. He shot you once in the right thigh. Once in the hip. They removed the bullets and you’re going to be just fine.”

  “What…what happened?” she said.

  “We got him,” he said. “It’s over.”

  “You’ve been here…?”

  “Only the past couple of hours. I had to get this taken care of.” He smiled and raised his arm and she saw the sling and the bone white cast. “They just turned me loose, actually.”

  “And…Lee…”

  He looked at her and she realized she’d known all along. Maybe because he wasn’t there sitting in a chair next to Rule beside the bed. And maybe, more probably, because of the feeling she’d awoken with, that had flung itself over her like one final rape immediately upon waking—that sense of loss she’d felt, that feeling of being somehow linked to him that had come too late, too deeply and far too late, stunned that somehow this link too had been taken from her before she had even fully realized the depth of it and that now he was gone. No perfect partner. Insane as she had been back then perhaps and certainly wrong as she had been. A deep black hole they had dug for themselves but it was their hole dug for their reasons. He had been her lover. Her friend.

  The feel of his hands. The smell of him. The easy silences.

  They were friends.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  And he was sorry. It wasn’t just something you said to somebody. It wasn’t just formality. She could see that he meant it. She thought that he was probably a very good man. And she had been lying to him forever now.

  She thought that he would understand the tears.

  “I want you to know something,” he said. His voice was soft, gentle. “I want you to listen to me.

  “This man Lock, he had it in for you. He murdered your husband.

  “We don’t know why and it doesn’t matter why. Lock was crazy.

  “We can place him at the murder site.

  “Then he kidnapped you and Lee.

  “I want you to know that there is no one who connects you to any of these killings. No one blames you for anything. Not the families of the victims and not the police. You understand that? When they let you out of here you’ll be free to go. You’ll have to make a statement, a pretty detailed statement, but after that you’ll be free. You understand, Carole?”

  She hesitated. Were it not Rule sitting here telling her this, were it anybody else she would not have believed it possible.

  She looked at him and nodded. He reached for a tissue on the nightstand beside her and handed it across to her.

  “Why,” she said. “Why are you…?”

  He stopped her.

  “Say it’s because I believe you’ve been a victim here all along. No, let me correct that. I don’t believe it, I know it. We both do. You should try to remember that about yourself. A victim will do some crazy things to stop being a victim, and maybe you did, too. But that doesn’t make you crazy, and it doesn’t make you evil.

  “So don’t ask why. When you get out of here, just get on with it. Just get on with your life. Be free.”

  He looked away. There was pain in his eyes.

  She glimpsed it there just before he turned away.

  She did not think it was his wounded arm.

  They sat in silence for a while. As though something awkward had just happened between them.

  “I’ve got an appointment,” he said finally.

  He rose slowly from the chair.

  “I’ll be back to see you tomorrow, all right? We’ll talk. Is there anything you need? Anything I can get for you?”

  “Thanks. Not right now,” she said.

  He turned and walked to the door.

  “Oh god!” she said. “The cats. Beast and Vinni.”

  He laughed. “Vinni. That’s her name. I remembered the other one’s. I meant to tell you. I hope you don’t mind. I just sort of…adopted them. Had my partner bring them over to the house. Just for the duration.”

  She found that she could smile.

  It almost surprised her that she was able to smile.

  “I’m grateful,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

  He nodded. And for a moment she saw the look in his eyes again as he turned and walked out the door and she thought So much pain. It was everywhere.

  Even in this man who was so kind.

  She leaned back into the softness of the pillow. The room was still.

  Perhaps she’d sleep. She’d try to sleep.

  It was good for her.

  It occurred to her that it was possible that she would dream of Lee. Of Lee and not Howard nor Wayne nor any man who had hurt her. She did not believe she would dream of them now. But of him, perhaps.

  She thought that it
would break her heart to wake up knowing she had dreamt of Lee but it was perhaps a way to thank him and it was a way to remember.

  It was so strange that for the first time since she was a little girl she really wanted to remember.

  The bed was soft. She settled in.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “So,” Marty said. “You saved the maiden.”

  “Please. Don’t start,” said Rule.

  “Well you did, didn’t you? And you got the bad guy?”

  “Yeah. I did.”

  “There. See? Glad to hear it.”

  “I’ll tell you something,” Rule said. “I sat there in the hospital looking at her while she was still under and you know what? I realized something.

  “All this time I’ve been thinking that Carole reminded me of Ann, situation-wise certainly, and even looks-wise, and that was why it was getting to me, that was why I was having so much trouble with this one and why I was thinking of Ann all the time. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t Carole Gardner reminding me of Ann.

  “It was Wayne reminding me of me. How about that.”

  Marty didn’t comment.

  He sat back heavily in the chair.

  “Me and Wayne,” he said. “You see what I’m getting at? It’s what we do. We hurt things. Not just by being. Not just by walking through life. Everybody does that. You can’t help but do that.

  “But by being who we are.”

  “Hey Joe. That’s a pretty damn big stretch. You’re not some killer.”

  “No, of course not. But I destroy things. Faith. Trust. Connections. Lives in a way, or parts of lives. Because of who I am and what I am.

  “Me and Wayne.”

  Marty studied him a moment.

  “There’s a difference,” he said.

  “Sure. I don’t go around blowing people away on the highway.”

  “I don’t mean that. What I mean is that a guy like this Wayne character, he puts nothing back into it does he. He just takes. You? You do what you can to even things up, maybe even tip the scales a little back toward something positive. Something decent. You do your job. You do what you can.

  “You save the maiden.”

  “You think that’s enough? I don’t. I can’t.”

  “Listen to me. It’s a damn rough piece of business living in the world. Nothing’s ever enough. The point is not to give up on it. To do what you can do. You haven’t destroyed Ann’s life or Chrissie’s life for god’s sake. Sure you’ve changed them. And maybe not wholly for the best either because it didn’t work out for the best.

  “But you think about it—they’ve gotten to know a pretty decent guy. That counts for something.” He laughed. “There aren’t all that many of us around, you know? You’re not dead yet. And neither is she. Lives have a way of getting richer if they don’t stop happening altogether.”

  “That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, huh?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “You think you’re a pretty hot ticket, don’t you Marty.”

  “Yeah. I do, Joe.”

  He sat back in the chair and lit a cigarette. He was breaking his own rule about smoking in session. Rule guessed it counted as a special occasion.

  “Don’t you?” he said.

  At home he fed the cats and called them both by name, petted them when they were finished and followed them into the living room and scratched their ears and looked at the telephone. He went back to the kitchen, did the dishes in the sink and looked down the hall to the telephone and thought about what time it was in California. He left the TV off for a change so that the house was quiet.

  He sat down in the living room with a beer in his hand and the cats came by again wanting to be scratched and petted, rubbing up against him, so he obliged them. They began roughhousing, playing. He watched them. The cats didn’t need him anymore. They had each other.

  He was left to his own devices.

  He got up and walked to the telephone and picked up the receiver and held it a moment and then put it back in the cradle.

  He thought, Not now.

  He turned on the outside light and walked out to the garage in the cooling night.

  The dollhouse was painted white with black shutters. He had done a good job on it so far and it welcomed him as his own house had not, aside from the cats, and he bent to the tasks remaining—cutting this and building that, making something, shaping something, finishing something, doing what he could do.

  ON WRITING JOYRIDE

  People have asked me, do I outline. The answer is no. I scrapbook. And then I sort of…collage.

  Like many other writers I’m a pack rat when it comes to ideas. Give me a few square feet of bulletin board space and I’m happy. I’ll fill ‘er up with yellow post-a-notes, pushpinned three by five cards, cocktail napkins, matchbook covers and news clippings, I’ll fill it in no time at all. Phone bills, invitations to weddings—even a check can get lost on my desk. But ideas never do.

  For me writing’s like working a jigsaw puzzle. One piece alone won’t get you far. But a bunch of pieces together—ah! then you’ve got a picture. I’ll sit on an idea for years. Literally years. Then one day it seems to fit together with something. And that seems to fit with something else and pretty soon all these pieces start to look a whole lot like a novel.

  I sat on the central notion for JOYRIDE more than a year and a half. I wasn’t worried. It wasn’t going anywhere. I had it hidden away in the best place possible—right under everybody else’s noses.

  I was stealing.

  From Emil Zola no less.

  Early on in LA BETE HUMAINE Zola has a character standing in a railway yard who witnesses two people murder a man through the window of a passing train. The guy has always wanted to kill somebody himself but hasn’t dared, he can’t quite seem to get himself over that edge—though he’s just come within inches of killing his girlfriend. And seeing the murder, he decides he’s got to get to know these people.

  From there, Zola goes one way and I go another. If you haven’t read it his way by the by, I highly urge you to.

  The key to my own direction came when I finally figured out who my particular bad guy was—my murderous observer. In this case, observing from a mountain, not a train yard. Again I pulled the material right out of the old scrapbook where it’d been sitting all the time. My bad guy was going to be a composite of two real-life bad guys, Howard Unruh and Thomas Eugene Braun—a pair of distinguished lunatics I noted many years ago in Jay Robert Nash’s BLOODLETTERS AND BADMEN. Where I also found the original source material for my novel THE GIRL NEXT DOOR.

  Thanks, Jay.

  Braun and his buddy Leonard Maine went on an interstate killing spree in 1967 for no apparent reason, seemingly just for the fun of it. For my purposes it was convenient to leave Maine out of it and concentrate on Braun. I grafted his exploits onto the perhaps even stranger personality of Howard Unruh.

  Howard kept a list of enemies. He’d get pissed off at one of the neighbors and enter each petty grievance in his diary with the word RETAL next to the person’s name—RETAL for retaliation, naturally. He built a huge fence around his house. He got quieter and quieter. Then one day in 1949 he lost it completely. In twelve minutes he killed thirteen people along the quiet little streets of Camden, New Jersey, shooting up the whole damn neighborhood with his 9mm German Luger.

  Nestled between these two personalities and linked only by pistols and rabid looniness was my bad guy. I had him take these two people who had committed a killing in sheer desperation (she an abused ex-wife, he her lover—both of them totally at their wits’ end and trying to ward off a vicious ex-husband from whom in every way the justice system has failed to protect them) for the scariest ride of their lives through his own private Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood of paranoia, true evil and sudden death.

  The bloody interstate ride became a ride through Vermont and New Hampshire—not Washington, Oregon and California as in Tom Braun’s actual stor
y. I know these states far better than the ones he drove through and I was able to visit some old friends in the meantime while rustling up the color and research.

  Call it one of fiction’s perks.

  I spent ten days there collecting place names and route names, driving until I felt comfortable I knew the times and distances involved in their journey. I found places like Foxfire, Black Mountain Inn, Avery’s General Store and the Chapel of St. John of the Mountains. I found and then climbed the mountain where the ex-husband’s murder would occur. I had me a good time.

  And then the final piece fell into place when I found a handle on the cop, Rule, who’s always hot on their trail. Though never quite hot enough.

  I needed a backstory for him which would explain the strange overall kindness of his attitude toward these two captive killers. The guy’s a cop after all and they murdered somebody. I got that by taking him into therapy. Unusual for a cop because he’s not there because of job stress or because he or his partner shot anybody or they themselves got shot, nothing like that, he’s actually sneaking to therapy when he goes because other cops might not think much of his reasons for attending.

  Rule feels very guilty. He’s recently ended a relationship with a woman and her young daughter which has been very important to all of them for years. He feels he’s committed a kind of metaphoric murder of his own. That in his own way he too can be called a destroyer of lives. Throughout the book he’s trying to work on this, sometimes with the therapist and sometimes all by himself—while tracking a woman who inexplicably constantly tends to remind him of his woman, the one he’s lost.

  Now that piece of the puzzle—the psychotherapy part—god knows where that came from. Of course I personally have never been there.

  I guess I just made that part up.

  I mean, there’s nothing like that in my scrapbook.

  Really.

  WEED SPECIES

  “Vegetables are more serious than men and more sensitive to frost.”

  —Francis Picabia