by Jack Ketchum
Her father was standing just outside the doorway.
The door had been open a crack. It wasn’t a mistake she usually made. Had he opened it without her hearing?
“Daddy?”
He’d obviously just come from the bathroom. He was standing in the hall flossing his teeth, one of the many habits of his she casually detested. Flossing wasn’t a thing you did in public, even with family. You kept it in the goddamn bathroom.
“Who’s Ed?” he said “And why in god’s name are you going all the way to Hopatcong for a steak? Perfectly good steak at the White Horse Grill. Plus we know the owner.”
“You were listening to me?”
He shrugged. “Just passing by.”
She’d always wondered how he’d come so far in real estate. As far as she was concerned he was a lousy liar. There wasn’t any point calling him on it though.
“So. Who’s Ed?”
“A man I know.”
“A man you know? How old a man we talking about?”
She had the feeling she understood where this was going and felt a chill that he should know. If he did it couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t going to change anything. If he was only fishing she wasn’t about to help him. She decided to try cutting this off before it went any farther. It was usually as easy to get around her father as it was to get around her mother.
She didn’t want to know what or how much he knew.
She didn’t care.
“Men my age aren’t boys anymore, daddy. Try to move a little with the times, okay? And it’s none of your business anyhow. I’m leaving for college in a month or so. You going to want to know who I’m seeing in Boston too?”
“Maybe.”
“Well I won’t have any more intention of discussing it with you then than I do right now. At the moment I’m thirsty. Excuse me.”
She walked around him and down the stairs. Left him standing there, floss dangling from his fingers.
“And the steaks at the White Horse Grill are awful,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-seven
The Cat
It was dusk. With dusk the need to get out of the tree had conquered all her apprehension. Her belly rumbled. There were night predators far more suited to trees than she was.
She chose to go down on the same side she’d come up. As she had done many times before she placed her front paws against the bark and dug in with her claws as best she could and inched along, only this time when she’d stretched her full length down along the tree trunk she retracted the claws and allowed herself to fall. She arched her spine and raised her head and lowered her shoulders, her legs seeking the ground. For a moment she felt sudden wind and perfect balance and then the jagged earth hit her and she yowled in pain.
The cat had great tolerance for pain but this was unlike any she’d ever had before. A deep dull throb ran from her right front foreleg to her shoulder. When she placed the pad of her foot tentatively to the ground the pain became an electric red-hot streak that dizzied her so much that she fell sideways onto her hip into tall tufts of scrubgrass and then awkwardly had to work her way up again.
The right front leg was useless to her.
Her only thought was to get back to the house where the man was and where there was a comfortable place to lie down.
She was deep in the woods.
She hobbled three-legged in the house’s direction. Each footfall brought new pain, a combination of the bone-deep throbbing and a lesser version of the earlier sharp agony that had caused her to fall to her side into the grass. She felt thirsty now, not hungry and made her way slowly through the woods. No longer quite herself anymore. Not quite the same cat she had known herself to be.
Diminished.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Ray
Black.
All black.
Black silk shirt buttoned to the neck, tight black jeans, black string tie, shiny black boots, onyx ring in a silver setting on the index finger of his left hand.
He looks into the mirror and sees a handsome young Black Knight freshly showered and shaved, teeth brushed, hair combed and patted gently into place and sprayed to hold. His eyeliner, shadow and mascara are somewhat heavier than usual though still in very good taste he thinks so that the eyes are the first thing you notice, their dark glitter the first thing you see. A touch of rouge on the powdered cheeks. The mole carefully painted with the tip of an eyebrow pencil wetted with his own saliva—his witch’s mark, his Mark of Cain.
He removes the mirror, turns the four silver clamps that hold it in place so that they no longer do so and sets the mirror on the floor so that it leans against the toilet. In removing the mirror he reveals a large, deep hole and inside the hole, a horizontal brace against a vertical stud. Along the length of the brace there lies, first, a .38 Smith & Wesson Ladysmith revolver with a frosted stainless finish and a rosewood grip. Behind it are two full boxes of cartridges, one for the Ladysmith and the other for the Remington bolt action .22 long rifle with the beautiful checkered walnut stock that lies behind them.
Each day as Ray has been looking into the mirror he has simultaneously been looking at these.
No one, not even Tim, knows they are there. Tim thinks they’re long since thrown away. Ray has oiled, cleaned and polished them once a year on the anniversary of the night at Turner’s Pool and then thrown out the materials he purchased to do so. He has covered his tracks.
He takes out the Ladysmith and the boxes of shells and places them on the toilet seat. He reaches in deep and grips the Remington by its smooth slim stock and stands it by the sink. He picks up the mirror and clamps it back in place. He opens the box of .38 shells and sets it on the sink and picks up the Ladysmith and watches himself in the mirror as he loads it.
Empty, the Ladysmith weighs only a pound and a half, its barrel just two inches long. But it feels heavier in his hand. A thing of fine balanced weight. He slides the five bullets into the cylinder and when he is finished snaps it shut.
He closes the box of shells and puts those and the handgun back on the toilet seat and opens the second box of shells, picks up the rifle and releases the magazine and fills it with four shells and slides it back into the magazine floor plate. To do this he must pay attention to the rifle and not himself in the mirror. When he’s through he slings the rifle over his shoulder by its soft leather strap and closes the second box of shells and picks up the Ladysmith and then his gaze returns to the mirror to his reflection in the mirror to the Black Knight in the mirror to Ray, Death-Ray in the mirror and the now-empty hole behind the mirror, he regards all this and then takes up the boxes and turns away smiling the Elvis grin, the Evil Elvis grin and walks out of the bathroom and through his bedroom and living room past his waterbed and his television and his stereo set and his wet bar and out his door into the brightness of the motel-parking-lot lights to greet his defected fans.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The Lost
Ray walked from his car to the top of the hill and clicked off the safety on the rife and watched the lights from the television flicker in the living room. He walked through the door to the big house where his mother and father had raised him and saw her sitting on the sofa watching Ed Sullivan. Ed was talking with Dinah Shore following her number, and the audience applauded and his mother blinked at him standing in the doorway and frowned and started to say something as Dinah exited and the audience applauded and Ed went to a commercial waving to the audience and Ray shot her through the heart and threw the bolt. The .22’s spent cartridge made no sound whatsoever on the welcome mat and he raised the rifle and sighted and shot her again.
He walked back down the hill to the car and as he did so threw the bolt and heard the cartridge ping on the flagstone walkway. The sound was satisfying. He clicked on the safety. He opened the door to the Chevy and got in and slid the rifle over into the passenger seat next to the Ladysmith and boxes of shells.
His father was in the lighted office staring at the
television which would have the sound off and he wondered if his father was also watching Ed Sullivan only without the sound. His father looked up and smiled and waved at him as he drove past and Ray returned the wave. He pulled out onto the street wondering where to first and then realized he was hungry and thought it would be a damn good idea to get some food in him before proceeding any further.
He drove through mostly empty streets with only an old Ford proceeding him and two pair of headlights behind him moving over the hills and pulled into Don’s Drive-In. The drive-in was crowded for a Sunday night, the first row of spaces completely full of cars with trays hooked to their driver-side windows so he drove around them and turned moving slowly along the second row, and then saw an empty space but before that saw something else that made him forget all about his hunger.
He pulled in anyway.
Parked the car and thought a minute.
There was a waitress taking an order two cars down to the left of him. The driver had just turned off his lights at her approach. Ray did the same. He took his keys out of the ignition and opened the car door and walked to the back of the Chevy and noticed a dark splotch of bird shit splattered drying on the trunk which he would have to go over with a rag later on. He opened the trunk and took out the tire iron and jack so that only the spare tire remained. He left the trunk open and walked around to the backseat of the car and tossed the tire iron and jack down on the floor through the window. Went to the front and took the Ladysmith off the seat and holding the gun at his side walked down the row of cars.
The girl in the passenger seat of the Volkswagen was someone he had never seen before but he didn’t care who she was, it didn’t matter. Her window was open which did matter and she glanced up at his approach, turned her head toward him slightly which made the angle fine for him, perfect, so that he brought up the .38 and fired directly into her right eye from just inches away, driving her exploded head into Sally Richmond’s lap and her blood and brains all over her sitting with her chocolate shake and she immediately began screaming, the shake falling out of her hand, Sally Richmond trying to push the girl’s head off her and at the same time open the driver’s side door.
He got around to the door just as she managed to throw it open and put the gun to her wet glistening belly.
“Shut up,” he said. “Shut the fuck up.” His voice was very calm.
She stopped screaming with the gun pressed into her belly but kept sobbing and noisily trying to get her breath but he guessed she couldn’t help that. He grabbed her arm remembering that other parking lot when he’d grabbed her arm which seemed like only yesterday. Only this time she didn’t pull away. This time she didn’t mouth him. He turned her around and shoved the muzzle into the small of her back.
“Move. Wipe that shit off your face. Come on.”
People were standing outside their cars or climbing out of their cars, mostly guys and one of the waitresses stood frozen in the middle of the lot but nobody tried to stop him. He kept the gun just above the crack of her ass and walked her to the rear of the Chevy. The adrenaline rush was truly one hundred percent amazing. He pointed to the trunk.
“Get in.”
She was trying to wipe the blood out off her hairline but only managing to smear it across her forehead and didn’t seem to understand him.
“Get in there. Get your ass in.”
She turned and looked at him with the blood smeared all over her face and the tears running down and her whole body shaking tits shaking nipples practically popping through the bloodsoaked once-white short-sleeved blouse, and he put the gun up under her chin and used it to tilt her head back.
“Get. In.” he said, nice and quiet. And if he was not his voice was still calm which amazed him.
He was practically coming in his pants here.
She turned and did as he said. He slammed the trunk door shut. The door sounded as loud to him as the shot had been. People were staring. He could feel their eyes crawl over him. He could hear low murmurs and the squealy voices of little girls. The voices made him want to laugh but he didn’t laugh. It would spoil the effect he wanted. He walked slowly around and got into his car and shut the door. He turned the key in the ignition and revved the Chevy hard and then eased up and put it into gear and pulled away past faces pale in the fluorescent light past the long row of cars and the red and green flashing neon sign above the entrance to the Drive-In out into the streets of Sparta.
He laughed and shook his head and pounded the wheel at his amazing good fortune.
Gradually his hunger returned.
But that would have to wait now.
Inside the trunk Tonianne’s blood was sticky on her hands, sticky on her chest and skirt, sticky in her hair. She lay jostled in a fetal position in the dark, her hip pressed against a tire, unable to stop shaking, eyes blinking uncontrollably and the eyelids too sticky with blood. She could smell exhaust fumes and rubber and dirty metal and her own faint perfume and she could hear the hissing of the tires moving over the road and something metallic rattling on the floor of the backseat a few unreachable feet behind her back. When the car turned abruptly she put her right hand down to the floor of the trunk for balance and the hand came away with some kind of wrapper stuck to it, some kind of cellophane and she picked it away revolted like the wrapper was a spider she had crushed burst across the palm of her hand.
Her mind played the scene over and over again vivid and sharp and she couldn’t get it to stop. She kept thinking how Ed on the phone had asked her out tonight and if she had only gone Tonianne would be alive her oldest girlfriend would still be alive and she wouldn’t be here in this dark close rattling box, that this never would have happened because Ed would have protected her and she kept calling silently for him to come protect her now, needing to believe for the first time in her life that such a thing as telepathy might exist but despairing that it did, the tires on the road sibilant as a snake beneath her.
Schilling was dozing through the last ten minutes of Ed Sullivan when the call came. There were no premonitions, no warnings, no feelings about the phone call whatsoever. It was Jackowitz.
“Don’s Drive-In,” he said.
“What about it?” .
“I hear you worked a homicide a few years back, suspect was a guy named Ray Pye. Ring any bells?”
“Rings all my bells, cap. What’s up?”
“You’re not gonna like this, Charlie. Pye’s been ID’d by two eyewitnesses as the shooter of a girl named Tonianne Primiano about fifteen minutes ago. Uniforms just phoned in their report. Girl was sitting in the passenger seat eating her burger and fries and up walks Pye and blows her brains out. The driver he kidnaps at gunpoint and forces into his trunk and drives away with her. They’re telling me it all went down in about two minutes flat. We got an all-points out on his car.”
“Her?”
“Car’s a Volkswagen Beetle. I hate this the worst, Charlie. It’s registered to Sally Richmond.”
It felt like somebody had hit him in the chest with a bowling ball. He sat down on the sofa. He didn’t know what to say. But his thinking was clear. Stunningly so.
You did this, he thought.
You had to push him. You goddamn idiot.
“I don’t know how well you know the girl personally, Charlie. But Ed . . . I mean . . . it’s got to be a helluva thing for him. A helluva thing.”
You pushed him and he went off. Just like that. Only not the way you thought he’d go off. Not the kind of slip you wanted. You smart-assed stupid obsessing sonovabitch drunk you were playing with lives all along here. You asshole.
“You want to go over there? I mean, you want in on this one? You want me to phone Ed?”
“I want in on it. But I’ll tell Ed. I’ll do it right now while I’ve still got the guts to and then head on over to the Drive-In. Get a car over to the Starlight Motel right away. Pye has an apartment in back. Tell them to watch for him but not to approach. There’s a file on Pye on my desk. Inside are tw
o names, Tim Bess and Jennifer Fitch. Send uniforms over to their addresses too. Have somebody call and tell them to stay put and not open the door for anybody until we get there. Especially not Ray Pye.”
“You think Pye might be making a night of it?”
“Yeah cap, I think maybe I do.”
“Jesus. Okay, we’ll get on it right away. Charlie listen, when you talk to Ed tell him for me, I mean, tell him for everybody here . . .”
“I know. I will. Thanks.”
Ed placed the phone in its cradle and sat staring at his hands a moment, as though the hands didn’t belong to him and were not the hands that puttered in the garden or the hands that had stroked her. He rolled them into fists and unrolled them. The hands were cold and clammy and he didn’t like the feel of them.
He got up and walked to the bedroom and opened the drawer to his nightstand and took out the .38 special and checked the chamber to be sure it was loaded even though he knew it was. He took the gun and the box of bullets back into the living room and set them on the table while he pulled on his jacket and then slipped the box into one pocket of the jacket and the gun into the other and went outside and locked the door behind him.
The cat was approaching the rear of the house when she heard the front door slam and the key in the lock and the man’s heavy tread across the walkway. She had become accustomed to the pain to the extent that the pain was part of her now and not a foreign thing as at first, the pain was simply part of her being. But it would not permit her to move swiftly and that was part of her now too. She hobbled around the side of the house past the hedges and heard the car door slam and the engine roar and for a moment found herself bathed in headlights as they swept over her and the car pulled out of the driveway and the man drove away.
She listened to the house.
The house was empty.
