CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  "That's not a bad sum," he said. "That would buy gas."

  "Oh, I'm going by bus. I want to see Salt Lake City and Reno. Besides, I don't have a car."

  "I do," he said and my head went faint. Was this a proposal we travel together? If I supplied expenses would he take me in his car?

  I feared to hope. Bobby was too beautiful for me. Angels do not consort with fragile, flawed earthlings.

  Bobby remained in Louisville General six weeks. He confided he must go to court and face charges the day he was to be released. "They're going to hang me--not literally, but you know," he said. "That cop'll make sure of it."

  "What about your parents, didn't they hire a good attorney?"

  He laughed and turned away his head. "I don't have parents. Not so you'd notice. I left home when I was fifteen. I haven't seen them since so I'm on my own in this deal. They'll railroad me into prison where I'll never see daylight again."

  "You can't let that happen, Bobby."

  He turned back to me, eyes brimming, the sky blue of the irises thunderhead dark and troubled. "I have a car," he said. "It was impounded, but a friend of mine got it out for me. I've always wanted to see the land west of the Mississippi."

  I trembled in ecstasy at the thought of having Bobby all to myself even though I was not ready to abandon Louisville and my good job yet. What would Jerry say? What would my supervisor and the personnel director say? Then there was the fact I would be abetting a felon or something along those lines. All I knew about cops and the law came from television. I did know that what Bobby proposed meant flight from justice and without me and the money I had saved, he couldn't do it. I had almost three hundred dollars now and it was plenty to make the trip.

  "I don't know, Bobby..."

  He caught my hand where I stood next to him and drew me down toward the bed. In front of God and the whole men's ward he kissed me to the accompaniment of catcalls and shrill whistles. I was signed, sealed, stamped, and delivered. Just exactly what Bobby wanted.

  "Meet me here at six in the morning," he whispered. "A court appointed officer is coming for me at ten. I have to get out before then. We'll have to be very quiet about it."

  "But your hospital bill..."

  "Let the state pay it. That's what they're good for."

  You don't listen to pretty boys, that's what my grandmother told me. You don't listen to silky promises from the cunning lips of an angel in disguise. Even Lucifer was pretty. The prettiest. And look what he is responsible for, she said.

  These thoughts plagued me all night while snow swirled down from a night sky onto Chestnut Street. The one window in my first floor efficiency apartment was barred and looked out on a narrow alley. On the other side of the alley stood a fence and on the other side of the fence reared an ancient structure that housed the Juvenile Detention Center. Cries and howls from my unfortunate young neighbors often startled me awake in the night where I lay in the dark imagining the horrors taking place mere feet away from my window.

  The snow had stopped by five in the morning. I sat on the ratty brown sofa with two suitcases parked next to me. This was a momentous decision, maybe more important than the decision to quit college so I could find a way to California or to take up Jerry on the offer of a ride to Louisville.

  The apartment, bare and depressing before, now bore down my spirit with the full weight of its poverty. There was a long uneven rip in the linoleum starting at the bathroom door and zigzagging to the foot of the sagging double bed. Roaches marched in hordes across the white porcelain sink counters, unafraid of interference. Pine wood shelves, once painted black but now peeling, separated the dining alcove from the living-sleeping room. The shelves were barren of the odd decoration. They only held the few books of poetry I owned, the bunch of dried flowers Jerry had brought to show he was a good sport when I landed the job at the hospital.

  What was I giving up by leaving with Bobby? Nothing but an experiment in low living, Friday night gin rummy games with the out-of-work couple down the hall, Saturday night forays to the YWCA where we all sat around sipping tepid Cokes and listening to the latest bad folk singer strum and sing about how the times they are a'changing. They weren't. The times weren't changing in Louisville and never would. They were changing somewhere else--in California, for instance, where a great revolution was taking place.

  I craved more excitement than Louisville offered. I wanted to taste the adult life, get myself into corners and out again, pay my own rent, buy my own navy blue pea coats for Kentucky winters, talk myself into better jobs. And I wanted Bobby. How I wanted Bobby.

  #

  It was in Reno that I left him. I knew I had to by the time we drove across the Utah line toward Salt Lake City. Sometimes what you think you want isn't right for you at all. It wasn't just the pistol he'd secreted in the car pocket. That scared me, but I could have rationalized a way to understand it. No, it wasn't just that. The angel was tarnished as greening brass. Outside the hospital atmosphere, Bobby let down his hair and showed a cruel, hateful, manipulative side. On the outskirts of Reno he was complaining how his leg hurt and how my excited chatter got onto his nerves.

  "Do you always blabber on this way?" Sarcasm dripped from his voice. It coated the air inside the car, turned it as frigid and disgusting as frozen vomit. I cringed against the door. "Don't you ever shut up? God, you'd think you had something to say."

  Yes, I thought I had. It's possible I was wrong about that the way I'd been wrong about Bobby.

  On a dim side street we took a room from a smirking hotel manager and fought in the rickety elevator about whose fault it was we stayed in fleabag hotels. The room, the only one in the city we could afford, overlooked a shadowed, windswept shaft cornered by the backsides of three smog-grayed buildings. Bobby had been too tired from the trip for making love, even once, and I thought perhaps the glorious event might finally occur in this tawdry room and make it a magical, special place. Something had to happen to save me from jumping into the shaft. Bobby was ill-natured as a rabid dog and continued to rag me about everything just as if it was all my fault.

  "Who needs to go to San Francisco," he bitched. "Anyplace will do. Why not L.A.? I should go to Hollywood."

  "Hollywood's phony," I said.

  "And you think your pukey friends hiding out in Haight-Ashbury are for real?"

  "Bobby, don't." We had already been over this particular terrain before. Hippies to him meant acid heads, free love, and panhandling. He wanted nothing to do with riffraff. He was as enlightened as some of my southern redneck relatives.

  "I'd have some kind of chance in Hollywood. I have the looks to get into the movies."

  He was right about that, but at this point I could have told him he didn't have the personality. Hollywood might be shark infested, but as far as I knew they hadn't yet found interest in mean-spirited Gila monsters.

  "Bobby, love me. Make love to me." I expected the logistics to be difficult considering the leg cast, but any sort of impossible maneuver was preferable to listening to Bobby bitch. The more he opened his mouth, the more I loathed him, the more I wished I were back at Louisville General with my clipboard and my wards to wander.

  "Is that what you want?" he asked. "Is that all you've ever wanted from me? One good fuck?"

  I wilted under his gaze. "I only want you to love me, Bobby."

  "Love!" He let go a splutter of air, exasperated. "What do you know about love? What do you know about anything for that matter? You really bought that story I told you, didn't you?"

  I looked at him and it seemed that behind him was a dark shadow larger than he was, hovering just above his shoulders. It looked human in form, like a disembodied demon. It had come up from the other side of the bed, crawling up higher and higher until it loomed over Bobby's form. I blinked my eyes, hoping it would go away. It swayed and writhed all around Bobby and then it entered him! I had seen it, seen it slither into him as if climbing into a shell.

  "Bobby..." My voice was shakin
g, my hands were shaking. I really had seen something take possession of a human being and it scared the living daylights out of me.

  "You're the dumbest bitch I have ever met," he said and even his voice sounded different now.

  "Don't say those things." I began to back away from him.

  "You don't want me to say things, you don't want me to tell you what I think? I won't tell you what a fucking dunce you are. What a damn brainless dummy you are."

  "Bobby, please..."

  "I won't tell you that cop shot me because I drew on him. I won't tell you if he hadn't shot me in the leg, I might have splattered his idiotic brains all over the sidewalk. No, I won't tell you anything truthful because you'll believe any lying bullshit I feel like making up."

  "You wouldn't kill a cop."

  He laughed and of course it was true, he would do it, he would kill if pressed to it, he would destroy like the avenging angel he was if he felt the slightest whim. He was right. I was a fucking dunce. I was the biggest fucking dunce ever came down the fucking pike. And now there was something seriously wrong with Bobby Tremain. He wasn't himself any longer. He'd let something in and it wasn't going to leave. But I was.

  "What are you doing?" he asked.

  "I'm getting my suitcase."

  "What for?"

  "I'm leaving now, Bobby. I don't have to take this anymore."

  "Hey, wait a minute. What is this bullshit?"

  "It's goodbye shit, that's what it is." I was at the door. Bobby lay disadvantaged where he had fallen onto his back on the bed when we entered the room. He struggled to get the cast to the floor and lever himself onto his feet.

  "Don't you dare walk out that door. It's my car. My car, you bitch!"

  "And it's my money, Bobby. I worked months for it. It's my dream, this trip. It was your escape and I was stupid enough to provide it for you. But it's my dream. I've done all I ever mean to do for you." I had the door open and one foot in the hallway.

  "I'll find you if you dump me here!" He was onto his feet and tottering, reaching for the cane he used where it leaned against the arm of a busted-spring chair. It all pressed down then, swallowing the two of us in a murky cloud. The window facing the air-shaft. The gloom, the faded rose bouquet wallpaper, the smell of urine spilled and soaked over a period of years, the old bad scent of dried semen, the stench of despair, of dreams trounced and smashed and lying without pity upon the floor.

  "You mean you can try to find me. You won't, though. If I were you I'd be careful running red lights and skipping out on hotel bills. Which is what you'll have to do here because I'm not leaving you a penny, Bobby, not a penny."

  He changed tactics. I saw it coming in how his face softened, how he tried to wipe the scowl away. "Aw, don't be that way. I was just kidding ya. My leg's hurting, that's all, I was outta my head, baby. I'm in a bad mood but I wanna apologize. You don't believe that crap I said, do you? I made it up, really, come here, baby, let me do to you what you want, let me make you feel..."

  "Goodbye Bobby." I was into the hall. He approached the door, his face red and livid with splotches. He was not so pretty now. He was not at all pretty. How could I have been so blind as not to see? "By the way," I said, making for the elevator while he painfully followed, leaning against the aged wallpapered wall for support, the heavy cast clumping along the floor. "I threw away your goddamned pistol in Salt Lake. I found it and threw it in a garbage can at a service station."

  "I'll..."

  The elevator door slid shut before he reached me. The chugs and clangs of the cables rang in my ears as I descended to the lobby floor. "Goodbye, Bobby," I whispered. "I wish I could say it had been fun."

  #

  There weren't many pretty boys in Haight-Ashbury. It's hard to be pretty when you're stoned and vacant-eyed. LSD trips do not make for pretty. The pretty ones I found there I left as pickings for other, weaker girls. Someone should have told them not to get involved. Pretty boys either die stubborn of pneumonia, or they do crime like crime wants to be done. Either way they aren't worth the bother to spit on.

  Bobby found me two months later. I didn't think he could, but the street talked. That's what the street did best in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, talk and sell shit.

  Someone told him I'd crashed with a girl everyone called "Petunia"-- Pet, for short. She had a two-room dump on the ground floor of a dilapidated, condemned building just three blocks off the main drag. The only working toilet was on the second floor and the way it worked was we poured a bucket of water into it. Bathing, when it was done, came from the same bucket. But the pad was free, who was going to complain?

  I was nearly bummed out with the hippie crowd. That's what you said then--bummed, crashed, talking shit in the pad. I thought hippies would be fun, the sex fantastic, the drugs more than adequate. The truth was the people in the midst of this revolution were crazy as hell, the sex, when you could get it, was listless and uninspiring, and the drugs gave me ultra-paranoid dreams where ten-foot tall cats tried to scratch out my eyes. So much for the golden west and the counterculture movement. Just one more demonstration of a social experiment gone wrong, one more example of bad taste.

  Pet was a sweetheart, though, and even if she slept all day and hallucinated all night, she was good people. If the hippie heart was to be found, she had it cornered. I needed clothes, she went scavenging and brought back brocaded vests, silk pants, rich, colored scarves. I got hungry, she disappeared and returned laden down with a feast extraordinaire, everything from pizza to chicken soup and sardines, to plums so purple and ripe they made your mouth run water just to look at them. I don't know how she did it, but she knew how to supply our two rooms with everything but electricity. And she was working on that.

  Sweeping long dishwater blond hair from her sleepy, hooded brown eyes she said, "Babe, I got connections. We'll have a free line into the power company by week's end."

  Pet came from San Diego. "That pit of vipers. Sailor lech types and Chicano macho types. You can have it," she had said of it.

  She was going nowhere. "This is the best place on earth. This is where God smiled on us."

  I tentatively put forth the traitorous notion that we were floating through life and maybe should rejoin the establishment, get a job, get a real apartment, make some honest cash.

  Pet gave me a pained look and took up her place on the three stacked mattresses that lay on the floor. "Get smart, babe. You don't want straight time. It's slow poison and you know it."

  At that point I wasn't sure she was right. Poison, yeah, it was out there in three-piece suits and nappy haircuts, but wasn't there a middle ground somewhere? Couldn't you play the game and still win? Stealing from the electric company wasn't my idea of making remarkable social progress. It was just a pinprick in the ongoing war of sticking it to The Man.

  That was the day and the dying conversation we were having when Bobby showed up.

  He loomed in the open doorway, grinning an evil, twisted smile. "Found you," he said quietly.

  "Friend of yours?" Pet asked. "He's pretty."

  So she thought so too. But she didn't know Bobby Tremain.

  He wore faded jeans and a ripped black tee-shirt. The cast was gone, but he leaned a little sideways against the door jamb as if the leg was still a problem.

  "Hello, Bobby. Goodbye, Bobby."

  "You won't get rid of me so easy this time. I come for my car."

  "You come for revenge. I know you, Bobby."

  "Hey now, cool out," Pet said, climbing off the mattresses and going to where Bobby leaned. "What you wanna fight for, babe? How about a few tokes, you know, make you feel better?"

  "You get away from me, you fucking pothead." Bobby's gaze never left me.

  Pet held up both hands. "Hey, fine. Sae la vie, man, and all that good shit."

  "My car," he repeated, his gaze now boring into me with fire, with fierceness.

  "I had to sell it, Bobby. So get another one." Saying this did not give me the satisfaction I th
ought it would.

  He moved past Pet and limped across the room. He stood much too close and I could smell danger coming off him like a cologne too heavily splashed on the skin. I couldn't look him in the eye. A trill of fear finger-walked up my spine. I didn't remember him being this big, this overwhelming. Maybe the cast had made him seem vulnerable. Without it he was gargantuan, a nightmare, a reject from one of the last doped out visions of cats and bells and Pepsi cans that said things like, "Pardon me while I kiss the sky." He blocked the light from the grimy windows. I backed away, slowly, oh so carefully. "Leave me alone, Bobby."

  "I'm going to kill you." He said it so calmly.

  I sucked in my breath because I knew this was the truth, the unvarnished, absolute truth. Grandma hadn't told me pretty boys might be homicidal. But then how would she know?

  Pet laughed nervously and licked her lips. "Listen, man, that's a little hard for somebody taking your car, don't you think? What if I see if I can get you another car? I might be able to do that if you're sweet."

  Bobby turned faster than I thought he could. "Sweet, my dimpled ass! Now you get out of my face, you understand? This ain't got nothing to do with you, but if you want, I'll just make this a twosome. Two for the price of one, are you getting my drift, little honey?"

  Pet changed color. She was creamy California sun beige and turned white as cottage cheese. Her small mouth pinched down tight as a lid on a catsup bottle. Her eyes suddenly blazed with more formidable emotion than I've ever seen from her before. I didn't know if she was impressing Bobby, but she sure as hell impressed me. This was warrior territory and Pet had on her paint.

  "Out," she commanded, pointing to the door. "You get out."

  Bobby threw me a dark glance before limping past her to the hall entry. "Later, baby."

  When the front entrance door slammed, I was finally able to breathe, but not too easily. I was chuffing like an asthmatic.

  "Hell, where'd that freakzoid come from? That the one you left in Reno?"

  "That's him. He wanted to shoot a cop. I think we better believe his threats."