at First Sight (2008)

by Stephen Cannell

  “You don’t know how dangerous icy roads can be:” I told her, struggling to contain my anger.

  “I live in North Carolina, Chick. I drive icy roads all winter. Let’s get this stuff into the car. I want to leave.”

  She picked up a box and I had to block her from walking out the door with it.

  “Leave it:’ I said. “You’re not going.”

  “An order?” Her eyes turned instantly hard. She stepped back, still holding the box, but turned sideways and spread her feet like she was settling into some kind of corny Bruce Lee fighting stance.

  After more years of Evelyn’s bullshit than I care to remember, you’d think I would have developed a few calluses for this kind of horseshit—an attitude shield. But I obviously hadn’t, because right then all I wanted to do was smack her in the mouth.

  Here’s the deal. I invite a girl up to the mountains. I treat her to a beautiful Christmas card setting. I light a fire, turn on music, make every damn effort to be charming. I even pour three fucking bottles of expensive wine, which, believe me, shouldn’t get uncorked unless I do. And what do I get? I get a lot of nutty shit about wanting to go home. She was standing in my kitchen, her mouth pulled down, looking way-the-hell-too-much like Evelyn.

  Suddenly, blind, white anger flashed through me. But it passed quickly. I looked at her carefully over the rim of the wineglass, calmed myself down, and smiled.

  “Let me lay out a few ground rules, just so we’ll both know what’s going on.”

  “Before you do that, Chick, here.”

  Paige handed me the box she’d been holding, then without warning, turned and sprinted into the living room, heading toward the telephone.

  I dropped the box and took off after her, but she was quick, and by the time I got into the main room she already had the handset to her ear and was trying to get a dial tone. There wasn’t one. I already knew that. It didn’t matter if the phone company had fixed the lines because the first thing I did when we got here, while she sat in the car refusing to get out, was disconnect the phone at the junction box.

  “What’s going on, Chick? Am I a hostage?”

  “Bad choice of words. You’re a houseguest who I will not permit to make a dangerous trip down the mountain on icy roads at night. I have your safety to protect.”

  “The phone is dead.”

  “Lines are down again because of the storm.”

  “Then how did you call the lodge? Were you faking that call?”

  “I don’t take well to being quizzed, Paige. I’m not some country club pussy like Chandler. I’m a man who is used to being in charge—used to controlling his space:’

  Of course, the minute I said that, I knew it was wrong but this wasn’t turning out the way I envisioned it.

  Her teeth were bared, her feet spread. In that moment, she looked like she was getting ready to kick my ass.

  I had another rush of anger. I was beginning to hate her guts.

  Chapter 40

  PAIGE

  ANGER COLORED CHICK’S FACE AS I STOOD THERE WITH the dead phone in my hand. Apparently, I wasn’t cooperating with his twisted fantasy. I watched as he made a huge effort to compose himself, taking half a dozen deep breaths.

  “I need to tell you something,” he finally said. “I’ve been waiting for just the right moment, and now that we’re alone with no distractions, I think you need to understand a few things. It’s important because it affects everything between us.”

  “There is no `us: Chick.”

  “When I first saw you in Hawaii almost a year ago, I had never seen anyone so breathtakingly beautiful … “

  “Please, Chick … “

  “Stop arguing and interrupting! Listen to me, for chrissake!” He took several more breaths, then calmed himself again and continued.

  “Y’see, Paige, I’ve never been a man with a big emotional component. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it was my dad dying so early in my adolescence. Maybe it was because my mother and grandmother were such hovering crones. I don’t know what caused it. But then, in Hawaii last January, I saw you. You were my definition of human perfection. Right then a floodgate of emotion just opened. All these feelings I’d never felt before, they just swamped me.”

  “Chick, please! Don’t do this. You don’t have a clue who I am.”

  He cocked his head like an animal scoping prey. The look was chilling.

  “But I was married, so it was one of those impossible things,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard me. “You had Chandler. I had Evelyn. So you went home; I went home. That should have been the end of it. But Paige, I couldn’t get you out of my mind—couldn’t erase the memory of you from my thoughts. Little things, adorable things about you haunted my every waking moment. The birthmark on your calf, I love that birthmark. The way you like to sit with your legs tucked under you, the giggly laugh you have. The little hairs on your arms, so fine, so perfect?’

  Jesus Christ, I thought. This guy is out of his fucking mind. “Chick, you’ve had quite a bit of wine, so let’s stop this right now, before either of us says something we don’t mean.”

  “I’ve been planning to tell you this for months, Paige. I’ve thought about nothing else for almost a year. From the second I first sawyou getting out of the pool at the Four Seasons, it was love at first sight.”

  He took another sip of the Bordeaux and set down the glass. “I have plans for us. Dreams.”

  I thought, I’ve had enough. This asshole murdered my husband. If I’m going down, then it might as well be swinging. So I shouted my next words right in his smug face.

  “Plans for us? I’m not interested in you, you silly son-of-a-bitch. I still love Chandler!”

  “Chandler is dead!” he shouted back. “He’s gone. Evelyn’s gone. It’s just us now.”

  I could see where this was headed. He would convince himself that I wanted him, despite my protests. First rape, then maybe even murder.

  Suddenly, Chick lunged toward me and grabbed my purse. “What’ve you got in there?” I was clutching the bag so tightly he must have sensed I had something inside. He jerked the bag open and pulled out the broken wineglass stem, waving it between us. “What’s this for?”

  I didn’t answer.

  His eyes fell on Bob Butler’s letter and the drawing. He reached into the purse and plucked them out. He opened the letter first, took one step back, and scanned it quickly. Then he glanced at the picture.

  The truth of Bob’s accusation was immediately all over his face.

  He dropped the letter to the floor. His eyes went dead, like the flickering glass eyes on the wall-hung animals.

  He whispered something. At first I didn’t understand him, but then he said it louder. “You complete me.”

  The insanity of that remark rocked me.

  “You killed them both, didn’t you? First Chandler, then Evelyn. All of it because of this twisted fantasy that you and I would one day be together?’

  I had to get out of here now or die trying. “Give me the keys to the car, Chick.”

  “I can’t let you leave, Paige.”

  “You gonna kill me, too?”

  He stepped forward. Both his hands were extended toward me, a strange look of frustration clouding his face.

  It was time to make my move, so right then, when he wasn’t expecting it, I gave him a kin-geri, which is a polite Japanese term for a kick to the balls. My foot strike caught him squarely, in the bulge of those tight, Roberto Cavalli stretchies. He grabbed his crotch, doubled over, and then dropped to his knees in pain.

  I exploded through the house and out the front door into the night. The fresh snow was almost a foot high on the porch. I ran down the steps, slipping once and going down, but I rolled immediately up to my feet and sprinted toward the gold Mercedes, running my fingers under the front bumper, looking for the hide-a-key. Nothing.

  “Paige, come back here! Don’t make me do this!”

  I turned and saw Chick standing on the fro
nt porch holding a scoped deer rifle. I spun and ran as fast as I could, into the trees at the side of the drive. I had carelessly left my sweater inside and the cold, wind-whipped snow swirled around me. Then I heard a rifle’s report, heard a limb snap nearby. I kept running, heading up the steep bank into the forest by the side of his driveway, my short choppy sprinter’s stride churning in the deep drifting snow.

  Chapter 41

  CHICK

  I’VE PRETTY MUCH SPENT MY ENTIRE LIFE BEING WHAT other people wanted. First, it was my loser father. Then I was forced to endure that hen party with my mother and grandmother. I’ve tried to fit in. Tried to belong. I’ve joined clubs full of people who bored me, brown-nosed people who, if they weren’t socially or corporately important, I probably wouldn’t have wasted a bullet on. My life was ordered by the stringent guidelines and demands of others.

  And what had come of all this endless ass-kissing? Disaster, that’s what. I had a personal balance-sheet that resembled the crater on Mount St. Helens and a dead wife who mocked me from the grave, the memory of her coarse insults bubbling relentlessly in my subconscious. I had an angry daughter I’d come to hate, and a business career that was like nine miles of dirt road.

  The only thing I’d asked for in my crummy life, the only perk, if you will, that I had applied for, was just a little happiness in the arms of this one woman. I had fantasized over her. I had even killed for her. And what did this contribution to my own madness produce? Nothing. It produced not one damn useful thing, except an ever-widening circle of rage.

  So here she was, standing before me like a crazed kamikazi, armed with the broken stem of a fucking hundreddollar Venetian crystal goblet, ready to unzip my ass with its jagged point. You see what I’m saying? When the hell is Chick Best gonna catch a fucking break? When’s the Chickster gonna get a little TLC?

  And then, next comes this bullshit letter from Bob Butler, accusing me of murder. My instincts on that toothpick-chewing Carolina hayseed had been right on target. He’d sniffed around until he’d finally found the auto body shop, and then written Paige that I was the one who’d run Chandler down.

  I had lusted after this silly woman, my nose filled with her scent from the first moment I’d seen her. Then just when I was on the one-yard line, I lost everything.

  She was my fantasy. But if I let her get out of here now, knowing what she knew, she would destroy me. I needed to finish this and make a run for Mexico before Bob Butler caught up to me.

  My new absurd reality was I’d become a hostage to events. To this woman who was too fucking stupid to realize what she was throwing away.

  I tried one last time. I stood there while she screamed at me. I tried to make her understand that she completed me. But to be perfectly truthful, I don’t know if she really did or not. Maybe I just needed to possess her, like every other damn thing I’d ever lusted after, then collected, and eventually thrown away. She was the ultimate trophy, but now I had to destroy her before she could destroy me.

  Then while I was evaluating this fucked-up dilemma, she kicked me right in the balls. That was it. That was the last straw. There’s only so much shit I’m prepared to take.

  She bolted out the door, and without thinking, I grabbed the deer rifle and took off after her.

  “Get your ass back in here!” I screamed.

  I blundered out onto the porch, saw her clambering up the hill through a foot of fresh snow. 1 put the deer rifle to my shoulder and fired a warning shot, intentionally aiming high and snapping off a tree limb. You see, despite my rage, I didn’t want to kill her. At least, not yet.

  Somewhere back in the reptilian part of my brain that services my need to reproduce, I still thought I might be able to talk sense into her and put this mess back together. Am I so repulsive that there was no set of conditions that would cause her to reconsider? I still had a shred of hope. It fluttered bravely, a torn fragment of my Hawaiian fantasy.

  “Come back! We can work this out!” I shouted.

  But she kept scrambling up the hill, her snow-wet shirt sticking to her back.

  “You fucking bitch! Come back here, now!” I roared and fired again, this time trying to wound her. But the second shot was rushed. I heard the bullet snapping limbs before it thunked into a tree trunk. She was fifty yards away, disappearing in a blizzard of snowflakes. I had to stop her. Had to keep her from getting to a neighbor for help.

  I could still make a run for it, but if she called 911 and the sheriff came after me, with only one road down the mountain, I’d never get away.

  If she went north she might get to the Mitchells’ place, so I fired again, aiming blindly, because I had now completely lost sight of her in the snowstorm.

  “You come back here!” I screamed again.

  But she was gone. Somewhere up on the hill by the side of the house. She was running for her life with my destruction her only goal.

  Chapter 42

  PAIGE

  THE SECOND BULLET CLIPPED A BRANCH RIGHT OVER my head.

  I could barely see—my eyes watered with melting snow. A branch scratched me badly under my right eye, spinning me around. I ignored the pain and kept going. I was in great shape from hours of marathon training, but the air was thin up here and as I ran uphill in the heavy snow my lungs were beginning to heave.

  Chick was out of shape and I didn’t think he could keep up. However, I was wearing only a light shirt, cotton slacks, and flats. The snow was already coming in over the tops of my shoes, and I knew that once I stopped running and my body started cooling, I stood a good chance of getting hypothermia.

  I paused and turned to look back. When I did, I saw I had another, much more immediate problem than just freezing to death …

  I was leaving a trail of easy-to-follow footprints in the fresh snow. Chick didn’t have to run very fast to catch me. He could simply follow my tracks and stalk me with that deer rifle until I fell or froze. Unless I could find help fast, I was going to lose.

  I paused every so often, holding my breath to listen. I could hear him somewhere down the hill, kicking an occasional boulder with those steel-toed cowboy boots. How far back was he? I didn’t know. How far does sound carry in a snow-filled night? You got me … All I knew was he was hunting me with a rifle, and if I didn’t keep moving, I was dead.

  I started off again, climbing higher up the slope. The wind whipped my wet shirt, my jaw clamped against the cold. My body was beginning to shiver.

  Then I heard him. “Paige! I don’t want to kill you, but I will if I have to. If you come back, we can work something out.”

  Right. All we have to get past is two fucking murders.

  His voice sounded like he was further away than I’d first thought. Even so, I knew I couldn’t rest, I had to keep going. I finally realized that my best chance wasn’t to keep climbing, but to double back and head down to the road. Maybe I could try and flag down a passing car or find another house. If I got to the road I could move away from here faster on the flat grade than I could by climbing this thirty-degree slope.

  I traversed several hundred yards to my left before beginning my descent. I was trying to maintain a parallel course to the one I’d used on the climb up. I went slower, trying to be very quiet, because I knew that somewhere along the way I would pass Chick coming up. However, each time I stopped to listen, I heard nothing but the rustling of falling snow in the treetops. I had no idea where he might be.

  Finally the rate of descent lessened and I was back at Chick’s driveway about a quarter of a mile from his house. I crouched low, my own breath and heartbeat thundering in my ears. My teeth were chattering so badly that I couldn’t hear anything else. I couldn’t just wait here. I would freeze to death. I stood, and hugging the tree line next to the drive, headed down toward Interstate 38.

  The snow was in my hair, falling in giant flakes on my face, melting and running down my back, chilling me to the bone. My shoes and feet felt like blocks of ice. Every hundred paces, I started running a
gain to get my circulation and body temperature up.

  Finally, I arrived at the highway and saw that it was a perfect field of snow. No tire tracks marked the surface. No cars had passed by in hours. I turned right and headed toward town. I couldn’t see the road but followed the plow markers.

  I wasn’t going to last much longer. My body was so cold I was already beginning to lose coordination. A half-moon was now peeking through, lighting the undersides of the storm clouds, throwing a soft, silver light on the drifting snow. Every time I looked back, I saw my telltale tracks stretching out behind me, traitorously pointing the way. If Chick figured out my plan, he would have no trouble finding me.

  And then I heard it.

  A high distant whine that sounded like a buzz saw cutting down trees. I paused and listened, then backed away from the road. It was getting louder, coming toward me. I finally identified the high-pitched sound as a gas engine, changing pitch as the throttle changed. I crouched down in the snow and then saw a lone headlight, about half a mile away, moving fast. A snowmobile.

  I prayed it was a neighbor trying to get into town, or perhaps a road crew checking the highway for cars in the ditch.

  The vehicle veered and started coming right at me, following my tracks in the snow. Panicked, I turned and started to run, but there was no way I could outrun a snowmobile. I stumbled and fell, going down face-first in a snowbank.

  Then the headlight was on me. I rolled over, dripping wet, blinded by its glare. As the vehicle pulled to a stop ten feet away, all I could see was the manufacturer’s name vibrating on the front bumper: YAMAHA.

  A man climbed off the idling red machine and came around the front. He was dressed in a threequarter-length gray parka. The hood was up and he had on yellow-lensed goggles to protect his eyes from the swirling snow. I prayed I was going to be rescued. Then the man kneeled down, crouching over me.