He had never known his father. His mother was a whore. One of his earliest memories was of himself peering over the foot of her bed, watching in terror as some fat slob pounded away on her, grunting and gasping as if he were trying to kill her. But then poor old Mom had turned her head and winked at Slade—winked at him!—and he knew from that moment on just who the enemy was.
“Cunts, my friend! Mother, sister, stranger, whatever—they’re all cunts! And no matter what you ever fuckin do to ’em, you never really get even. There’s just no way!”
Then it was the foster homes, so many of them that a social worker once joked that Slade should change his name to Foster.
“I fixed that fucker,” he said. “I made sure which car was his and then I put a screwdriver to it, keyed it real good on both sides.”
Next, he went on about reform schools, or “juvy,” as he called them.
“I made ’em all. And one thing I learned—you either fight the brothers or you bend over for them, one or the other. I fought ’em. Hell, I even crippled one, smashed his foot with a hammer.”
Baird took a pull on his tiny bottle of vodka. “Why tell me all this now? How can you think of anything but Satin?”
“I am thinkin about her. I’m just tellin ya—it won’t be just me doing her. It’s all them years, all the bastards who’ve been hammerin on me since Day One.”
“That’s a cop-out,” Baird said. “It’s your choice. You do it, it’ll be because you choose to do it.”
“Bullshit. It’s like that foster mother the cunt Jeffers says I did. The old hag started hittin me with a broom cuz I skipped school. So I took the broom away and hit her back. And when she falls, her dress hikes up, and it dawns on me—what better way to let her know who’s boss? Old hag probably dug it. Best fuckin day of her fuckin life.”
Slade settled back in the booth, breathing hard now for some reason. He drank more beer and lit a cigarette, and all the while, Baird sat there looking at him. Finally Slade bridled.
“What the fuck you lookin at?”
“One last time, Slade—don’t do it. Satin may not look it, but I bet she’s had a rough time the same as you. Why add to her problems? Give her a break, okay?”
“Cold feet, huh?”
“Whatever. And I don’t want to watch either. I really don’t.”
“Who gives a shit?” Sneering, Slade again checked Baird’s watch. “Almost twelve-thirty. Time to recon—ain’t that what they say in the army?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Slade laughed. “Boy, you really have slipped through, you bastard. No bumps and bruises on old Jack Baird, right? Just smooth sailin all the way.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
Slade looked at him with deep resentment. “Yeah? Well, I would. Someone like you—you make a killin just by gittin born, you know that?”
Baird did not answer.
“No foster mothers for old Jack Baird, right?”
“That’s right—no foster mothers.”
“No sir, just Mommy and Daddy and Little Jack. And growin up in one place, I bet, livin in the same fuckin house, probably with your own cozy little room. Then college and a purty wife, a purty kid, a good job. A killin, Jacko—that’s what you made. Just by gittin born.”
“If you say so,” Baird said.
The strip-club road followed the shore around the north end of Lake Washington and then ran straight east through the town of Bothell to Route 405, the north-south Interstate that served the east side. The land between the lake and the freeway at that point was still semi-rural, an odd mixture of horse farms, country estates, and an occasional raw, new apartment building, most of which looked grossly out of place, like a garden in Manhattan.
According to Slade, it was in one of these that Satin lived, a two-story, ten-unit, barracks-like building set back a couple of hundred feet from the blacktop road. On either side of the entrance there was about a half-acre of woods, mostly fir trees and ferns, which effectively obscured the building from the road. Beyond the wooded entrance was the parking lot, newly blacktopped, with each space delineated in bright yellow paint. The building itself faced away from the parking lot, with balconies on one side and the entrances to the individual apartments on the other. In between the lot and the building there was a flagstone walkway bordered by bushy evergreens as tall as a man.
Slade made a circle in the parking lot, then drove back out through the wooded entrance and turned south on the blacktop. A quarter-mile farther on, he pulled into another driveway and backed around, then headed back north. When he reached the wooded entrance again, he turned in and went straight across the parking lot this time, pulling into a space near the end of the evergreen walk.
“The cunt’s apartment is on the second floor,” he said. “I followed her here twice already. I don’t know why she takes off at one—the other strippers don’t. Maybe she gets sleepy, huh?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“When we see her lights coming, I’ll jump out and you get down in the fuckin seat. Don’t let her see you. She’ll park in one of the open spaces. And when she starts down the sidewalk, I’ll be there to say hello. I’ll bring her back to the car, maybe put her in the trunk—I don’t know yet. And we’ll do her someplace else. There’s lotsa nice woodsy spots around here.”
Baird was grateful for all the vodka he’d had. As it was, he had to steel his body to keep from shaking. On top of that, he felt feverish, hot one moment and cold the next. And he felt the same in spirit, alternately fighting to control his rage and fear. Listening to Slade detail how he would go about ravaging the girl, Baird wanted to take out his gun immediately and beat him over the head with it, no matter the consequences. But a moment later he would feel paralyzed with fear, mostly for Satin and his own family, knowing what might befall them if he screwed up.
Waiting there in the car, he tried to think ahead to when it would all be over. He tried to concentrate on what he would say to the police. He tried to imagine how it would play.
“Yes, I was with him—but not as a friend. He’s been stalking my daughter, and I thought that if I got to know him—went out drinking with him—he might leave her alone. And then tonight when it dawned on me what he was up to—that he wasn’t here to talk to this girl, as he claimed, but to attack her—that’s when I jumped out and stopped him, and had her call nine-one-one.”
“And you just happened to have a gun handy?”
“For my protection. I knew his record.”
That was what he hoped for. That was the way the thing was supposed to come out.
Again Slade grabbed Baird’s wrist and checked the time. “Only fuckin one o’clock,” he said. “Could be another half hour before she shows.”
He jumped out of the car and went to the back, twice unlocking the trunk and slamming it shut, evidently having decided to dump the girl in there for the drive to the “nice woodsy spot” where he and Baird would then entertain themselves at their leisure.
He got back into the driver’s seat. Though he left the door slightly ajar, no interior lights came on, either because they were burned out or because he had disconnected them. Breathing deeply, he took another pill and washed it down with rum, the last of another half-pint, which he then dropped over the seat onto the floor. He shook his head ruefully.
“You know, it’s so goddamn weird. I don’t feel a fuckin bit horny now. Not like last week at all. Christ, I was really sailin along then. Now I’m down. I’m depressed. I hate every fuckin thing in the world. Especially her. And you. I feel dead.”
“Why don’t we leave, then?”
Sneering, Slade again shook his head. “You just don’t give up, do you? There’s no fuckin way we’re quittin now. When I’m like this and suddenly let it all go, I get like a goddamn tiger. I get so hard I could open cans with it. And the cunt, she could be a fuckin gorilla, I’d still beat the piss outa her. When old Jimbo’s like this, he’s one mean dude, lemme tell ya.”
> Baird felt a wave of nausea. Had he been alone, he might have thrown up. As it was, though, he just sat there in the passenger seat watching as Slade got out his switchblade and began to clean his fingernails. He could hear music playing softly in the building, Barbra Streisand and a male performer singing a duet, most likely about love.
At that hour, there were not many cars on the blacktop road. Every time one appeared, its headlights coming over a hill from one direction or around a curve from the other, Slade would open his door and start to get out. Then, as the lights disappeared behind the wooded entrance and kept going, he would curse and get back in.
Finally, at close to one-thirty, another pair of lights came over the hill. But this time the car slowed down as it reached the woods, and Baird saw its headlights flickering as the car came toward them through the trees. By then, Slade was already outside. He pushed the door closed and moved in a swift crouch past the front of the car and onto the evergreen-bordered walkway.
Baird’s mouth went dry and his heart began to wallop his chest. Hunching down in the front seat, he peered out the window and saw a small red sportscar pull into an empty space three cars away. As the car’s door opened, he saw the girl’s face in the light, heavy-eyed and glum, not as striking without her makeup. She got out, closed the car door, then hitched a large handbag onto her shoulder and started forward, moving between two evergreens onto the sidewalk. At that same moment, Baird opened the Impala’s door and saw the girl turn in alarm, having heard the sound. It was then that Slade struck, stepping from behind another evergreen and clapping one hand over her mouth while furiously looping the other, a fist, into her face and head, over and over.
Immediately Baird scrambled out of the car, terrified that Slade was going to beat the girl to death before he got to him. Fumbling the gun out of his pocket, he reached the walkway just as Slade punched the girl out of his own grasp, sneering in utter hatred and joy as she dropped hard onto the flagstones, her bloody face already ballooning. Slade then reached down and seized her by the hair, either to pull her up for more punishment or to drag her to the car. But before he could do either, Baird lunged forward and struck him in the head with the gun, again and again, until he too crumpled onto the walkway and did not move.
Baird then took him by the hair, clamping his ponytail in one hand and the lapel of his vinyl Elvis jacket in the other, and dragged him roughly back to the car. He fished Slade’s keys out of his pocket, opened the trunk and dumped him in. Closing the trunk, he hurried back to where the girl was, still lying on her back on the flagstone walk. She had begun to moan and was holding a trembling hand out in front of her face, as if she feared to touch it.
“You’ll be all right, honey,” he told her. “You’ll make it. Just hang on.”
Running back to the car, he got in and jammed his hand against the car horn, glad that it was one of the old-fashioned klaxons, made to wake the dead and blow beetles off the road. Someone inside the building began to yell at him, and he raised the gun out the window and shot it into the air. Then he started the car, backed around, and drove out of the parking lot. At the road, he turned left, heading south, for he knew where he wanted to go now. As he drove, he tried not to think about it all, what had happened so far and what was yet to happen. But the one thing he could not put out of his mind was Satin’s eyes as Slade held her mouth shut and began to punch her: the eyes of a horse in a fire, the very look Slade had told Kathy he liked most in a woman.
Driving slowly, Baird kept moving south and west. He went through a residential neighborhood on his way to Holly Point Drive, which snaked through a small state park for over a mile before coming to the lake, where it then ran south along the lakeshore bluff. The park section was unlit and so heavily wooded with old-growth firs that the sky overhead seemed like a road itself, a narrow path of starlight.
Even during the day, it was a lightly traveled road; now, at night it was virtually deserted. Seeing no headlights in either direction, Baird pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. For the last few minutes he had heard sounds of bumping and pounding in the trunk, so he knew Slade had regained consciousness. Taking the car keys in one hand and his gun in the other, he got out and went around to the rear of the car. He looked in both directions again, making sure there still were not any other cars on the road. Then he inserted the key in the trunk’s lock and turned it. And as the lid popped open, Slade came lunging up out of the blackness, swinging his switchblade in a broad arc. Baird saw the blade glint in the starlight and jumped back just as the knife’s point nicked his coat, then rang against the steel of the trunk lid.
“Fucker!” Slade bawled.
Baird shot him. He fired at him three times, hitting him twice in the chest and once in the head. He watched him slump back into the trunk. Then he slammed the lid closed, and it locked.
About a mile farther on, Baird came to a turnoff, a narrow, semiprivate gravel road that ran even closer to the lake, starting along the top of the bluff and snaking downhill, connecting the five or six houses that wealthy owners had been able to build on the steep, wooded hillside. When the road came to a dead end at the last house, Baird turned around and drove back to the blacktop. He tried two other such gravel roads before he found one he could use. Halfway down, the third road went into a sharp S-curve, dropping toward what must have been the last house on the lane.
In the middle of the curve Baird stopped the car and turned off the lights. From that spot he couldn’t see either the house above or the house below. Trembling by now, he got out and went over to the outer edge of the narrow road. Even though there was a good seventy-foot drop to the water below, there was no guardrail. In the days when he had still owned a boat, he occasionally had fished this part of the lake, and he knew there was no beach under the bluff, just the vast green wall plunging straight into the water. He remembered that it was fairly deep right up to the shore, his depth-sounder usually having registered thirty feet or more.
So he wasted no time. Leaning into the car, he put on the emergency brake, pushed the gearshift into drive, then released the brake and stepped out of the way. And the old Impala went obediently to its grave, rumbling and smoking over the edge of the road and rolling downhill for about twenty feet, smashing saplings and bumping over rocks before it finally took to the air and dropped the rest of the way down to the water, where it made a large splash. As the car sank from sight, Baird took the gun out of his pocket and threw it as far out into the lake as he could. He saw the blip it made in the choppy black surface, but he heard nothing, not with the wind blowing as it was.
He turned and walked back up the S-curve a short distance, then cut through the woods above the road, figuring that anyone he might have awakened in the houses would not be able to see him in the trees. Though he wanted to get out of the area as fast as he could, he was too exhausted to walk fast. And anyway, he knew there was still a long night ahead of him. He knew he was a long way from home.
Eleven
It was almost four in the morning when Baird finally got home. After dumping Slade’s car, he had spent the next hour on foot, walking along Holly Point Road at first, then picking his way through the thick woods of the state park until he reached an all-night convenience store located on the road that bordered the park. There he telephoned for a taxi and had the driver take him to a motel a few blocks from the Oolala. After the cab had pulled away, he walked back up the road to the strip club and got his car, which by then was the only one in the parking lot.
As he drove home, he tried not to think about anything except what he was doing, crawling along under the speed limit, even though the road was practically deserted. He knew he would have plenty of time later—half a lifetime—to think about it: what had happened, what he had done. But this was not the time for it, he kept telling himself. Better now to pretend the thing did not even exist, was not right there beside him like a rabid hyena chained in the passenger seat, snapping and snarling.
When he finally ar
rived at his house, he paused in the kitchen only long enough to drain the last few ounces in a bottle of vodka. Then he went upstairs and slipped into his and Ellen’s bathroom, off the master bedroom. He pilfered two of her tranquilizers and downed them along with a couple of aspirin tablets, then slinked back out of the bedroom, being careful not to glance over at the bed for fear he would find her lying there wide awake, watching his every move. He quietly closed the door behind him and went into the guest room across the hall. There he got out of his clothes and fell into bed as if it were a final resting place, a bier from which he never expected to rise. At the same time, neither did he expect to sleep. He figured he was much too exhausted for that, too violated, too lost.
Eyes wide open, he lay there staring at the shadows playing across the ceiling. But what he saw was his hand raising the tiny, black automatic and bringing it down on Slade’s head over and over, and then minutes later holding it out and squeezing the trigger, firing the gun endlessly into the dark pit of the trunk. He watched the car fall toward the lake, and he saw the splash it made before it sank from sight, and he wondered who he was now, what he was—certainly not good old Jack Baird anymore. He was afraid he had killed that man just as surely as he had murdered Jimbo Slade.
Despite his expectations to the contrary, he eventually did fall asleep. But he was awakened by Ellen at eight o’clock, on her way out, about to drive herself and Kathy to work.
“You going to work today?” she asked. “Or are you giving that up too?”
Baird was still in a sweat of terror, coming down out of a nightmare. He nodded vaguely. “Sure,” he said. “Of course.”
A Man's Game Page 18
