The Nightrunners - Joe R. Lansdale.wps

by phuc

  "Love birds," Brian said.

  They didn't say anything. Angela slid her arm around Jimmy's waist.

  "You a spick?" Brian asked her.

  "Yeah, I guess."

  "You are or you aren't. Which is it?"

  "Yes."

  "You two want in?"

  "Yeah," Jimmy said. "Yeah, we want in."

  "What about you?" Brian asked Angela.

  She looked at Jimmy. "Sure."

  "We play hardball here. You know that?"

  "Yeah, we know."

  "You don't play the game right, may find yourself fertilizing center field. Know what I'm saying here?"

  "Yeah, I know," Jimmy said. "We know."

  "That's good. You might be asked to play all positions on this team. First base, catcher, shortstop. Anything we want you to play, you play it. Got that?"

  "Got it."

  "And her."

  "Got it," she said. "I do what Jimmy says."

  "No, you do what I say."

  "She will," Jimmy said.

  "That's good, real good. I like to see a girl that knows her place in the scheme of things.

  One last thing, now that you're in don't think about flaking out. There aren't enough places to hide or enough police to protect you."

  "Got you," Jimmy said.

  "You're in then. Now, go ahead and get back in the car. I'm going to talk to Loony and Stone here."

  They got back in. Brian walked with Loony and Stone to the middle of the yard.

  "What do you think?" Loony asked.

  "I don't know. You watch them. They go to the police, something like that, and I'll have your balls to stuff with coffee beans so I can have me a rattle. Got me?"

  "Got you. They won't go no place. We'll watch them, won't we, Stone?"

  Stone nodded.

  "All right. I'm holding you to it. I don't want to see you guys again until the twenty-eighth. And get a shotgun, and some knives. Be sure you bring the knives, sharp knives. I'm going to cut that goddamned teacher's heart out."

  "We'll get the knives,"

  "You do that. Now, so long. I got to get to bed so I can get to school in the morning."

  "School?"

  "Yeah, unlike you guys, people know I'm alive and I can catch hell about not going to school. I'm going to keep my nose clean."

  "I thought you got expelled."

  "So they let me back in. My mother begged some."

  "That's shitty."

  "Twenty-eighth's my last day. After that, we're blowing up-country."

  "Suits us."

  "Now, so long."

  FIVE

  It would be over a week before the authorities found Brian's mother cut to pieces in her bed. And they would find her only because the next-door neighbors had complained about the stink. Since she lived on a retirement check and had no friends, just her "loving little boy," no one had missed her. But it would be determined that she was probably murdered early on the night of the twenty-eighth. Written on the wall in her blood was a note. It read:

  Good night, Mommy. Gone to Hell. Won't be back. Your loving baby boy.

  P.S. Clyde sends his love.

  SIX

  October 28, 11:3O P.M.

  They went over to the apartment where Becky and Montgomery Jones lived, climbed out of the car and stood for a moment in the crisp October air.

  "Jimmy, you're going with us. Angela, you're going to stay in the car, be ready to honk the horn if anything comes down we should know about. If that happens you crank the motor and drive over to the stairs so we can get in quick like. Got me?"

  Heads nodded all around.

  "Let's do it," Brian said. The four of them crossed the lot, went upstairs, Brian pressed his ear to the door.

  No sound.

  He took out his pocket knife and put it between the edge of the door and the lock and rocked the blade from side to side until there was a snicking noise.

  "Easy as hell," he whispered.

  They went inside, Brian and Stone and Jimmy with knives, Loony with the shotgun. Less than a minute later they discovered the apartment was empty.

  Except for a cat and Loony picked it up and petted it. "She got herself a cat," he said.

  Brian cursed. He looked about. Found on the bar a note that read: Dear Dean and Eva:

  Just throw Casey's litter box out once. Fresh litter under the sink, food is there too.

  Thanks so much for feeding him. And thanks for the loan of the cabin once again.

  Beck

  "Shit!" Brian said. "Gone camping or something." "They'll be back," Loony said, scratching the cat behind the ears.

  "We're not waiting. We're going to find them."

  "How?" Loony asked.

  Brian turned on the light over the bar, flipped open the little phone and address book there. He found a Dean and Eva Beaumont listed. They lived on Heard's Lane.

  "Well," Brian said, "here we are, the Beaumonts. We'll pay them a little visit, find out where this cabin is." He tore the page out of the address book.

  After Loony killed the cat they drove over there.

  The pot of blood on the stove of Hell had just begun to boil.

  PART THREE:

  The Shark Shows ItsTeeth

  October 31 (Halloween)

  Somewhere in the United States, someone is

  brutally murdered every twenty-six minutes.

  — Statistical fact

  Fierce as the Furies, terrible as Hell.

  — Milton, Paradise Lost

  By the pricking of my thumbs.

  Something wicked this way comes.

  — Shakespeare, Macbeth

  ONE

  October 31, 12:O2 A.M.

  —clay road winding, '66 Chevy humming, falling forward in time . . .

  And so for a few more miles the car rolled on. Brian driving with his pale face looking ghostlike in the night, the others sleeping, storing up ...

  TWO

  October 31, 12:27 A.M.

  They found another pasture, Brian stopped the car and Loony got out to open the post and barbed-wire gate.

  Brian drove the car through. Loony closed the gate and climbed back inside. They drove through the pasture, past sleeping cows, some of which came unstuck from sleep to look up and watch the black shark sail past.

  They found a collection of pines next to a metal enclosure that contained water and had salt blocks placed on the outside and all around. The car stopped and the lights went out.

  Brian got out, took a leak. "I'll be back," he said. He walked off.

  Five minutes later Jimmy and Angela climbed out of the car, walked off in the opposite direction. They looped over a slight rise in the pasture and found a copse of hardwoods that the fall had shook free of leaves, sat down beneath them, backs to an oak.

  "I'm scared, Jimmy," Angela said.

  "I know. I am too."

  "What are we going to do?"

  "I don't know." Jimmy didn't want to admit it, but he was even more frightened than Angela thought. The moment she began to get rattled, show obvious fear, he had begun to rip out at the seams. For all his macho bravado, Angela was his anchor, and when her calm and cool began to slip, the final stitch of his own control began to unravel

  —rapidly.

  "He's crazy, Jimmy. They're all crazy."

  "I know."

  "By the Blessed Virgin, how did we get into this?"

  "Me. Me wanting a few friends. Me the tough guy. I'm not so tough, Angela."

  "So, who wants tough. I've grown up with tough. I've seen tough. I want to see gentle. I want to get out of this. Those poor people, Jimmy."

  "I know . . . while you were being sick in the hall, Brian, he made me cut the woman . . .

  She was dead, but he made me take a knife and do some things to her breast ... I didn't want to, but if I hadn't they'd have killed me . . . and you."

  "After they got through with me. Do you see how that Loony looks at me?"

  "Yes. I
want to kill him, but . . . I'm not tough, Angela. I'm just ... I just am, that's all."

  "We've got to split out of this, Jimmy. That Brian, he's going to kill that woman and I don't even know why really."

  "Less we know the better."

  "God, he's crazy, so crazy, crazier than the rest. Last night, late, after we'd parked in that other pasture, I got out to go to the bathroom and I found me some trees and it was cool, and I got to thinking how it would be to run, to just take off and not come back."

  "You should have,"

  "I couldn't leave you. Never. I'd die first. So I'm going to the bathroom—got to pee all the time now, it seems—and I notice that just a little ways off, out in the moonlight, is Brian. He didn't see me, and I was frightened, you know, not sure I wanted to show myself on account of I don't know how he's going to act, you know. Maybe he'll think I'm spying or something. So I just sat real still, thinking he'd go on, but then he starts talking to himself, but . . . This was really scary, Jimmy. And I heard him answer himself, but not with his own voice. In another voice, and I swear on the Blessed Virgin,"

  she crossed herself, "the voice that answered him back didn't sound anything like his. The voice made the hair on the back of my neck crawl. It was a human voice, but . . . there was something wrong with it, Jimmy. And this voice, he kept calling it Clyde—I guess that's the guy we've heard them talk about, the creep that hung himself.

  "Anyway, I didn't move, just watched. I was really frightened then. And I watched Brian and he started walking back and forth, you know, nervous like, and pretty soon there's another voice, and . . .it wasn't like a human voice, Jimmy, it was deep and rumbly and sounded like someone trying to talk and gargle at once, only it was loud. And I started to just up and run like a deer, but I'm scared, you know. I think, this guy is absolutely Flip City. He's talking to himself and answering in two other voices . . . But I don't know how he could make a voice like that last one, and neither of them sounded like Brian . . . And once . . . I'm not sure about this, Jimmy. I was frightened and maybe I just thought I heard it, but it sounded once like Brian, and this voice he called Clyde, were talking at the same time . . . just for a few seconds, you know, and it was like Brian had accidentally started talking when Clyde started talking and when he knew he was doing that he just shut up and the voice he called Clyde went on.

  "I didn't understand what was being said, least not much, Brian was too far away, but I heard something about a razor and about tomorrow night, and then Brian sat down on the ground—I mean he just sat, like his legs had melted out from under him, and then Brian said something . . . crazy, crazier than anything else. He said, 'Clyde, turn off that goddamned television set.' I could hear that plainly, every word of it. It was like someone had a set on and it was turned up too loud for him or something ... So he got quiet then, and while he was sitting with his head hung down, I snuck out of there. I tell you, Jimmy, it was scary. He's crazy, completely Flip City."

  Jimmy, who was shivering, said, "I know."

  "I think that's where he's gone again tonight. To go out there somewhere to talk to this Clyde, and maybe this other voice—shit, Jimmy, you should have heard ... I don't know how he could have done that with his voice. It was like one of those demon voices out of that movie with the green puke, The Exorcist. Jesus, Jimmy, Jesus and the Blessed Virgin."

  THREE

  October 31, 5:49 A.M.

  He awoke before the alarm was to ring, looked where his wife should be, and she was not there. Only her indentation and the sweet woman smell of her mingling with the crisp morning air.

  Ted Olsen cut off the alarm, cried out, "Roxanne?"

  "Making breakfast," she said from the kitchen. "Come in here, it's warmer."

  He scratched his head and scratched his scrotum through the slit in his boxer shorts, then he went to the bathroom to wash up and brush his teeth. He always brushed his teeth first thing in the morning, even if he were about to eat. Brushing made him feel human again, nothing like getting the old green hair off the fangs. After breakfast, he'd brush again. He even went as far as to carry a toothbrush and paste with him while he worked, and two or I three times a day, he'd brush. It was almost a fetish. Probably because his parents had had such bad teeth.

  He finished his toilet and dressed without showering, went out of the cold and into the warmth of the kitchen, the smell of bacon and eggs, the sight of Roxanne. Roxanne, Roxanne.

  She stood at the stove, spatula in hand. She wore her short blue nighties and the cheeks of her ass showed themselves in a half-exposed, tantalizing manner. Olsen felt a movement in his pants that wasn't pocket change. He checked his watch. Well, it might as well be pocket change. If he'd gotten up just thirty minutes earlier there would have been time.

  That was the story of his life.

  No time.

  When he was ready, there wasn't time. And when there was time, he wasn't ready.

  He was thirty-five, for Christsake, and he had to make a schedule so he could go to bed with his wife.

  He looked at his watch again and thought about a squeeze play.

  Nope, just wasn't time. That asshole Larry would be by shortly, and if it was like yesterday, he'd be early. Perhaps now, with the psycho who. had killed Patrolman Trawler running loose, it was necessary for them to team up, but he'd be damn glad when things returned to normal and he had a car to himself.

  He picked his gun belt (Roxanne brought it in for him every morning when he was working, which was most of the time) off the back of a chair, strapped it on. It was a silly habit. He still had breakfast to eat, but after all these years in the Highway Patrol, it had become as natural a thing to do as zipping up his fly—in fact, more natural. Men and their guns, he thought. He sat down at the table and tried not to look at Roxanne's ass, which was difficult, because as she cooked she wiggled all over the place.

  He sighed.

  She turned, had a plate of eggs and bacon in her hand. She set it down in front of him and they traded smiles. The toast popped up as if on command (her timing was incredible) and she brought it over to him on a fork. Next she brought butter and coffee, sat down next to him. There was no plate in front of her, only coffee. As usual, she'd eat after he left.

  Sometimes he felt a bit guilty about Roxanne and her wifey role. The woman was college-educated and here she was slinging hash for him every morning like a waitress in a two-bit cafe. And all he had was a high school education and a shit-ass, no-thank-you job he'd had since he was in his early twenties. If he applied now he couldn't even get in.

  You had to have college these days—sixty hours at least.

  Truth was, he ought to be cooking for her and she ought to be going to work every morning in one of those classy female business suits or one of those dresses she looked so fine in. As it was, she didn't even have the occasion to wear that sort of thing. For any reason.

  Living in the country, with him gone most of the time, or home and just too tired to do anything, wasn't much of a life for an attractive woman. Worse, even, was the fact that his job had grown stale and tiresome, unchallenging.

  And now he had Larry.

  Crazy Larry. The only reason he was still in the Highway Patrol was the grace of God and friends in high authority—Christ! could a guy like that have friends?

  Yesterday, the first time they'd actually worked together, they'd nearly come to blows.

  The guy was worse than he had heard. Larry had asked him right off what his politics were, and then insulted him and called him a communist when he said Democrat.

  Next he'd asked how he stood on "niggers," "spicks," "wops" and other foreigners.

  And when he explained that he found the terms offensive, he had to submit to fifteen minutes of "it's the nigger-loving bastards like yourself that are bringing the country down around our ears."

  If he had to put up with that today . . . Well, he just might shoot the sonofabitch, throw him in a ditch beside the road and tell God he'd died.

&n
bsp; For heaven's sake, how could a guy like that walk around loose in society? Here they were combing the country for a nut, or nuts, who had killed a fellow officer, and he was riding with one of the biggest nuts in the country. "Breakfast okay, baby?"

  "Ummm, fine," he said. "Was I frowning?"

  "A little."

  "Not the food, it's Larry."

  "Only been with him one day so far and you're letting him give you an ulcer."

  "He is an ulcer."

  "Sure sounds like it."

  "Just be glad to have it to myself again, my own car. I used to think I wanted a partner all the time, but if it's going to be Larry, I'd just as soon not. When I find out who put me with him, I'm going to strangle them—slowly."

  "You think they're still out there, Ted? The ones who killed Jim?"

  "They haven't caught them yet. I figure they're in Louisiana somewhere. This area has been combed pretty thoroughly."

  "Lot of back roads."

  "You're right about that. I suppose if they were "You're really going to quit?"

  "Really."

  "You're not just saying that because—"

  "You're not responsible. I want to quit and have normal hours and live like a normal human being. Have some kids and not have you worry to death about my coming home to them all the time. Just lead a normal life. Soon as I can, I'm hanging it up."

  "No idea what you'll do?"

  "No."

  "I could go back to work for a while, until you decide."

  "We'll worry about that later. I've got to do some thinking in that area." She smiled. "You better eat your breakfast." He smiled back and ate.

  ........

  He was brushing his teeth again when he heard Roxanne call from the kitchen,

  "Larry's here."

  Softly, through toothpaste-foamed teeth, he said, "Bastard,"

  "Okay," he called to Roxanne. He rinsed his mouth, put his spare toothbrush in a very wrinkled paper bag, dropped his toothpaste in with it.

  When he came out of the bathroom, Roxanne was holding his hat. He took it from her and put his arms around her, pulled her lips to his.

  "That was nice," she said when their lips parted.

  "Yes, it was." He pulled her to him again and they had an instant replay.

  "My goodness, Teddy," she said when they moved apart. She reached down and pressed her hand to his erection. "I thought your gun had slid around." She began to massage his penis.