February came. A few days after the official groundhog had supposedly seen its shadow and returned to its burrow for another six weeks of winter, it snowed. An inch lay on the ground already and at least half a dozen more predicted. Jack stood on the overpass looking at the thinning southbound traffic slushing along beneath him. He was cold, tired, and ready to call it a night.
As he turned to go he saw a figure hesitantly approaching through the snow. Continuing his turning motion, Jack bent, scooped up some wet snow, packed it into a ball, and lobbed it over the cyclone fencing to drop on a car below. After two more snowballs, he glanced again at the figure and saw it was approaching more confidently now. Jack stopped his bombardment and stared at the traffic as if waiting for the newcomer to pass. But he didn't. He stopped next to Jack.
"Whatcha putting in them?"
Jack looked at him. "Putting in what?"
"The snowballs."
"Get lost."
The guy laughed. "Hey, it's all right. Help yourself." He held out a handful of walnut-sized rocks.
Jack sneered. "If I wanted to throw rocks, I could sure as hell do better'n those."
"This is just for starters."
The newcomer, who said his name was Ed, laid his stones atop the guardrail and together they formed new snowballs with rocky cores. Then Ed showed him a spot where the fencing could be stretched out over the road to allow room for a more direct shot...a space big enough to slip a cinder block through. Jack managed to hit the tops of trucks with his rock-centered snowballs or miss completely. But Ed landed a good share of his dead center on oncoming windshields.
Jack watched his face as he threw. Not much was visible under the knitted cap pulled down to pale eyebrows, or above the navy peacoat collar turned up around his fuzzy cheeks, but a wild light flared in Ed's eyes as he threw his snowballs. And he smiled as he saw them smash against the windshields. He was getting a real thrill out of this.
That didn't mean Ed was the one who’d dropped that cinder block. He could be just another one of a million petty terrorists who got their jollies destroying or disfiguring something that belonged to someone else. But what he was doing was potentially deadly. The impact of one of his special snowballs—even if it didn't shatter the windshield—could cause a driver to swerve or slam on his brakes. And that could be lethal on the slippery asphalt.
Either that had never crossed Ed's mind, or it was what had brought him out tonight.
Could be him.
Jack fought to think clearly. Had to find out. Had to be absolutely sure.
Jack made a disgusted noise. "Fucking waste of time. I don't think we cracked even one." He turned to go. "See ya."
"Hey!" Ed said, grabbing his arm. "I said we're just getting started."
"This is diddley-shit."
"Follow me. I'm a pro at this."
Ed led him down the road to where a 280-Z was parked. He opened the trunk and pointed to an icy cinder block wedged up against the spare tire.
"You call that diddley-shit?"
It took all of Jack's will to keep from leaping on Ed and tearing out his throat with his teeth. Had to be sure. Jack’s plan left no room for error. No going back later and apologizing for making a mistake.
"I call that big trouble," Jack managed to say. "You'll get the heat down on you somethin' awful."
"Naw! I dropped one these bombs last month. You shoulda seen it—perfect shot! Right in somebody's lap!"
Jack felt himself begin to shake. "Hurt bad?"
Ed shrugged. "Who knows? I didn't hang around to find out." He barked a laugh. "I just wish I coulda been there to see the look on their faces when that thing came through the windshield. Blam! Can you see it?"
"Yeah," Jack said. "I can see it."
As Ed leaned over to grab the block, Jack slammed the trunk lid down on his head. Ed yelled and tried to straighten up but Jack slammed him again. And again. He kept on slamming it until Ed stopped moving. Then he ran to the bushes where twenty feet of heavy-duty rope had lain hidden for the past month.
*
"Wake up!"
Jack had tied Ed's hands behind his back. He’d cut a large opening in the cyclone wire. He now held him seated on the top rung of the guardrail over the south side of the overpass. A rope ran from Ed's ankles to the base of one of the guard rail supports. Ed's legs dangled over the southbound lanes.
Jack rubbed snow in Ed's face.
"Wake up!"
Ed sputtered and shook his head. His eyes opened. He looked dully at Jack, then around him. He looked down and stiffened. Panic flashed in his eyes.
"Hey! What—?”
"You're dead, Ed. Ed is dead. It rhymes, Ed. That's 'cause it's meant to be."
Jack was barely in control. He would look back in later years and know what he was doing was crazy. A car could have come down the road and along the overpass at any time, or someone in the northbound lanes could have looked up and spotted them through the heavy snow. But good sense had fled along with mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.
This man had to die.
Jack had decided that after talking to the State Police after his mother's funeral. It had been clear then that even if they learned the name of whoever had dropped the cinder block, without an eyewitness to the incident or a full confession freely given in the presence of the defendant's attorney, he'd walk.
Jack refused to accept that. The killer had to die—not just any way, but Jack's way. He had to know he was going to die. And why.
Jack's voice sounded flat in his ears, and as cold as the snow drifting out of the featureless night sky.
"You know whose lap your 'bomb' landed in last month, Ed? My mother's. You know what? She's dead. A lady who never hurt anyone in her whole life was riding along minding her own business and you killed her. Now she's dead and you're alive. What's wrong with that picture, Ed?"
He took bleak satisfaction from the growing horror in Ed's face.
"Hey, look! It wasn't me! Wasn't me, I swear!"
"Too late, Ed. You already told me it was."
Ed let out a scream as he slid off the guardrail, but Jack held him by the back of his coat until his tied feet found purchase on the ledge.
"Please don't do this! I'm sorry! It was an accident! I didn't mean for anyone to get hurt! I'll do anything to make it up! Anything!"
"Anything? Good. Don't move."
Together they stood over the right southbound lane, Jack inside the guardrail, Ed outside. Both watched the traffic roar out from beneath the overpass and flee down the turnpike. With his hand gripping the collar of Ed's peacoat to steady him, Jack glanced over his shoulder at the oncoming traffic.
With the continuing snowfall, the traffic had slowed and thinned. The left lane had built up an accumulation of slush and no one was using it, but plenty of cars and trucks remained in the middle and right lanes, most doing forty-five or fifty. Jack saw the headlights and clearance lights of a tractor-semitrailer approaching down the right lane. As it neared the overpass he gave a gentle shove.
Ed toppled forward slowly, gracefully, his bleat of terror rising briefly above the noise of the traffic echoing from below. Jack had measured the rope carefully. Ed fell feet first until the rope ran out of slack, then his body snapped downward. Ed's head and upper torso swung over the cab of the oncoming truck and smashed against the leading edge of the trailer with a solid thunk! His body bounced and dragged limply along the length of the trailer top, then swung into the air, a piñata spinning and swaying crazily its string.
The truck kept going, its driver probably blaming the noise on a clump of wet snow that had shaken loose from the overpass. Another truck came rolling down the lane but Jack didn't wait for the second impact.
He walked to Ed's car and removed the cinder block from the trunk. He threw it into a field as he walked the mile farther down the road to his own car.
No connection to his mother's death, no connection to him.
Over.
Don
e.
He went home and put himself to bed, secure in the belief that starting tomorrow he could pick up his life again where he’d left off.
He was wrong.
He slept into the afternoon of the following day. When he awoke, the enormity of what he’d done descended with the weight of the earth itself. He’d killed. More than killed: he’d executed another man.
He was tempted to cop an insanity plea, say it hadn't been him up there on the overpass but a monster wearing his skin. Someone else had been in control.
It wouldn't wash. It hadn't been someone else. It had been him. Jack. No one else. And he hadn't been in a fog or a fugue or consumed by a red haze of rage. He remembered every detail, every word, every move with crystal clarity.
No guilt. No remorse. That was the truly frightening part: The realization that if he could go back and relive those moments he wouldn't change a thing.
He knew that afternoon as he sat hunched on the edge of the bed that his life would never be the same. The young man in the mirror today was not the same one he’d seen there yesterday. Everything looked subtly different. The angles and curves of his surroundings hadn't changed; faces and architecture and geography all stayed topographically the same. But someone had shifted the lighting. Shadows lurked where once there had been light.
Jack returned to Rutgers but college no longer seemed to make any sense. He could sit and laugh and drink with his friends, but he no longer felt a part of them. He was one step removed. He could still see and hear them, but could no longer touch them, as if a glass wall had risen between him and everyone he thought he knew.
He searched for a way to make some sense of it all. He went through the existentialist canon, devouring Camus and Sartre and Kierkegaard. Camus seemed to know the questions Jack was asking, but he gave no answers.
Jack started flunking courses. He drifted away from his friends. Finally he saw no point in continuing the charade. He took all his savings and disappeared with out telling anyone, including his family—especially his family—where he was going. He moved to New York where he took odd jobs to survive, and made contacts, started getting fix-it work with a gradually escalating level of danger and violence. He learned how to pick locks and pick the right gun and ammo for any given situation, how to break into a house and break an arm. He’d been there ever since.
Everyone, including his father, blamed the change on the death of his mother. In a very roundabout way, they were right.
14
The overpass receded in his rearview mirror, and with it the memory of that night.
Jack wiped his sweaty palms against his slacks. He wondered where he'd be and what he'd be doing now if Ed had dropped that cinder block a half second earlier or later, bouncing it harmlessly off the hood or roof of his folks' car. Half a second would have meant the difference between life and death for his mother—and for Ed. Jack would have finished school, had a regular job by now, with regular hours, and maybe even a wife and kids. Stability, identity, security.
And he'd be able to drive under that overpass without reliving two deaths.
Jack came through the Lincoln Tunnel and headed directly crosstown. He drove past Sutton Square and saw a blue-and-white unit parked outside Nellie's townhouse. After making a U-turn under the bridge, he drove back down to the mid-fifties and parked near a hydrant on Sutton Place South. He waited and watched. Before too long he saw the blue-and-white pull out and head uptown. He cruised around until he found a working pay phone and used it to call Nellie's.
"Hello?" Gia's voice was tense, expectant.
"It's Jack, Gia. Everything okay?"
"No." She seemed to relax. Now she just sounded tired.
"Police gone?"
"Just left."
"I'm coming over—that is, if you don't mind.”
Jack expected an argument and some abuse; instead, Gia said, "No, I don't mind."
"Be there in a minute."
He got back into the car, pulled the Semmerling from under the seat and strapped it to his ankle. Gia hadn't given him an argument. She must be terrified.
15
Gia had never thought she’d be glad to see Jack again. But when she opened the door and found him standing there, it required all her reserve to keep from leaping into his arms.
The police had been no help. In fact, the two officers who finally showed up in response to her call had acted as if she was wasting their time. They’d given the house a cursory once over inside and out, seen no sign of forced entry, hung around asking a few questions, then they’d gone, leaving her alone with Vicky in this big empty house.
Jack stepped into the foyer. For a moment it seemed he would lift his arms and hold them out to her. Instead, he turned and closed the door behind him. He looked tired.
"You all right?" he asked.
"Yes. I'm fine."
"Vicky, too?"
"She's asleep." Gia felt as ill at ease as Jack looked.
"What happened?"
She told him about Vicky's nightmare and her subsequent search of the house for Nellie.
"The police find anything?"
"Nothing. 'No sign of foul play,' as they so quaintly put it. I believe they think Nellie's gone off to meet Grace somewhere on some kind of senile lark!"
"Is that possible?"
Gia's immediate reaction was anger that Jack could even consider such a thing, then realized that to someone who didn't know Nellie and Grace the way she did, it might seem as good an explanation as any.
"No. Utterly impossible."
"Okay. I'll take your word for it. How about the alarm system?"
"The first floor was set. As you know, they had the upper levels disconnected."
"So it's the same as with Grace: The Lady Vanishes."
"I don't think this is the time for cute movie references, Jack.”
He nodded. "You’re right. Sorry. Let's take a look at her room."
As Gia led him up to the second floor, she realized that for the first time since she’d seen Nellie's empty bed, she was beginning to relax. Jack exuded competence. He had an air about him that made her feel things were finally under control here, that nothing was going to happen without his say so.
He wandered through Nellie's bedroom in a seemingly nonchalant manner, but she noticed that his eyes constantly darted about, and that he never touched anything with his fingertips—with the side or back of a hand, with the flat edge of a fingernail or knuckle, but never in any way that might conceivably leave a print. All of which served as an uncomfortable reminder of Jack's state of mind and his relationship with the law.
He nudged the French doors open with a foot. Warm humid air swam into the room.
"Did the cops unlock this?"
Gia shook her head. "No. It wasn't even latched, just closed over."
Jack stepped out onto the tiny balcony and looked over the railing.
"Just like Grace's," he said. "Did they check below?"
"They were out there with flashlights—said there was no sign that a ladder or the like had been used."
"Just like Grace." He came in and elbowed the doors closed. "Doesn't make sense. And the oddest part is that you wouldn't have found out she was gone until sometime tomorrow if it hadn't been for Vicky's nightmare." He looked at her. "You're sure it was a nightmare? Is it possible she heard something that woke her up and scared her and you only thought it was a nightmare?"
"Oh, it was a nightmare, all right. She thought Mr. Grape-grabber was stealing Ms. Jelliroll." Gia's insides gave a small lurch as she remembered Vicky's scream—"She even thought she saw him in the backyard."
Jack stiffened. "She saw someone?"
"Not someone. Mr. Grape-grabber. Her doll."
"Go through it all step by step, from the time you awoke until you called the police."
"I went through it all for those two cops."
"Do it again for me. Please. It may be important."
Gia told him of awakening to Vicky's scr
eams, of looking out the window and seeing nothing, of going down to Nellie's room...
"One thing I didn't mention to the police was the smell in the room."
"Perfume? After shave?"
"No. A rotten smell." Recalling the odor made her uneasy. "Putrid.”
Jack's face tightened. "Like a dead animal?"
"Yes. Exactly. How did you know?"
"Lucky guess." He now seemed tense. He went into Nellie's bathroom and checked all the bottles. He didn't seem to find what he was looking for. "Did you catch that odor anywhere else in the house?"
"No. What's so important about an odor?"
He turned to her. "I'm not sure. But remember what I told you this morning?"
"You mean about not drinking anything strange like Grace's laxative?"
"Right. Did Nellie buy anything like that? Or did anything like it come to the house?"
Gia thought for a moment. "No...the only thing we've received lately is a box of chocolates from my ex-husband."
"For you?"
"Hardly! For Nellie. They're her favorite. Seem to be a pretty popular brand. Nellie mentioned them to your Indian lady's brother last night." Was that just last night? It seemed so long ago. "He called today to find out where he could order some."
Jack's eyebrows rose. "Kusum?"
"You sound surprised."
"Just that he doesn't strike me as a chocolate fan. More like a brown-rice-and-water type."
Gia knew what he meant. Kusum had ascetic written all over him.
As they walked back into the hall, Jack said, "What's this Mr. Grape-grabber look like?"
"Like a purple Snidely Whiplash. I'll get it for you."
She led Jack up to the third floor and left him outside in the hall while she tiptoed over to the night table and picked up the doll.
"Mommy?"
Gia started at the unexpected sound. Vicky had a habit of doing that. Late at night, when she should be sound asleep, she would let her mother walk in and bend over to kiss her good night; at the last moment she would open her eyes and say, "Hi." It was spooky sometimes.
The Tomb (Repairman Jack) Page 24
