She drops my hand and steps away. “You don’t believe me.”
“That’s not what I meant.” This is backfiring badly. “It’s just…Nina, you need to consider other possible explanations. When you bring everything back to him, it scares me.”
Her eyes are wet. “He should scare you. He thinks you can just make people disappear. He thinks all our lives matter less than we think—including his. But you think I just made him up, don’t you?”
She looks so angry and lonely that I reach out without thinking and grasp both her arms at the elbow, steadying her. “I know there are people like that in the world,” I say. “And about Mr. Gustafsson—I’m sorry. I just had to ask.”
Our first night on the road, all my joints are stodgy from hours behind the wheel, and I fall into bed expecting to get eight straight beautiful, almost-dreamless hours like I usually do.
Then I’m awake, and it’s still dark behind the curtains. I roll over just enough to see the clock on the nightstand through slitted eyes: 3:20 A.M. The other bed is empty.
The bathroom door clicks, light appears around the edges, and water rushes.
So this is how it feels to sleep with Nina Barrows. Okay, in the twin bed beside hers, under a polyester spread with a tacky rose print, with the hissing window air conditioner making the room into a walk-in freezer. This is how it feels.
I turn over and stare into the dark.
She stays in there for forty-two minutes, not making a sound. Then she tiptoes back to her bed, and my eyes snap closed as the springs creak. Five minutes later, when I peek, she’s a fetal hump in the covers.
We’ve come five hundred miles today. We’re almost in Ohio. We’ve dutifully called and texted our moms and posted pics of endless cornfields to our blog. Three more days till we see the desert.
Until the third day, the road trip sucks. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri are pretty much like home, just with rounded hills instead of mountains, and the occasional nuclear glow of a big city on the horizon.
I have problems staying awake on the flat stretches, so Nina reads to me. We listen anxiously to tornado warnings on the radio. She insists on buying junk food “fuel” for me, teasing me the whole time.
When I speed, she fusses. “We can’t get stopped. Not with…that stuff in the trunk.”
She means the guns—safely cased and unloaded for transport, but not legal for me to possess in most of the states we traverse. I’ve already coached her to play dumb if anyone stops her on the way to Arizona. “Blame your boyfriend, the gun nut.” Wait, did I just say that?
But she didn’t seem to notice my deep blush, just said, “Ha-ha.”
Every night I still check the Schenectady news sites out of habit, but I never mention who’s supposedly in Albuquerque. Sometimes Nina goes quiet and I feel like she’s about to mention him, but she never does.
Until Indianapolis, where I can’t help pointing out how big people are—in every direction. It’s just an observation. Whatever people in the middle of the country eat—maybe those fields and fields of gleaming corn?—makes them larger than I’m used to at home.
Nina’s eyes go cold, and she says, “That’s what he thinks. He thinks America let itself get soft around the middle. Too comfortable. Easy pickings.”
I gun it on a straightaway, feeling my back begin to cramp. “I didn’t mean it like that. Anyway, if there was justice in this world, I’d be huge. Right?”
Ugly discussion averted. She grins and says, “Lucky you’ve got the metabolism of a hummingbird.”
When we cross into Oklahoma, the dirt is red instead of black. The ditches on the median are a mess of jagged fissures, nothing growing there but black-eyed Susans. Charcoal-gray clouds swallow the sun. We stop talking; we just look.
“There’s gonna be a tornado,” I say, but there isn’t. Just wind, wind, wind.
That night I wake at two A.M. to find the bed beside me empty again. The bathroom light is on, door closed. The wind wails, battering the flimsy walls of our motel.
I wonder what would happen if I knocked on the door. Asked if she was okay.
On the fourth day, we cross the Texas Panhandle. The clouds burn off, leaving nothing but glaring sun and endless flat fields of mud and yellowish grass. At the wheel, I spot a watery glitter on the asphalt about a hundred feet ahead.
We drive through it. And the glitter’s still ahead of us, making the blacktop buckle and shudder. I rub my eyes, realizing I’m just seeing a heat mirage, more vivid than the ones back east.
Then I wonder if Nina feels this way at night, when she sees things that aren’t there in the daytime. When she dreams and wakes and runs into the bathroom.
At a diner called the Sands, we have a late lunch, or maybe brunch—either way, a grease-stravaganza. On this trip, we’ve decided to observe only two meals: breakfast and snack. We’re all about hash browns, pancakes, bacon, waffles, burnt-tasting coffee, sausage you don’t want to know the origins of.
Hank Williams Sr. yowls sadly from a jukebox. The waitress calls us both “hon” with a monster twang. When she sees I haven’t finished my Western omelette, she asks if I’m sure I want her to clear. “You might as well eat up, hon. It ain’t gonna stick to your ribs—you’re growing like a weed.”
Then she reaches down and tousles my hair. Nina puts her hand over her mouth, while I feel my face go beet red.
Nina’s practically tearing up with laughter by the time the waitress is gone. “Oh, my God. Warren, you might need a restraining order.”
“She’s my mom’s age, okay? But stacked,” I can’t help pointing out.
Nina flicks a butter pat at me. “She’s gonna have to fight Violet the Chuckette.”
I flick it back. “Shut up. Violet’s into bikers. Not me.”
But it’s true that, when I introduced Violet and Nina at the Golden Dome Café, Violet smiled at us both in a weird, intense way and patted my arm three times during the conversation. Not that I counted or anything.
Before we leave the Sands, Nina makes me pose with her under the vintage sign. She pulls out a pack of Marlboros and says, “Pretend you’re smoking one. More Texas that way.”
I wave them away; I don’t need to explain to my mom that I was ironically pretending to smoke. “Where’d you get those?”
“Table next to ours. Somebody just left them.”
I persuade her not to put some stranger’s smoke in her mouth, and we snap the picture. We both look tan and strong in it, leaning half on the sign and half on each other.
“Don’t post that one,” Nina says, and I know it’s because of him. She doesn’t want pictures of us online, just in case. The blog is landscapes-only.
If there were no him, I wonder if she’d be willing to put us out there for the world to see, together.
Late that afternoon, a sign welcomes us to New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.
Green has bled out of the landscape. The red sun slants on distant anthills of beige sand, and I wonder why anybody ever put down roots in the desert. It looks sterile, dry, dead, like outer space.
Also streamlined, clean. No wild tangles of brush and saplings to muddy the outlines. You can see every jut of rock. Sagebrush casts sharp shadows on the flat ground; tumbleweeds lurk on the medians.
We practice saying “Tucumcari,” which is fun to say, and I tell her the plot of the old western For a Few Dollars More. The whole thing. She doesn’t make me stop.
The sun goes down, and the desert turns blue. A glow grows on the horizon. Albuquerque.
Nina will sleep in town tonight, in the same motel where we’ll stay together later in the week. Tomorrow morning, she’ll set out for four days in Arizona with her birth mom, while I head into the desert with Prof. Sandoval’s shoot. Sasha Charney, my student taskmaster, has been texting me frantic reminders to show up early and get the keys to the departmental van, so I can swing by a mini-mart and stock up enough water to fuel a trek across the Sahara.
For three days
Nina and I have done everything together. Now I’m going to be meeting a dozen new people, trying to remember names. I try not to glance at her too often as she helps me drag my stuff into the cinder-block dorm room, because the ache is starting.
She needs this, I remind myself. Leaving Albuquerque is for the best.
One last glance at the gun box before I close the trunk of the Legacy. I’m leaving it there—locked, and the key stays with me. Part of me wants to give Nina the little Sidekick for protection, but I’ve convinced myself that’s a bad idea. The chances she’ll need to scare off an attacker are low. The chances she might get caught with it in this state where you have to be nineteen to own a handgun, or that she might misuse it…I won’t think about.
When I’m all settled in, I steel myself for good-byes, but Nina says, “Hey, I could go for coffee and a slice of pie right now. Whaddaya think?”
“Always pie,” I say, trying to hide my relief.
Of course Albuquerque has a chain of 24/7 pie joints. The hostess gives us a vinyl booth, and Nina orders peach and I order pecan with a decaf.
“Wait!” she says as I try to dig in, and snaps a pic. “Lean across the table so I can get both of us. I’m sending this one to Kirby.”
I strike the pose. “I thought we had a rule about photos.”
Nina’s dark brows bunch up. “I’ll ask Kirby not to post it anywhere. She knows we’re on this trip together.”
News to me. I scrunch a sugar packet in my palm. “Does Kirby also know about…you know? Schenectady?”
Nina looks horrified. “Of course not. I haven’t told anybody, and I hope you haven’t.”
I shake my head, cursing myself for breaking my own rules. Three days on the road and four days in Arizona are supposed to make Nina forget Schenectady and whatever she thinks happened there.
I’ve seen pictures of Nina’s birth mom, Becca Cantillo—a big woman with long hair and a wide, weathered smile, standing on a porch covered with bougainvillea and wind chimes. I imagine her home as a spa where Nina will be restored. She’ll get in touch with her roots, purging any past trauma that might have made her imagine…things. No matter how many times she insists she was adopted before her memories start, I can’t help wondering if her nightmares go back to being separated from her mom in Arizona. Back to the desert.
And when we go out to that abandoned mine and find it as empty as Al Capone’s famous vault, maybe Nina will finally accept that there’s no him in her head, either. Just weightless shreds and tatters of childhood fears.
It’s wishful thinking, but being on the road has made her less jumpy. And now here I am, nudging her back into the obsession zone.
“I’ll never tell anybody,” I say. “And I’ll keep checking on Schenectady news if it makes you feel better.”
She nods, though it’s more like a nervous twitch. “Not sure I’ll have a good signal out there.”
She looks so unsettled that I do the only thing I can think of—I take her hand between mine, palm to palm, sweat to sweat. “Just focus on your visit for now. Call me when you can.”
Country Muzak croons around us. Nina doesn’t pull away.
“Thanks for making this trip so awesome, Warren. I don’t know if I could’ve done it alone.”
And then she adds in a low voice, so low I’m not entirely sure later if I heard or imagined the words, “It’s still okay if you don’t believe me.”
Our first night on the road, I close my eyes and I drift and I dream.
He’s followed me, of course. I can’t escape him.
Tonight he’s in his special underground hidey-hole, the place he calls “the mine,” where he buried the homeless man. The place he keeps returning to. The place I plan to use against him.
I still don’t think of him by his name, though I use it with Warren. He’s always hated it: the name of a poet, a folk singer, a school shooter. Too many conflicting associations. I hate his name for a different reason: because it gives him humanity.
This is no natural cave. By the light of the camping lantern he’s placed on the ground, I can see exposed rock face and masonry, wooden beams. The cavity stretches into two or three rooms in the distance.
The floor is dry and crumbly, almost pure sand. In the room to our right, where the earth looks darker, he buried the homeless man. I remember how his arms and shoulders ached as he dug down to where the soil moistened.
Twice I’ve climbed down into the mine with him. The dry air feels like it’s been trapped for centuries. You enter the mine from a desert ridge, and below the ridge stands the abandoned cabin where he sometimes sits on winter nights, feeding an ancient woodstove.
Take I-85 north past Bernalillo, past Algodones, past the casino…watch for the turn-off on your right.
The bench against the wall is ancient, rotting. Its seat lifts to reveal a hollow compartment, the hinges intact. Inside is a steel toolbox, and inside the toolbox are the new Remington 597, his dad’s Beretta Cheetah, and a box of ammo.
He takes out the Beretta, examines it in the lantern light, strokes its barrel. He had to ditch the 597 he used on Mr. Gustafsson, and the Glock he took from their bedside table and used on the wife. He needs to transfer his suppressor to the new rifle, test it on the range.
He’s been thinking about nailing moving targets, setting up ambushes at stop signs. Using binoculars to pick out cars to bring to a sudden halt.
Like that bottle-green Beemer the college girl was driving. Yesterday he followed her for a few blocks and watched her talk on her phone, too cool for a handsfree. She was pretty and obviously knew it, but she kept moving the phone from her ear to flick her hair back with one finger. It made her look insecure.
Insecure people do what you say when you point a gun at them.
That reminds him of the little girl from before the Bad Days, the one in the car seat. She was always so nervy, fidgety, flighty, crying, and needing to be soothed.
His mind winces in guilt, complicated feelings tearing at him. She’s almost as old as that college girl now.
So maybe he won’t do a girl next. Maybe he’ll resist the temptation ever to do a nice college girl, the kind people miss. Too close.
He won’t do a kid; that’s a given. But a woman Eliana’s age? Maybe one with no kids. He made the mistake of doing a woman with school-age kids once, and he still thinks about those kids sometimes. Hopes they’re okay.
How long since he’s field-stripped that Beretta? He keeps it more for sentimental reasons than practical ones, but it can’t hurt to be prepared.
He pulls cloths, lube, solvent, brushes from his backpack and begins breaking it down. It’s boring work, so his thoughts drift.
The mine is open to the outside, no locked doors, but well hidden from casual observers—if there are any casual observers out here. How hard would it be to build a secure, locked enclosure—say, in that corner? A prison cell?
Yes, that corner would work. He’d just have to haul his materials in the long way, through the mucky lower passage that floods in August. He’d bring the target in that way, too.
But why? And who?
He did a lot of talking with the Gustafssons. He had to get them in the car. He thought treating them like people would bother him, but it didn’t really. Maybe he could keep somebody here for a few days before it was over. Keep her.
Great, now he’s thinking about girls again. But it’s just thinking.
Maybe a girl like Jaylynne from the rest stop, only older. It would be a challenge, talking. But he wouldn’t tell her what he was going to do. He would let her think he just wanted money. People are eager to believe the best-case scenario, don’t want to know the worst.
He imagines his arm curling around a little girl’s shoulders, as if he could shield her from the thoughts in his head. Forgive me. I love you.
Twitch.
He doesn’t hate women. He just doesn’t like how some of them flaunt themselves, like their beauty is a charm that makes them immune t
o aging and disease and death.
If he thought his mom or Eliana knew, thought Trixie might ever find out, he’d do what his father did. Tighten the noose around his neck, and bam, that’s all she wrote.
It wouldn’t be a loss, really. He knows he’s no great asset to the world, and eventually his time will be over, just like everyone’s. He just doesn’t want death to blindside him again.
Fool me once…
He puts the cleaned Beretta back in the toolbox, shuts it in the bench, and stands. Zips the rifle in his duffel bag. He’ll hide it in the Sequoia on the way to the range, like he did the previous one, because Eliana hates guns.
He climbs the rough wooden ladder he built and finds himself blinking back the light of a new day. The desert stretches for miles below his outcropping, the rising sun a blazing penny above the distant mesa.
It’ll take time to improve his marksmanship with the new 597. More time to build a prison. He’ll wait and see. The news reports on the Gustafssons have stopped, leaving him to slog through day after day with nothing to look forward to, but he still has the secret knowledge of what he did, and that lasts him a while.
No one even knows he exists. They know the person they call by his name. But the other part of him, the truer part? That part is a stranger.
Our last day on the road, I say good-bye to Warren and watch him walk back to his mango-yellow dorm. At the door he pauses, turns to look at me, and I wave, and he waves, and then we just stay stock-still staring at each other till I put the car in gear.
I don’t look back again.
I fall into bed at 11:20, aching all over from ten hours plus in the Subaru, my left eyelid twitching like his from all the caffeine.
Now, here’s the weird thing: when my mind floats into his mind, he’s sleeping, too.
The Killer in Me Page 12
