by Drury, Tom
Cresting a hill, she saw in the lane ahead a small gray pickup with a rust-stained refrigerator strapped upright in the bed. The pickup was meandering along and might as well have been backing up. The gap between the pickup and the Mustang closed at a sickening rate.
Sandra veered into the oncoming lane to pass and there encountered another truck, a serious one, a stone hauler with a high and dust-caked windshield and a mangled vertical grill like the teeth of a monster.
The drivers of these trucks are known throughout the county as the bat-out-of-hell drivers, for they brake for no one.
Nose to nose with the gravel truck, Sandra did the only thing she could, sliding the Mustang down into the ditch on the wrong side of the road.
The ditch was steep and flat at the bottom, and with amazement she found herself and the Mustang unbroken and hurtling down the frozen trough with the highway lost to sight.
She screamed then, full-throated, venting endless months of tension and boredom and alienation in the search for Jack Snow and the Lia Fáil. With tears streaming from eyes to ears, she felt her heart opening like a red-hot flower.
Then the Mustang hit the inclined berm of a dirt lane crossing the ditch and flew into the sky.
Sandra let off the gas. The engine sound died away. She couldn’t hear anything at all. The car climbed above the land, and in the windshield she saw only blue.
She had hoped that the car would behave as flying cars do in movies—leveling off, landing, going on—but no, that’s not what this car did. It maintained its upward attitude all the while, and, when it came down, the back end hit first, acting as a fulcrum with which to slam the rest of the car savagely into the bottom of the ditch.
The nose pierced the ice and the dirt beneath and the car flew again, end over end, chassis to the sky, coming down on its roof and sliding for quite some distance before bumping a culvert and turning slowly sideways in the ditch, smoking and ruined.
Dan Norman met Louise for lunch at the Lifetime Restaurant, where he hoped the fussing of the waitresses would give him time to figure how to tell her what happened to Jack Snow.
He took her coat from her shoulders and hung it on a hook and they slid into the booth and looked at laminated menus.
“We don’t do this enough,” said Louise.
“Hi, folks,” said the waitress, a barbwire tattoo encircling her wrist. “Do you know what you want?”
“Go ahead, Dan,” said Louise. “I’m still thinking.”
“I’ll have the BLT.”
“Toast, babe?” said the waitress.
“Yeah. Wheat.”
“What about you, angel?”
“Can I get the chowder?”
When the waitress had gone, Louise said, “She seems awfully fond of us.”
“Listen,” said Dan. “I have something to tell you. It’s about the guy who came to the house last night.”
“Did they arrest him?”
Dan shook his head. “He was murdered.”
“He what?”
“Somebody stabbed him at his warehouse in Stone City. They don’t know who. They’re looking.”
Louise began picking up crumbs from the table by pressing them with her index finger and brushing them off against her palm.
“I feel guilty,” she said. “I didn’t want him to die. Maybe for a minute I did.”
“You have nothing to do with him dying.”
“I was the last person he saw.”
“There was at least one more.”
“This is true,” said Louise. “But, now, he’s dead?”
“Yeah.”
The waitress brought their food. She did not call them “baby” or “honey,” “love” or “lamb.” Maybe she sensed the bad news. They ate quietly. Louise said she didn’t feel like she should be hungry but she was.
“Will the police want to talk to me?”
“I don’t know. They might.”
Leaving the restaurant, they ran into Britt, the chef whose mother had sold Louise the swing clock.
He unbuttoned his overcoat and unwrapped a red scarf from his throat. He asked about the clock and Louise told him it was in their bedroom.
“This is my restaurant,” he said. “Come back at night. The dinner menu is better. Oh, and when you leave? I wouldn’t go west. They’ve got the highway closed off for something.”
Louise went east, Dan west. A cruiser blocked the road, and Earl Kellogg was setting out a line of orange pylons. Dan rolled the window down.
“It’s the car,” said Earl.
“Can you let me through?”
“Don’t tell Ed I did.”
Dan drove up and parked well back of the fire engines and cruisers and ambulances. The EMTs had cut the Mustang open and were bringing Sandra Zulma up from the ditch on a gurney. When they got her to the highway they let the wheels down and set the gurney on the pavement.
Dan crossed the highway. Her eyes were open.
“I found him,” she said.
There was blood on her face, in her hair, on her boots.
“Don’t talk,” said Dan.
They rolled the gurney away and lifted it into the back of the ambulance and closed the doors.
Sheila Geer stood on the shoulder of the highway taking pictures of the car.
“What happened?” said Dan.
She lowered the camera. “Love to tell you but Ed said we weren’t supposed to answer to you because you’re not the sheriff.”
“Well, Ed’s right, really. I respect that. Seems a little defensive, but his call.”
“She damned near got herself killed is what happened. Missed a head-on gravel truck by I am not kidding you Dan it couldn’t have been more than arm’s length.”
“You saw it?”
“Fuck yeah! We were right behind her. How this chick is alive I don’t know. She shouldn’t be.”
Dan walked down the highway with his hands in his pockets, bending low to look at the crushed Mustang. Fire crews blasted it with water. Few would have come out of that car talking, it was true.
Ed Aiken struggled to climb out of the ditch with a piece of folded metal. Dan gave him a hand and pulled him up.
“I believe this is what we call the murder weapon,” said Ed.
“Like as not.”
“It has blood on it.”
“Could be hers, I suppose.”
“I realize that. Found this, too. Looks like we might have drugs involved.”
He held a tightly wrapped cylinder of aluminum foil. Dan took it from him and tore the foil open at one end.
“Pancakes,” he said.
The next morning Hans Cook stopped by Louise’s mother’s house as he usually did. Hans was Mary’s gentleman friend of twenty-five years. He brought her newspaper in, made coffee, ran the curtains open for the light. And though it was cold he cracked a couple windows, for he would not have the place smelling like an old lady’s house.
Mary was up and dressed in a blue corduroy smock, listening to a radio program of popular songs from forty or fifty years ago. The announcer had the unnaturally smooth voice of someone trying to soothe a dog.
“That was Susan Raye with L.A. International Airport, where the big jet engines do indeed roar. That is a busy, busy airport, one of the busiest in the nation if I’m not mistaken. Coming up we’ve got the Statler Brothers, checking in on the Class of ’57.”
“How do you listen to this?” said Hans.
“I like to have something on.”
He turned the radio off and waved the newspaper in his hand.
“How about I read to you?”
“You do that.”
He brought a dining chair in and sat beside her in the living room.
&
nbsp; “Big headline today,” he said, turning the front page for her to see. “Slay Suspect Nabbed, Getaway Car Flips, Sword and Driver in Custody.”
“‘Slay suspect?’”
“That’s what they call them. Say, guess who’s a contributing reporter. Albert Robeshaw.”
“Claude’s boy? He’s mixed up in this?”
“He’s just reporting on it.”
“I listened to this on TV last night,” said Mary. “A gruesome thing. Where were you?”
“Swimming.”
“I find that hard to picture.”
“At the Y in Morrisville. I used to swim a fair amount. Set a record one time for treading water.”
“How long?”
“Oh, I forget. Five, six hours.”
“Impressive. Well, go ahead.”
And so Hans read her the story:
Sandra Catherine Zulma, 29, of Mayall, Minnesota, was apprehended yesterday after a high-speed pursuit that rerouted traffic on Highway 41 east of Romyla.
Police believe that Zulma was involved in the previous evening’s killing of John Lief Snow, 30, who had been operating a Stone City antique dealership.
Federal agents investigating possible tax fraud raided Snow’s establishment on the North Side yesterday morning only to find that the subject of their investigation had been slain in an altercation of unknown origin.
Local law enforcement officials were quickly instructed to be on the hunt for Snow’s automobile, a late-model coupe that was missing from the grisly scene.
“Thanks to the fine police work of Deputies [Sheila] Geer and [Earl] Kellogg, the vehicle sought was located and stopped at 11:20 a.m.,” said Sheriff Edward T. Aiken in a prepared statement.
And what a stop it was, according to Romyla resident Russ W. Roller, 41, who witnessed the spectacular apprehension.
“I was driving a refrigerator over to my grandparents’ place in Lunenberg, because they want an extra one to put in the garage, why I don’t know, when all of a sudden I hear a siren and see her [Zulma] coming up on [the rear end of my vehicle],” said Roller. “And I thought, ‘Sorry lady, you’ll just have to wait, because there’s a [large] truck coming the other way.’ But she give it a try. So things weren’t looking too good for me at that time.”
Police confirmed the essentials of Roller’s account, adding that to avoid the oncoming truck Zulma took to the ditch, where her vehicle hit a rise and flipped twice. Freed from the wreckage by a rotary metal saw, Zulma was rushed via ambulance to Mercy Hospital in Stone City, where she is in fair condition.
No charges had been filed at press time, but requesting anonymity a member of the Sheriff’s Department said a sword that may have been used in the killing was recovered from the wreckage of the Mustang.
Ironically, Zulma was interviewed last fall for this newspaper’s “People in Towns” column. She said she had walked to the United States in a tunnel beneath the ocean. Due to the outlandishness of the claim and other issues, the interview was never published.
“The whole thing is outlandish,” said Mary.
The back door opened. Louise called hello and they could hear her putting groceries in the refrigerator.
“It’s getting to be Grand Central Station around here,” said Mary.
Louise came in and sat. She took her hat off and held it in her hands and told them how, before he was killed, Jack Snow had come to the house looking for Dan.
“What’d I tell you about running around all hours?” said Mary.
“I was home washing my hair!”
“His mom was on TV, said him and the girl used to be thick as thieves.”
“Poor word choice on her part,” said Hans.
Mary sat back in her chair and closed her eyes.
“You always had the most beautiful hair,” she told Louise, “but you would never let me brush it. ‘I brush,’ you would say. ‘I brush.’”
“When was this?” said Hans.
“A couple weeks ago,” said Louise.
On her third day at Mercy Hospital Sandra Zulma moved from the ICU to a room on the top floor, where Sheriff Ed Aiken went to see her in the evening.
He sat down on a chair by the bed and unfolded a piece of paper and read from it, saying that whatever she said would be used against her. She waved her hand.
“You have to say if you understand.”
“I understand.”
“Why did you come to Stone City?”
“To find a rock.”
“That should’ve been easy.”
She went on to explain the possible history of the rock, adding this time that it might also be the stone of invisibility the maiden gave to Peredur so he could fight the monster of the cave, or the rock slung by Cúchulainn to kill the squirrel on Maeve’s shoulder.
“Did you know Jack Snow was here?”
“I heard he might be.”
“From who?”
“People.”
“People in Omaha?”
“I don’t know where Omaha is.”
“You thought Snow had the rock? Why did you think that?”
“A feeling.”
“From where?”
“Inside me.”
“What’d you want with it?”
“To take it home.”
“You wanted to take a rock to Minnesota.”
“No.”
“Where then?”
“No place in this world.”
“You see, now there’s where you lose me,” said Ed. “Did you kill Jack Snow?”
“Yes.”
“And why did you?”
“We fought. His skills are not what they once were.”
Ed Aiken left the room. Earl Kellogg was sitting arms crossed in a chair by the door.
“How’d that go?” said Earl.
“Pretty well, I think.”
“Can I leave now?”
“Stay. I or Sheila will come spell you at midnight.”
“At least go get me some magazines. If I sit here with nothing to do I’ll go crazy.”
“I know you told the paper about the sword.”
“Prove it.”
Sandra Zulma opened the door and peeked out of the room. The barrel chest of a sleeping lawman rose and fell with his chin resting upon it. He had a gun in a holster with a black strap over the grip. A magazine lay open on the floor. A woman in black lace had put him right out.
“Hey,” she whispered. “You there.”
Sandra stepped out, hearing the soft voices of the nurses at the station, and crept down the lavender hallway. On the walls were pictures of flowers, horses, mothers and children. It was that late-night hospital time when all is quiet and beautiful, and you can almost hear the sound of mending and dying. The hall was empty but for a doctor who stood tapping the chest piece of a stethoscope on the back of his hand.
“I’m walking,” said Sandra.
“Let me listen to you.”
He pressed the stethoscope to her chest.
“What is wrong with this thing?”
“Maybe I don’t have a heartbeat.”
The doctor touched her wrist with his fingers and looked at his watch.
“Adagio,” he said. “That means okay.”
At the end of the corridor Sandra took an elevator to the basement. The walls were steel with raised hash marks and she ran her hand over them, soothed by the cool repetition of bumps.
In the basement she found a long room lined with green lockers. There was a mirror on the wall and she looked at the bandages on her arms and face. Down the room she saw a young man wearing scrubs and hanging street clothes in a locker.
She picked up a mop and held it like a spea
r. “I’ll lay you for your clothes,” she said.
He looked at her, said nothing.
“That’s all I’ve got to trade.”
“You’re off your ward. I know who you are.”
“Got to have those clothes.”
He glanced at a two-way radio on a wooden bench.
“Please don’t do that,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you but I will.”
“Sometimes I don’t get the padlock done right. So it looks locked but it isn’t.”
“You don’t want to get laid,” said Sandra.
“Not the state you’re in.”
“Maybe you could just hold me.”
She let the mop fall and they embraced. At first he was afraid, but she held him tightly, courage flowing from her body into his. The man closed his locker, picked up his radio, and left the room.
Sandra dropped her gown and put on the pants and T-shirt and sweatshirt, the socks and boots, the watch cap and gloves of the doctor or orderly or whatever he was.
A door at the end of the hallway opened onto a ramp lined with dumpsters. Sandra stood looking up and down the street. A light soft snow fell, so little you could hardly tell.
A police car glided by with the ray of a fender-mounted light sweeping the sidewalk. She bent behind a dumpster with her arms across her chest and waited.
The Laughing Bandit struck again that night. Tiny sheared the padlock from the loading dock at Shipping Giant in Stone City. He liked using bolt cutters. There was something satisfying in the way the jaws bit and compressed before slicing.
Hard to pin down, the feeling he got using bolt cutters.
He took nine packages of various sizes and carried them out to the trunk of his car a few at a time. One had a yellow note taped on saying:
HOLD FOR AUTHORITIES
PER HERB
Tiny couldn’t pass that one by. He left his trademark laugh written in blue marker on an erasable board.
Before setting out for home he smoked a cigarette in the car. He rolled his own lately, the tobacco reminding him in look and smell of pencil shavings he’d once emptied from school sharpeners. He liked making the cigarette rather than just taking it from a box. More of an earned smoke, you might say.
Through a haze of blue he saw the rangy woman walking down the alley, shoulders hunched and hands in pockets. Without a glance at him, she crossed steady from one side of the windshield to the other and kept on going west.
