Again, she shook her head.
The nanny called across the house, ‘Mrs Pritchard? Lynn?’
‘Did Duane and Steven break into Eric Skooner’s house?’ I asked. ‘Did they steal his papers?’
The nanny came through the living room and into the sitting room, carrying the crying baby. The girl’s face was bright red, and the nanny looked almost as stricken. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘She won’t stop.’
Lynn Pritchard took her daughter, pulling her to her shoulder. The baby stopped crying as if she’d been falling and flailing through space and had come to a soft landing.
‘I’m sorry,’ the nanny said again and left to get the baby’s sister.
‘I need to know,’ I said.
Lynn Pritchard gazed at the baby, soothing her, and said, ‘I told Duane’s mom I would talk to you for another reason too. She said you’re working as an investigator for a prisoner rights group.’
I stared at her and her child. ‘Something like that. The Justice Now Initiative. But they fired me.’
‘Do you mind telling me why?’
‘Too much enthusiasm on my part,’ I said. ‘Too aggressive. I go into places I shouldn’t go. At least they thought so.’
She turned her eyes from the baby to me. ‘Do you have a gun?’
I shrugged.
‘Are you willing to use it?’
‘If necessary.’
‘I watched the stories about you on TV. You got yourself out of prison. You must have done something right.’
‘I had a lot of time and very few distractions.’
She said, ‘So my question is, will you work for me? Will you protect me and my girls? I have money. I’ll pay whatever you ask.’
I hadn’t expected that. ‘Why me? You should hire people who do this. An agency.’
‘You believe me. You know it’s true. We’ve both been locked up for the last eight years.’
‘How about your husband? Can’t you pack up your family and leave?’
‘I can’t tell him. I won’t. He has an idea of me. He goes out on his adventures with his friends, and he thinks he leaves me happy and safe. If he knew, he’d be more scared than I am. Can’t you see what I am for him?’
‘What are you for yourself?’ I said.
‘You don’t want me to answer that,’ she said. She went to a credenza and opened a drawer. She took a stack of fifty-dollar bills and brought it to me.
‘I can’t do this,’ I said. ‘I’m driving all around, trying to figure things out.’
‘So drive by here too,’ she said. ‘Check on us. Make sure we’re OK.’
‘I can do that without you paying me.’
She almost smiled. ‘The money’s nothing to me. Maybe it’s something to you.’
I said, ‘My head’s all over the place. You can’t count on me.’
‘Who else am I going to count on?’
I looked at the money. Then I counted out a thousand dollars. ‘This will keep me going for a couple of weeks. It’ll give me time.’ I gave her back the rest. ‘But I need you to tell me who threatened you. When Bill Higby arrested me, he put words in my mouth. I won’t do that to you. But if I’m going to protect you from this man, I need to know for sure who he is.’
She looked at her baby again, then at me, and she made her decision. ‘Eric Skooner.’
‘He sat next to you at my trial?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘He sat by me and my mom. After a while, he let his hand fall between his leg and mine, against my thigh. My mom didn’t see. I slid away, but he kept his fingers against me, the way you touch something to show that it’s yours. Then, during a break, while my mom was in the bathroom, he followed me into the hall. He told me I was brave for coming to the trial. Such a young girl, he said, and so willing. He said it like I was the dirtiest thing he’d ever seen. Then he told me he could do anything he wanted in the city. He could go into other people’s houses more easily than a teenage thief. He could read people’s histories. He could get into their lives. He told me I had something that was his. When my mom came out of the bathroom, he introduced himself and said he was a judge and had been sitting in on the trial. He told my mom she should be proud of me – such a young girl and so brave.’
The baby squirmed in her arms.
‘He had no fear,’ she said. ‘That scared me more than anything else. He knew he could get away with anything, and I knew it too.’
‘Did he say he killed Duane and Steven?’ I asked.
Her baby made a sound as if she would cry. Lynn Pritchard rocked her in her arms. She touched her tongue to her lipstick. ‘I’ve never felt as dirty as when he touched me.’ The baby started crying, and she hushed it and said, ‘He never quite told me he killed them. He said Duane and Steve took a briefcase. He said he was sorry, very sorry, about what happened to them, but it had to happen to boys who broke into a judge’s house and stole his briefcase. Didn’t I see that? He would be sorry, very sorry if something like that happened to me – that or something worse, something special for me since I was so young and so pretty and so brave and so willing.’
She hushed her daughter again and rocked her, but now the girl cried as if nothing would console her.
When we walked to the front door, the nanny came into the entryway with the other baby, who also started crying. Lynn Pritchard, in her red dress and her matching lipstick and fingernail polish, took her second daughter and held one on each shoulder. With the cut-glass chandelier hanging above her from the high ceiling, she looked small and vulnerable. But she’d lasted eight years since the murder of the Bronson brothers, as alone and unsure of her life as I’d been in my prison cell, and I thought she must be stronger than she admitted. I wondered if she saw in me a kindred spirit, one who would understand how she had lived. I wondered if she’d decided that since she couldn’t deny that life entirely, she was willing to pay me to keep me close.
I stepped out into the rain.
‘Come by tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Check on us.’
I ran to my car. But before getting in, I turned back and went to the front porch. ‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘Do you know if Duane and his brother ever went to a town called Bostwick – about fifty miles south of here?’
Again, she almost smiled. ‘I did too. That was our best night together. Ever.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Two months before he died, Duane told me he’d found a new place on one of his night-time drives. I’d snuck out once before with him and Steve and once with just him. My mom caught me the second time, and I’d promised never to do it again, but he made this place sound magical. So one night we drove down through Bostwick and over toward the river. We parked by some buildings that looked like a factory, though the smell that came out was sweet. We climbed over a fence and went down a grassy area and behind some trees, away from the lights. Duane told me to take off my clothes. I wouldn’t. He and I hadn’t gone that far, and now Steve was with us. But they stripped and waded into a pond. They were laughing, and Duane told me to come in – the pond was the best ever. So I thought, what the hell – it was dark, and I’d already snuck out. So I took off my clothes and went in. The water was hot – like an amazing bath. For the first time, I understood what Duane meant when he said a place was shining. Whatever was in the water was beautiful. That pond shined.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
A few minutes after midnight, Cynthia ran from the Cineplex and climbed into my car. The rain came hard and, when she closed the door, layered over the windows and shelled us from the world. She kissed me and I tasted rain on her lips.
We drove to a park along the Intracoastal Waterway, a couple of miles from her house. Before I went to prison, I would fish from the dock there or set my dad’s red kayak into the tidal water. Now the boat ramp disappeared in the storm and dark. I stopped at the top, and the headlights shined on needles and threads of rain.
I told Cynthia about m
y visit with Lynn Pritchard and my conversations with Coach Kagen and Deborah Holt. I said, ‘Eric Skooner must have killed Steven and Duane Bronson. Before them, he killed Jeremy Ballat and Luis Gonzalez. He probably did the first two kids when he found them near his mill. He could do anything to them and get away with it. Just another dead runaway. Just another dead Mexican.’
I felt Cynthia staring at me in the dark.
I said, ‘Maybe he stopped for a while then. Or maybe he found other boys we don’t know about. There was a guy who came to prison at Raiford just before I got out – a seventy-year-old who’d molested his granddaughter. He’d spent just three years in prison before, also for molesting a girl, but that was thirty years ago. One night, some guys were beating him up, and they asked him about the thirty years. He spat out a tooth and laughed at them and said, Oh, he’d always had girlfriends, but most of them had been discreet.
‘Maybe Skooner kept it quiet like that guy, or maybe he fought the urge, but when the Bronson boys broke into his house, they stirred him up. He had access to juvenile records – he’d even done juvenile drug court for a while – and he could track down a couple of teenage thieves easily enough. He would think these kids had it coming to them. Jeremy Ballat and Luis Gonzalez bothered him at the mill land, but the Bronsons stole papers that might have showed something bad about the place. How else would they have known enough about it to drive there and climb over the fence with Lynn Pritchard?’
‘So, what are you going to do?’ Cynthia asked.
‘Tomorrow I’ll go to talk to the judge,’ I said.
‘With Deborah Holt?’
‘Unless Lynn Pritchard will tell her that the judge threatened her, that won’t happen – and Lynn Pritchard distrusts the cops as much as I do. More, if that’s possible. She barely could get herself to tell me. She’ll never tell Holt. And unless Holt has more reason than she has right now, she’ll never accuse the judge. He has too much power.’
‘So you’ll just knock on Skooner’s door alone?’ Cynthia said.
‘I’ve done it before.’
‘That would be idiotic,’ she said.
I figured telling her about the pistol under the seat wouldn’t help, so I said nothing.
She kissed me then anyway.
‘I thought I was an idiot,’ I said.
‘You are,’ she said, and a gust of wind slapped rain against the side of the car. She kissed my neck, then said, ‘The world might be fucked up, but why would I want to be anywhere else? I want to be fucked up with you.’
Two hours later, I drove back toward my room. Rainwater pooled on the shoulder of Beach Boulevard, and the stoplights, set for late-night traffic, blinked and blurred yellow. The rain battered the roof of my car, and I slowed and drove alongside a delivery truck. A car in the oncoming lanes shot past, water rooster-tailing from its tires.
When I reached Philips Highway, the lights were off at most of the roadside businesses.
I pulled on to the parking lot at the Cardinal Motel. A pickup truck had taken the spot by my room, and other cars filled the spaces along the walkway. The motel windows were black, and the streetlight over the highway shined dismal orange light on the wet pavement. I parked in the middle of the lot and ran to my door. As a car whished by on the highway, I fumbled my key into the lock.
The rain and wind knocked down the sound of footsteps behind me. Or maybe Randall Haussen knew how to move without making sound. Maybe he’d also gone into a crack house twenty-five years ago and shot two addicts without anyone hearing him coming. Maybe he’d come up behind his wife as she stood at their kitchen counter and he’d crammed his gun into her mouth before she could scream.
Now, a pistol barrel touched the back of my head, boring into my skin.
I tried to turn.
‘No,’ Haussen said. He patted me down and laughed scornfully, as if I was a fool for going unarmed. ‘Come on,’ he said, and turned me back out into the rain.
I said, ‘What—’
The pistol barrel lifted from my skin, and the butt smashed the back of my head. ‘Not a goddamned word,’ he said.
The blow stunned me. Fear flooded my belly. So did rage.
I spun and struck out at him, catching his chin with my fist.
He stumbled back, and his gun fired.
I wondered if the wet on my skin was rainwater or blood. When no pain came, I stepped toward him.
He fired again – wide – and yelled, ‘Goddamn it,’ then steadied the gun, aiming at my chest.
I showed my palms.
‘What are you?’ he said, and I thought he would shoot again.
Lights went on in two of the motel rooms.
‘Come on,’ he said, and he gestured at my car.
When the first motel room door opened, I was in the driver’s seat, and he was sitting next to me.
‘Go,’ he said, and I pulled on to Philips Highway.
‘Where to?’ I asked again.
‘Do you know what you did to me?’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea?’
‘I think so. But no one has charged you.’
‘I can’t go home,’ he said. ‘I can’t go to my goddamned business. I can’t go back to Atlanta – my sister’s got a protective order. I can’t—’
‘Then turn yourself in,’ I said.
For a moment, he looked as if he would shoot me, but he said, ‘You’re a goddamned whore.’
‘You shot those crackheads twenty-five years ago. You killed your wife.’
‘Who the fuck cares?’ he said.
‘The crackheads might.’
‘No one cares about crackheads,’ he said. ‘They don’t even care about themselves. I’ve been there. I know.’
‘Your wife?’
‘Not my fault. She would’ve talked – and that’s on you.’
‘Thomas LaFlora? He’s about twenty-four hours from the needle. He cares.’
‘He’s a thug,’ Haussen said. ‘If he hadn’t gone down for the crackheads, he would’ve gone down for someone else.’
‘How about me? I care.’
‘But you don’t matter,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you’re dead now too. And if no one cares about a crackhead, from all I’ve seen they’ll care less about you.’
The rain whipped across the intersection at Emerson Street and came down hard again as we passed a Walmart.
‘But you’re in the news,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to know who killed you. Better for you to disappear, don’t you think? Better for me. Better for everyone.’
So I cut the steering wheel.
As easy as digging a spoon into a man’s eye.
The tires slid on the wet pavement, and the car left the road, bounced down through a rain-filled ditch, and rose on the other side. Haussen fell against the passenger door. If he died, I thought, I might live. I straightened the wheel, and the tires found the asphalt on a driveway leading to a Chinese restaurant. We careened toward the front wall of the building. If he lived, I would die. I yanked the wheel, and the car skidded. Haussen tumbled into me, and his pistol fell on the floor. I straightened the wheel again, and we flew past the side of the restaurant. Haussen grabbed for the gun. I hit the brakes, and he slammed into the dashboard. Still he groped for his gun.
I reached under my seat and found my pistol. I brought it up and saw the end of the asphalt coming at the car. I crushed the brake to the floor.
The car slid.
Stopped.
Haussen came up with his gun.
I aimed the pistol and said, ‘No.’
He aimed at me.
I pulled the trigger and shot him in the head.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Haussen’s head flew back.
Crashed against the passenger window.
Bounced.
He fell across the seat.
On to my lap.
On a night when I expected nothing.
Nothing.
I shoved him and opened my door.
Shouldn’t have. The
interior light went on. Some things best unseen. Abandoned to nature. Sunk in saltwater. Dumped in a swamp.
Wind gusted through the open door, raining mist and light.
Blood spatter. Fishhooks for nightmares.
Haussen’s eggshell head.
I tipped out of the car, on to my hands and knees. On the flooding pavement. Under the slamming rain.
And vomited.
I had killed a man.
After eight years. Writing appeals on scraps. Whispering into the plumbing. Gripping the bars when lawyers visited. Saying, I’m an innocent fool who picks up the phone when he should let it ring, who answers the door when he should hide in the attic, who stops on Monument Road to help two boys when he should drive drive drive.
I’d killed a man.
I pushed myself to my feet. Stumbled from my car. Stared at the sky. The rain burning my eyes. I stumbled past the Chinese restaurant. The sign said Chopstick Charley’s. As if that was possible.
I walked to the side of Philips Highway. Empty except for a pair of headlights blasting through the blasting rain. Tunnel of light. To take me from here to there. If I stepped into it.
As every dying man must.
The rushing tires in the wind and rain. A last denying of the real that is here and not there. If I stepped into it.
As every dying man must.
I closed my eyes. Held my breath. Stepped into the highway.
Wheels, metal, light shot past.
The driver as unconscious as a brass bullet.
I opened my eyes. I opened my mouth.
Double tail lights.
Red.
Snake eyes.
I’d missed my bus, my train, my flight.
I stood in the highway.
Five minutes.
Ten.
Couldn’t catch a …
Fifteen.
I stood until despair met futility, cleansing in a dirty rain, because what more could I lose?
What does a man do when pounding his head on a prison wall fails to kill him and he gasps through the bed sheet he has wrapped around his neck?
He writes another appeal.
He whispers into the plumbing.
He rattles the bars.
He lives because when he looks in the rearview mirror, death has quit the chase.
Monument Road Page 22
