Darker Than Night

by John Lutz

  “I believe I’ll have another. They’re delicious.”

  Why does she call to me so…?

  19

  It had rained lightly but persistently the morning of Raoul Caruso’s funeral, but by the time many of the mourners and family arrived at Anna’s father’s modest frame house in Queens, the sun was shining. Food—ravioli, salad, and chocolate-chip cookies—had been prepared there by a neighbor who’d been a good friend of Anna’s father.

  Anna looked at the woman, a dark-eyed, onetime beautiful widow in her fifties who’d put on weight but was still attractive. She wondered if her father and his neighbor had had an affair. The woman, whose name was Lilitta, had certainly been deeply distressed at the funeral.

  Anna’s father’s employer, a swarthy man named Stick, who looked cheap and disreputable even in his expensive suit, had stood next to her at the funeral but didn’t drive to the house afterward. Anna’s uncle Dale, her father’s brother and Melba’s father, whom she’d met only half a dozen times, came to the house. He was seated on the edge of the sofa with a paper plate full of ravioli balanced on his knee and listening to a woman Anna didn’t recognize, who was sitting next to him. Melba, who was fifteen and made ill by the funeral, was curled in a chair looking as if she wanted to cry and make her eyes even more red and puffy.

  With eyes almost as red from crying as Melba’s, Anna’s mother approached Dale and whispered in his ear. Dale nodded, set his plate aside on a lamp table, and stood up. Anna watched them climb the stairs to the second floor. Lilitta, standing over by a big steel coffee urn, also saw them, and put down her foam cup and followed.

  Anna hesitated, then followed Lilitta. As she took the stairs, she looked over and saw that Melba hadn’t noticed them and was seated with her head bowed and her eyes clenched shut, absently picking at a zit on her chin.

  At the top of the stairs Anna heard voices and went to an open door at the end of the hall.

  Her father’s bedroom.

  The three of them were standing at the foot of the bed, talking calmly, but Lilitta seemed to be holding in anger as well as grief. Anna looked at the bed, at Lilitta, and wondered.

  “It’s difficult but we oughta do it,” Dale was saying. “We’re family, and from what Raoul told me”—a glance at Lilitta—“almost family.”

  Anna’s mother saw her and waved her in.

  “We’re going to look through some of your father’s things,” she said, “and see what he might have wanted us to take to help us remember him. You should do this, too, Anna. It’s posterity.”

  Anna wondered if the three of them were being sentimental, or actually looking for items of value. Either way, she couldn’t stop them, so she decided to play along.

  Acting tentative and guilty, as if her father might still be alive, they began opening drawers. Dale went to the closet and yanked open its door, which was warped and stuck on the wood frame. He was about the same size as his late brother and began selectively removing clothes, a shirt, two pairs of slacks, a sport jacket.

  “Isn’t it a little soon to be doing this?” Anna asked.

  Lilitta smiled at her.

  “We need to be realistic,” Anna’s mother said, looking up from the dresser drawer she was rooting through and shooting a glance at Dale.

  Anna understood. Her mother feared that if given the opportunity, Dale would return to the house alone and confiscate anything of value.

  Dale seemed oblivious of this as he held up the sport jacket to inspect it for wear or moth damage.

  Anna’s mother removed a wooden box from one of the dresser drawers and placed it on the bed next to the folded slacks. She opened the box and began spreading jewelry out on the tufted white spread.

  Anna could see at a glance that all of it was cheap; she recognized the steel Timex watch her father had always worn and sworn by. Lilitta picked up the watch and held it as lovingly as if it were a $20,000 Rolex.

  While the other three were occupied by the jewelry on the bed, Anna went to the closet. On the top shelf were stacks of old Newsweek magazines, a dusty rotary-style phone, and a shoe box. Anna slid the shoe box down and opened it to find that it contained what looked like a new pair of jogging shoes. As she was returning the box to where she’d found it, she noticed an old wooden cigar box that had been behind it on the shelf.

  When she reached for the cigar box, she found it surprisingly heavy. With a backward glance to make sure no one was paying attention to her, she stepped deeper into the closet and lifted the box’s lid. The scent of ancient tobacco wafted up to her.

  Inside were about a dozen silver dollars with a thick rubber band around them to keep them in a neat stack, and a small revolver.

  Fascinated, Anna looked at the revolver, then lifted it from the box and hefted it in her right hand. It felt good, as if it belonged there. It was blue steel with a checked walnut grip, and she could see the dull brass of the cartridge cases in the cylinder and knew it was loaded.

  Her father’s gun.

  Her gun now. Posterity.

  My gun.

  Possessing it gave her a sense of secret power she didn’t want to lose.

  Barely hesitating, she slipped the revolver beneath her blouse and tucked its cool steel bulk into her waistband. Later she could go into the bathroom downstairs and transfer it to her purse.

  “Anna?”

  Her mother’s voice.

  Anna turned, still holding the open cigar box.

  “Whatcha got, honey?”

  “Money,” Anna said, and held out the box.

  The cheap cuff links, rings, and tie clasps on the bed were forgotten as Anna’s mother took the box from her hand.

  “Not much,” Dale said, obviously disappointed. “Twelve dollars.”

  “Silver ones, though,” said Anna’s mother. “They might be worth something to a collector.”

  “Kinda thing the people who’ll auction off the household items will keep for themselves. I don’t wanna sound greedy, but the fair thing’d be to divide them coins three ways and forget them.”

  Anna’s mother looked at Lilitta.

  “He means family,” Lilitta said. “Dale, you, and Anna.” She held up the Timex. “I’ll keep Raoul’s watch, if nobody minds.”

  “No objections,” Dale said, and carried the box over to the bed.

  “You take my share,” Anna said to her mother.

  She watched as Dale and her mother carefully meted out the twelve silver dollars, four for Dale, eight for Anna’s mother, taking them from the top of the stack in order, one by one, and making it a point not to look at the dates. Lilitta observed the process closely, her face impassive.

  Everyone was involved with the money and uninterested in whatever else might have been in the cigar box.

  Like the gun tucked firmly against Anna’s hip.

  Lars Svenson emerged from the Hades Portal Club in the East Village and drew a deep breath of cool night air. He was dressed in black leather from the toes up—black Doc Marten boots, tight black pants, and a studded black vest over a sleeveless black T-shirt.

  He hadn’t been completely satisfied inside the club, where he was a regular patron. The woman he’d attempted to pick up belonged to somebody bigger and probably meaner. That was actually okay with Lars, as he’d gotten close enough to see that the bruises on her face were dark makeup. So he hadn’t scored sexually tonight, and he hadn’t scored for dope. Lars still needed relief from his barely contained guilt and rage, which meant he was still looking for meth or cocaine, and for somebody to hurt.

  From the time he was a teenager, Lars’s relationships with women always led to violence. At first he tried to deny that was what he wanted, what he truly needed, but always the yearning was there, the compulsion only sometimes held in check. Gradually his willpower and his denial eroded, and during the past few years he accepted his need and learned how to lure his victims with feigned concern and kindness.

  He soon found that it was like baiting a
trap, a contest of wits his opponents had little chance of winning. He learned to enjoy it. It was like the hunting he used to do in the Minnesota woods—find the game, flush it, and make it yours. The only real difference he could see was that now he was in New York and it was women he hunted. And between hunts he enjoyed going directly to willing victims who endured pain for pay. It was like hunting birds in cages.

  Just last week, even after moving furniture all day, he still felt the energy and the need, so he’d gone to a club and used his blond good looks and his pickup skills to get a young woman named Tina to invite him to her apartment.

  Lars smiled, remembering Tina’s trusting, round face and zaftig body, even fleshier than he’d imagined when she’d stripped off her bra and panty hose. Tina liked to play rough. Or at least she thought she did. Lars had shown her what rough was, once she was tied and gagged and his for the rest of the night.

  His smile had become such a wide grin that a passing couple of guys, faggots, stared at him as he strode along the sidewalk. He was recalling Tina’s futile struggles and muted cries for help, the terror and pain in her eyes, and then the resignation. After all, she’d gotten herself into this, said her eyes, after Lars had patiently explained it to her over and over. It wasn’t difficult to get her to believe it; she came with guilt built in, part of the package.

  She’d welcomed his advances in the club and even told him she enjoyed bondage and discipline, rough sex with a little pain. Verbal commands and the whip were okay, if used sparingly. B&D and S&M. She hadn’t mentioned which she enjoyed more. Her oversight.

  In the morning he untied Tina and asked if she wanted to go out for breakfast, but she awkwardly crept from the bed with sore and stiffened limbs and cowered in a corner, staring at him in mute disbelief.

  Lars laughed, and as he got dressed, he told her what a stupid bitch she was. He didn’t glance back at her when he left the apartment. He wouldn’t be surprised to see her again; she might even come looking for him. They were like that, some of them, once you took them to a higher level. They needed to go higher and higher, and Lars was willing to fly them all the way to heaven so they could escape their hell. They’d beg him to, after a while. They’d plead and pledge their souls. What they wanted, they loathed, but their problem was they loved it even more. It was like a drug addiction.

  Speaking of which…Lars was going to go out of his gourd if he didn’t score some dope pretty soon.

  He tried to think of something else as he roamed the gray morning streets, watching for possibilities.

  The something else was Claire Briggs.

  She was the type Lars liked, slender and helpless, fems all the way, natural submissives once they were shown the path, once they were kicked in the ass and shoved along the path. And she lived alone, some kind of actress, probably with a rich family that might come across once he taught her how to mooch.

  Claire Briggs. Definitely worthwhile.

  Lars spotted a guy he recognized standing outside the entrance to a diner, a gigantic black dude with dreadlocks, looked like a former NFL linebacker who’d taken up reggae. While bigger than Lars, he wasn’t as solid. The soft life was making him vulnerable. He was talking to a woman with straight blond hair that hung almost to her ass. The guy’s name was Handy and he dealt.

  The woman said something about pancakes, then sashayed her ass inside the diner, making the long hair swish. Handy stayed outside, leaning back against the brick wall and smoking a cigarette like it was an art.

  “Handy,” Lars said when he was about twenty feet away; he didn’t want the dealer to miss seeing him and go inside after the woman. “Remember me, my man?”

  Handy flicked away his cigarette and gave Lars a wide, gleaming smile. “I remember your money.”

  “I wanna reintroduce you,” Lars said, forgetting all about Claire Briggs.

  For the moment.

  20

  Hiram, Missouri, 1989.

  “He’s sixteen,” Milford Sand said, “of an age when he can damn well work and pull his own weight around here. Hell, I was—”

  “I know,” his wife Cara said, “you were working in the mine when you were fourteen. This boy, Luther, is the only survivor of a house fire that killed his foster family in Missouri; then he somehow survived almost a year of life on the streets in Kansas City.”

  “So he’s no innocent,” Milford said.

  “So he needs time to heal body and soul, Milford. Please show him some compassion.”

  Milford snorted and jammed his arms into his suit coat almost hard enough to split the seams. “He can heal his soul while he’s working with his body.”

  Milford Sand was fifty-three, almost twenty years older than his wife, but he looked as if he could be in his late sixties. His narrow back was bent from sitting hunched over at his desk at the Hiram Lead Mine, where he kept the company books, and his face was pale and pinched. His cheap drugstore spectacles, which were too small, gave him a slightly cross-eyed appearance. Milford monitored the household money the way he tracked expenses at the mine, and there was no point in spending for prescription glasses when the ones on the revolving rack at Drexel’s Pharmacy would do just as well.

  He studied his thinning brown hair, strained blue eyes, and puckered mouth as he adjusted his tie knot in the dresser mirror. He’d once overheard somebody at the mine say his natural expression was that of a man about to spit. Milford wasn’t insulted; the comment hadn’t been far off the mark. “The agency said this boy—Luther—has had some experience as a housepainter. I’ll talk to Tom Wilde about taking him on as an apprentice.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “That’s true,” Milford interrupted in a weary, tolerant tone. “You don’t know, and there’s no need for you to worry about that part of it. You just try and make the lad feel at home; I’ll take care of his employment this summer so he can earn his keep.”

  “Maybe he should go to summer school. He’s already two grades behind.”

  “Maybe he’s simply unable to do the work and needs to learn a trade.”

  “Milford—”

  “I have to get to the office.” He snatched up his heavy brown leather briefcase from the floor alongside the dresser, an adroit and powerful motion for such a frail-looking man, and headed for the door. Then he paused. “What time’s the agency bringing the boy?”

  “One this afternoon. Try and get home if it’s at all possible.”

  “I’ll speak to them at the mine.” He forced a lemony smile and hurried from the room.

  A few seconds later Cara heard the screen door slam downstairs, the hollow thumping of his footfalls on the wooden porch, then after a minute or so the grinding of his car starting in the garage and the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway. Morning sounds. It was how Cara started each long day, listening to Milford leave for the mine.

  The mine. All he thought about was the mine, his job, numbers, and lead. Profit and loss, this column or that. Cara thought the lead in the air was probably poisoning the whole town.

  It was certainly poisoning their marriage.

  Luther was surprised by the house that Saturday afternoon. He’d expected something smaller. This was a cream-colored frame monster with gray trim, a gallery porch, and a steep, tiled roof with lots of dormers. It looked like the house Luther had seen in Hansel and Gretel drawings—only much, much larger. There were a few other houses something like it on the wide, tree-lined street, but this one was the biggest and in the best condition even though it was old like the rest of them. The yard around it was wide and level, with a low stone wall in front and with lots of trees and shrubs. There was a long gravel drive that ran to a garage in back that looked newer than the house.

  It was warm when he and the woman from the state agency got out of the air-conditioned car. There was plenty of shade in the yard, and twenty or thirty industrious sparrows pecking away busily on the green lawn. The sparrows all took flight when Luther slammed the car door. He hefted his lumpy d
uffel bag and walked around the car toward the wide wooden porch steps.

  The porch was shady and had viney potted plants and a glider and rocking chair on it. “Looks like Norman fuckin’ Rockwell lives here,” Luther heard the agency woman mutter under her breath. She was slender, with lustrous blond hair, and was better-looking than most of the state employees. Luther knew she would have been pissed off if she was aware of how he’d been studying her.

  Their footsteps made noise on the plank floor, and the front door opened before the agency woman pushed the doorbell button.

  Inside, the woman introduced herself to Mr. and Mrs. Sand as Helen Simpson, which was a good thing because Luther had forgotten her name somewhere on Interstate 40. He watched and listened as she went through the routine that was so familiar to her, complete with smiles and pats on Luther’s shoulder at proper intervals; then she left the house and walked down the drive to her dusty white agency car. Business finished.

  And there sat sixteen-year-old Luther Lunt with his new foster parents. The three of them listened to gravel crunch as Helen Simpson backed her car out of the drive. Then it was quiet in the big three-story Victorian house that Milford Sand and his wife had restored.

  Luther would be the only charge here, which he liked. And he liked the wife, Cara, right away. She was kinda old—maybe even in her thirties—but still pretty, with her curly dark hair and brown eyes. She had an oval face that looked like it belonged in one of those heart-shaped lockets you opened up to see the photograph. And she smiled at Luther as if she meant it.

  On the other hand, the husband, Luther’s new temporary father, acted like he had a stick up his ass. While working the streets as a male prostitute in Kansas City, Luther had seen his kind of little weasel before. He thought he might need the wife to protect him from Mr. Sand. He was sure, just by looking, that she wasn’t like Mrs. Black.

  Cara—Mrs. Sand—was smiling at him. “Would you care for a glass of lemonade, Luther?”