by Robert Ward
Why, hadn’t he done the whole thing for her? Stolen and murdered to keep her around? It was almost, almost as though she had ordered him to do it.
Anyone could see that.
He twisted the key in his car and roared off down the street.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Bob figured that she’d be heading for the beltway. Once she made it there she’d go to the airport. Of course. She must already have a plane reservation. And probably under another name.
Christ, the airport was huge. Once there he might never find her.
And which country would she go to? He had no idea. And he was pretty sure she had no idea, either.
Or had she already arranged some kind of offshore banking deal?
Christ, that made perfect sense. She’d been planning it ever since they got back from their happy little visit with Emile.
Yeah, the whole Dave and Lou Anne thing was just an excuse.
She had always planned on taking the money. Of course, and good old, softhearted Bob hadn’t seen it.
He made it to the stoplight at Broadway. There was a giant National Bohemian beer truck in front of him. He leaned on the horn, but the truck didn’t move.
Then he saw her. She’d been stuck in traffic, as well, and was just on the other side of the truck turning right at Broadway.
If he waited he might lose her forever. There was nothing left for Bob to do but drive up on the sidewalk. He heard the muffler dragging as he bumped over the curb. A woman screamed in front of him and narrowly dove out of his way. Though his stomach was throbbing now he started to laugh wildly. Was this a new kind of fun? He drove across the wide sidewalk and smashed into a parked car, smashing his own front bumper, which now hung from the grille.
People screamed at him, waved their arms, and a man threw something at him. It bounced off the window and Bob caught a glimpse of it through the window. It was a Cal Ripken puppet. Well, yes, he thought, of course.
He turned the wheel frantically to straighten himself out and then floored the car, shooting a block and a half in barely thirty seconds.
There she was, in her shitty Honda, turning at Lombard. Trying to get to the freeway, but he could cut her off if he could just get by a taxi that was blocking him.
He wanted to honk his horn, scream at the guy, but didn’t dare. If she heard it and looked behind her, she’d see him. So he tail-gated the taxi driver and waved his arms. The guy shot him the finger back and Bob rammed into his rear.
The taxi driver, an Indian man, relented and moved over. As Bob passed him the man waved his arms and cursed him.
But Bob paid no attention to him. Now she was just on the left of him. He pulled up next to her and gave her a couple of quick blasts on his horn.
She looked over and Bob saw the shock on her lovely face.
He hit the window button and stuck his head out.
“Pull over and give me the money,” he said. “Now!”
“Fuck you, Bob,” Jesse said.
That left him no choice. He rammed into her side, sending her into the far left lane. She managed a turn on the other side of Broadway, but slid off the road, overcompensated to her right, and smashed into a light pole.
Steam blew from the engine like a geyser.
Barely able to stay on the road himself, Bob pulled up on the street in front of her, parked, and jumped from his car.
He walked toward her, but was surprised to see her leap from the car and run into the Aero Theatre.
Bob tried to run after her, but felt something shift inside his stomach. He looked down at himself and saw the blood making a thick, red stream down his shirt and pants.
And suddenly he was aware of the pain. In the car, he had been so focused on driving that he was numb, but now Bob couldn’t believe the radiant throbbing he felt from deep inside. It was as if someone had placed a hot coal in his intestines.
He had to get to the hospital. But the thought of giving up the money was too ugly. It was his and his alone.
He staggered up to the Aero’s door, opened the doors, which said COOL in big wet-looking letters, and went inside.
A fat, little black man looked at him and shook his head.
“You a mess,” the man said. “You need to get yo’sef to a doctor.”
“I’m with the Baltimore Police Department,” Bob said. “Detective Geiger. I’m following a woman who is suspected of being a terrorist. I saw her enter here.”
“Yeah,” the man said. “I was, like, working over at the snack bar and she run right in there. I was jes getting ready to call a cop when you came in. She shoot you?”
“Yes, she did,” Bob said, staring down at the blood stream, which ran steadily down his pants.
“You want me to call the cops?”
“No,” Bob said. “This whole deal is undercover. Top secret.”
“Whoa,” the ticket man said. “Ain’t that something?”
“Keep the crowds back,” Bob said.
“Right,” the man said, looking at two junkies who were eagerly staring at Jesse’s wrecked car in front of the theater. “Hey, like, be careful in there, Officer. Bitch still has her piece wif her.” Bob opened the two gold doors that led into the dark theater.
Inside, the blackness blinded him as he stood by the door. It occurred to him that she could be standing right in front of him, her gun aimed at his head. He quickly dodged into the back row and took a seat while his eyes got used to the darkness.
While he waited he looked up at the screen and saw two women making love to a man dressed in some kind of superhero costume. The man Bob recognized as the repulsive porn star Ron Renzle, a man Rudy Runyon had recently interviewed on his radio show. The two of them had discussed the liberating aspects of porn, and Bob had to suppress a desire to call in and scream at Rudy for selling porn as freedom. The nerve of him. What had happened to the left? Now they sold anything as freedom, anything that could make money.
Bob got so mad at Rudy Runyon (the phony, the cad, the wife stealer) and the porn star that for a second he forgot why he was in the Aero Theatre at all. He fell back in the seat and wanted badly to go to sleep.
But the pain in his stomach kept him awake and a second later he remembered why it was that he was here.
Yes, of course, he had to keep focused.
He was here to kill his fiancée and take back his money. The money he had stolen and killed for. (But it didn’t seem that way. Somebody had killed for it, yeah, but was it him? Really? No, it couldn’t be, could it? Not he who so loved the world … )
He could see in front of him now.
Twenty or thirty men in the old theater, where Bob had once seen Rocket Man serials, old Roger Corman movies, like The Invisible Eye, and was it watching him now? Oh yes, it could be, and wasn’t it always watching a person? Yeah, you know it was. It was always there, and it was sometimes Jesus’ eye and sometimes it was Karl Marx, and sometimes Bakunin and sometimes R. D. Laing and they were all watching him all the time … they were. It was kind of a no-escape deal and he felt the blood leaking out of him and he forced himself up and saw a man bobbing up and down in his seat to his left, a newspaper over his lap. And Bob realized he was here in jackoff city in the hot afternoon, and yet when he looked at the man again, a long-haired guy with a round face, he was sure he knew the guy.
Wasn’t that Billy Stetzle, the old activist? Hadn’t they taken part in some of the greatest street battles of the early seventies? Yeah, that was him. Bill Stetzle sitting in a porn theater with a copy of the Sporting News over his pants. How weird was that?
The man looked up and when he saw Bob’s face, he blushed and kind of pulled his hand out of his lap and waved.
“Hey Bob,” he said.
“Bill,” Bob said.
Bill looked deeply embarrassed.
“I don’t usually do this so much,” Bill said.
“Of course not,” Bob said. “You see a blonde come in here?”
“She have a briefca
se with her?” Bill said.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Bob said.
“I saw her go somewhere down front,” Bill said. “Not too many girls come in here.”
“Right,” Bob said. “Well, keep working it, Bill.”
“Yeah,” Bill said, looking away.
Bob looked at the screen and saw the two men and the woman starting to have sex with a huge, hairy thing with one eye. Behind them was a paper moon.
Bob felt ashamed for being in such a place.
He slipped out into the main aisle, light-headed, and walked down toward the screen. He looked in each aisle, many of which held two or three single men, all of them with newspapers on their laps.
On the screen a character was saying, “We are the gods of Venus,” and Bob had a thought that soon we could send porn to other planets. Porn and sex toys, and wouldn’t that be fine.
Yeah, eventually a scientist could look through the Hubble telescope and see a used condom on the moon. Hey, hey, hey!
He felt faint again and for a second forgot why he was here in the … theater, which he could no longer name. And in fact, was it even the theater, or was it the Lodge? He peered down the dark rows, his gun in his hand, and saw someone else he thought he knew … who was that?
The guy looked like Young Finnegan, and he was really working it there, up and down with his hand, and making “ahhhha ahhhh” noises. What was he doing here, Bob thought. Why was Young Finnegan here at the Lodge jerking off to a porn movie? Bob staggered on, his throat dry, the pain now radiating all over his body like a radio signal, and he had forgotten just why it was … and how … and he wished the couple on the other planet would stop humping the moon man.
He was in row three when he saw Meredith and Rudy and they were screwing right there in their seats and they were very young and had long hair and they saw him and gave him the black power sign, the old clenched fist … and he heard this dripping and felt hot stuff leaking down his legs and into his groin.
Oh yeah, this was the dawning of the Age of fucking Aquarius, didn’t they all know? Why don’t we do it in the road?
And on the screen there was a dog in the story now and he had on silver underpants and Bob didn’t want to look at that for too long.
He walked farther down the rows and saw more people he knew, or felt like he knew … people wearing berkas, and in the second row there was something lying there that might have been a body, but it had no head, and Bob felt as though he would throw up, and there were all his old patients in row one, smiling and waving at him, Ethel and Perry and whoa … Emile, too … but with a bashed-in head … Bob felt a wave of compassion for him … tenderness even, and gratitude, too, because he’d obviously forgiven Bob and come here to the Lodge today or tonight, whatever, to hear the Rockaholics play.
And then there was something else, something he hadn’t counted on. There was a hot, red rain leaking down from the roof, and at first he couldn’t understand what it was … but then he remembered the three other kinds of rain from the hospital and he knew that this was it, the fourth, the last.
A red rain, dripping down and covering them all … all his friends and all his enemies sitting in the COOL theater in the middle of the afternoon.
And he knew what it was, of course. He knew exactly what it was. It was a rain of blood.
And wasn’t that something? They said no man could make rain—why, only God could do that—but Bob had proved them wrong.
He had made this rain without any divine assistance. Yes he had, a rain of blood dripping down over all of them, and he knew Utu would like it, too….
Yes, he would. Wasn’t that what he was about? Wasn’t that what all gods were about. Four kinds of rain, but only one was fit for mankind.
Then he saw somebody coming from out of the left side of the theater and he looked up and saw Jesse running for the left exit and he felt so happy to see her. What a great combination they were onstage. He wanted to get over to her, tell her what the playlist was going to be tonight, today … but she was already at the exit door. And she was working it, really working it, pushing the exit bar on the door, but the bar was stuck … ha ha, in reverse gear, Bob thought.
She couldn’t get out, either. No one could escape the past, why even try? You try and try and try to transform yourself, but you won’t make it, dude … all you can do is change your hair. Ha ha.
He was standing next to her now and he touched her back.
She turned around and looked at him.
“Get away,” she said, pointing the gun at him. “I’ll kill you. I will.”
Bob smacked her in the face and her head snapped back. He reached for her neck, but she smacked him in the head with the briefcase and he fell back.
She ran by him, up the battered little steps to the stage in front of the screen, and Bob looked at her up there, caught in the spotlight, the movie playing over her face, and when he looked back at the crowd he saw old friends waving to him, old movement pals who had long ago moved to the burbs and left their politics behind. He saw his mother and father out there, as well, and they were looking out at him and shaking their heads in disapproval, oh, but what did they know?
And there was the Today show crew with their cameras, and there was Dave and Lou Anne with their faces bleeding and their eyes and tongues gouged out, but hey, they’d made it. And there was the old gang at the Lodge screaming for him and Jesse to get up on the stage and do their thing one more time. Old and Young Finnegan and Abbie and Nixon, too … all of them out there like the old Sgt. Pepper’s album … and Lenny and Terry and all the wise guys.
And then from behind him Bob heard a moaning sound, and he turned toward the screen and saw the fat little actor wearing the mask of Utu as he severed off one of the actress’s pale arms with his electric saw. That was perfect, Utu had shown up, too, and maybe, maybe he was running it all …. Yes, wasn’t it funny if the old Sumerian god had been playing with them all this time strictly for his own entertainment.
Bob had always laughed at such ideas as Fate, but now it seemed entirely possible. Anything seemed entirely possible….
They were all there except two guys and now remarkably Bob saw them coming in at the back of the theater. The gendarmes. Yes, Geiger and Garrett were there, too. All of them convening for a very special episode of The Life of Bob.
The two detectives were standing there in the back of the theater talking to the little black ticket man and he was pointing down the rows, and the cops were holding their hands over their eyes and squinting and trying to see through the pouring red rain, and now Jesse was up on the stage, frozen there in the spotlight, and Bob was somehow up on the stage with her, not ten feet away, but she was blinded by the film and he aimed his pistol at her head.
“You deserve this, you bitch,” he yelled.
Jesse turned and tried to lift her own gun, but she was several seconds too late. Bob had her dead in his sights. Dead on, and wouldn’t this be a treat for the bloody crowd who might just be too jaded for a simple rock concert. No, they had all been through way too many oldies concerts to get any kick out of them anymore. They needed something raw. Something rawer and realer than reality TV, something that could match the blood dripping from the ceiling. And Bob knew just what it was they needed.
She was his.
He held the gun on her, staring her down, wanting to pull the trigger, wanting so badly to do the one right thing, the definitive thing … blow the bitch away and with her all the years of haplessness and failure…. He needed to do this, he should just go ahead and pull the trigger, but instead he found himself thinking of the baby, the goddamn baby he never wanted. The kid, his kid with blue eyes and a round, smooth, pink-cheeked face.
The child who looked up at him and smiled. And said, “Daddy.”
It was no use, no good.
Bob turned the gun away from her. And saw Garrett and Geiger racing down the aisles, their own guns drawn.
Bob aimed the gun at the first o
ne. Saw him clearly. Saw him so clearly, and held his hand lightly on the trigger.
Good old Geiger, Bob thought, as the first bullet tore through him.
He felt it rip through his arm (whoa, that hurt), and behind it, a second one hit his chest, and finally, the third came for him from the left side.
It did what he had never been able to do, take his head out of gear.
And as he fell he saw them all out there waving and screaming his name. They loved him, they all loved and understood his sacrifice, Bob thought, all of the people he had known and would like to have known … cheering and calling his name.
“Bob … Bob … Bob … Bob …”
The third bullet blew out his brain, and as he faded Bob saw an assemblage of stars, and in the distance a lovely woman, running, running over a starry staircase and disappearing into a whirlpool of red rain.
“Where’d that Reardon woman get to?” Geiger said, as they watched the ambulance pull away.
“I don’t know,” Garrett said. “But she’s a waitress without much dough. How far can she go?”
“Heard she’s from West Virginia,” Geiger said, as they watched the wrecker tow Jesse’s car away.
“So we’ll get out an all points there,” Garrett said.
“Only one problem, though,” Geiger said.
“What’s that?” Garrett said.
“She does have some money and runs to a foreign country, I’m not sure we can bring her back for questioning. I mean, we got nothing else on her.”
“Yeah,” Garrett said. “That’s right.”
“Anyway, that’s the sad end of Dr. Bobby. Know what?”
“What’s that?” Garrett said.
“Between you and me? I’m gonna miss that guy.”
“Miss messing with him, you mean,” Garrett said.
“Well, yeah, what else?” Geiger said, as he got into their Crown Vic. “But there was something about the guy. You gotta admit. He was a special kind of asshole.”
“Right,” said Garrett. “I’ll give you that.”
“Yeah,” Geiger said. “Funny thing.”
