by Lee Thompson
Geneva wouldn’t be able to file for divorce when he abandoned her. At least he didn’t think so. There was a grim satisfaction in that. He didn’t want to imagine her able to remarry. He’d miss Regina, too, but there were thousands of Reginas on the road between here and San Diego—which was where he planned to end up. Live a year as a beach bum. Get some color (something he never got working in the funeral home), and he’d enjoy the fresh air, the smell of young flesh—girls from SDU—lathered in suntan lotion, their eyes alive with possibilities, enjoyment, as carefree as he was. No more fog. No more snow. He could be anyone he chose to be out there.
So, with all the potential for freedom, why was his stomach tied in knots? He watched a young boy playing on a jungle gym in the park. The boy’s mother was sitting on a bench, fifteen feet from the child, reading a book.
After watching the sun set, with Raul dreaming of distant beaches, he grew hungry. He was coming up on the roundabout on M-81 when he saw an old car that looked like Luther’s ram into the side of another car and shove it off the asphalt and onto the slope leading down to the interstate. Two other cars were in front of him and honked their horns for the Impala to move out of the way. It was too dark for Raul to see the driver of the vehicle. Anyway, he couldn’t imagine the kid doing something so crazy. Luther was the most level, responsible kid he’d ever met. The kind of kid Raul’s father had always expected him to be, and the role that Raul had done his best to play until now.
Then he thought about how he didn’t really know his mother, and he couldn’t say that he knew Luther any better. Only from work, really. And who knew what the kid got up to on his own time. He hoped it was him, and that Luther would be arrested and that he was sent to jail for malicious use of a motor vehicle, and that, in turn, Spencer Funeral Home suffered with the fucking kid.
He pulled off the road and into the Flying J parking lot. There was a Wendy’s attached on the east side of the large complex. His stomach growled. He parked as close as he could and closed his eyes for a minute, took a few deep breaths.
Later, he woke, unaware where he was or what time it was. He looked at his watch. It was almost midnight. He felt as if he’d only slept for fifteen minutes, not five hours. Groggy, starving now. But he felt paralyzed by fear too because there was a shape right outside his driver window. A body. Motionless. Dark. Leaning close.
Raul jumped when the person tapped on his window. The hand was dark too. Ebony skin, maybe. Or gloves. A red sleeve. A bit of gold showing on the wrist. The dark shape leaned over. He could see her cleavage, her breast about to spill out of her shirt, her red jacket only zipped high enough to offer partial warmth. She shivered and rubbed her arms and pranced from foot to foot. The car was as cold as outside since he’d slept with the motor off for the past five hours. He started the engine, the heater gathered steam fast. The girl was still outside, shaking. He wiped the sleep out of his eyes and then lowered the window and said to her, “It’s warming up fast in here, get in.”
Got a little better look at her as she leaned forward as if she were having a hard time hearing him. She was pretty and young. Maybe a college girl hitching rides to see her family for the tail end of spring break. She wore a thin red jacket, looked like it was made of velvet, like it was some stage garment. Maybe an actor, maybe theater. Raul didn’t know. It didn’t seem to suit her either way. He thought she’d probably found it in the trash, or out of desperation, stolen it from someone’s vehicle. Maybe she was on her way through with a friend or boyfriend, and there had been a fight and they’d left her here to suffer.
She climbed in the passenger side of the Jeep and looked him over before she closed the door. Smart girl. She didn’t know him. Some guys, Raul had heard (and he believed it, not every girl who had a service through his dad’s funeral home had died of an accident or natural causes) some guys would offer help to young girls like this, and then pounce on their prey: beating, mauling, raping, murdering, disfiguring, and finally burying, all one fluid line of events that left them as hollow as the moments before initial contact.
He said to her, “Are you okay?” wondering if that was something those brutal men asked pretty girls trapped in their cars. He hadn’t locked the doors yet, she was free to go back in the cold if she wanted. He didn’t understand why she didn’t just stay in the warmth of the building. He said, “Can you hear me?”
“I think my ears are froze.”
Raul smiled. Her voice sounded like a little kid’s. He said, “You’ll warm up pretty quick.”
She looked through the windshield and didn’t answer him.
Raul said, “What were you doing out there?”
She raised her eyebrows, and said, “I was just looking, waiting, for the right guy to come along.”
“Who’s that?”
“Could have been anybody. Turns out it’s you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not following you.”
He’d been worried about making her feel uncomfortable, but now he felt apprehensive. She stared at him openly, with something in her eyes, a pout to her lips, and he had no idea what she wanted or expected of him.
He said, “What’s your name?”
“Brandy. What’s yours?”
“Raul.” He swallowed. “How old are you?”
“Old enough,” she said.
“Old enough to drive?” She was younger than he’d first thought—the cleavage had thrown him. But he could see it now, she was still a kid.
“What’s with all the questions?” she said.
“I’m trying to figure out what you need.”
“Oh. I only need some quiet. Those big rigs idling kinda wormed their way into my head. I could sleep a hundred years. I could use something to eat. A coffee. A back rub. You got a phone?”
“Yes.”
“A cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Hmph.” She glanced out the passenger window without looking back at him. She said, “Why are you here?”
“Just where I ended up,” he said.
“Huh, me too.”
“Are you a runaway?”
“What would you do if I was? Are you a narc? Or have you just been sitting here waiting to pick someone up because you’re lonely, or some kind of freak?”
“I’m not lonely or a freak,” he said. “I’m headed to San Diego.”
“For real? What do you have out there?”
“A clean slate. Think I’ll bum up and down the beach. My wife is from there.”
“Where is she?”
“At home.”
“She’s not going with you?”
“No, she’s staying home.”
“You got a lot of money?”
“Enough to get by until I find something out there to do part-time.”
“Huh,” she said. “I’m all out of options.”
“How’s that?”
“Runaway, you guessed right. I got sick of my stepdad fucking with me and my mom pretending she didn’t know it was happening. She called me a liar when I told her. She’s stupid.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I’ll die before I go back there. You could take me to San Diego with you. I’ll help out any way I can.”
He felt a stir in his loins, looking at her lips, the fragile cheekbones, the soft, sad eyes, the thick hair. He said, “How old are you, really?”
“Nobody is going to come looking for me. You get sick of me out there, tell me to hit the bricks and I’ll be out your hair faster than you can say get. I’ll be gone. I won’t cause you any problems though. I’d bet my life on that. I am, if you’ll have me. You seem like a nice guy, right? I’m a nice girl. Maybe we need each other right now. And you are lonely, anybody could see that. I get a little lonely too,” she said. “When are we leaving? I want to put as many miles behind me as I can before tomorrow.”
Raul didn’t know what to say. It’d be easy to take her with him. He believed her when she said nobody
would look for her. And if he was honest with himself, he might enjoy her company. She was nearly a woman, he told himself. What was a year or two? And by then she might love him and depend on him so much that she’d never hurt him the ways Geneva and Regina and his mother had.
The kid smiled and said, “Don’t think so hard, Raul. Let’s just be friends, all right?”
Raul laughed nervously. “It’s just a big decision.”
“No one will know but us.”
She was right about that, he was certain, and it was fucking tempting.
He said, “Can you drive?”
“I’ve done it a few times when I’d sneak out.”
“It’s easy on the interstate anyway. We can get there faster if we take turns driving.”
She shrilled girlishly and threw her arms around his shoulders and kissed his cheeks and cried, “Yes!” When she pulled away from him, she said, “You won’t regret this. Let’s get the show on the road!” She reached for her seat belt.
“I’m starving,” Raul said. “Let’s grab some Wendy’s, use the restroom, grab some waters or whatever for the first leg of our journey, and then we’ll get on the road.”
“All right,” she said, beaming. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
They got out and were on their way inside when Raul saw Geneva walking into the main entrance, eighty, maybe ninety feet away. She didn’t see him until she opened the door, but she didn’t pause either, went right inside as if he didn’t exist. The girl stiffened by his side, said, “What’s wrong?”
“Give me a minute,” Raul said, handing her a twenty to order some food.
30
Hazzard hadn’t planned any of the things he’d do, they sort of happened. The crippled kid was dead. Herman. So was the guy Nathan had never seen before, the guy standing behind the wheelchair, the guy he’d thought had been Luther. It wasn’t until after he’d shot the two of them, both illuminated by the headlights of the Impala, that he saw Luther race into the woods like a startled jackrabbit.
With his weight problem there wasn’t any way Nathan was going to chase after him; he’d have a heart attack in the woods, or he’d get lost, which were both reasons he hadn’t taken Barb’s body too far in. The good thing about the revolver was no shell casings to pick up. He crammed the gun into his pants, studied the situation. He should move the bodies, at least drag them over to the shoreline and chuck them into the frigid water, count on nobody would find them until tomorrow afternoon. The Luther guy would call the cops as soon as he could. He could count on that. They’d put a car on the grandmother’s house, so he couldn’t go there and wait for the kid. Couldn’t let him walk either. He’d never had anyone do him so much damage in such a short time. But then he stopped thinking because a car was crunching gravel and its lights were flashing, the sirens off, as it pulled onto the landing.
The policeman got out with his hand on his pistol, ready to draw it at the first sign of threat, but he saw Nathan and said, “Officer Hazzard?”
It was one of the two uniforms from the accident in front of Geneva’s house. Hazzard was fifteen feet from him. No great distance. He’d pulled the pistol from his waistband when he’d heard the car, before he saw the lights. Others would be coming soon. The young policeman opened his mouth to say something else but Hazzard raised the pistol, squeezed off two shots that caught him high in the chest, knocked him back into the car until he slid out of it and onto the wet ground, flailing like a dying fish.
Hazzard climbed in his Buick and drove away with the headlights off. Nearing the main road he heard sirens so he parked on the shoulder and leaned across the bench seat, just a large, inert mass like his Buick, still in the night, as more cruisers and an ambulance roared by. Once they were gone, he sat back up. Knew where it was he planned to go, and so he went, pulling up in front of a nice bungalow four miles away. He left the car running because he was afraid it wouldn’t start again if he shut it off. He could smell antifreeze leaking from the radiator. He exited through the passenger door, walked up to the house. All the lights seemed to be on. It was a big yard, the nearest house was almost a block away. Country living with the convenience of the city a mile away.
He squeezed the butt of the pistol. It was slippery in his hand. He rang the doorbell, heard a dog bark, heard a woman’s high voice, laughing, headed toward the door. The woman opened it a crack. She was in her early fifties, blonde, petite. He slammed his shoulder into the door, and it knocked her back on her ass, into the hall, her nose bleeding. Beyond her, the dog barking, a pug, when it got close, when he’d wrapped her hair into his hand so she couldn’t get away, he kicked the pug in the side as hard as he could. The dog smashed into the wall, broken ribs, a broken leg, and it tried to bark at him, to get him to release his owner. Brave pooch, but broken, beyond repair. A second later the pain hit it and all it could do was whimper.
Hazzard dragged the woman closer. No point in letting the mutt suffer. He raised his foot and stomped on the dog’s head until it stopped moving.
The woman, coming back to her senses, cried out, “Gary!”
Hazzard rattled her brain with the butt of the pistol. Then Captain Philips was rushing at him down the hall, unarmed, teeth bared. Hazzard figured it was the dead dog that had so enraged him, but he couldn’t be sure.
He lifted the pistol and shot Philips low in the stomach, but he’d been running and his momentum kept him coming and he barreled into his wife, whom Hazzard had jerked between them so he could use her as a shield.
Bones broke. He wasn’t sure whose.
Philips clawed at his cheeks like a helpless woman, and Hazzard pointed the pistol at his face and pulled the trigger. Philips crumpled on top of his wife. She cried hysterically, covered in his blood. He put the pistol to the top of her head and said, “Shhh…” and he could feel her tremors through the barrel, in the frame.
He shot her, felt the bone splinters and blood splatter his hand and sleeve.
He left the three of them in the hall and washed his face and hands and rinsed his sleeve in the bathroom.
“Done is done,” he said.
At that point, evidence didn’t matter. Bodies would pile up. Good riddance, he thought, to those who ride it out the hard way. He’d killed before. Death was nothing to fear. But it was better to be the bringer. If your only choices were to kill or be killed, to ruin or be ruined, who could argue with that?
By the time anyone had figured out who he was, and what he’d done—which he believed, actions defined who you were—he’d be long gone. Somewhere rustic. Alaska maybe. Everybody fled to Mexico, didn’t they? Who the fuck hid out in Alaska? Who could ever find you there, or would even think to look there? Besides, he liked the cold, the dark, the quiet, the solitude.
He didn’t bother to wipe anything down. He was neither proud nor ashamed about what he’d done to Captain Philips, or his wife, or his dog. But they were evidence of his existence. No one could say he was boring, or that he had not had an impact on other lives.
After he found the keys to their SUV, he walked outside. He drove his Buick into the woods a half mile away and hiked back to their house. Their car was new. Leather seats. The dash reminded him of a spaceship. There was no trash cluttering the interior. He started it, turned up the radio. There was a CD playing, some self-awareness/heightened mindset/self-feeding bullshit.
The narrator said, I am special.
Hazzard nodded, adjusted the seat, the mirrors, and said, “I am special.”
The narrator said, I can be whatever I want to be.
Hazzard repeated it. The CD wasn’t so bad. It was apparently full of affirmations he already believed and could repeat with conviction.
The narrator: I will not stand in my own way.
Hazzard said, “I will not let anyone stand in my way.”
He thought he could have written that audiobook. He backed out onto the dark street. The lights were still on in the house. It looked loved, warm, and lived in.
<
br /> 31
Geneva had just shut Dominic’s bedroom door when Isaac returned. He asked how she was. She wanted to tell him about her mother-in-law’s visit, but he looked tired, and she had little energy, so she walked into the living room with a bottle of vodka in her hand, telling herself it’d be foolish to have even a single drink, but she had hurt plenty that day and there were so many things she was uncertain of, and she wanted to numb herself for a while to avoid reality.
Isaac said, “Do you want me to grab us some glasses, or do you plan to drink straight from the bottle?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” she said. She placed the bottle on the end table, sat heavily and brushed her hair out of her face with her fingers. “How was your day?”
“Busy.”
“Are you working on something while you’re here?”
“Do I give that impression?”
“Yes,” she said. “What are you up to?”
“Where’s Raul?”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“What?”
“Him and your friend.”
“No, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Would you like to talk about anything else?”
“I don’t want to talk at all,” she said. “I’m so tired that it takes all my strength to open and close my mouth.”
“I’m going to make something to eat. Would you like something?”
“You’ve never been around. How would you have any idea what I like?”
He smiled. “Your house, your groceries. I figure you gotta like something in there.”
“Where do you live?”
“I move around a bit.”
“Do you see Mom and Dad at all?”
“From time to time.”
“Do you ever think about setting down roots?”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” he said. “Do I want to buy a specific house in a specific city so I can say I love the place, that it’s mine? Get to know the neighbors? Work a square job forty hours a week? Plan to start living when I can afford to retire? Those kinds of roots? I don’t see how they can appeal to anyone.”
