Dark Debts (10 page)

“I know what I do and why I do it,” he said, trying to be patient. “Why can't you trust me on that?”

“What happens when you start thinkin' about comin' here? How do you feel?”

“Cathy . . .”

“Just tell me, the simplest way you know how.”

He thought about it for a minute. He knew she wasn't going to let him out of this. “I feel . . . like I can't stay calm.” He looked at her. She was nodding.

“Okay. That's good.”

“Great. I passed. Is it over?”

“It's not just about sex, Jack. It's about that volcano you sit on all the time.”

“You think I'm unaware of it?”

“I love you to death, Jack. You're my oldest friend, and I'd love to think it could be more than that, but you . . . you know . . . your life is what it is and I think it's a stupid waste, but it
is
your life.”

He suddenly knew what she was going to say. He kept quiet and let her say it.

“I've been seein' somebody. I mean,
really
seein' somebody . . . I think we're . . .” She stopped. She shook her head, then looked away, toward the wall. He got her drift. He'd been through lots of boyfriends with Cathy, and while there may have been occasional problems of logistics, it had never altered their relationship.

“Where'd you meet him?” He didn't know why it mattered, but he wasn't ready to say anything else.

She looked back at him. “He's the night manager at Winn-Dixie. He transferred from Columbus about six months ago. I kept seein' him in there . . . One night I had to get a check approved and we started talkin' . . . He asked me out and we just . . .” Her voice trailed off. “God, I hate this . . .”

“Cathy, it's okay,” he said quietly.

She was starting to cry. He pulled her to him and held her. She tried to go on.

“I want a life, Jack. I'm tired of being alone, I'm tired of living in a trailer . . .” Jack handed her a tissue from the box by the bed and she dried her eyes. “I know I'm probably just headin' for another disaster—”

“You don't know that. It could be fine.” He kissed her cheek, then rubbed a stray tear away with his thumb. “Don't cry. You've told me, it's over, everything's okay.”

“I'm worried about you.”

“Cathy, I'll be okay. I'm not going to go nuts, I'm not going to . . .” He stopped. “Look, if I didn't know how to take care of myself, I wouldn't be here, would I?”

“But after tonight?”

“I'll come out to the truck stop. You can introduce me to some of your friends.”

She smiled a little. “Just . . . be careful.”

“I'm always careful. You know that.”

B
ack home, Jack went through the nightly routine like a robot: got undressed, brushed his teeth, set the coffeepot. He got into bed and tried to read, but he couldn't keep his mind focused. It kept going back to everything Cathy had said. Was he that volatile, he wondered, that a prolonged period of celibacy was a threat to society? Maybe, but it didn't matter. It wasn't a theory he planned to test.

It took his mind a while to settle down, but he finally felt himself slipping into unconsciousness and was deeply grateful.

He was walking down a shady residential street. Broad daylight. Up ahead he saw a girl walking toward him. She was in her late teens, pretty, with long blond hair and tan legs in cutoff blue jeans. She smiled and motioned for him to come to her. He went, stood in front of her, and waited to see what she wanted. She looked at him oddly, like she could hear his thoughts and was pausing to listen. And then, without warning, she was kissing him, with a strength that amazed him. He could barely stand up. And then he realized she was pushing him down. He felt his knees give way and he was on the ground and she was on top of him, still kissing him, his face cupped in her strong hands. He kept his eyes closed and tried to just go with it, but he couldn't stop wondering why it didn't feel as good as it should. Something told him to open his eyes; he did, and instantly he knew something was wrong. The girl's hair, hanging down around his face, was not blond anymore. It was gray and coarse. He pushed her away so he could see her face. It wasn't the girl.

She was the most grotesque thing he'd ever seen. Her skin was a transparent, slimy white and covered with open, runny abscesses. Her eyes were blue, but the whites of them were laced with red, and the look in them was pure hatred. She smiled at him; her mouth was full of sores and half her teeth were missing. The ones she had were yellow and pointed, like a vampire's. She looked at him like she owned him.

He tried to push her away, but it was like pushing a brick wall. He tried to roll himself out from under her. She laughed, a howling, mocking laugh. The more he struggled, the louder the laugh became, until the woods were echoing with it. He screamed at her to leave him alone, and she stopped laughing. The silence was almost worse. She looked in his eyes, and he couldn't move. Somehow her gaze had the power to paralyze him. He couldn't do anything but watch as she wrapped her bony hands around his throat and started to squeeze. He tried to move, but he couldn't. He could feel her fingers digging into his throat with a strength that was not human. In seconds, he couldn't breathe at all. She started that laugh again, and as she leaned her head back to howl, he was suddenly able to move. He grabbed her hands, but her grip was like iron. He thrashed, trying desperately to throw her off him. He had to breathe. His chest felt like someone had run a hot knife through it. In a wild attempt that he knew would be his last, he summoned every ounce of strength and shoved himself to the side. Her grip slipped just enough, and he managed to shove her off and roll away. He sat up, gasping for air. He looked around quickly, to see where she was, and realized he was awake.

He sucked air into his lungs in visceral gasps. His eyes scanned the apartment. The late-morning sun was bright and he could see right away there was nothing wrong. He lay back down on the pillow and took deep breaths. His head felt like someone had it in a vise.

The phone rang, making him jump. He glanced at the clock. Christ, had he really slept until eleven? The machine picked up. He heard his own voice; the one that followed the beep was not Rick's.

“Yes, I'm trying to locate a Mr. Jack Landry. This is Bill Warren at the Los Angeles County coroner's office and I need you to return my call at your earliest convenience. The number here is (213) 343—”

Jack turned the machine off, then stared at it in disbelief. There was only one reason he'd be getting a call from the Los Angeles County coroner's office.

Cam is dead.

He didn't move for a long time. Just lay there, staring at the phone.

Cam is dead.

What the hell was he supposed to do about it? When he finally picked up the receiver, it was to call Rick and say he wasn't going to work at all this week, pretending he had the flu. Then he dressed and headed down the road, on the two-mile walk to the liquor store.

H
e sat in the vacant lot behind the train depot, where he and Ethan and Tallen used to play. He took the pint of Jack Daniel's out of the paper bag and looked at it. He'd felt as nervous buying it as a kid with a fake ID. He hadn't gone near alcohol in ten years, no matter how much he'd needed to escape, but he'd always told himself it would be there if things got bad enough, and that it would be okay as long as he was careful. He twisted the cap and broke the seal, and was halfway amazed that there was no ensuing thunderclap.

He opened the bottle and tilted it, letting half the contents spill onto the ground. He watched the copper pool soak into the dirt until he was satisfied the right amount remained in the bottle—enough to spread a soothing fog over him, but not enough to do any real damage. He put the bottle to his lips, paused for a moment, then tipped his head back and felt the welcome burn slide down his throat. A few minutes and a couple of ounces later, he let himself think about Cam.

What on earth could have happened? It was hard to believe Cam and death could travel the same axis, much less collide. It made him think about nights when he was a kid, lying in bed, fantasizing about smothering Cam with a pillow and letting everyone think Cam had died in his sleep. His plan included comforting his mother with a theory he thought she'd buy—that the angels had decided they just couldn't live without Cam another day. The whiskey dulled the pain in his head, but it was getting back at him in other ways. It stirred the old voices and, as always, brought him closer to the anger. Pictures flashed through his head. His father holding Cam by the hand, waving Cam's report card like it was the goddamned flag. Looking at the rest of them like he wished the ground would open and swallow them.

“At least I've got one son who's gonna amount to something. The rest of you combined ain't worth the breath it'd take to cuss you.”

And now the Boy Wonder was gone. Jack suddenly saw clearly what he'd known since the moment he'd heard the message. The LA County coroner would have to move on to plan B. Even if Jack had loved Cam the way he'd loved the others, he wouldn't have been able to do it again. He couldn't do one more funeral.

At least he could comfort himself with the knowledge that it was all but over. There was no one left to die. No one but him. And when he died, there would be no phone call, no stricken faces, not even one ambivalent drunk wrestling with his conscience. Just a quiet end to the chain of misery.

He drained the last of the whiskey. He put the cap back on the bottle, stared at it for a moment, then hurled it at the side of the depot, where it shattered and fell to the ground in a violent spray of a thousand pieces.

D
riving her rented car down I-75, Randa began to feel it—the almost tangible poignancy she always felt in Atlanta, and had felt ever since she first went there on a second-grade field trip. Memories whirled over her, and she could feel her throat tighten into what she had come to think of as the Atlanta knot.

There was a bank of black clouds on the horizon, and every now and then a streak of lightning would split them. Randa was driving right into the storm, and had to force herself not to look at it as an omen. Thunderstorms were high on the list of reasons she had left Georgia. She reminded herself of all the reassurances she'd heard about a car being the safest place to be, and how statistically slight her chances were of being struck by lightning. Those statistics never calmed her, though, since they had likewise applied to anyone who ever
had
been struck by lightning.

The storm seemed to be stalled somewhere. By the time she was within three exits of Barton, it was still off in the distance. Maybe it would stay wherever it was until after she was safely back in her hotel room.

Barton was a little town about an hour south of Atlanta. It was also the town where Will Landry had finally done his version of settling down, and the town the Landry boys had spent their youths terrorizing. Randa had never been there. It was one of those towns there was no reason to visit. Its biggest claim to fame was the country's oldest still-standing buggy factory. Once a year everyone got decked out in antique clothes and celebrated Buggy Day by riding buggies up and down Main Street. But that event was hardly worth the time it would have taken her to drive down there when she was growing up in Gainesville, two hours north.

Chances were slight that anyone in Barton would know where Jack lived now, but she had to start somewhere, and it seemed like the logical place. (Not that any of this had anything to do with logic.) She took the exit, followed the signs to the downtown area (such as it was), parked in one of the diagonal spaces on Main Street, and surveyed the landscape. Typical small-town Georgia. A little row of shops that hadn't been updated in decades. The lawn in front of the courthouse was dotted with silver historical markers and a large statue in honor of the Confederate war dead. She'd been gone long enough to find it all quaint.

She spotted a small coffee shop, always the best place to go for information in a small town. A sign painted on the window read
TILLIE'S GOOD FOOD COFFEE SHOP
. Randa left her car unlocked and headed inside. Tillie was not doing a booming business. A few customers, mostly elderly ladies, were beating the dinner rush. As Randa passed them, they stared hard at her, their eyes squinting with the intense mistrust of strangers only rural Southerners can muster. Randa ignored them and made her way to the counter, where a pudgy waitress greeted her with a forced smile.

“Do you need a menu?”

“No. Actually, I'm trying to find someone. I wondered if you could help me.”

“I'll try. Who is it?”

“A man named Jack Landry. He grew up here and moved away. He's in his late forties, probably blond . . .”

“Yeah, I know who he is.”

Randa stopped, a bit surprised. “You do?”

“He eats here sometimes.” She lowered her voice. “Is he in some kinda trouble?” Her tone was not one of concern.

“No, no. Nothing like that.” Randa tried to hide her amazement. “Does he live around here?”

“I think he lives in that boardinghouse out on Thirty-Six. That's what I heard.”

Randa was too stunned to know what to say. If Jack still lived here, why hadn't Cam been able to find him? Had Cam lied about it? Why would he do that?

“The road that goes past the courthouse is Thirty-Six. Go east, it's about half a mile.”

Randa thanked the girl, who had already gone back to filling the napkin dispensers. As she turned and headed for the door, the early diners seemed to be glaring even harder. Evidently they'd overheard. Evidently the Landry reputation had not diminished with time.