The Lost (36 page)

He walked back down the hill to the car and as he did so threw the bolt and heard the cartridge ping on the flagstone walkway. The sound was satisfying. He clicked on the safety. He opened the door to the Chevy and got in and slid the rifle over into the passenger seat next to the Ladysmith and boxes of shells.

His father was in the lighted office staring at the television which would have the sound off and he wondered if his father was also watching Ed Sullivan only without the sound. His father looked up and smiled and waved at him as he drove past and Ray returned the wave. He pulled out onto the street wondering where to first and then realized he was hungry and thought it would be a damn good idea to get some food in him before proceeding any further.

He drove through mostly empty streets with only an old Ford proceeding him and two pair of headlights behind him moving over the hills and pulled into Don’s Drive-In. The drive-in was crowded for a Sunday night, the first row of spaces completely full of cars with trays hooked to their driver-side windows so he drove around them and turned moving slowly along the second row, and then saw an empty space but before that saw something else that made him forget all about his hunger.

He pulled in anyway.

Parked the car and thought a minute.

There was a waitress taking an order two cars down to the left of him. The driver had just turned off his lights at her approach. Ray did the same. He took his keys out of the ignition and opened the car door and walked to the back of the Chevy and noticed a dark splotch of bird shit splattered drying on the trunk which he would have to go over with a rag later on. He opened the trunk and took out the tire iron and jack so that only the spare tire remained. He left the trunk open and walked around to the backseat of the car and tossed the tire iron and jack down on the floor through the window. Went to the front and took the Ladysmith off the seat and holding the gun at his side walked down the row of cars.

The girl in the passenger seat of the Volkswagen was someone he had never seen before but he didn’t care who she was, it didn’t matter. Her window was open which did matter and she glanced up at his approach, turned her head toward him slightly which made the angle fine for him, perfect, so that he brought up the .38 and fired directly into her right eye from just inches away, driving her exploded head into Sally Richmond’s lap and her blood and brains all over her sitting with her chocolate shake and she immediately began screaming, the shake falling out of her hand, Sally Richmond trying to push the girl’s head off her and at the same time open the driver’s side door.

He got around to the door just as she managed to throw it open and put the gun to her wet glistening belly.

“Shut up,” he said. “Shut the fuck up.” His voice was very calm.

She stopped screaming with the gun pressed into her belly but kept sobbing and noisily trying to get her breath but he guessed she couldn’t help that. He grabbed her arm remembering that other parking lot when he’d grabbed her arm which seemed like only yesterday. Only this time she didn’t pull away. This time she didn’t mouth him. He turned her around and shoved the muzzle into the small of her back.

“Move. Wipe that shit off your face. Come on.”

People were standing outside their cars or climbing out of their cars, mostly guys and one of the waitresses stood frozen in the middle of the lot but nobody tried to stop him. He kept the gun just above the crack of her ass and walked her to the rear of the Chevy. The adrenaline rush was truly one hundred percent amazing. He pointed to the trunk.

“Get in.”

She was trying to wipe the blood out off her hairline but only managing to smear it across her forehead and didn’t seem to understand him.

“Get in there. Get your ass in.”

She turned and looked at him with the blood smeared all over her face and the tears running down and her whole body shaking tits shaking nipples practically popping through the bloodsoaked once-white short-sleeved blouse, and he put the gun up under her chin and used it to tilt her head back.

“
Get. In
.” he said, nice and quiet. And if
he
was not his voice was still calm which amazed him.

He was practically coming in his pants here.

She turned and did as he said. He slammed the trunk door shut. The door sounded as loud to him as the shot had been. People were staring. He could feel their eyes crawl over him. He could hear low murmurs and the squealy voices of little girls. The voices made him want to laugh but he didn’t laugh. It would spoil the effect he wanted. He walked slowly around and got into his car and shut the door. He turned the key in the ignition and revved the Chevy hard and then eased up and put it into gear and pulled away past faces pale in the fluorescent light past the long row of cars and the red and green flashing neon sign above the entrance to the Drive-In out into the streets of Sparta.

He laughed and shook his head and pounded the wheel at his amazing good fortune.

Gradually his hunger returned.

But that would have to wait now.

Inside the trunk Tonianne’s blood was sticky on her hands, sticky on her chest and skirt, sticky in her hair. She lay jostled in a fetal position in the dark, her hip pressed against a tire, unable to stop shaking, eyes blinking uncontrollably and the eyelids too sticky with blood. She could smell exhaust fumes and rubber and dirty metal and her own faint perfume and she could hear the hissing of the tires moving over the road and something metallic rattling on the floor of the backseat a few unreachable feet behind her back. When the car turned abruptly she put her right hand down to the floor of the trunk for balance and the hand came away with some kind of wrapper stuck to it, some kind of cellophane and she picked it away revolted like the wrapper was a spider she had crushed burst across the palm of her hand.

Her mind played the scene over and over again vivid and sharp and she couldn’t get it to stop. She kept thinking how Ed on the phone had asked her out tonight and if she had only gone Tonianne would be alive
her oldest girlfriend would still be alive
and she wouldn’t be here in this dark close rattling box, that this never would have happened because Ed would have protected her and she kept calling silently for him to come protect her now, needing to believe for the first time in her life that such a thing as telepathy might exist but despairing that it did, the tires on the road sibilant as a snake beneath her.

Schilling was dozing through the last ten minutes of Ed Sullivan when the call came. There were no premonitions, no warnings, no feelings about the phone call whatsoever. It was Jackowitz.

“Don’s Drive-In,” he said.

“What about it?” .

“I hear you worked a homicide a few years back, suspect was a guy named Ray Pye. Ring any bells?”

“Rings all my bells, cap. What’s up?”

“You’re not gonna like this, Charlie. Pye’s been ID’d by two eyewitnesses as the shooter of a girl named Tonianne Primiano about fifteen minutes ago. Uniforms just phoned in their report. Girl was sitting in the passenger seat eating her burger and fries and up walks Pye and blows her brains out. The driver he kidnaps at gunpoint and forces into his trunk and drives away with her. They’re telling me it all went down in about two minutes flat. We got an all-points out on his car.”

“Her?”

“Car’s a Volkswagen Beetle. I hate this the worst, Charlie. It’s registered to Sally Richmond.”

It felt like somebody had hit him in the chest with a bowling ball. He sat down on the sofa. He didn’t know what to say. But his thinking was clear. Stunningly so.

You did this
, he thought.

You had to push him. You goddamn idiot
.

“I don’t know how well you know the girl personally, Charlie. But Ed . . . I mean . . . it’s got to be a helluva thing for him. A helluva thing.”

You pushed him and he went off. Just like that. Only not the way you thought he’d go off. Not the kind of slip you wanted. You smart-assed stupid obsessing sonovabitch drunk you were playing with lives all along here. You asshole
.

“You want to go over there? I mean, you want in on this one? You want me to phone Ed?”

“I want in on it. But I’ll tell Ed. I’ll do it right now while I’ve still got the guts to and then head on over to the Drive-In. Get a car over to the Starlight Motel right away. Pye has an apartment in back. Tell them to watch for him but not to approach. There’s a file on Pye on my desk. Inside are two names, Tim Bess and Jennifer Fitch. Send uniforms over to their addresses too. Have somebody call and tell them to stay put and not open the door for anybody until we get there. Especially not Ray Pye.”

“You think Pye might be making a night of it?”

“Yeah cap, I think maybe I do.”

“Jesus. Okay, we’ll get on it right away. Charlie listen, when you talk to Ed tell him for me, I mean, tell him for everybody here . . .”

“I know. I will. Thanks.”

Ed placed the phone in its cradle and sat staring at his hands a moment, as though the hands didn’t belong to him and were not the hands that puttered in the garden or the hands that had stroked her. He rolled them into fists and unrolled them. The hands were cold and clammy and he didn’t like the feel of them.

He got up and walked to the bedroom and opened the drawer to his nightstand and took out the .38 special and checked the chamber to be sure it was loaded even though he knew it was. He took the gun and the box of bullets back into the living room and set them on the table while he pulled on his jacket and then slipped the box into one pocket of the jacket and the gun into the other and went outside and locked the door behind him.

The cat was approaching the rear of the house when she heard the front door slam and the key in the lock and the man’s heavy tread across the walkway. She had become accustomed to the pain to the extent that the pain was part of her now and not a foreign thing as at first, the pain was simply part of her being. But it would not permit her to move swiftly and that was part of her now too. She hobbled around the side of the house past the hedges and heard the car door slam and the engine roar and for a moment found herself bathed in headlights as they swept over her and the car pulled out of the driveway and the man drove away.

She listened to the house.

The house was empty.

She moved back to the dark protection of the hedges, moved carefully between and into them and lay down on her uninjured left side and waited for him to return.

A few moments later she smelled
dog
and heard a snuffling sound and peered out from between the hedges. She saw it large and shaggy sniffing at the base of the streetlight a block away, sniffing and moving on along the grass between the sidewalk and the street and headed in her direction.

She crept back farther and hunkered down.

He parked two doors down from Jennifer’s house and reloaded the rifle and the single empty chamber in the Ladysmith. He climbed out of the car and stuck the Ladysmith in his belt and grabbed hold of the rifle. He listened for noises coming from the trunk but there were none. Maybe she was dead of exhaust fumes. It happened. He closed the car door and walked up the street. Opened up their door and came upon a family tableau.

Mrs. Griffith was just putting the phone down, she was standing by the sofa and the end table, a worried expression on her face, and she struck him as so
old
, he’d never realized how old these two fuckers were, old enough to be her grandparents not her parents which of course they weren’t anyway and Mr. Griffith sitting skinny and hunched and balding in the armchair was the first to see him, Mr. Griffith startled, rising and you never knew not even with these old guys so he shot him first with the rifle assuming the stance and firing, shattering his glasses
he was getting all eye-shots tonight
and Mr. Griffith falling back into the chair like somebody’d pushed him except his eye was a wide red hole pumping blood all over his shirt. Then Jennifer was running up the stairs which was stupid and fine with him so he turned to Mrs. Griffith who was screaming high and whiney and holding her face in both withered white hands which looked deformed to him for some reason and he didn’t even bother aiming, he just pointed the rifle at her midsection and shot her in the stomach and she went down onto the carpet writhing, moaning, trying to crawl.

He ejected the cartridge and stepped over her and climbed the stairs.