Ride the Nightmare, Page 3

  “I thought I’d never have to tell you,” Chris said. “I never thought he’d find me. Then that—picture had to be taken. It’s fantastic,” he went on. “A secret I’ve kept for almost fifteen years. Ended in a second because some kids won a baseball game!” His laugh was closer to a sob. “It’s practically hilarious,” he said.

  Helen closed her eyes. Now it was as if the other end of the balance—his end—were being weighted. He had risked his life for Connie. He had planned to intercept the man. Wasn’t it possible that he’d been less motivated by a desire to hide his secret than by a wish to protect his wife and child? That Chris loved them was beyond denial.

  No! Helen sat back stiffly. That he was suffering was his own doing, not hers. He had lied to her. All these years, he had trusted her so little that, rather than speak a simple truth, he had constructed a world of falsehoods around himself. A world which was now at an end.

  Chris got up and headed for the hall.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, suddenly frightened.

  He turned in the hall doorway. “To call the police,” he said.

  She stared at him.

  “And then?” she asked.

  “I’ll be arrested.”

  She couldn’t stop the cold knotting in her throat and upper chest.

  His hands closed slowly into fists.

  “I’ll go to prison, Helen,” he said.

  “No, Chris!” She didn’t realize how anguished her expression had become.

  He stood motionless for a few seconds. Then he walked over to the sofa and sat down beside her. “Do you mean that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “That you don’t want me to go to prison?”

  “I—”

  “That you’re willing to—to consider doing something else besides call the police?”

  Abruptly she was thrust back into nightmare again. Now it was a penny thriller, absurd and ghastly. A murdered man sprawled in the kitchen, her husband sitting beside her, asking her if she was willing to consider— “I don’t know,” she said, unable to keep her voice from breaking. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Listen to me,” he said. “If the body isn’t found, there’ll be no way for anyone to know what happened.”

  Helen stared at him blankly. She didn’t understand.

  Christ looked down at his clenching hands.

  “I could take him into the hills,” he said in a voice that sounded hideously calm to her. “I could bury him. No one would ever find out.”

  He looked at her.

  “It’s either that,” he said, “or call the police.”

  She couldn’t answer him.

  “Well?”

  “Chris, I—”

  “Do you want me to go to prison, Helen?” he asked. “I’ve lived a decent life ever since it happened. You know that. I’ve done everything I could to atone for my past. Is that all to end because of—him?”

  “No.” She grasped his hand impulsively.

  “Helen.” His fingers tightened in hers. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “What?”

  “I mean—” She shuddered fitfully. “Oh, God, let’s get it over with,” she said.

  ***

  The folded newspaper page fell from the man’s pocket as Chris was lifting him. Helen picked it up and was about to throw it in the wastebasket when she noticed the story outlined in pencil.

  LIFERS ESCAPE PRISON!

  LEAVE DEATH TRAIL!

  Three convicts sentenced to life

  imprisonment for a 1943 murder

  escaped last night from—

  Helen looked up, shocked. “Murder?”

  When Chris saw the expression on her face, he put the body down. Helen handed him the paper and he looked at it.

  “Helen, I had nothing to do with it,” he said.

  She stared at him.

  “I had nothing to do with it.”

  She lowered her gaze from his. “All right, Chris.”

  “Helen, if you don’t believe me—”

  “All right, Chris.”

  He stood quietly for a moment, then put down the paper and went back to the body. Helen heard the man’s heels scraping slightly on the linoleum, then the door bumping against him as Chris opened it.

  She listened to the sound of the body being dragged down the alley and into the garage through the side door. When the door was closed, she lifted the dishwasher again and reloaded it. Then, turning to the sink, she opened one of the doors beneath it. Taking out the pail, she poured in a mound of soap powder, then ran hot water over it, watching it billow into cloud-like suds.

  When Chris came back, she was running the mop back and forth across the puddle of blood on the linoleum, her lips pressed together, her eyes looking straight ahead.

  “Here, I’ll do it,” Chris took the mop from her.

  “What about—?”

  “What, Helen?”

  She cleared her throat. “The—knife,” she said.

  “I left it in him.”

  “Oh.”

  She heard Chris wringing out the mop and found herself imagining how the water in the pail looked. Teeth on edge, she moved past Chris and walked into the living room. She sat until she heard the pail being emptied and rinsed out.

  She stood as Chris came in.

  “I’ll be back as soon as possible,” he said.

  “I’m going with you,” she said.

  “What about Connie?”

  “We can take her.”

  “I’d rather you stayed,” he said. “It’s not going to be pretty.”

  “What about the other two?” she asked.

  “Cliff couldn’t have shown them that photograph,” he said. “If he had they wouldn’t have let him come. They’re hunted men. They haven’t got the time for vendettas.”

  She didn’t look convinced.

  “What if Connie woke up and saw him,” he asked.

  Helen shuddered. “All right,” she said, “but what do I do?”

  “Lock up, turn the lights out. I won’t be long.”

  “All right,” she said.

  She watched him walk across the kitchen and move out onto the back porch. He turned to close the door.

  Then, with a lunge, he regained the house and shut the door behind him as quickly as he could without slamming it.

  Someone was ringing the front door bell.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Helen’s instinct was to scream in fury at this monstrous piling of shock on shock. Then in an instant new terror had wiped her mind clean.

  She glanced into the kitchen. Chris couldn’t seem to get away from the door. He leaned against it heavily, looking trapped and dazed. The bell rang again with a coarse buzzing noise.

  Now Chris moved away from the door and she heard him pull a drawer open. The bell rang again, a jarring burst of sound.

  “Chris,” she said.

  He appeared holding the revolver.

  “Answer the door,” he said. “If it’s them, tell them I’m in the—the bedroom. Then go in Connie’s room and lock the door.”

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the revolver. “But you can’t—” she started.

  “Honey, she’s going to wake up again,” he said.

  “Chris, no.”

  “Do what I say.”

  Turning, she headed for the door, a sense of hideous inevitability crowding away all feeling. Her fingers closed over the knob and she tried to turn it. It’s broken, she thought in dull surprise and tried again. Abruptly, then, she realized that it was locked.

  The bell rang again. Helen was about to unlock the door when an idea pierced her terror. Reaching over, she switched on the porch light. Then, holding her breath, she drew aside the blinds.

  It was like a weight falling from her.

  “It’s Bill,” she called out hollowly.

  As she opened the door, she heard Chris moving in the kitchen, the sound of the dra
wer being shut again.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Say, I’m sorry to be a pest, Helen,” Bill Albert said, “but we’re all out of ice cubes.”

  “Of course.” Helen forced a smile back to her lips. “Come on in. We have plenty.” She wondered if her voice sounded as bad to Bill as it did to her.

  Chris came out of the kitchen and smiled at Bill.

  “Hi,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “They’re out of ice cubes,” she explained.

  “Oh.” Chris nodded. “Come on in the kitchen and we’ll get you some.”

  “I sure hate to bother you like this,” said Bill.

  “Not at all,” Chris told him.

  Helen followed them toward the kitchen, her mind leaping ahead to investigate: the floor mopped, the sink clean, the newspaper page in the wastebasket, the pistol in the drawer, the dishwasher standing and loaded again.

  The broken window!

  “I hope I didn’t wake up Connie,” said Bill.

  “No, not her,” said Chris. “She sleeps like the dead.”

  Helen shivered, stopping in the kitchen doorway. Chris had pulled down the door shade again so the broken window was hidden. Like the dead, her mind repeated.

  “Naturally Mary had to pick this afternoon to defrost,” said Bill. “I keep telling her to do it overnight. She keeps telling me to buy one that defrosts itself.”

  “Know what you mean,” said Chris. He pulled open the refrigerator door and opened the freezer compartment.

  Helen looked around the kitchen nervously. One of the plates in the washer had been lying in the blood. Moving to the washer, she pushed its top down quickly. As she turned, she saw Bill looking at her and smiled.

  “How are you tonight?” he asked her.

  “I’m fine.”

  Bill smiled politely and Helen turned to watch Chris tugging at the ice cube tray. It was stuck to the surface of the freezer.

  “Can I help?” Bill asked.

  “I’ll get it,” said Chris. He didn’t sound very cheerful now. In a second, he’d wrenched the tray loose.

  Now Bill had the tray wrapped in a towel and was apologizing once more for having disturbed them. Now Helen heard herself telling him not to worry about it and to take his time returning the tray. Now she was walking into the living room with the two men and listening to them say something about television which they decided to pretend was worth laughing at. Now they were saying good night and the front door was closing and Chris was leaning against it, breathing slowly, heavily.

  “I’m going with you,” she said.

  “What about—?”

  “I’ll hold her on my lap,” she said. “She’ll be all right.”

  “But—”

  “I won’t stay here,” she said.

  He stared at her a few seconds. Then he sighed.

  “All right,” he said. “All right,” he said again.

  ***

  Chris turned the Ford onto the hill that led to the coast highway. On the floor in back, there was a sound of something shifting and Helen felt her skin crawl.

  Chris braked beside the red light at the foot of the hill. He sat, wordless, his hands clenched over the rim of the steering wheel. Then the light changed and he turned the Ford around the corner, heading north Helen closed her eyes as the car picked up speed. Maybe she could sleep, she thought.

  After a while, she opened her eyes again and looked at the highway. The headbeams hurried on ahead, picking out a path of light for the car. She tried to shift Connie a little.

  “She too heavy?” Chris asked. He sounded almost grateful for the excuse to speak to her.

  “It’s all right,” Helen answered.

  He stopped for the light at Santa Monica Canyon and Helen looked around the deserted intersection, at the steep hill angling off the highway, leading to the Palisades, the silent cafes and stores. The light changed and the car moved forward.

  “Helen?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to tell you about it.”

  He waited as if expecting her to answer. Helen swallowed. “If you want,” she said.

  “I know you think I lied to you because I was afraid of going to prison,” he said. “That isn’t true. It was you I was afraid of. You were so young when we married, so unprepared for anything like that.”

  “That was seven years ago, Chris.”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “It’s just that I never knew how to tell you.”

  The Ford started along the stretch of highway that led toward Sunset Boulevard. “I was living in New Mexico when it happened,” he said. “I told you about it. That part wasn’t a lie. I was working for a bank. I picked up deposits from the big stores and factories in the area. It wasn’t much—”

  He broke off as Connie made a restless noise in her throat. Then, after several moments, he began again.

  “I was living with my mother,” he said. “We didn’t get along. I was seventeen but, to her, I was still a baby. So, more to defy her than for any other reason I started going to the skid row section of the city. I bowled there, played pool, just sat around sometimes. I didn’t belong there and I knew it. I would have preferred going to a concert or reading a book. But music and books I associated with my mother. I didn’t want to have anything to do with them.”

  He clenched his teeth and blew out breath. “That’s how I met Adam and Steve,” he said. “Later on, Cliff. The four of us sort of stuck together.”

  The thought of Chris associating with the dead man gave Helen a restless, uncomfortable sensation. It made her wonder if Chris was really what he’d always seemed to be.

  “We saw a lot of each other,” Chris was saying. “I don’t know if they worked except for Adam. He was an accountant at the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant; a sort of pseudo intellectual I guess you’d call him.”

  For a few moments, there was only the sound of the Ford pulling quickly around the dark curve of highway that ran beside the ocean-fronting restaurants and houses.

  “Why we decided to do what we did I’ll never know,” Chris said. “I can’t explain why four supposedly sane human beings should decide to commit a robbery.”

  Helen closed her eyes and shuddered. There it was. They’d robbed someone and, during the robbery, that someone had been killed. And Chris had been there. Her Chris.

  “We decided to rob one of the bank’s depositors,” Chris went on. “He owned a jewelry store. I’d told them how much money he deposited and—Adam picked him.”

  They drove past the entrance to Topanga Canyon and Helen wondered why he didn’t turn in, deciding that it was because there were too many people living there. There was no safe place for burying things.

  “We were to use Adam’s car,” Chris was saying. “I was supposed to knock on the back door of the jewelry store the way I usually did. When the man opened it, they were going in to get the money while I waited in the car.”

  His fingers tightened on the steering wheel and beneath his foot, the Ford accelerated steadily.

  “I was supposed to warn them if anything went wrong,” he said.

  He was silent for such a long time that Helen thought his story was finished. “Something went wrong, all right,” he finally said. “The old man who owned the store had an alarm system. It didn’t make any noise in the store itself though, only outside. I heard it. I was going to warn the others when I heard a police car coming.”

  His foot pressed down harder on the accelerator and the speedometer needle quivered past sixty.

  “I lost my nerve,” he said bitterly. “I didn’t warn them. I just drove away as fast as I could, ditched the car when it ran out of gas. I hitchhiked out of the state. Later on, I read that they’d been caught and that the old man had been killed.”

  He sank back against the seat as if, suddenly, exhausted.

  “That’s it,” he said. “I came to California. I changed my name. I managed to keep it all a secret. I thought I’d beaten it. Now�
��”

  He gestured defeatedly with his right hand.

  Neither one of them had noticed the red light blinking behind them. The first thing they were aware of was a harsh, metallic voice ringing out above the wind and engine noises.

  “Blue Ford, pull over!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A hundred yards back, the turning roof light of another car was just disappearing behind a curve.

  “Put Connie in the back seat!” Chris told her.

  “What is it?”

  “A police car! Hurry!”

  Breath choked in Helen’s throat. She tried to lift Connie and felt a painful drawing in her back and shoulder muscles.

  “She’s too heavy!” she said.

  “Grab the wheel then!”

  Her left hand clutched at the wheel. Raising himself quickly, Chris grabbed Connie under the shoulders and legs and lifted her. For a second, Connie’s leg was in front of her face and Helen couldn’t see the highway. The Ford veered toward the opposite lane and she twisted the wheel sharply. Connie whimpered as she was dumped onto the plastic covering of the back seat. With desperate haste, Chris tucked the blanket around her. Before the police car had reappeared, he was steering the car again.

  “Why did you do that?” Helen asked.

  “They’ll probably look in back,” he said. “If they see Connie they may not look at the floor.” He pulled the car to the side of the road and braked.

  “But is he—?”

  “He’s covered,” said Chris.

  Helen sat there woodenly, staring straight ahead, as the black and white police car angled to a halt in front of them. The red light on top of the car revolved slowly, glaring into their eyes. Two policemen got out and Helen listened to their shoes crunching over the roadside gravel. They were carrying something in their hands. Helen shuddered, realizing that they had flashlights.

  “I’ll talk to them,” said Chris.

  The policemen separated now, one to each side of the car. The one on Chris’s side directed the flashlight beam into his face.

  “Don’t you read traffic signs?” the policeman asked.

  “Yes. I—”

  “You were doing seventy in a thirty five mile zone, did you know that?” the policeman interrupted.

  “I’m sorry,” Chris said, “I—I wasn’t looking. We were—”