Full Dark, No Stars, Page 24

  "I said shut up!"

  She tried to think, but that blaring light made it hard. Shadows from the parked cab-over and the long-box to her left seemed to reach for her with sharp black fingers--boogeyman fingers. Goddam pole light! Of course a man like him would have a pole light! She ought to go right now, just turn around on his lawn and drive back down to the road as fast as she could, but she would meet him if she did. She knew it. And with the element of surprise gone, she would die.

  Think, Tessa Jean, think!

  And oh God, just to make things a little worse, a dog started barking. There was a dog in the house. She imagined a pit bull with a headful of jutting teeth.

  "If you're going to stay, you need to get out of sight," Tom said... and no, that didn't sound like her voice. Or not exactly like her voice. Perhaps it was the one that belonged to her deepest self, the survivor. And the killer--her, too. How many unsuspected selves could a person have, hiding deep inside? She was beginning to think the number might be infinite.

  She glanced into her rearview mirror, chewing at her still-swollen lower lip. No approaching headlights yet. But would she even be able to tell, given the combined brilliance of the moon and that Christing pole light?

  "It's on a timer," Tom said, "but I'd do something before it goes out, Tess. If you move the car after it does, you'll only trip it again."

  She threw the Expedition into four-wheel, started to swing around the cab-over, then stopped. There was high grass on that side. In the pitiless glare of the pole light, he couldn't help but see the tracks she would leave. Even if the Christing light went out, it would come back on again when he drove up and then he would see them.

  Inside, the dog continued to weigh in: Yark! Yark! YarkYarkYark!

  "Drive across the lawn and put it behind the long-box," Tom said.

  "The tracks, though! The tracks!"

  "You have to hide it somewhere," Tom returned. He spoke apologetically but firmly. "At least the grass is mown on that side. Most people are pretty unobservant, you know. Doreen Marquis says that all the time."

  "Strehlke's not a Knitting Society lady, he's a fucking lunatic."

  But because there was really no choice--not now that she was up here--Tess drove onto the lawn and toward the parked silver long-box through a glare that seemed as bright as a summer noonday. She did it with her bottom slightly raised off the seat, as if by doing that she could somehow magically render the tracks of the Expedition's passage less visible.

  "Even if the motion light is still on when he comes back, he may not be suspicious," Tom said. "I'll bet deer trip it all the time. He might even have a light like that to scare them out of his vegetable garden."

  This made sense (and it sounded like her special Tom-voice again), but it did not comfort her much.

  Yark! Yark! YarkYark! Whatever it was, it sounded like it was shitting nickels in there.

  The ground behind the silver box was bumpy and bald--other freight-boxes had no doubt been parked on it from time to time--but solid enough. She drove the Expedition as deep into the long-box's shadow as she could, then killed the engine. She was sweating heavily, producing a rank aroma no deodorant would be able to defeat.

  She got out, and the motion light went out when she slammed the door. For one superstitious moment Tess thought she had done it herself, then realized the scary fucking thing had just timed out. She leaned over the warm hood of the Expedition, pulling in deep breaths and letting them out like a runner in the last quarter-mile of a marathon. It might come in handy to know how long it had been on, but that was a question she couldn't answer. She'd been too scared. It had seemed like hours.

  When she had herself under control again, she took inventory, forcing herself to move slowly and methodically. Pistol and oven glove. Both present and accounted for. She didn't think the oven glove would muffle another shot, not with a hole in it; she'd have to count on the isolation of the little hilltop house. It was okay that she'd left the knife in Ramona's belly; if she were reduced to trying to take out Big Driver with a butcher knife, she'd be in serious trouble.

  And there are only four shots left in the gun, you better not forget that and just start spraying him. Why didn't you bring any more bullets, Tessa Jean? You thought you were planning, but I don't think you did a very good job.

  "Shut up," she whispered. "Tom or Fritzy or whoever you are, just shut up."

  The scolding voice ceased, and when it did, Tess realized the real world had also gone silent. The dog had ceased its mad barking when the pole light went off. Now the only sound was the wind and the only light was the moon.

  - 38 -

  With that terrible glare gone, the long-box provided excellent cover, but she couldn't stay there. Not if she meant to do what she had come here to do. Tess scurried around the back of the house, terrified of tripping another motion light, but feeling she had no choice. There was no light to trip, but the moon went behind a cloud and she stumbled over the cellar bulkhead, almost hitting her head on a wheelbarrow when she went to her knees. For a moment as she lay there, she wondered again what she had turned into. She was a member of the Authors Guild who had shot a woman in the head not long ago. After stabbing her in the stomach. I've gone entirely off the reservation. Then she thought of him calling her a bitch, a whiny whore bitch, and quit caring about whether she was on or off the reservation. It was a stupid saying, anyway. And racist in the bargain.

  Strehlke did have a garden behind his house, but it was small and apparently not worth protecting from the depredations of the deer with a motion light. There was nothing left in it anyway except for a few pumpkins, most now rotting on the vine. She stepped over the rows, rounded the far corner of the house, and there was the cab-over. The moon had come out again and turned its chrome to the liquid silver of sword blades in fantasy novels.

  Tess came up behind it, walked along the left side, and knelt by the chin-high (to her, at least) front wheel. She took the Lemon Squeezer out of her pocket. He couldn't drive into his garage because the cab-over was in the way. Even if it hadn't been, the garage was probably full of bachelor rickrack: tools, fishing gear, camping gear, truck parts, cases of discount soda.

  That's just guessing. It's dangerous to guess. Doreen would scold you for it.

  Of course she would, no one knew the Knitting Society ladies better than Tess did, but those dessert-loving babies rarely took chances. When you did take them, you were forced to make a certain number of guesses.

  Tess looked at her watch and was astounded to see it was only twenty-five to ten. It seemed that she had fed Fritzy double rations and left the house four years ago. Maybe five. She thought she heard an approaching engine, then decided she didn't. She wished the wind wasn't blowing so hard, but wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first. It was a saying no Knitting Society lady had ever voiced--Doreen Marquis and her friends were more into things like soonest begun, soonest done --but it was a true saying, just the same.

  Maybe he really was going on a trip, Sunday night or not. Maybe she was still going to be here when the sun came up, chilled to her already aching bones by the constant wind combing this lonely hilltop where she was crazy to be.

  No, he's the crazy one. Remember how he danced? His shadow dancing on the wall behind him? Remember how he sang? His squalling voice? You wait for him, Tessa Jean. You wait until hell freezes over. You've come too far to turn back.

  She was afraid of that, actually.

  It can't be a decorous drawing-room murder. You understand that, don't you?

  She did. This particular killing--if she was able to bring it off--would be more Death Wish than The Willow Grove Knitting Society Goes Backstage. He would pull in, hopefully right up to the cab-over she was hiding behind. He would douse the lights of the pickup, and before his eyes could adjust--

  It wasn't the wind this time. She recognized the badly tuned thump of the engine even before the headlights splashed up the curve of the drive. Tess go
t on one knee and yanked the brim of her cap down so the wind wouldn't blow it off. She would have to approach, and that meant her timing would have to be exquisite. If she tried to shoot him from ambush, she would quite likely miss, even at close range; the gun instructor had told her she could only count on the Lemon Squeezer at ten feet or less. He had recommended she buy a more reliable handgun, but she never had. And getting close enough to make sure of killing him wasn't all. She had to make sure it was Strehlke in the truck, and not the brother or some friend.

  I have no plan.

  But it was too late to plan, because it was the truck and when the pole light came on, she saw the brown cap with the bleach-splatters on it. She also saw him wince against the glare, as she had, and knew he was momentarily blinded. It was now or not at all.

  I am the Courageous Woman.

  With no plan, without even thinking, she walked around the back of the cab-over, not running but taking big, calm strides. The wind gusted around her, flapping her cargo pants. She opened the passenger door and saw the ring with the red stone on his hand. He was grabbing a paper bag with the shape of a square box inside it. Beer, probably a twelve-pack. He turned toward her and something terrible happened: she divided in two. The Courageous Woman saw the animal that had raped her, choked her, and put her in a pipe with two other rotting bodies. Tess saw the slightly broader face and lines around the mouth and eyes that hadn't been there on Friday afternoon. But even as she was registering these things, the Lemon Squeezer barked twice in her hand. The first bullet punctured Strehlke's throat, just below the chin. The second opened a black hole above his bushy right eyebrow and shattered the driver's side window. He fell backward against the door, the hand that had been grasping the top of the paper bag dropping away. He gave a monstrous whole-body twitch, and the hand with the ring on it thudded against the middle of the steering wheel, honking the horn. Inside the house, the dog began to bark again.

  "No, it's him!" She stood at the open door with the gun in her hand, staring in. "It's got to be him!"

  She rushed around the front of the pickup, lost her balance, went to one knee, got up, and yanked open the driver's side door. Strehlke fell out and hit his dead head on the smooth asphalt of his driveway. His hat fell off. His right eye, pulled out of true by the bullet that had entered his head just above it, stared up at the moon. The left one stared at Tess. And it wasn't the face that finally convinced her--the face with lines on it she was seeing for the very first time, the face pitted with old acne scars that hadn't been there on Friday afternoon.

  Was he big or real big? Betsy Neal had asked.

  Real big, Tess had replied, and he had been... but not as big as this man. Her rapist had been six-six, she had thought when he got out of the truck (this truck, she was in no doubt about that). Deep in the belly, thick in the thighs, and as wide as a doorway. But this man had to be at least six- nine. She had come hunting a giant and killed a leviathan.

  "Oh my God," Tess said, and the wind whipped her words away. "Oh my dear God, what have I done?"

  "You killed me, Tess," the man on the ground said... and that certainly made sense, given the hole in his head and the one in his throat. "You went and killed Big Driver, just like you meant to."

  The strength left her muscles. She went to her knees beside him. Overhead, the moon beamed down from the roaring sky.

  "The ring," she whispered. "The hat. The truck."

  "He wears the ring and the hat when he goes hunting," Big Driver said. "And he drives the pickup. When he goes hunting, I'm on the road in a Red Hawk cab-over and if anyone sees him--especially if he's sitting down--they think they're seeing me."

  "Why would he do that?" Tess asked the dead man. "You're his brother."

  "Because he's crazy," Big Driver said patiently.

  "And because it worked before," Doreen Marquis said. "When they were younger and Lester got in trouble with the police. The question is whether Roscoe Strehlke committed suicide because of that first trouble, or because Ramona made big brother Al take the blame for it. Or maybe Roscoe was going to tell and Ramona killed him. Made it look like suicide. Which way was it, Al?"

  But on this subject Al was quiet. Dead quiet, in fact.

  "I'll tell you how I think it was," Doreen said in the moonlight. "I think Ramona knew that if your little brother wound up in an interrogation room with an even half-smart policeman, he might confess to something a lot worse than touching a girl on the schoolbus or peeking into cars on the local lovers' lane or whatever tencent crime it was he'd been accused of. I think she talked you into taking the blame, and she talked her husband into dummying up. Or browbeat him into it, that's more like it. And either because the police never asked the girl to make a positive identification or because she wouldn't press charges, they got away with it."

  Al said nothing.

  Tess thought, I'm kneeling here talking in imaginary voices. I've lost my mind.

  Yet part of her knew she was trying to keep her mind. The only way to do it was to understand, and she thought the story she was telling in Doreen's voice was either true or close to true. It was based on guesswork and slopped-on deduction, but it made sense. It fit in with what Ramona had said in her last moments.

  You stupid cunt, you don't know what you're talking about.

  And: You don't understand. It's a mistake.

  It was a mistake, all right. Everything she'd done tonight had been a mistake.

  No, not everything. She was in on it. She knew.

  "Did you know?" Tess asked the man she had killed. She reached out to grab Strehlke's arm, then drew away. It would be still warm under his sleeve. Still thinking it was alive. "Did you?"

  He didn't answer.

  "Let me try," Doreen said. And in her kindliest, you-can-tell-me-everything old lady voice, the one that always worked in the books, she asked: "How much did you know, Mr. Driver?"

  "I sometimes suspected," he said. "Mostly I didn't think about it. I had a business to run."

  "Did you ever ask your mother?"

  "I might have," he said, and Tess thought his strangely cocked right eye evasive. But in that wild moonlight, who could tell about such things? Who could tell for sure?

  "When girls disappeared? Is that when you asked?"

  To this Big Driver made no reply, perhaps because Doreen had begun to sound like Fritzy. And like Tom the Tomtom, of course.

  "But there was never any proof, was there?" This time it was Tess herself. She wasn't sure he would answer her voice, but he did.

  "No. No proof."

  "And you didn't want proof, did you?"

  No answer this time, so Tess got up and walked unsteadily to the bleach-spattered brown hat, which had blown across the driveway and onto the lawn. Just as she picked it up, the pole light went off again. Inside, the dog stopped barking. This made her think of Sherlock Holmes, and standing there in the windy moonlight, Tess heard herself voicing the saddest chuckle to ever come from a human throat. She took off her hat, stuffed it into her jacket pocket, and put his on in its place. It was too big for her, so she took it off again long enough to adjust the strap in back. She returned to the man she had killed, the one she judged perhaps not quite innocent... but surely too innocent to deserve the punishment the Courageous Woman had meted out.

  She tapped the brim of the brown hat and asked, "Is this the one you wear when you go on the road?" Knowing it wasn't.

  Strehlke didn't answer, but Doreen Marquis, doyenne of the Knitting Society, did. "Of course not. When you're driving for Red Hawk, you wear a Red Hawk cap, don't you, dear?"

  "Yes," Strehlke said.

  "And you don't wear your ring, either, do you?"

  "No. Too gaudy for customers. Not businesslike. And what if someone at one of those skanky truck-stops--someone too drunk or stoned to know better--saw it and thought it was real? No one would risk mugging me, I'm too big and strong for that--at least I was until tonight--but someone might shoot me. And I don't deserve to be sh
ot. Not for a fake ring, and not for the terrible things my brother might have done."

  "And you and your brother never drive for the company at the same time, do you, dear?"

  "No. When he's out on the road, I mind the office. When I'm out on the road, he... well. I guess you know what he does when I'm out on the road."

  "You should have told!" Tess screamed down at him. "Even if you only suspected, you should have told!"

  "He was scared," Doreen said in her kindly voice. "Weren't you, dear?"

  "Yes," Al said. "I was scared."

  "Of your brother?" Tess asked, either unbelieving or not wanting to believe. "Scared of your kid brother?"

  "Not him," Al Strehlke said. "Her."

  - 39 -

  When Tess got back in her car and started the motor, Tom said: "There was no way you could know, Tess. And it all happened so fast."

  That was true, but it ignored the central looming fact: by going after her rapist like a vigilante in a movie, she had sent herself to hell.

  She raised the gun to her temple, then lowered it again. She couldn't, not now. She still had an obligation to the women in the pipe, and any other women who might join them if Lester Strehlke escaped. And after what she had just done, it was more important than ever that he not escape.

  She had one more stop to make. But not in her Expedition.

  - 40 -

  The driveway at 101 Township Road wasn't long, and it wasn't paved. It was just a pair of ruts with bushes growing close enough to scrape the sides of the blue F-150 pickup truck as she drove it up to the little house. Nothing neat about this one; this one was a huddled old creep-manse that could have been straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. How life did imitate art, sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation.

  Tess made no attempt at stealth--why bother to kill the headlights when Lester Strehlke would know the sound of his brother's truck almost as well as the sound of his brother's voice?

  She was still wearing the bleach-splattered brown cap Big Driver wore when he wasn't on the road, the lucky cap that turned out to be unlucky in the end. The ring with the fake ruby stone was far too big for any of her fingers, so she had put it into the left front pocket of her cargo pants. Little Driver had dressed and driven as his big brother when he went out hunting, and while he might never have time enough (or brains enough) to appreciate the irony of his last victim coming to him with the same accessories, Tess did.