He was still holding the gun, and he lowered his eyes and stared at it. The barrel was warm, he noted, but the malachite grips remained cool to the touch.
He’d sniffed it before and smelled nothing but steel and gun oil. Now the air was thick with the reek of spent gunpowder, and he waved a hand in front of his face as if to push the smell aside.
It seemed to him as though the sound of the gunshot was still there to be heard, still echoing audibly off the water. But he was just hearing the shot in his memory. The night air was still, silent.
He waited for a response. Lights going on, car engines, a siren.
Nothing.
Well, it was a fact that his house was set off by itself. He had neighbors, but nobody all that close. And a single gunshot wasn’t all that rare in the still of a Florida evening, and this little gun didn’t make that loud a noise, for all that it had sounded to him like a cannon going off. From any kind of distance, it could have been a firecracker, could have been a car backfiring, could have been a door slamming. Could have been a gunshot on TV, where God knows there were a lot of them.
He weighed the clip in his hand. It still held five cartridges. He didn’t expect to need more than that.
Thirty
* * *
He woke up with a headache and a dry mouth, hauled himself out of bed, swallowed a couple of aspirin and drank a lot of water. By the time he got out of the shower, his headache had subsided and he felt almost human.
He remembered everything.
All of it, clear as a bell, clear as a gunshot echoing off the water. Clearer, really, than it had been to him while it was going on.
Jesus, he’d come awfully close, hadn’t he? The gun to his temple, his finger on the trigger. He hadn’t known there was a bullet in the chamber, but he’d have found out, wouldn’t he? The tiniest bit more pressure on the trigger and—
And it would all have been somebody else’s problem, he thought, because he’d be out of it. Assuming the bullet did the job, and didn’t just leave him in a profound vegetative state, which everybody agreed was a fate worse than death.
But was it? If you didn’t know what was going on, what difference did it make?
Not the right kind of thoughts for a man to be having, not when he had a busy day ahead of him.
When he pulled up within sight of the Stapleton Terrace duplex, both the Hyundai and the minivan stood at the curb. The Lincoln, as he’d expected, was no longer parked in the driveway.
He sat in his car for the better part of an hour. Didn’t she have a yoga class this morning? Hadn’t she mentioned as much somewhere, maybe in an email to C, aka hodehoho?
Maybe the class was within walking distance and she was there now. Or maybe the class was some other day, and she was already midway through the hour of jogging that was on this morning’s agenda.
He could go ring the bell. If she answered, he was a man with a clipboard, looking for Mr. Rupert. Nobody here by that name, she’d say, and he’d say the fellow must have moved out.
He was weighing the pros and cons when the door opened and Ashley emerged, gym bag in hand. She walked briskly to her car, unlocked it with the remote, and drove away.
He gave her five minutes, then let himself into her house.
The first thing he noticed was the fifth of Glenmorangie on the sideboard, the same brand Otterbein kept in his office. It hadn’t been there on his last visit.
No need to stop at the liquor store, not with a bottle already on hand. The seal was broken, and a couple of ounces were gone. One good drink, he thought, or two small ones.
No need to boot up her computer, either. She’d left it on. The screen had gone dark, but it brightened as soon as he touched the mouse.
He checked History, saw that her last activity was in her Hotmail account. He went to it, and read that morning’s email to hodehoho. Some quality time with SD, she’d reported, and then went on to wonder whether aerobics and yoga might tend to cancel each other out.
He copied from his clipboard, amending the text slightly:
OMG, here’s what I forgot to tell you!!! SD had some drinks last nite and then surprised me with an amazing gift—a gun!!! Pretty swirly green handle. Mallokite (sp?) So I won’t worry about prowler, but would I dare use it? I don’t think so!!!
~A~
He read it over, hit Send.
Upstairs, he retrieved the voice-activated mike from the platform bed’s blanket drawer, the receiver from the ceiling crawl space. Leaving them would establish the notion that Otterbein had been suspicious of his mistress, but he couldn’t do that without knowing what the mike might have picked up, and he couldn’t spare the time to play it back now.
He returned to the first floor, frowned at the computer on the dinette table. The only way she’d see the email he’d just sent on her behalf was if she clicked out of her Inbox and into her Sent Mail file, and why should she do that?
Of course there was another way she could see it, and that was if hodehoho read the new message and replied to it. He gave you a gun? Whoa. Sounds pretty but pls don’t get carried away and shoot yourself!!!
Well, he would just have to hope hodehoho didn’t check her email all that compulsively, and took her time replying.
He let himself out, pulled the door shut behind him. On the way to his car he had the sense that he was being watched, but avoided turning around until he reached his car. Then he looked back at the house, just in time to see a curtain drop back in place in the other half of the duplex.
Ashley’s neighbor, taking an interest.
He’d have been just as happy not to have a witness to his departure. But the woman didn’t know him, and had only seen him from the back. And from where she was, she couldn’t have gotten a good look at his car. Or spotted his license number, even if she’d been inclined to write it down.
So what might she conclude? Probably that her bouncy blonde neighbor had more than one boyfriend, and what harm could that do?
Halfway home, he pulled over and took out his cell phone. The regular one, not the Lisa phone.
He called Otterbein’s office, gave his name to the woman who answered. When Otterbein came on the line, he gave the report he figured the man wanted to hear, said he couldn’t find anything unsettling to report.
“Her background appears to be everything you could hope for,” he said. “No one related to her has committed a felony or misdemeanor in the state of Florida. There’s no evidence of mental illness in her family, or any sign of hereditary diseases in her family tree.”
Otterbein said that was good.
“And I didn’t like to snoop,” he went on, “but I had a good look at her computer and her recent emails, and my impression is that she’s very pleased with her present situation. In fact I think—”
“Yes?”
“Well, that she cares for you.” And that pleased the man, too.
“I want to have one more look at her hard drive,” he said, “but I want to pick the right time. You won’t be over there this evening, will you? You will? Good thing I asked, I wouldn’t want to show up at the wrong moment. I’ll wait until tomorrow or the next day.”
Back home, he set up the recorder and played the tape. There were two sequences, and the first and more interesting of the two consisted of an extended monologue of Ashley’s. She was doing all the talking, but seemed to be addressing her remarks to someone else, someone who never appeared to respond. She talked about her day, recalled an incident or two from childhood, and went on for quite a while before the penny dropped.
She was talking to her teddy bear.
That brought him up short, the sweet innocence of it. He stopped the tape and had to sit down. Maybe, he thought, this would be a good time to pull the plug on the whole business. Toss the mike and the recorder where he’d tossed the empty vodka bottle, toss the Baby Browning in after it. Toss the Taurus and the Ruger and the two boxes of shells.
Toss everything, for Christ’s sake. The fla
sh drive, with all Ashley’s files copied onto it. Toss his own computer while he was at it, and his phones, both of them.
And then just get in the car. Get over to I-75 and just drive north for a couple of hundred miles, and then figure out where to go next. Sheriff Radburn would wonder where he’d gone to, but he wouldn’t burst a blood vessel over it. A couple of women would miss him, but not that badly and not for all that long.
As for where he’d wind up, well, it wouldn’t be Florida and it wouldn’t be New York. But that still left a whole lot of country.
He played the rest of the recording. After she was done talking to the teddy bear, he got to hear her with Otterbein, and they’d evidently got most of their talking out of the way before coming upstairs. Much of what he was able to hear consisted of the two of them shifting position on the bed, and then there was a sequence where Otterbein said, “Oh, that’s good, that’s good,” and Ashley said nothing at all, for reasons that weren’t all that difficult to imagine.
Then some more conversation, fading in volume as they dressed and left the bedroom. And then a break, and then a sigh from Ashley, and the words, “Oh, pul-leeze, give me a fucking break,” addressed probably to God, but possibly to the teddy bear.
And then he heard her gargle. And spit.
Well, maybe he wouldn’t throw the gun in the creek, or drive the car halfway to Montana. Not just yet, anyway.
Thirty-one
* * *
He was stretched out on the couch, not asleep and not awake, while Turner Classic Movies went on plumbing the emotional depths with In A Lonely Place. From the first close-up of Bogie’s face, you just knew this could only end in tears.
The phone rang.
He picked it up, saw who it was. It rang again while he tried to decide whether or not to let it go to voicemail, and midway through the third ring he picked up.
“I was all set to leave a message,” Barb Hamill said.
“Well, if you’d rather—”
“Silly. I was thinking I could come over, actually.”
“Hang on,” he said, and muted the TV, leaving Bogart and Gloria Grahame in a wordless pantomime.
“You know,” she said. “If you feel like company.”
“Hell.”
“Shall I take that for a no?”
“I’ve got a client coming,” he said. “In about half an hour.”
“A client? I hope she’s cute.”
“It’s a man,” he said, “and he’s a long way from cute. He thinks his wife’s cheating on him.”
“Is she?”
“If she’s not,” he said, “it’s not for lack of provocation. He’s a moron, and his commitment to personal hygiene is sort of tentative.”
“Ewww.”
“So if you had any ideas of dropping by for threesies—”
“I didn’t,” she said, “but if I did, you just nipped them in the bud.”
“But he won’t be here for half an hour,” he said. “Are you in your office?”
“In my car, actually.”
“Parked?”
“No, driving around.”
“And talking on the phone while you’re driving? I think this is one of those states where that’s against the law.”
“It is, but my phone’s hands-free. It’s still against the law, but how can they tell? I’m not holding a phone, I’m just talking to myself, so the worst they can do is assume I’m crazy.”
“Now why would anybody get that idea?”
“I know, it’s preposterous, isn’t it?”
“Utterly,” he said. “Now if you were to park the car—”
“We could have a conversation. Is that what you were going to say?”
“It is, and—”
“And I’ll probably want to have my hands free. Did I take the words right out of your mouth?”
“You did.”
“Hang on a minute. I think I might like to find a spot where there’s a chance I’ll have some privacy . . . Okay, this is good. Are you still there?”
“I’m right here.”
“And I’m wearing panties, but . . . there, now I’m not. Now what are we gonna talk about? I haven’t done anything since I saw you, except fake an orgasm with the man himself, and I can’t see triggering a real orgasm by telling you about a fake one.”
“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said.
“You do? Oh, how nice. Has little Doak been a naughty boy? And was he playing with anybody I know?”
“This was years ago.”
“Oh?”
“Back in New York, when I was a cop.”
“Tell mama.”
“There was this woman I met at a party,” he said, and described Phyllis, letting her be a little more attractive than he remembered her. He dropped her cop husband out of the picture, made her a little younger, and had her living at home with her parents.
“She liked to be choked,” he said.
“Really?”
“You never heard of that? Yeah, she liked it. When she was getting close, you know.”
“To coming.”
“Uh-huh. ‘Oh, baby, choke me a little. Just a little, not too hard, but choke me.’ ”
“And you didn’t feel weird doing that?”
“No, I sort of liked it. And she would come really hard that way.”
“I don’t know if I’d like it.”
“Well, try to imagine it,” he said. “Are you touching yourself?”
“Of course.”
“Are you wet?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, imagine my hands on your neck, just applying the least little bit of pressure. And you’re a little bit afraid, because suppose I lose control? But you’re also excited, because it’s out of your hands now, and all you can do is let go.”
“Oh, wow,” she said. “I guess I get it. It’s a little freaky, though. You’d be inside her and choking her at the same time, huh?”
“You bet.”
“Are you hard now, baby? I’ll bet you are.”
He wasn’t. He felt nothing, really, which was interesting in and of itself.
“Like a tree trunk,” he said. “Like a rock.”
She was breathing hard, moving toward the edge. He waited, and she said, “Then what happened?”
“She got pregnant. Swore it was mine, but how did I know?”
“She was seeing other men?”
“She said no, but I had my suspicions.” Waiting for her to ask.
“What did you do?”
“Well, I went to bed with her. We had to be quiet, you know, because she was still living in her parents’ house, and of course I didn’t have a place to take her.”
“You were married.”
“Uh-huh. And she was really nice, you know, with her tits getting bigger because of the pregnancy, and her belly just beginning to swell. You couldn’t see it when she was dressed, but it showed when she was naked.”
“And you went to bed with her.”
“I did,” he said, and spun it out for her, describing a round of imaginary foreplay, letting Barb get into it. She’d lost her edge some with the news of the pregnancy, but now she was getting it back.
“And then I was inside her.”
“In her pussy.”
“No, in her ass,” he said, “the way you like it.”
“And she liked it, too.”
“No,” he said, “she never liked it in the ass. In fact she hated it.”
“Then why did you—”
“Because I liked it,” he said. “And what did I care what she liked or didn’t like?”
“But—”
“And I got my hands on her throat,” he said, “and I choked her the way she liked to be choked, the little cunt. And all of a sudden she didn’t mind that I was fucking her in the ass, she was into it, and she was moving in that nice rocking motion, like you’re moving now, aren’t you—”
“Oh—”
“And what I do, I just keep
squeezing. Both hands, as tight as I can make them, and she starts twitching like a fish on a line, twitching like crazy, and I can feel the cartilage giving way, and I don’t stop, I can’t stop, and I come in a flood as the life drains right out of her.”
A long, long silence.
Then she said, “That was terrible.”
“Just a story, babe.”
“What on earth made you say all that?”
“Oh, just a change of pace. I thought you’d enjoy it.”
“How could you even think that? You just ruined everything. You realize that, don’t you?”
“How is anything ruined? Hey, don’t tell me you don’t know the difference between fantasy and reality. I made up a story, I tried to make it exciting for you.”
“It was much too real.”
“Well, maybe I’m a better storyteller than I realized.”
More silence, and he let it build. Then she said, “I think maybe this whole thing is taking a turn I don’t like.”
“Oh?”
“Maybe we need a break. Maybe I won’t call you for a little while.”
Like forever, he thought. He said, “I’ve got a better idea, Barb. Let me see if I can’t get rid of my client, and you can come over. We’ll go to bed, and then I’ll choke you a little bit—”
“Please stop.”
“—and you’ll be able to see if you like it, and—”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Now why would you want to go and do a thing like that?”
But it was he who pushed the button and ended the conversation. And the relationship with it, he thought, and not a moment too soon.
About time he let go of Barb. His life was complicated enough without her in it.
In a Lonely Place, the sound restored, reached its dark ending. He turned off the set and sat in front of it, his eyes on the blank screen.
After a while he called Lisa, caught her just as she was leaving for work.
“Stay on the floor for your whole shift,” he told her. “Be around people. Don’t duck out even for a minute, don’t make any phone calls.”