“Yeah. So we could do it to her all over again.”
We all laughed at that one.
Later on, Tommy drove us home. Mom and Dad were out back, having cocktails. I helped myself to a handful of peanuts. “Did you have a good time over at Tommy’s?” Mom asked.
“Yeah! We played catch, swam in the pool ... It was great!”
Later, Dad did shish kebabs on the barbecue.
Speaking of shish kebabs, I’m starving. Haven’t had a bite since the sandwich I ate while I was unloading the fridge for Benedict, and it wasn’t much.
Problem is, I can’t go out bald and I really don’t feel like sticking Hillary’s clammy old scalp on my head right now. I’ve got to get my hands on a decent wig.
But first I’ve gotta eat.
Ah ha! I’ll phone in for something and have it delivered right here to my room.
It’ll mean touching that grimy phone, of course.
Guess I’ll clean it first.
Anyway, that’s it for right now. We’ll continue my adventures after I’ve put some chow inside me.
Chapter Twenty-one
Okay. All set. I ordered Chinese, by the way. Sweet and sour pork.
Hester was such a pig. Maybe all that talking about her is what made me hanker for pork.
It was very tasty, by the way.
Before the delivery boy arrived, I wrapped a bath towel around my head—the way some gals do when their hair is still wet. Seemed to work fine.
Anyway, back to my history of our nefarious deeds.
What we did to Hester pretty much changed everything. For starters, it was just incredibly exciting, sexually and every other way. Doing her that way was the biggest thrill I’d ever had. The rest of the guys felt that way, too. I know because we talked about it. A lot. Hell, we couldn’t stop talking about it.
Mixed in with how great it had been, there was a kind of sick feeling. We all had the sick feeling. It was partly fear that we might get caught and convicted of murder. Being only thirteen years old, though, we wouldn’t have had much to worry about from the California legal system. A couple of years in juvenile hall, maybe. But the notion that everybody would find out about what we’d done to Hester was enough to give me a yucky stomach. Mom and Dad, for instance. Talk about embarrassing.
I mean, this wasn’t like we’d shoplifted an album or smoked dope. This was serious stuff that could basically ruin our futures.
Nothing about Hester showed up in the newspaper or on the television news. Around school, rumor had it that she’d run away from home. She’d run away before, a year earlier, and had actually disappeared for a whole month. So nobody suspected foul play.
That was good news. But we figured it would all change if her body got found. Each day for the first week after the murder, Tommy checked to make sure her body was still where we’d left it. He tried to calm us down by saying it would never be found, impossible.
“And even if it is,” he said that Thursday, “the cops won’t have any reason to think we had anything to do with it.”
“She’s on your property,” I pointed out. “And what if we left fingerprints on her.”
“You can’t leave fingerprints on skin,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Well ... I don’t know for sure, but ...”
The next day, at lunch, Tommy had news for us. “I went to the library after school and checked out some books on criminal investigation techniques.” He wrinkled his nose. “Man, I had no idea. It’s a lot worse than I figured. There’s no telling what sort of stuff the cops might get on us if they find Hester: how many of us were there, our blood types, hair color, height and weight, not even to mention what they might find out about our clothes and shoes.”
“Just from her body?” Ranch asked, his nose wrinkled.
“Yeah, from her body, plus everything they’ll figure out when they study the crime scene.”
I suddenly felt like I might throw up.
Ranch and Minnow looked sick.
“What’ll we do?” Minnow asked.
“It’s no big problem,” Tommy said.
The big problem was waiting twenty-four hours without going nuts. On Saturday morning, Dad gave me a ride to Tommy’s house. He identified himself into a speaker on the gate, the gate swung open and we went up the driveway to the house. Dad mussed my hair. “Have a good one, pal,” he said. “If you won’t be home for dinner, give us a call.”
After everyone was there, Tommy equipped us with a couple of shovels, a pick, and a rake. Then he led us straight through the trees to Hester.
Man, what a mess. And what a stink.
I won’t go into that, though. Don’t want to make anybody sick.
Our job was to bury the body.
And what a job it was. Even with four of us taking turns at it, the digging was brutal.
Tommy did his fair share. He was still annoying, though. It seemed like all he could say was, “Not deep enough. It’s gotta be deeper. Deeper. Deeper.”
I was standing at the bottom of the grave when Tommy finally decided it was deep enough. “Just even out the bottom a little,” he told me.
So I bent over with my shovel to put in the final touches, and those sons of bitches tossed Hester down on me.
Hilarious. They thought so, anyhow.
She dropped onto my back and knocked me flat, and the stink! And she was slippery, like her skin had turned to goo. For better or for worse, I was naked (because of the heat, and so my clothes wouldn’t get filthy from the digging). That saved my clothes from being wrecked by Hester. But it meant there was nothing between her and me. Talk about revolting!
I guess it was pretty funny, throwing her on me like that. At the time, though, I was anything but amused. I had an awful time getting out from under her. The way her arms and legs wrapped around me, it was like she wanted to keep me down there with her. When I finally managed to squirm free, she rolled onto her back and her knees flopped apart till the sides of the hole stopped them. “Fuck me again.” That’s what I heard, and it damn near turned my bones to ice before I realized Tommy was the one who’d said it. He was up above with Ranch and Minnow staring down at us.
So then I boosted myself out of the grave. “You guys are a riot,” I said. “Somebody else can fill in the ...” Then I attacked, pretty much taking them by surprise. Before they had time to react, I shoved Minnow into the grave. Tommy dodged away from me and ran. Ranch stayed to fight. We wrestled, but I wasn’t any match for him. He pinned me down. Even though I couldn’t throw him into the grave, he ended up nicely slimed from squirming around with me.
Only Tommy got away unscathed.
He always does.
Anyway, Minnow finally climbed out of the grave. He looked gory, but he was grinning. We gathered up Hester’s clothes and tossed them in with her. After that, we filled in the hole, then scattered leaves and twigs over the dirt until it looked the same as everywhere else.
Tommy reminded us of the .22 shell from the bullet Minnow had fired at her. He said we shouldn’t leave it behind. So we spent about half an hour searching, and I finally found it.
Tommy put it in his shoe. “I’ll get rid of it later. The important thing is that it doesn’t get found near the body. Maybe I’ll throw it in the trash at school, or something.”
When we started picking up the tools to leave, he said, “Wait. We’ve gotta take care of one more thing. Come here.” He held his hands out away from his sides, the way people do when they want you to form a circle and join hands.
We did it.
He said, “As long as Hester stays here where we put her, nobody can ever touch us.”
“The cops, you mean?” Minnow asked.
“Yeah, the cops. The thing is, nobody will ever find her unless they know where to look. And they won’t know where to look unless one of us blabs.”
We all pretty much at once promised we’d never blab.
“We’ve gotta make a pledge,” Tommy sai
d.
Nobody had any objection to that.
“Repeat after me,” he said. “I, Thomas Baxter ...”
We all substituted our own names. As the pledge went along after that, Tommy waited after each phrase so we’d have time to say it. Mine went like this:
“I, Simon Quirt, a full-fledged member in good standing of the Killer Krulls [this was the first I’d heard of our name, though I knew the book where he’d picked it up], do hereby swear on pain of death to myself and my entire family that I shall never betray any secrets of the club to any soul. I also swear to forfeit my own life to prevent the cops from ever taking me alive. I also swear to kill any fellow Krull who breaks this oath, and also to kill his mother and father and sister and brother and dog, if he has them. Amen.”
I almost laughed a couple of times, including when it came to the “amen.” But I held it in because Tommy seemed pretty serious about the whole thing.
He’d probably been up all night, thinking it up.
Back at his house, the garden hose wasn’t good enough to get rid of Hester’s aroma. So we went into the house. Tommy only had to wash his hands. The rest of us, one at a time, took hot showers while he went out to get our clothes.
It felt pretty good to be clean and dressed again. We got together in the den and had Pepsis and potato chips. Tommy told us that, with the body buried and everything, the cops wouldn’t stand a chance of nailing us for what we did to Hester.
I don’t think any of us really believed it.
There would always be a chance they’d get us.
For a few weeks, I worried about it all the time. I had plenty of nightmares, too. As time went by, though, it seemed less and less likely that we’d get caught. I quit feeling sick every time the phone or doorbell rang or I saw a cop car.
My nightmares eased off, but they’ve never gone away completely. I have some real doozies. Nightmares are supposed to be manifestations of unresolved shit in your unconscious mind, or something. I don’t know, though. I’ve got this theory that maybe there really is such a thing as ghosts, but they aren’t what people think. They don’t creep through haunted houses. What they do is creep into your head. Maybe through the mouth, when you’re sleeping. Or maybe through the nostrils. They get in there when you’re zonked out, and make nightmares happen.
It’s just a theory. Maybe I’m nuts. But I think somebody should look into it. Maybe scientists can figure out a way to stop the ghosts from getting in. Maybe something along the lines of a gas mask you wear when you go to bed. Call it a “ghost mask.”
Anyway, where was I?
Okay.
What it boils down to is that nothing ever happened. We did all that to Hester, and got away with it.
We talked about it all the time, at least when nobody was around except the four of us. It was like reliving a championship game where we’d demolished the other team. “Oh, man, did you see the look on her face when ... I meant to shoot her there, you dork ... How about when I took my knife and ... Talk about dead, man, was she dead or what ... How about that stink?” We’d go on and on.
Sometimes, we talked about doing it to someone else. We even made lists. Denise Dennison always topped the list, by the way. It was like a game, though. We had no intention of going after anyone, mostly because we were pretty sure we couldn’t get away with it a second time. So we were just playing with our fantasies.
Four years went by, and it looked as if Hester Luddgate would forever be the one and only victim of the Killer Krulls.
The next killings happened during the summer before our senior year of high school.
By then, Tom had a driver’s license so he could operate his Mercedes legally. He came up with the idea of taking a trip up the California coast and going all the way to Salem, Oregon. He wanted to check out Willamette University before deciding whether to apply for admission there. He thought it would be a kick if the whole gang went on the drive with him.
My parents agreed to let me go, even though they knew we’d be traveling without any adult supervision. For one thing, they trusted Tom. (He’s handsome, polite, intelligent, witty, and rich—what’s not to trust?) Also, they figured it would be a good experience for me.
I’m sure the parents of Ranch and Minnow also would’ve been glad to let their sons go on an adventure like that. Problem was, Ranch and Minnow were out of town on family vacations.
We’d gotten to know some other guys, though. Two of them, Clement Calhoun and Tony “Private” Majors, joined us for the trip.
We had a blast. Clement was sort of dumb, and always up for anything. Private was a goofball. I could go on forever about the stuff we did, but there’s no point. It was all just dumb teenage junk, and pretty harmless. Like mooning a couple of old farts having a picnic by the roadside, that sort of thing. Also, we got drunk quite a few times.
Sometimes we stayed at motels, and other times we slept in our sleeping bags.
We’d been on the road for a few days, and were driving through a forest of giant Sequoias up above Fort Bragg, when we met up with the bicycle riders. Two of them. It was raining like mad, so they wore bright yellow slickers with hoods covering their heads. They were pedalling along single file, heading north just like us.
In the middle of our lane.
Coming down the other lane was a logging truck.
The bicyclists were going about half as fast as us. Tom couldn’t swerve around them because of the truck, so he had to hit the brakes. “Bastards!” he shouted at the windshield.
Those two freaks just kept doodling along as if nothing had happened. They didn’t move over to the side of the road. They didn’t even look back at us. Just stayed hunched over their handlebars and ignored us and pedalled up the middle of our lane.
Truck after truck came along, heading south. We had no choice except to stay behind the bikers—or run them down.
“Fuckers,” Clem muttered. “What’s the matter with ’em?”
“They all act like that,” I said. “Plant somebody’s ass on a bicycle seat, they think they own the road. You ever notice that?”
“I’ve noticed,” Tom said. “I oughta drive right through ’em.”
“Not a bad idea,” I said.
Private was behind us with Clement. He leaned forward and peered over the top of Tom’s seat back. “Do it,” he said. He sounded very eager. “Plow right through ’em. Go on. We won’t tell. Will we, guys?”
Tom and I glanced at each other.
“You don’t really mean it,” Tom said.
“Sure I do. It’d be a gas. Slam right through those two fucks. It’d be a gas.”
“It’d probably kill ’em.”
“Big loss. Right, Clem?”
“Road hogs like them,” Clement said, “they’ll probably get run over sooner or later anyway.”
I smiled over my shoulder. “You guys are really cold-blooded.”
“I’m not gonna run over them,” Tom said. “It’d mess up my car.”
“Chicken,” Private said.
“Just give ’em a little bump,” Clement said.
About that time, we reached the top of a rise. Another logging truck roared by, throwing a shower of water at us. Then the road was clear all the way to the crest of the next hill, probably a mile away.
Tom could’ve swung around the bikers, now. Instead, he tooted his horn.
The one at the rear still didn’t so much as glance back, but swung an arm in a gesture for us to go around them.
“How thoughtful,” I said.
So then Tom really laid on the horn and sped toward the rear bike. At the very last second, he swerved to the side. We roared by them both. Still, neither of them lifted a head to look at us. Like they were in their own little world.
We got about a couple of hundred yards ahead of them, and Tom pulled off onto the shoulder of the road.
“What’re you doing?” Private asked. He sounded real excited and curious.
“Everybody out,” Tom
said.
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Clement said. “We gonna pound ’em?”
“Something like that,” Tom said.
He popped the hood. Then we all climbed out and stood in the rain just in front of the car.
“What’re we gonna do?” Private asked for the second time.
“Just do whatever I tell you,” Tom said.
We checked around. The road was still clear—just us and the bike riders. They came at us single file, hunkered down over their handlebars, their heads down so nothing showed except the tops of their yellow hoods.
Tom had been keeping Hester’s old .22 pistol under the front seat, just in case. We all knew about it. Hell, you wouldn’t want to take a long drive without some sort of a gun.
What we didn’t know is that Tom had picked it up before leaving the car.
We didn’t know it until he swung his right hand out from under his jacket, aimed and fired. Bam bam! Very quick. The rain was coming down hard, so I couldn’t see where the bullets hit. But the bike in the lead took a quick swerve, skidded and flipped, tossing its rider toward the pavement.
Number two biker looked up. He had a black mustache. Bam bam bam bam bam!
He flung up his arms and tipped his face toward the sky and fell backward. He hit the rear tire of his bike, which made the bike flip and land on him.
“Let’s go, let’s go!”
Clement and Private, who both looked pretty shocked, bolted for the car doors.
“Morons!” I shouted. “Come on. Quick!”
Tom and I dashed past them. He took the first biker and I took the second. While we dragged them toward the side of the road, we gave the other guys orders to bring along the bikes.
We had the road empty with at least half a minute to spare before anyone came along. We ducked in some bushes and watched a big old Winnebago roll by.
Then we dragged the bikers and bikes deeper into the woods. Mine, Mr. Mustache, was deader than shit. One round had punched a hole in his chin, another had caught him between the eyebrows, and another had demolished his right eye.
Tom’s biker was alive, but unconscious. She was still out cold when we got to a clearing and gathered around her. She had two nicely spaced holes in her left shoulder. We found them when we pulled off her rain slicker. One hole was in her bare skin. The other, half an inch away, had poked through the strap of her tank top. Her tank top was white except for the blood, and very tight. Like it was glued to her. You could see every curve and slope. She wasn’t wearing any bra. Instead of normal shorts, she had on a black number that looked like bikini bottoms.