Cage of Night (9 page)

Richard Mitchell, KNAX-TV:

"Earlier in the day, there was some hope among the lawyers that their client would be granted a stay of execution. But Justice Stoddard of the Supreme Court has turned down the last minute plea. Now the only person who can save the prisoner is the Governor. And that's unlikely. This is a Governor who was elected on the promise of bringing back capital punishment to this state."

Tape 22-D, October 15. Interview between Risa Wiggins and her client in the Clark County Jail.

A: You said it was like being paralyzed?

C: Yeah. Right after I looked down the well, I had this kind of seizure. I mean, I was afraid my arms and legs were going to break, I was throwing myself around so hard.

A: What do you think it was?

C: (Angry) What do I think it was? Are you kidding? It was the fucking alien down in the well.

From a Police Report-September 2, 1903

One of the regular drunks from Carney's Tap found her down by the river. He claimed that he was there relieving himself on his way home. He said he screamed when he saw what had been done to her. Several people in the neighborhood testified that they heard his scream.

This one was even worse than the one who got her head cut off. I know we're not supposed to put personal opinions in these reports but I need to, Chief. There's no other way I can tell you how awful it was.

He's torn all her clothes off and then cut off her breasts and fingers, and then dug out her eyes, same as the first one.

I saw this raccoon crouched under this bush watching me. He had one of her bloody fingers in his mouth.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Just about seven hours later, that same Saturday night, the murders happened, and my life would never be the same again.

After the mall, I went home and laid on my bed and read some old Theodore Sturgeon stories. People don't read him a lot these days but they should because he's not only one of the best science fiction writers of all time, he's one of the best writers period. I look on him as the patron saint of fuck-ups. He was sort of a fuck-up himself, from what I've been able to read about him. Takes one to know one.

"You do what I tell you to, Romeo?" Josh said when he came into my room after taking his Saturday night date shower. He had on a starched white button down shirt, jeans, and a pair of cordovan penny loafers without pennies and without socks. He was also wearing about a quart-and-a-half of Brut.

"Pretty much," I said.

I told him about meeting her at the mall.

"Sounds promising."

"It does?" I said.

"Sure. Sounds like he's got some kind of hold on her and she's trying to break away."

"What kind of hold could he have on her?"

"Who knows? She had those mental problems, you know."

"Yeah. But so what?"

"Maybe she did some real crazy shit and he knows about it and says he'll tell everybody about it if she doesn't keep going out with him. I mean, face it, she's a little bit psycho."

I got mad. I couldn't help it. I didn't like to hear her talked about that way.

"She isn't a psycho. She just had a breakdown."

"Only psychos have breakdowns, Romeo." He grinned at me and I couldn't be mad at him any more. "When you get to be a little older, you'll understand stuff like that."

"I will, huh?"

"Yeah." He grinned again. "So what's up for tonight?"

"Probably go out and drive around."

"Alone?"

"Yeah."

"Boy, you really know how to live. Excitement piled on excitement."

"Better than standing around watching a bunch of high schoolers have puking contests."

The grin again. "I guess I couldn't argue with that one."

He gave me a jaunty salute and left.

When I was younger, I used to go uptown on Saturday night just to watch the arrests for drunk and disorderly. Small town like this, that can be a major source of excitement.

I did pretty much the same thing this Saturday night, except I drove around doing it.

I drove past "Harley & Co." which is the biker bar; and "Blood Sweat & Tears," which is where the construction gangs hang out; and then I drove real slow past "Bronco Billy's," which is where the country western folks congregate.

The problem was, by nine o'clock, I'd driven past them eight, nine times each and I still hadn't seen anybody come catapulting out the door and land on his head on the pavement and then get up and start punching it out with the bouncer who'd kicked him out, to be followed by sirens and gendarmes.

I was on one of my last passes, losing all hope, when I saw the flasher on top of a cop car go on behind me. So did his siren.

He pulled me over.

"You can get the chair for this," Garrett smiled when he walked up to my window.

"I really do something wrong?"

"Light's out on your back plate."

"Oh."

"But I'm not going to give you a ticket."

"I appreciate that."

I noticed that, as always, he had his hand on the butt of his weapon.

"How're things going?" he said.

"Oh, you know."

"She's still seeing fuck-face, isn't she?"

"Myles?"

"Uh-huh."

"For the time being, anyway."

'"For the time being,'" he said. "That sounds like something
she
probably told you."

"Matter of fact it is."

He shook his head. "About 95% of what women tell you is bullshit. You got to get a lot smarter about pussy, Spence. You really do. For your sake."

Not only had Garrett become a swaggering cop, no longer recognizable as the kid I'd known, now he was an expert on women in general and Cindy in particular. Like Josh.

"We got to get her away from that sonofabitch," he said.

At first, I was kind of touched by what he said. He liked me enough that he wanted to help me get Cindy.

"She deserves a lot better."

And I knew suddenly that he wasn't talking about me.

He was talking about himself.

"A lot better," he said again.

Then he patted my car door with his hand and said, "Well, see you around, Spence."

"Yeah."

"But get that license plate light fixed, all right?"

"Right away."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I took the car over to the DX station. Luckily, they had a light for the license plate.

After that, tired of riding around, I stopped in at the video store and picked up the 1978 version of
Invasion of The Body Snatchers
. I think it's almost as good as the original.

I was passing McDonald's, on the way home, when I suddenly got hungry.

I went in and got a fish sandwich and a vanilla shake and some fries. The place was pretty much empty except for a couple of giggling high school girls in the corner.

I sat at the front window and watched the traffic along Hawthorne Street. I figured out once that Hawthorne Street was at least seventy years old. Sometimes I thought of all the different kinds of cars that had driven up and down on this street, from old boxy Model T's to the big-fin jobs of the fifties. Then I thought of all the people who'd come and gone who'd driven up and down Hawthorne. The passing parade, generation after generation. Sometimes, it made me sad to think about the way Mom and Dad would have to die someday. Then the way I'd have to die, and Josh, and Cindy, and everybody else.

If I hadn't been in the Army, I probably wouldn't have figured out the gunshot for what it was.

But it was a gunshot, all right.

Big city people always have this notion that small-town folks are used to guns. But except for hunting trips, gunfire is not something you hear very often in a town like ours.

Then there was another; and another.

Three shots in all.

I glanced hack at the high school girls. They were still giggling.

I looked over at the counter. The two boys wiping everything down didn't even glance up.

None of them had any idea that a gun had just been fired. They probably thought it was a car backfiring or something.

I was curious but there wasn't anything I could do about it.

Anyway, I still had a shake and fries I owed some attention to.

I was just tilting the shake back when I saw Fred Wyman running down the sidewalk. He looked as if he was going to run right past me but when he saw me in the window, he ran into the parking lot, and came straight inside.

Fred lived down the block from us. He was about Josh's age.

He was chunky. He wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt. His fleshy face was glazed with sweat. His breath came in gasps.

"You hear what happened?"

"Huh-uh," I said.

"David Myles."

"Myles?"

"He just killed Nancy Tumbler over at the Stop 'n Shop."

"Killed her? What the hell're you talking about?"

"Killed her, Spence. Shot her three times in the chest. Blood all over the place. He took off runnin'. They're lookin' for him now."

"Why do you think it was Myles?"

"People seen him. Three eyewitnesses. He took the money and killed her right in front of them. I was just goin' down to the video arcade to tell all the kids." He gave me a half-wave and then turned back to the door.

I sat there.

At the moment, I couldn't think of anything else

to do.

Sometimes, things don't quite register in your brain, as if your brain just refuses to accept them.

It was that way with what Fred Wyman had told me. I was ready to believe just about anything terrible about David Myles but I sure couldn't see him as a killer. Maybe in a fist fight; maybe accidentally like that. But robbing a convenience store and then killing the 60-year-old clerk in cold blood? For one thing, Myles came from a wealthy family. He didn't need to rob a convenience store. For another, even if he
wanted
to kill somebody with a gun, why would he do it with three witnesses?

So I sat there.

I was going to get Cindy back.

That was a lousy thought to have with Nancy Tumbler, a poor, hard-working woman the whole town liked, lying dead on the cold gray tiles of the Stop 'n Shop.

But that was the thought I had: that whatever hold Myles had had on Cindy was now gone.

And she was going to come back to me.

I got up and carried my tray over to the wastebasket, dumped everything and walked out.

On the sidewalk, I looked west down Hawthorne.

Two blocks away, I could see cop cars and an ambulance and a crowd of people. The emergency lights whipped through the November-bare trees.

I wondered where Cindy was, what she was doing.

I thought about calling her at home but decided that that wouldn't be a good thing.

I'd called the Brasher house enough today.

If I was going to win back Cindy, and I was sure I was, I'd need to have her folks on my side. Cindy thought a lot of her folks.

I'd parked my car in the far, deserted corner of the lot. I'd read an article that said you could lose 300 calories a day just by parking at the extreme end of parking lots you were using. I'd put on four pounds since coming home from service.

I peeked in the side window of my junker and saw something weird. The video tape I'd tossed on the back seat had been moved from the corner to the middle of the seat. Had somebody robbed me? Everything else looked all right.

But then I thought that maybe I'd made a mistake. I didn't have the world's greatest memory. Maybe I'd only thought I'd put the video in the corner.

As I was opening the car door, I heard something behind me, something I recognized vaguely as shoes scuffling across small rocks on concrete.

I turned just in time to see David Myles running at me. He had a gun in his hand.

"Get in," he said.

I got in.

He ran around and climbed in the shotgun seat.

"Go," he said, slamming the door.

"They're looking for you."

"I know they're looking for me, asshole. That's why I want you to get the hell out of here. I tried hiding in the back seat but Garrett pulled in here and started sniffing around. So I hid behind the dumpsters over there."

"You killed her."

"Drive, you asshole," he said. "Drive."

He had the gun pointed right at my chest.

My bowels did cold and nasty things.

My fingers were trembling so hard I couldn't even turn the ignition on at first.

Was he going to kill me, too?

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I did what he told me.

He said to go out to the country and that's where we went.

He didn't say much, just mostly stared out the window. There was a full moon painting all the fallen cornfields silver, and glazing the tops of the forest trees.

We didn't see any traffic. The only evidence of human life was in the lighted windows of farmhouses. They looked snug, smug, as if they didn't want to know anything at all about a couple of hick kids riding around in the darkness.

"Why'd you shoot her?"

I had to say something. I couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Just drive."

Then: "You think it was my fucking idea? You think I'd fucking do something like that?"

He was crying when he said this.

"You mean you didn't shoot her?"

He didn't look scary now, all the anger was gone from his face, now he just looked scared and sad, football hero sitting there smelling of after-shave and sweat, shaking like a junkie in a bad movie. He had on his letter jacket. It didn't seem to be giving him much solace right now. Being a football hero didn't count for much after you'd murdered somebody in cold blood.

The gun was in his lap.

He wasn't even holding it.

"I need to see her."

"Who?" But I knew who.

"Go back to town."

"Maybe you should turn yourself in."

He glared at me. "Maybe you should keep your fucking mouth shut."

"You sure? About town, I mean?"

"I have to talk to her."

"We get anywhere near town, the cops are going to see us."

"Can't be helped."

He was looking up at the full moon again, talking to himself.

He started crying. It was hard for him, as if he didn't quite know how and needed some practice.

I wanted to hate him but I couldn't. Not quite.

"Myles?"

"Yeah?" he said between sobs.

"Let me take you to the police station."

"They won't believe me."

"About what?"

He didn't say anything for a while.

We drove back to town on a gravel road. Gravel dust plumed up behind us like a ghostly tail.

"I did you a favor," he said, looking over at me.

"You did?"

"Yeah. I took her away from you."

"Some favor."

"You don't know about her, man. Believe me, you don't. That's why I said the cops wouldn't believe me. They wouldn't. You know that time they put her away?"

"Yeah."

"They thought she was making all that shit up, what she told them and everything. But she wasn't. It was true." He turned away from me, back to the moon.

Town lights lined the horizon.

He reached down and picked up the gun again.

"I just need five minutes with her."

"Maybe they'd let you see her after you turn yourself in."

He reached over and grabbed my shoulder so violently that he pulled me up from the seat. "Knock off the shit about the cops. You're taking me to her place. You understand?"

He was shouting at me.

Gravel road became asphalt street, timberland became small bungalows, prairie darkness became street lights.

Cindy lived on the far side of town.

With all the cops looking for him, it was going to be a long drive.

"I didn't mean to kill her."

I just looked over at him.

"I didn't want to."

I looked back to the street.

"It wasn't me—not really."

He was on that again. If it hadn't been him, then who had it been?

I wondered if he was insane. That was possible. People did that sometimes. Just went insane.

I'm not sure just when Garrett saw me. Maybe he picked me up a couple blocks sooner than I realized.

He was used to pulling me over and having a little talk and maybe that was what he originally had in mind.

I didn't realize he was behind us until we'd reached the outskirts of the shopping area, where the lights got about ten times brighter.

That's when he must have seen Myles silhouetted in the front seat.

He hit his cherry and he hit his siren.

Myles came up from a kind of stupor, jerked around for a look behind and then said, "Get me down to J Street and then let me out. I'll be better off on foot."

Garrett rammed us then, doing to me what Myles had done to me a few weeks earlier.

The police car hit us with such impact that I was knocked into the curb.

"Don't stop!" Myles shouted, pushing the gun into my face. He looked lurid, sweat like silver blisters all over his face, dark eyes bulged and crazed, tears running from his eyes.

We went up over the curb and crashed back down.

"Step on the gas!" Myles shouted.

Then we were doing 60 mph down a narrow town street. I just hoped nobody stepped out in front of us.

Garrett rammed us again.

This time he knocked us up and over the curb completely.

We skidded across dew-wet grass, through a shrubbery, through a picket fence, and right up to the front door step of some elderly people who were just now peeking out their front window.

When we stopped, I saw that Myles had struck his head against the dashboard. He looked dazed. The gun was on the seat next to him.

I grabbed it, got the door open and crawled out of the car.

Garrett was on the lawn now, gun drawn.

"Get away from the car, Spence," he said, walking closer and closer to Myles' door.

I hobbled away, my knee painful and bleeding from where I'd cut it on the underside of the dash.

Garrett was at the door now.

He approached cautiously and then said, "Come out of there, Myles. Right now."

"He doesn't have a gun anymore, Garrett," I said.

"Just shut up, Spence," he said. "This is police business."

Sirens in the distance, rushing here.

Dark lawn. Two scared oldsters peeking out the window. Garrett in Clint Eastwood stance, gun drawn.

Myles inside the car.

I heard him say: "I want to see her."

"Shut the fuck up and get out of the car."

"You hear me? I said I want to see her. She can explain all this."

"You're never going to see her again, asshole. I can promise you that."

Sirens. Closer.

Garrett raising his Magnum.

Me wanting to shout out that Myles didn't have his gun anymore.

And then Myles saying: "I want to see her, man. That's all I'm asking you. I want to see her."

That's when the two shots exploded in the night.

Right through the open window, they went.

Right into Myles' chest.

I'd never heard a man die before. The sound was kind of funny, kind of a cry and kind of a grunt, and then a slumping forward, and then a long deep silence.

The silence scared the shit out of me. Then Garrett walked over to the car and looked inside.

"Oh, Jesus," he said. "Oh, Jesus Christ."

Then there wasn't any silence at all, not for a long time, not with the cop cars and the ambulance and the coroner's van and all the fascinated onlookers and then the weeping family of David Myles.

They took me down to the police station and I was there for six hours and when I got out there were a bunch of reporters there and then Josh had me by the arm and he was pushing me through the crowd and out into the chilly prairie night.

Garrett hadn't merely shot David Myles. He'd executed him.

That was the only thing I could think of all that night as I lay awake still shaking from everything that had happened.

He'd known Myles didn't have a gun. He'd executed him.