The Suicide Motor Club (29 page)

JUDITH TRIED THE DOOR AND FOUND IT OPEN. A DEAD DOG LAY ON A TABLE JUST TO
her right. Straight ahead, she saw the shape of an old man in a chair, barely lit by indirect sunlight bleeding in from a single window. She saw the object of her hatred now crouched behind the chair, squinting, his eyes watering even against this weak light. Metal glinted as the vampire called Rob pressed a kitchen knife up under the old man's jaw. The knife was smeared with blood.

“Put the gun down,” the creature said.

“No.”

“Aren't you afraid I'll cut him?”

“No.”

He smiled like he liked that answer, then looked her in the eye. “Now put the gun down.”

“That doesn't work on me,” she said.

“No, I guess not.”

“Come from behind that chair.”

“What if I don't?”

“I'll wait.”

A moment passed in silence.

“Luther told you about the boy.”

“He's a liar.”

“Sometimes. But we did turn your boy. Luther did.”

“Come out from behind the chair.”

“Anyway, there's a worse liar than Luther. You need to know.”

“Just come out. Come at me.”

“Look at this,” he said, and flicked a photograph at her like a man throwing a card into a hat. It landed facedown. “You're working for a liar, too,” he said.

Her heart beat fast. He spoke then. He told her what he had to tell. She shook her head, even though the words he said had a ring of awful truth.

“Look,” he said, pointing at the facedown picture with his knife. “Just look.”

It was when she reached down that he came at her.

—

SHE SHOT THE VAMPIRE WHO TOOK HER SON, SHOT HIM HIGH ON THE FOREHEAD.
She grabbed him by the heels and dragged him toward the door. He started coming to, so she shot him again. Dragged him some more. And so it went all the way out the door and up to the frontier of sunlight pushing at the shadow of the poor old blind man's house. BANG! Drag. BANG! Drag. At the end, not five feet from the edge of sunlight blazing on the ground, the gun clicked dry and he started to grab for her. So she beat him with the butt of the big pistol. She beat him like Riley Eberhart's daughter, beat him like Glendon Lamb's mother, beat him so hard she knocked the eyes out of him, wrecked his skull without a bullet, and, while the pieces tried to right themselves, she grabbed his bootheels and dragged his legs into the sun and his legs burned hot. But he didn't go easy. He scurried back on his elbows, yelling, throwing dirt and rocks first at her, and then on his jeans trying to put himself out. In the end she dragged him
into the sunshine by his hair, her silence a grim counterpoint to his dying scream. When he caught fire, she caught fire too, but she rolled in the dirt and put herself out while he just burned and burned until there was nothing left of him but echo.

She said the words then, even for him.

“Your curse is lifted. May God remember your former kindnesses. And may he one day relieve me of the hatred I bear you.”

The house sat quiet, the door cracked open.

When Judith went inside, she confirmed her suspicion that Rob had cut the old man's throat. She put the dog in his lap, crossed herself, then went to the sink. She hissed as she ran her burned hands under the tap water, and she drank, and washed the smoke out of her eyes.

At last, as sirens wailed in the east, she picked up the photograph the monster had flicked at her and ran into the rocky labyrinth of foothills past a plain of tawny grass. She saw twin plumes of smoke in the west and understood Luther Nixon and the big one had died as well. When at last she felt far enough away from the business of police and fire trucks she heard behind her, she let herself look at the photo.

She immediately wished she hadn't.

She wanted to collapse but didn't let herself.

Not yet.

She had one more job to do.

—

BETHANY ROAD RAN NORTH TO SOUTH ACROSS THE INTERSTATE, BUT IT WAS TOO
small to warrant its own exit or overpass; instead, one had to follow a feeder road to Clines Corners and then double back. By the time she found the abandoned rail car Clayton had described, it was nearly noon and her fair skin was badly sunburned. The car had been a caboose at one time. She stepped warily into the blackness offered by the tall, narrow rear door and walked into the heat of the interior,
which stank of age and ancient tobacco. Numerous cigarette butts and one pair of old, soiled boxer shorts attested to the car's occasional use as a habitation, though exactly when the last squatters had squatted was not apparent. The once-white interior paint had long been flaking away to show the dry wood beneath, and the floorboards were gapped here and there by missing slats.

In the middle of everything sat a toolbox that looked large enough to hold a smallish man. She liked how slight Clayton was; he came from a time before overeating was so common, when men were considered normal at five-six. She smiled to think of the pleasant economy of his body, but then that smile faded. That he came from another time was the problem at hand. He was
undead
, his life unnaturally prolonged. However pleasant he was to talk to, and however helpful he had been, he was an abomination before God. Maybe he wasn't in the box at all. She gripped the end handle, hissing with pain when her raw, burned hand touched iron, then pulling up on it to test its weight.

Heavy.

She wanted to talk to Clayton, to tell him how sorry she was, but she couldn't have him waking up. How would he react? Would he harm her? God knew she had no fight left in her; she was bruised, burned, half deafened, half dying of thirst.

Had Clayton told her where he would be because he wanted her to do this? Or just because he wanted to see her again?

Did God want this of her?

What God? God isn't dead. He just . . .
isn't
.

Shut up Clayton Birch you shut up.

Oh God I don't want to do this must I do this.

Clayton had offered to make her a vampire, which meant he had almost certainly made others. Were they as benign as he? Were the ones who murdered her husband and took her boy unusual in their extreme violence?

Or was Clayton the anomaly? No matter how he had helped her, no matter how humanely he harvested what he needed, his life ran on stolen human blood. She had seen him feed.

I can't make decisions like this alone God please help me.

A scorpion made its way across the floorboards, claws out, stinger high.

That's the sign,
she thought.

Poison.

“I'm sorry,”
she whispered.

She hugged the box, left it moist where her cheek had touched it.

Before she could stop herself, she dragged it across the caboose's floor, eased it into a bright rectangular patch of sunlight offered by a window.

She breathed in and out three times.

She glanced out the window where tall, rocky hills offered black shadows between heaps of stones. Something bright flashed there, but she couldn't make out what.

Am I really killing him after he helped me?

You're helping him now.

You're ending his curse.

She thought she should get on the other side of the chest so her way to the door wouldn't be blocked—her hands throbbed with the memory of the white-hot fire ignited by Rob's exposure to sun. Would an older vampire burn hotter and faster? More tears dropped on the box. She sobbed openly and hugged her face to it. She suddenly didn't care if she made it out of the caboose—she didn't have the strength for a hike to Pennsylvania, she had no money, no abbey to return to. And her son—she didn't want to think about her son. She had seen the vampire Rob's mouth moving, making words, telling her the lengths Wicklow would go to in furtherance of his cause.

She had looked at the awful picture he had shown her.

She would go into the desert and pray about Glendon.

The desert was a good place for understanding revelations.

Two years ago, Phillip Wicklow and Hank Calvert had been hot on the heels of the Suicide Motor Club when the vampires struck Judith's family. Calcutta had called her mother from Amarillo that night, so the Bereaved had gone to a suspected lair in McLean in the morning, hoping to catch them. They didn't find Luther and company. They were only just too late.

They found instead a newly made vampire child shrieking for its mother in the shadows of an old tire shop. A child Luther had turned and abandoned for his own amusement, knowing it would burn or starve. And Wicklow took it back to All Souls Ranch. It was precious to him, both as a specimen to study and as incontrovertible evidence that the thirsty dead were real. He kept the child alive, if barely, on the blood of deer, and kept him imprisoned.

Have you witnessed proof of evil on the earth?

I have.

They didn't show the boy to Judith, of course.

She would have known it for her son.

Glendon.

She remembered now the music from the basement at All Souls Ranch.

To soothe him.

I'm in the trunk, Mom.

Not a car trunk.

A case.

A cage.

Gimme little lovin'

Got a cake in the oven

And I'm servin' up a piece for you

She didn't know if this image was true, but she thought it was.

Rob had given her a picture of Glendon taken from the 1967 newspaper article about his disappearance, clipped out and laminated, like many of the pictures Wicklow had shown them.

The number 10 stood out in red on the top corner.

Known vampire.

It would be hard to keep her sanity but she would have to.

She would free her son from this.

She would kill Phillip Wicklow if he tried to stop her.

He would probably try to stop her.

No, to die here in the caboose wouldn't be so bad.

She unlatched the hasp of Clayton's tool chest, dug her fingers into the wood of the lid, prepared to lift.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

You're a betrayer.

She sobbed so hard she barely got the Latin words out.

“Sublata est maledictio. Memoret Deus misericordiam tuam.”

She lifted the lid, let the sun in.

And laughed.

Paint cans for weight.

Five one-hundred-dollar bills fanned out.

A PO box address, scrawled on a notecard beneath these words:

Repay me if you must.
Write me if you will.

Those weren't the first things she saw, of course. First she had been dazzled by the most glorious arrangement of sunflowers she had ever seen, their saffron petals blazing in the New Mexico morning light.

She held the sunflowers to her chest, stood in the window, looking out at the cave mouth where a light glinted—she knew he sat safe, watching her, ready to go deeper into the cave or mine or whatever it was if she came after him.

She had no bullets in her gun, anyway.

She had very little strength left.

He had outsmarted her.

Which, she supposed, wasn't very hard.

The brass telescope flashed again in the darkness.

Judith put her hand to her heart.

Smiled at him.

Blew a tender kiss that way.

She folded the money and the address into her pocket.

The scorpion raised its pincers at her.

She stepped over it.

Walked out into the sunlight and
away.

Sincere thanks to friend and editor Tom Colgan at Berkley for his unwavering support, and for his invaluable observations about
The Suicide Motor Club
, my favorite of which went something like “Are you crazy? Don't cut that!” I am again and always grateful to my agent, Michelle Brower, and to Sean Daily at Hotchkiss and Associates; both of you affected the trajectory of this narrative in all the best ways. For expert assistance with matters forensic, ballistic, and kinetic, I'd like to thank Teri DeWitt and Eric Wagner. Drawing on hard-won law enforcement experience, Officers Derek Conley and Kevin Daniels gleefully examined the chase scenes herein to make sure rubber met road in credible ways. Thanks, Steven Graham Jones, for lending your hawk-keen eye and coyote-sharp ear to this fable and leaving it better than you found it. If I had forgotten how thrilling and dangerous older V-8s feel with their chirping tires and lazy brakes, Corey Dickerson at Mershon's World of Cars was kind enough to remind me by letting me take a '65 Falcon for a spin on the lonely roads just outside Springfield, Ohio. (Damn, that was fun!) Thanks are due to several who helped midwife this story, as they helped with stories past; if I do not again conjure them individually, it is only in the interest of adding new
names to this finite space, and in the confidence that they know who they are and how indispensable they are to me. Finally, I want to thank Jennifer Schlitt, who in her constancy, kindness, and grace informed Judith's character in ways I wasn't fully aware of until I sat down to write these final
lines.

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