Mr. Murder Read online

“Reindeer sweep down out of the night. See how each is brimming with fright? Tossing their heads, rolling their eyes, these gentle animals are so very wise— they know this Santa isn’t their friend, but an imposter and far ’round the bend. They would stampede for all they’re worth, dump this nut off the edge of the earth. But Santa’s bad brother carries a whip, a club, a harpoon, a gun at his hip, a blackjack, an Uzi—you better run!— and a terrible, horrible, wicked raygun.”

  “Raygun?” Charlotte said. “Then he’s an alien!”

  “Don’t be silly,” Emily admonished her. “He’s Santa’s twin, so if he’s an alien, Santa is an alien too, which he isn’t.”

  With the smug condescension of a nine-year-old who had long ago discovered Santa Claus wasn’t real, Charlotte said, “Em, you have a lot to learn. Daddy, what’s the raygun do? Turn you to mush?”

  “To stone,” Emily said. She withdrew one hand from under the covers and revealed the polished stone on which she had painted a pair of eyes. “That’s what happened to Peepers.”

  “They land on the roof, quiet and sneaky. Oh, but this Santa is fearfully freaky. He whispers a warning to each reindeer, leaning close to make sure they hear: ‘You have relatives back at the Pole— antlered, gentle, quite innocent souls. So if you fly away while I’m inside, back to the Pole on a plane I will ride. I’ll have a picnic in the midnight sun: reindeer pie, pâté, reindeer in a bun, reindeer salad and hot reindeer soup, oh, all sorts of tasty reindeer goop.’ ”

  “I hate this guy,” Charlotte announced emphatically. She pulled her covers up to her nose as she had done the previous evening, but she wasn’t genuinely frightened, just having a good time pretending to be spooked.

  “This guy, he was just born bad,” Emily decided. “For sure, he couldn’t be this way just ’cause his mommy and daddy weren’t as nice to him as they should’ve been.”

  Paige marveled at Marty’s ability to strike the perfect note to elicit the kids’ total involvement. If he’d given her the poem to review before he’d started reading it, Paige would have advised that it was a little too strong and dark to appeal to young girls.

  So much for the question of which was superior—the insights of the psychologist or the instinct of the storyteller.

  “At the chimney, he looks down the bricks, but that entrance is strictly for hicks. With all his tools, a way in can be found for a fat bearded burglar out on the town. From roof to yard to the kitchen door, he chuckles about what he has in store for the lovely family sleeping within. He grins one of his most nasty grins. Oh, what a creep, a scum, and a louse. He’s breaking into the Stillwater house.”

  “Our place!” Charlotte squealed.

  “I knew!” Emily said.

  Charlotte said, “You did not.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too. That’s why I’m sleeping with Peepers, so he can protect me until after Christmas.”

  They insisted that their father read the whole thing from the beginning, all verses from both nights. As Marty began to oblige, Paige faded out of the doorway and went downstairs to put away the leftover popcorn and straighten up the kitchen.

  The day had been perfect as far as the kids were concerned, and it had been good for her as well. Marty had not suffered another episode, which allowed her to convince herself that the fugue had been a singularity—frightening, inexplicable, but not an indication of a serious degenerative condition or disease.

  Surely no man could keep pace with two such energetic children, entertain them, and prevent them from getting cranky for an entire busy day unless he was in extraordinarily good health. Speaking as the other half of the Fabulous Stillwater Parenting Machine, Paige was exhausted.

  Curiously, after putting away the popcorn, she found herself checking window and door locks.

  Last night Marty had been unable to explain his own heightened sense of a need for security. His trouble, after all, was internal.

  Paige figured it had been simple psychological transference. He had been reluctant to dwell on the possibility of brain tumors and cerebral hemorrhages because those things were utterly beyond his control, so he had turned outward to seek enemies against which he might be able to take concrete action.

  On the other hand, perhaps he had been reacting on instinct to a real threat beyond conscious perception. As one who incorporated some Jungian theory into her personal and professional world view, Paige had room for such concepts as the collective unconscious, synchronicity, and intuition.

  Standing at the French doors in the family room, staring across the patio to the dark yard, she wondered what threat Marty might have sensed out there in a world that, throughout her lifetime, had become increasingly fraught with danger.

  16

  His attention deviates from the road ahead only for quick glances at the strange shapes that loom out of the darkness and the rain on both sides of the highway. Broken teeth of rock thrust from the sand and scree as if a behemoth just beneath the earth is opening its mouth to swallow whatever hapless animals happen to be on the surface. Widely spaced clusters of stunted trees struggle to stay alive in a stark land where storms are rare and drenching downpours rarer still; gnarled branches bristle out of the mist, as jagged and chitinous as the spiky limbs of insects, briefly illuminated by headlights, thrashing in the wind for an instant but then gone.

  Although the Honda has a radio, the killer does not switch it on because he wants no distraction from the mysterious power which pulls him westward and with which he seeks communion. Mile by dreary mile, the magnetic attraction increases, and it is all that he cares about; he could no more turn away from it than the earth could reverse its rotation and bring tomorrow’s sunrise in the west.

  He leaves the rain behind and eventually passes from under the ragged clouds into a clear night with stars beyond counting. Along part of the horizon, luminous peaks and ridges can be seen dimly, so distant they might define the edge of the world, like alabaster ramparts protecting a fairy-tale kingdom, the walls of Shangri-la in which the light of last month’s moon still glimmers.

  Into the vastness of the Southwest he goes, past necklaces of light that are the desert towns of Tucumcari, Montoya, Cuervo, and then across the Pecos River.

  Between Amarillo and Albuquerque, when he stops for oil and gasoline, he uses a service-station restroom reeking of insecticide, where two dead cockroaches lie in a corner. The yellow light and dirty mirror reveal a reflection recognizably his but somehow different. His blue eyes seem darker and more fierce than he has ever seen them, and the lines of his usually open and friendly face have hardened.

  “I’m going to become someone,” he says to the mirror, and the man in the mirror mouths the words in concert with him.

  At eleven-thirty Sunday night, when he reaches Albuquerque, he fuels the Honda at another truckstop and orders two cheeseburgers to go. Then he is off on the next leg of his journey—three hundred and twenty-five miles to Flagstaff, Arizona—eating the sandwiches out of the white paper bags in which they came and into which drips fragrant grease, onions, and mustard.

  This will be his second night without rest, yet he isn’t sleepy. He is blessed with exceptional stamina. On other occasions he has gone seventy-two hours without sleep, yet has remained clear-headed.

  From movies he has watched on lonely nights in strange towns, he knows that sleep is the one unconquerable enemy of soldiers desperate to win a tough battle. Of policemen on stakeout. Of those who must valiantly stand guard against vampires until dawn brings the sun and salvation.

  His ability to call a truce with sleep whenever he wishes is so unusual that he shies away from thinking about it. He senses there are things about himself that he is better off not knowing, and this is one of them.

  Another lesson he has learned from movies is that every man has secrets, even those he keeps from himself. Therefore, secrets merely make him like all other men. Which is precisely the condition he most desires. To be
like other men.

  In the dream, Marty stood in a cold and windswept place, in the grip of terror. He was aware that he was on a plain as featureless and flat as one of those vast valley floors out in the Mojave Desert on the drive to Las Vegas, but he couldn’t actually see the landscape because the darkness was as deep as death. He knew something was rushing toward him through the gloom, something inconceivably strange and hostile, immense and deadly yet utterly silent, knew in his bones that it was coming, dear God, yet had no idea of the direction of its approach. Left, right, in front, behind, from the ground beneath his feet or from out of the sable-black sky above, it was coming. He could feel it, an object of such colossal size and weight that the atmosphere was compressed in its path, the air thickening as the unknown danger drew nearer. Closing on him so rapidly, faster, faster, and nowhere to hide. Then he heard Emily pleading for help somewhere in the unrelenting blackness, calling for her daddy, and Charlotte calling, too, but he could not get a fix on them. He ran one way, then another, but their increasingly frantic voices always seemed to be behind him. The unknown threat was closer, closer, the girls frightened and crying, Paige shouting his name in a voice so freighted with terror that Marty began to weep with frustration at his inability to find them, oh dear Jesus, and it was almost on top of him, the thing, whatever it was, as unstoppable as a falling moon, worlds colliding, a weight beyond measure, a force as primal as the one that had created the universe, as destructive as the one that would someday end it, Emily and Charlotte screaming, screaming—

  West of the Painted Desert, outside Flagstaff, Arizona, shortly before five o’clock Monday morning, flurries of snow swirl out of the predawn sky, and the cold air is a penetrating scalpel that scrapes his bones. The brown leather jacket that he took from the dead man’s closet in the motorhome less than sixteen hours ago in Oklahoma is not heavy enough to keep him warm in the early-morning bitterness. He shivers as he fills the tank of the Honda at a self-service pump.

  On Interstate 40 again, he begins the three-hundred-fifty -mile trip to Barstow, California. His compulsion to keep moving westward is so irresistible that he is as helpless in its grip as an asteroid captured by the earth’s tremendous gravity and pulled inexorably toward a cataclysmic impact.

  Terror propelled him out of the dream of darkness and unknown menace: Marty Stillwater sat straight up in bed. His first waking breath was so explosive, he was sure he had awakened Paige, but she slept on undisturbed. He was chilled yet sheathed in sweat.

  Gradually his heart stopped pounding so fearfully. With the glowing green numerals on the digital clock, the red cable-box light on top of the television, and the ambient light at the windows, the bedroom was not nearly as black as the plain in his dream.

  But he could not lie down. The nightmare had been more vivid and unnerving than any he’d ever known. Sleep was beyond his reach.

  Slipping out from under the covers, he padded barefoot to the nearest window. He studied the sky above the rooftops of the houses across the street, as if something in that dark vault would calm him.

  Instead, when he noticed the black sky was brightening to a deep gray-blue along the eastern horizon, the approach of dawn filled him with the same irrational dread he had felt in his office on Saturday afternoon. As color crept into the heavens, Marty began to tremble. He tried to control himself, but his shivering grew more violent. It was not daylight that he feared, but something the day was bringing with it, an unnameable threat. He could feel it reaching for him, seeking him—which was crazy, damn it—and he shuddered so violently that he had to put one hand against the windowsill to steady himself.

  “What’s wrong with me?” he whispered desperately. “What’s happening, what’s wrong?”

  Hour after hour, the speedometer needle quivers between 90 and 100 on the gauge. The steering wheel vibrates under his palms until his hands ache. The Honda shimmies, rattles. The engine issues a thin unwavering shriek, unaccustomed to being pushed so hard.

  Rust-red, bone-white, sulfur-yellow, the purple of desiccated veins, as dry as ashes, as barren as Mars, pale sand with reptilian spines of mottled rock, speckled with withered clumps of mesquite: the cruel fastness of the Mojave Desert has a majestic barrenness.

  Inevitably, the killer thinks of old movies about settlers moving west in wagon trains. He realizes for the first time how much courage was required to make their journey in those rickety vehicles, trusting their lives to the health and stamina of dray horses.

  Movies. California. He is in California, home of the movies.

  Move, move, move.

  From time to time, an involuntary mewling escapes him. The sound is like that of an animal dying of dehydration but within sight of a watering hole, dragging itself toward the pool that offers salvation but afraid it will perish before it can slake its burning thirst.

  Paige and Charlotte were already in the garage, getting in the car, when they both cried, “Emily, hurry up!”

  As Emily turned away from the breakfast table and started toward the open door that connected the kitchen to the garage, Marty caught her by the shoulder and turned her to face him. “Wait, wait, wait.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I forgot,” and puckered up for a smooch.

  “That comes second,” he said.

  “What’s first?”

  “This.” He dropped to one knee, bringing himself to her level, and with a paper towel he blotted away her milk mustache.

  “Oh, gross,” she said.

  “It was cute.”

  “More like Charlotte.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

  “She’s the messy one.”

  “Don’t be unkind.”

  “She knows it, Daddy.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  From the garage, Paige called again.

  Emily kissed him, and he said, “Don’t give your teacher any trouble.”

  “No more than she gives me,” Emily answered.

  Impulsively he pulled her against him, hugged her fiercely, reluctant to let her go. The clean fragrance of Ivory soap and baby shampoo clung to her; milk and the oaty aroma of Cheerios were on her breath. He had never smelled anything sweeter, better. Her back was frightfully small under the flat of his hand. She was so delicate, he could feel the beat of her young heart both through her chest—which pressed against him—and through her scapula and spine, against which his hand lay. He was overcome with the feeling that something terrible was going to happen and that he would never see her again if he allowed her to leave the house.

  He had to let her go, of course—or explain his reluctance, which he could not do.

  Honey, see, the problem is, something’s wrong in Daddy’s head, and I keep getting these scary thoughts, like I’m going to lose you and Charlotte and Mommy. Now, I know nothing’s going to happen, not really, because the problem is all in my head, like a big tumor or something. Can you spell “tumor”? Do you know what it is? Well, I’m going to see a doctor and have it cut out, just cut out that bad old tumor, and then I won’t be so frightened for no reason. . . .

  He dared say nothing of the sort. He would only scare her.

  He kissed her soft, warm cheek and let her go.

  At the door to the garage, she paused and looked back at him. “More poem tonight?”

  “You bet.”

  She said, “Reindeer salad . . .”

  “. . . reindeer soup . . .”

  "... all sorts of tasty ...”

  “. . . reindeer goop,” Marty finished.

  “You know what, Daddy?”

  “What?”

  “You’re soooo silly.”

  Giggling, Emily went into the garage. The ca-chunk of the door closing behind her was the most final sound Marty had ever heard.

  He stared at the door, willing himself not to rush to it and jerk it open and shout at them to get back into the house.

  He heard the big garage door rolling up.

  The car engine turned over, chug
ged, caught, raced a little as Paige pumped the accelerator before shifting into reverse.

  Marty hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room. He went to one of the front windows from which he could see the driveway. The plantation shutters were folded away from the window, so he stayed a couple of steps from the glass.

  The white BMW backed down the driveway, out of the shadow of the house and into the late-November sunshine. Emily was riding up front with her mother, and Charlotte was in the rear seat.

  As the car receded along the tree-lined street, Marty stepped so close to the living-room window that his forehead pressed against the cool glass. He tried to keep his family in view as long as possible, as if they were certain to survive anything—even falling airplanes and nuclear blasts—if he just did not let them out of his sight.

  His last glimpse of the BMW was through a sudden veil of hot tears that he barely managed to repress.

  Disturbed by the intensity of his emotional reaction to his family’s departure, he turned away from the window and said savagely, “What the hell’s the matter with me?”

  After all, the girls were merely going to school and Paige to her office, where they went more days than not. They were following a routine that had never been dangerous before, and he had no logical reason to believe it was going to be dangerous today—or ever.

  He looked at his wristwatch. 7:48.

  His appointment with Dr. Guthridge was only slightly more than five hours away, but that seemed an interminable length of time. Anything could happen in five hours.

  Needles to Ludlow to Daggett.

  Move, move, move.

  9:04 Pacific Standard Time.

  Barstow. Dry bleached town in a hard dry land. Stagecoaches stopped here long ago. Railroad yards. Waterless rivers. Cracked stucco, peeling paint. Green of trees faded by a perpetual layer of dust on the leaves. Motels, fast-food restaurants, more motels.

  A service station. Gasoline. Men’s room. Candy bars. Two cans of cold Coke.

  Attendant too friendly. Chatty. Slow to make change. Little pig eyes. Fat cheeks. Hate him. Shut up, shut up, shut up.