CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (6 page)

"Buckle up," he said. "Have a Coke. We'll eat later."

Molly grinned and did as she was told. She could get used to funny old Cruise with his long hair and strange sleeping habits. She could. What an adventure running away from home was turning out to be!

Wouldn't her daddy just die.

CHAPTER 2

THE SECOND NIGHT

Molly was wired, all her senses jouncing to an internal beat. She hadn't slept much the night before, and during the day she had wandered around the park waiting for Cruise to wake. Now fatigue had taken over, but it left her mind strung out like an addict looking for a fix. This happened when she went too long without sleep. She chattered like a monkey until her mind closed shop and faded to black.

"Sure was boring hanging around all day while you were sleeping." She bit the inside of her cheek. Real smart. Cruise was taking her to California, and so far it was a free ride. She must try not to complain.

"I'm sorry about that." He sounded genuinely upset. "I just can't drive in the day. The light hurts my eyes."

She peered at him in the gloom of the car. Dusk was thick and the sky was devoid of stars. "You have a problem seeing?"

"Only in sunlight. It's been that way since I was a kid. I'm a night person. You heard of the lark and the owl? I'm the owl. The night is cooler, cleaner in some ways. I like the shadows of trees and hills, the houses and closed shops s1eeping in the towns. I like neon. Ever notice how neon lights sizzle? You walk beneath them on a sidewalk and you can hear them. It's like bacon frying."

"How'd you go to school if you stayed up all night?"

"I missed it as much as I could." He smiled, remembering. She saw that. She understood that. Wasn't she missing school? Wasn't school for idiots anyway? All that regimentation. All those dumb authority games. Principals and teachers playing like they were army sergeants. Students kissing ass or acting up, one or the other. Just about everyone on drugs. There was more LSD and pot in the schools than there had ever been at the Woodstock concert. Straight kids were on the make or trying to outdo everyone else. A dumb exercise in futility for goobheads.

"I even like truck stops," Cruise was saying.

"Truck stops? Really?"

"It's the meeting place for the underworld."

"Truckers, you mean?"

"Yeah, truckers. Their girls. Travelers. Night workers. They live like I do. On the road driving, living in a machine with wheels on it, meeting strangers . . ." He looked at her. She smiled, his stranger.

"I never knew anyone who liked truck stops." She had never heard anyone even mention truck stops.

"Most people don't know about them. It's where everything's happening while the rest of the world sleeps. Men are in there showering, doing their laundry, shopping, eating breakfast at three in the morning. People are awake in truck stops even in the middle of the darkest hours."

"I see you have a CB. You talk to truckers too?"

He glanced at the mike hanging from its slot below the radio. "I talk to them sometimes."

'They're all cowboys, right? Jeans and boots and big bellies?"

Cruise shook his bead. "Not all of 'em. That's what people think. Maybe that's the way it was years ago. Today these guys are the independents. They're the men who won't work regular jobs, who don't fit in. And they're not ignorant. You don't drive forty tons of steel at seventy miles an hour and live to tell about it if you're stupid."

Molly brought her right thumb to her lips and chewed softly on the fleshy part. "That's cool beans." Though she wasn't sure she believed it.

"Cool beans." He laughed. "Yeah."

"You ever drive trucks?"

He smiled. "No, not me. I do my cruising in four wheelers."

"That's why you're called Cruise, right?"

"Sure. I told you."

"Like they called you Cruise when you were a kid, huh?"' She knew teasing him might be a mistake, but she couldn't stop her mouth from running. Nervous energy twanged through her until she was drops of water dancing on hot coals.

"When I was a kid," he said slowly, "I had an awful name."

"What was it?"

"Herod."

"Hmmm." She sucked her thumb to keep from busting out with a derisive laugh.

"Herod. The king who ordered the murder of all male babies in Jerusalem. He was trying to do away with Christ, remember?"

She didn't, but she believed him. "Why did your mom name you that then? You Jewish or something?"

"No. She just had a bad sense of humor, I guess. Or she didn't know her Bible. Probably the latter. She gave us all formal-sounding names. Orson. Hortense. Evelander. We call her Laurie, but my mother didn't approve. Collan, Dorian. It goes on. I had a big family."

"Well, I like Cruise better. Herod doesn't fit you, you know?"

"I didn't think so either."

Molly fell silent, her mind finally slowing a bit, enough for her to seize control of it. The fatigue had made its sluggish way though her body, up her neck, and was now beginning to circle the wagons in her skull. She blinked sleepily.

"I knew a guy once," Cruise began slowly.

Molly stretched in her seat. She wondered if it had a lever that let the seat back the way his seat reclined.

"This guy," Cruise continued, "went to Hollywood to write scripts for the movies."

Molly's ears perked up. "Did he? Write for the movies?"

She loved movies and movie stars. Debra Winger. Rutger Hauer. Richard Gere. Cory Haime. Now there was a guy you could sink your teeth into. When he acted he always had his mouth open, even when he was a kid in the movies. Like he was a fly-catcher, unofficially, of course.

"He wanted to real bad," Cruise said. "He'd gone to one of those fancy colleges out east and he'd studied and he wanted more than anything to write screenplays. I met him in Hollywood. He was sitting in an all-night cafe drinking coffee. We started talking."

"Yeah? I bet they do that a lot--sit in cafes-- those writers."

"This one did. See, he had a problem."

"He couldn't sell any of his scripts."

"That's right. He was up against the best. And this guy had money. He came from a family with money so it wasn't like be had to make it in Hollywood. But in another way he did. He had stopped taking money from his mother. But she came over to his little apartment all the time, bitching him out, asking him what he thought he was doing wasting himself. He had graduated from Princeton or Harvard or some shit like that. She wanted him to do something else. Be useful, make a real living, have an office and a desk. On top of her nagging, she was always sending over her maid to clean his place. Wouldn't even ask him if he wanted that. She just did it."

"What an asshole. She was on his case bad, huh?"

"Every chance she got. And this guy, he was losing it. He was living like a pig and his mind was going. Failure does that to some people. Not getting the dream they think they deserve."

Molly said thoughtfully, "I can feature that."

"So this guy starts breaking out. He imagines things."

"Like what? Winning an academy award?"

"Nothing that wholesome. He started thinking he had worms and rats in his stomach. He thought they were always coming out. He thought he vomited them."

"Oh, ga-ross. You mean he told you this? Over coffee?"

"Yeah, we talked all night. He said he was sure people were going to know soon. About the things in his stomach. He said they moved around, beneath his shirt, and someone was going to see it. Or he'd vomit and they'd know. His mother came over so much, she was going to discover it. He thought maybe someone had given him something, some kind of new biological germ or something."

"Weirded out."

"That's what I figured."

"So what happened to him?"

"About a month later I came back through Hollywood . I dropped by his apartment to see him. When he let me in it smelled in there. Rancid, nasty. Like vomit. He was carrying around a knife."

"What for?"

"For protection, I guess. By then he was suspicious of everybody. I think he was getting ready to kill the rats and worms he thought were coming out of his mouth. I tried to talk him down, but. . ."

"Why didn't his mom do something?"

"She was a bitch. She didn't know he was a guy dying like that. She thought he was just being stubborn or something. She thought she could nag him out of it. Turn him into a contributing member of society. Make him into a top executive."

"Could you help him?"

"You don't help someone who's carrying around a butcher knife. You don't even try."

"That's too bad." Molly felt terrible. Rats in the stomach. God.

"The next time I came through Hollywood, his apartment was empty. He was gone. He had given me his mother's phone number. I called her and she said he'd slit his throat. Over the sink. She didn't know why and she was bawling so hard I hung up. But I know why he did it."

"Over the sink?
"

"Yeah. When I was there before he told me he always threw up in the kitchen sink so he could flush those things down the disposal. It was the only way he knew to get rid of them. Grind 'em up."

"Christ."

Cruise was silent. Molly swallowed hard, the idea of a slit throat squeezing her neck muscles tight.

"I've met some strange folk," Cruise said finally.

"I bet. Rats and worms. Ugh."

"If he'd just sold one script," Cruise said.

"He might not have gone crazy," Molly supplied.

"Maybe," Cruise agreed. "Maybe not."

Molly was no longer sleepy. In fact she might not sleep for a year. She stared wide-eyed out the windshield imagining the desperation it took to make someone commit suicide over the top of a disposal.

#

He saw Molly nodding now. She was tired, poor baby. Her waking and sleeping cycles did not yet fit his own. She was still a day person. If he woke her every couple of hours and kept her awake, he'd gradually change the cycles until she too would sleep during the day. He'd let her snooze just a little. Wake her again later.

He concentrated on the bright lights he approached. The city of Houston. Interstate 10 took him through the heart of the city. He could see it off to his right on the loop, the tall skyline of multiple dark rectangles against the night sky. Two of the buildings were identically wedge-shaped, butted close against each other. Dallas, he knew, was a more spectacular scene at night with buildings outlined in multicolored neon, but Houston wasn't bad. One building had a square of lime green around its roof, a few had white outlines. Streetlights twinkled in straight lines down the canyons. Cars streamed past on the freeway, all of them going ten or twenty miles faster than the speed limit. It was at lease seventy miles across the city from one side to the other. It spread from the NASA complex south of the city all the way to Conroe, Texas, a suburb town to the north.

Texas was a frightening place. Cruise didn't kill in Texas. The cops were hardasses. Smart. Tough. They were alert.

What he did not need was a Texas lawman sticking one of those nickel-plated big goddamn .357 Magnums in his face. Some of the highway patrolmen would blow you away as easy as look at you. Uh uh. Driving across Texas always gave him the creeps. He kept to the speed limit, stayed in his lane, and drove on auto pilot until he hit the New

Mexico line.

It was a long haul from Houston to the western border. Maybe he'd go down into Juarez, Mexico, outside of El Paso for a spot of relief. He sneaked a glance at his passenger. She was snoring lightly, little mouth open. He thought about her breath

smelling of milk, like a baby, although he knew it wouldn't, if anything it would smell like Coca Cola. He thought about her angular, pubescent body. Tiny breasts budding on her chest. Hips so small he could hold them in the palms of his big hands like slabs of rich steak.

Oh, boy, did he need relief. He was thinking of her in terms of food, for chrissakes.

He wondered if she'd dream of the scriptwriter with rats and worms in his stomach. The one with the rich mama and the failed dreams. Even now, somewhere in Hollywood

there was another guy just like that. They were out there, all those suicides and hucksters and nagging mothers. All those nightmares and paranoiacs. Cruise knew them and their stories. He lived one of the stories himself, the most bizarre of all. He was able to live out the fantasy, live out his dreams others called warped and depraved only because they didn't understand, because they weren't members of the outlaw elite.

Houston's lights melted into the background as he moved across the huge state of Texas going west. He raced the sun threatening to rise at his back. Every night he raced against the sun. Already his eyes came down into slits against the peril of dawn.

He'd wake Molly and tell her another story. That always helped to keep the night with him, the sunrise at bay.

"Molly," he called. "C,mon, wake up, baby."

"Huh...?What?"

"We'll stop pretty soon and you can sleep then. Keep

me company, okay?"

He heard her clear her throat, saw her straighten from the slump of sleep, trying to come awake and please him.

"Almost morning?"

He squinted into the darkness. "Soon."

"I'm really beat."

"Talk to me a little bit. I got a long stretch here to drive across Texas. Let me tell you about this guy I knew once...

Soon he had a tale spinning and Molly wide awake, riveted to her seat where she was turned toward him. What a kid. What a great kid. He just couldn't have found a better traveling partner if he'd tried for a month. Too bad that he'd have to kill her in the end. He was as fond of her as he had been of any of his former witnesses.

The edge of the sun slipped up behind him as he talked. The landscape changed from gray to pink to molten orange. The land looked wild and desolate painted in vivid Van

Gogh colors. They were in the dry plains where nothing but mesquite trees and cacti dared to try to make a go of it. It was too open, the sky too big, a maw opening to swallow him. He hated fucking Texas.

Cruise saw an exit for a truck stop and slowed to take the ramp. He was somewhere between San Antonio and El Paso. He had to drive this goddamn state in chunks. No