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“You’re a shitty writer and you were a shitty guest speaker,” Norville said. She was smiling, speaking faster and faster. Her voice had a nasal auctioneer’s lilt. “You phoned in your talk the same way you phone in your stupid books. You were perfect for him and he was going to do someone, I know the signs. I sent you that way and it worked out right and I’m glad he fucked you. I don’t know what you thought you were going to do, coming here, but this is what you get.”
She pulled the trigger and there was nothing but a dry click. Tess had taken lessons when she bought the gun, and the most important had been not to put a bullet in the chamber that would first fall under the hammer. Just in case the trigger was pulled by accident.
An expression of almost comical surprise came over Norville’s face. It made her young again. She looked down at the gun, and when she did, Tess drew the knife from the inside pocket of the jacket, stumbled forward, and jammed it up to the hilt in Norville’s belly.
The woman made a glassy “OOO- OOOO” sound that tried to be a scream and failed. Tess’s pistol dropped and Ramona staggered back against the wall, looking down at the handle of the knife. One flailing arm struck a rank of Hummel figures. They tumbled from the shelf and shattered on the floor. She made that “OOO- OOOO” sound again. The front of the housecoat was still unstained, but blood began to patter from beneath its hem, onto Ramona Norville’s manshoes. She put her hands on the haft of the knife, tried to tug it free, and made the “OOO- OOOO” for the third time.
She looked up at Tess, unbelieving. Tess looked back. She was remembering something that had happened on her tenth birthday. Her father had given her a slingshot, and she had gone out looking for things to shoot with it. At some point, five or six blocks from her house, she had seen a raggedy-eared stray dog rooting in a garbage can. She had put a small rock in her slingshot and fired at it, only meaning to scare the dog away (or so she told herself), but hitting it in the rump instead. The dog had made a miserable ike-ike-ike sound and run away, but before it did, it gave Tess a look of reproach she had never forgotten. She would have given anything to take that casual shot back, and she had never fired her slingshot at another living thing. She understood that killing was a part of life-she felt no compunction about swatting mosquitoes, put down traps when she saw mouse-droppings in the cellar, and had eaten her fair share of Mickey D’s Quarter Pounders-but then she had believed she would never again be able to hurt something that way without feeling remorse or regret. She suffered neither in the living room of the house on Lacemaker Lane. Perhaps because, in the end, it had been self-defense. Or perhaps that wasn’t it at all.
“Ramona,” she said, “I’m feeling a certain kinship to Richard Widmark right now. This is what we do to squealers, honey.”
Norville was standing in a puddle of her own blood and her housecoat was at last blooming with blood-poppies. Her face was pale. Her dark eyes were huge and glittery with shock. Her tongue came out and swiped slowly across her lower lip.
“Now you can roll around for a long time, thinkin’ it over-how would that be?”
Norville began to slide. Her manshoes made squittering sounds in the blood. She groped for one of the other shelves and pulled it off the wall. A platoon of Care Bears tilted forward and committed suicide.
Although she still felt no regret or remorse, Tess found that, in spite of her big talk, she had very little i
“You don’t understand.” Norville’s voice was a harsh whisper. “You can’t do this. It’s a mistake. Take me… hospital.”
“The mistake was yours.” Tess pulled the oven glove over the pistol, which was in her right hand. “It was not having your son castrated as soon as you found out what he was.” She put the oven glove against Ramona Norville’s temple, turned her head slightly to one side, and pulled the trigger. There was a low, emphatic pluh sound, like a big man clearing his throat.
That was all. – 35 -
She hadn’t googled Al Strehlke’s home address; she had been expecting to get that from Norville. But, as she had already reminded herself, things like this never went according to plan. What she had to do now was keep her wits about her and carry the job through to the end.
Norville’s home office was upstairs, in what had probably been meant as a spare bedroom. There were more Care Bears and Hummels here. There were also half a dozen framed pictures, but none of her sons, her main squeeze, or the late great Roscoe Strehlke; these were autographed photos of writers who had spoken to the Brown Baggers. The room reminded Tess of the Stagger I
She didn’t ask for an autograph on my photo, Tess thought. Of course not, why would she want to be reminded of a shitty writer like me? I was basically just a talking head to fill a hole in her schedule. Not to mention meat for her son’s meatgrinder. How lucky for them that I came along at the right time.
On Norville’s desk, below a bulletin board buried in circulars and library correspondence, was a desktop Mac very much like Tess’s. The screen was dark, but the glowing light on the CPU told her it was only sleeping. She pushed one of the keys with a gloved fingertip. The screen refreshed and she was looking at Norville’s electronic desktop. No need for those pesky passwords, how nice.
Tess clicked the address book icon, scrolled down to the R’s, and found Red Hawk Trucking. The address was 7 Transport Plaza, Township Road, Colewich. She scrolled further, to the S’s, and found both her overgrown acquaintance from Friday night and her acquaintance’s brother, Lester. Big Driver and Little Driver. They both lived on Township Road, near the company they must have inherited from their father: Alvin at number 23, Lester at number 101.
If there was a third brother, she thought, they’d be The Three Little Truckers. One in a house of straw, one in a house of sticks, one in a house of bricks. Alas, there are only two.
Downstairs again, she plucked her earrings from the glass dish and put them in her coat pocket. She looked at the dead woman sitting against the wall as she did it. There was no pity in the glance, only the sort of parting acknowledgment anyone may give to a piece of hard work that has now been finished. There was no need to worry about trace evidence; Tess was confident she had left none, not so much as a single strand of hair. The oven-glove-now with a hole blown in it-was back in her pocket. The knife was a common item sold in department stores all over America. For all she knew (or cared), it matched Ramona’s own set. So far she was clean, but the hard part might still be ahead. She left the house, got in her car, and drove away. Fifteen minutes later she pulled into the lot of a deserted strip mall long enough to program 23 Township Road, Colewich, into her GPS. – 36 -
With Tom’s guidance, Tess found herself near her destination not long after nine o’clock. The three-quarter moon was still low in the sky. The wind was blowing harder than ever.
Township Road branched off US 47, but at least seven miles from The Stagger I