Full dark, no stars

Tess made no attempt at stealth-why bother to kill the headlights when Lester Strehlke would know the sound of his brother’s truck almost as well as the sound of his brother’s voice?

She was still wearing the bleach-splattered brown cap Big Driver wore when he wasn’t on the road, the lucky cap that turned out to be unlucky in the end. The ring with the fake ruby stone was far too big for any of her fingers, so she had put it into the left front pocket of her cargo pants. Little Driver had dressed and driven as his big brother when he went out hunting, and while he might never have time enough (or brains enough) to appreciate the irony of his last victim coming to him with the same accessories, Tess did.

She parked by the back door, turned off the engine, and got out. She carried the gun in one hand. The door was unlocked. She stepped into a shed that smelled of beer and spoiled food. A single sixty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling on a length of dirty cord. Straight ahead were four overflowing plastic garbage cans, the thirty-two-gallon kind you could buy at Walmart. Behind them, stacked against the shed wall, were what looked like five years’ worth of Uncle Henry’s swap guide. To the left was another door, up a single step. It would lead to the kitchen. It had an old-fashioned latch rather than a knob. The door squalled on unoiled hinges when she depressed the latch and pushed it open. An hour ago, such a squall would have terrified her into immobility. Now it didn’t bother her in the slightest. She had work to do. That was all it came down to, and it was a relief to be free of all that emotional baggage. She stepped into the smell of whatever greasy meat Little Driver had fried for his supper. She could hear a TV laugh-track. Some sitcom. Seinfeld, she thought.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Lester Strehlke called from the vicinity of the laugh-track. “I ain’t got but a beer and a half left, if that’s what you came for. I’m go

She came into the room. He saw her. Tess hadn’t speculated on what his reaction might be to the reappearance of his last victim, carrying a gun and wearing the hat Lester himself wore when his urges came over him. Even if she had, she could never have predicted the extremity of the one she saw. His mouth dropped open, and then his entire face froze. The can of beer he was holding dropped from his hand and fell into his lap, spraying foam onto his only article of clothing, a pair of yellowing Jockey shorts.

He’s seeing a ghost, she thought as she walked toward him, raising the gun. Good.

There was time to see that, although the living room was a bachelor mess and there were no snowglobes or cutie-poo figurines, the TV-watching setup was the same as the one at his mother’s house on Lacemaker Lane: the La-Z-Boy, the TV tray (here holding a final unopened can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a bag of Doritos instead of Diet Coke and Cheez Doodles), the same TV Guide, the one with Simon Cowell on it.

“You’re dead,” he whispered.

“No,” Tess replied. She put the barrel of the Lemon Squeezer against the side of his head. He made one feeble effort to grab her wrist, but it was far too little and much too late. “That’s you.”

She pulled the trigger. Blood came out of his ear and his head snapped briskly to the side. He looked like a man trying to free up a kink in his neck. On the TV, George Costanza said, “I was in the pool, I was in the pool.” The audience laughed. – 41 -

It was almost midnight, and the wind was blowing harder than ever. When it gusted, Lester Strehlke’s whole house shook, and each time Tess thought of the little pig who had built his house out of sticks.

The little piggy who had lived in this one would never have to worry about his shitty house blowing away, because he was dead in his La-Z-Boy. And he wasn’t a little piggy, anyway, Tess thought. He was a big bad wolf.

She was sitting in the kitchen, writing on the pages of a grimy Blue Horse tablet she had found in Strehlke’s upstairs bedroom. There were four rooms on the second floor, but the bedroom was the only one not stuffed with junk, everything from iron bedsteads to an Evinrude boat-motor that looked as if it might have been dropped from the top of a five-story building. Because it would take weeks or months to go through those caches of the useless, the worthless, and the pointless, Tess turned all her attention on Strehlke’s bedroom and searched it carefully. The Blue Horse tablet was a bonus. She had found what she was looking for in an old travel-tote pushed to the very back of the closet shelf, where it had been camouflaged-not very successfully-with old issues of National Geographic. In it was a tangle of women’s underwear. Her own panties were on top. Tess put them in her pocket and, packrat-like, replaced them with the coil of yellow boat-line. Nobody would be surprised to find rope in a rapist-killer’s suitcase of trophy lingerie. Besides, she would not be needing it.

“Tonto,” said the Lone Ranger, “our work here is done.”

What she wrote, as Seinfeld gave way to Frasier and Frasier gave way to the local news (one Chicopee resident had won the lottery and another had suffered a broken back after falling from a scaffolding, so that balanced out), was a confession in the form of a letter. As she reached page five, the TV news gave way to an apparently endless commercial for Almighty Cleanse. Da

The letter was headed TO THE PROPER AUTHORITIES, and the first four pages consisted of a single paragraph. In her head it sounded like a scream. Her hand was tired, and the ballpoint pen she’d found in a kitchen drawer (RED HAWK TRUCKING printed in fading gilt on the barrel) was showing signs of drying up, but she was, thank God, almost done. While Little Driver went on not watching TV from where he sat in his La-Z-Boy, she at last started a new paragraph at the top of page five.

I will not make excuses for what I have done. Nor can I say that I did it while of unsound mind. I was furious and I made a mistake. It’s that simple. Under other circumstances-those less terrible, I mean-I might say, “It was a natural mistake, the two of them look almost enough alike to be twins.” But these are not other circumstances.

I have thought of atonement as I sat here, writing these pages and listening to his television and to the wind-not because I hope for forgiveness, but because it seems wrong to do wrong without at least trying to balance it out with something right. (Here Tess thought of how the lottery wi

But then I thought of Doreen Marquis, from the Knitting Society, and what she says once in every book…

What Doreen said at least once in every book was murderers always overlook the obvious. You may depend on it, dears. And even as Tess wrote about atonement, she realized it would be impossible. Because Doreen was absolutely right.

Tess had worn a cap so that she wouldn’t leave hair that could be analyzed for DNA. She had worn gloves which she had never taken off, even while driving Alvin Strehlke’s pickup. It was not too late to burn this confession in Lester’s kitchen woodstove, drive to Brother Alvin’s considerably nicer house (house of bricks instead of house of sticks), get into her Expedition, and head back to Co