“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 inner Tommy Udo; she had no urge to watch or prolong Norville’s suffering. She bent and picked up the .38. From the right front pocket of her cargo pants she removed the item she had taken from the kitchen drawer beside her stove. It was a quilted oven glove. It would silence a single pistol shot quite effectively, as long as the caliber wasn’t too big. She had learned this while writing The Willow Grove Knitting Society Goes on a Mystery Cruise.
“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 Inn’s foyer, with its band photos.
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 ovenglove—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 Inn and even farther from Colewich’s downtown. Transport Plaza was at the intersection of the two roads. According to the signage, three trucking firms and a moving company were based here. The buildings that housed them had an ugly prefab look. The smallest belonged to Red Hawk Trucking. All were dark on this Sunday night. Beyond them were acres of parking lot surrounded by Cyclone fence and lit with high-intensity arc lights. The depot lot was full of parked cabs and freight haulers. At least one of the cab-overs had RED HAWK TRUCKING on the side, but Tess didn’t think it was the one pictured on the website, the one with the Proud Papa behind the wheel.
There was a truck stop adjacent to the depot area. The pumps—over a dozen—were lit by the same high-intensity arcs. Bright white fluorescents spilled out from the right side of the main building; the left side was dark. There was another building, this one U-shaped, to the rear. A scattering of cars and trucks was parked there. The sign out by the road was a huge digital job, loaded with bright red information.
And at the bottom, badly spelled but fervent: