Mulling such thoughts took what little of my concentration wasn’t incessantly chanting smack smack smack and I never even saw the trooper’s car approach until the nose of his cruiser was headlamp to headlamp with my Jetta. He popped his lamps to bright, and when he opened the door I could hear the faint hum reminding him his keys were in the ignition. It was close to the sound Chase’s nightmare opium had buzzed me with and for a moment I felt certain I would flash back and begin writhing in turmoil. But for once my subconscious was just that — sub — and I was able to endure the rattlesnake hum by focusing on what to say, what to do to end the conversation quickly.
I heard the trooper’s boot crunch the loose asphalt as he took his first step toward me. Far away, a lone rig approached us, barely seen and as yet unheard. I imagined the conversation in my head. Very simple. Picked up a tar tack. Need help? No sir, I can manage, good to do a little work during a long drive anyway, clear the head. Long haul, eh? Yes sir, clear to Tallahassee. Well, see you get that tire patched and keep it under fifty with that spare on. Yes sir.
The rig finished rounding the off-ramp and approached, its whine slowly eating into the buzz of the cop’s Chrysler. I practiced the conversation again, head down, thinking in rhythm with the crunching of his boots. The third time through the script I saw the fatal error, but it was too late. Parked nose to nose, with my left rear wheel blown, the cop would have to come around the trunk of my car to get to my side, to get to “need help?” Come around the open trunk. The one with the bag holding a loaded syringe, the one with an uncovered Colt pistol lying plainly in sight.
He was a step away from rounding my Jetta’s back side when the rig roared by. My subconscious burst on the scene and my mind splintered eighteen different ways at once. I saw the cop spotting the firearm, cuffing me and taking me in, and getting a bust for possession in the bargain; I saw Lazarus getting the word to someone on the inside who owed him; I saw myself getting a tracheotomy with a toothbrush in the hoser at the Mississippi state pen — like father, like son. I saw Faith raising Emily to believe “Daddy was killed when the mine collapsed, before you were born,” not wanting to admit to her brood, much less to herself, that her judgement could have been so flawed.
A defiant scream erupted as the rig blew past, knocking the trooper’s hat off. “Goddammit,” he insisted and bent to pick it up, even as the tail end of the trailer completed its “woosh,” leaving only a vacuum of receding yellow reflectors. When the trooper replaced his hat and turned to finally check on me, I crushed him square in the jaw with my tire iron.
The sound was anticlimactic. Bones don’t “crunch” as advertised, nor do they crack or splinter. I heard a dense wet thud, as though I were splitting logs that had just come in from a three day drizzle. Blood exploded from his mouth and his tongue protruded dumbly, forked by a deep gash running from tip to root. I swung again, then again, mesmerized by the soggy, absorbing slap of the blows and the off-beat metallic ping that preceded each one. Only later did I discover that each back-swing had cost my Jetta a tail light, a trunk lip, a dinged fender.
His eyes stayed open throughout. I kept waiting for oncoming cars but the only time in my life when things went my way happened to be the time I bludgeoned a police officer to death. You have no idea how resilient the human spirit is until you are forced to extinguish one. To pound a man’s skull with a two-foot piece of steel and have him continue to gawk at you: why, it’s all the proof of the existence of the human soul you can ever need. It took me ninety seconds to spill enough of his brains on the hardpan to ensure my escape, and then I had to scrape the pieces of his scalp from my tool so I could finish applying the spare.
And now it is a day-and-a-half later and I-90 (and I-10 for that matter) is just a memory since I hit 95 north in Jacksonville. There’s no point in fulfilling my vision quest after doing one of Mississippi’s finest. A dead cop and a dead gambler inside an hour would only help draw a line through the big red dots I left behind. A line that would form an arrow pointing straight to good old Creole. It comes down to fight or flight and I’ve done my share of the former. It’s time to do some of the latter, or more accurately to do some of the latter by doing some more of the former. And maybe not alone either. Not if I can help it.
Charlotte is an hour away and I’ll make my true destination by nightfall. It’s been a long sobering drive in the dark and I have very little reason for hope. I left the cop’s dead body in the short grass by the side of the road, his car door still open, brights still blazing. No doubt I left a breadbox full of forensic evidence as well. That rig driver could remember spotting us. Patsy probably doesn’t get Marx quoted to her all that often. Yet, very little reason or no, I remain hopeful.
For one thing, what I said to Patsy was honest, and that’s a start. If I can confess my horrific concept of love as a house-rules gamble to a stranger, how hard can it be to do the same with my wife? And once I tell her, maybe she can help me find my way back to seeing it as I did when I first fell in love with her. For another, if I can write all this down for you — you whove never even set eyes on me and have every right, every reason to believe me a monster — if I can set all this down for you, what do I have to hide from Faith? And still another: I saw that cop coming and saw my future and fought back. Inherent in that slaying must be the conviction that a better, alternate future is possible. For the second time in as many days, I had a gun at my head, but this time I chose a new path.
So all signs point to a trust my subconscious has yet to make public but might. Maybe I can beat heroin. Maybe I can find my wife and my daughter in Baltimore, a scant ten hours away, and convince them I — we — deserve another chance. Maybe we can dodge Lazarus long enough for him to lose interest, get a job in San Luis Obispo, or Cincinnati, or Canada. Maybe we can live happily ever after and all that shit.
Lawrence Block
Keller on the Spot
from Playboy
Keller, drink in hand, agreed with the woman in the pink dress that it was indeed a lovely evening. He threaded his way through a crowd of young marrieds on what he supposed you would call the patio. A waitress passed carrying a tray of drinks in stemmed glasses and he traded in his own for a fresh one. He sipped as he walked along, wondering what he was drinking. Some sort of vodka sour, he decided, and decided as well that he didn’t need to narrow it down any further than that. He figured he’d have this one and one more, but he could have ten more if he wanted, because he wasn’t working tonight. He could relax and cut loose and have a good time.
Well, almost. He couldn’t relax completely, couldn’t cut loose altogether. Because, while this might not be work, neither was it entirely recreational. The garden party this evening was a heaven-sent opportunity for reconnaissance, and he would use it to get a close look at his quarry. He had been handed a picture back in White Plains, and he had brought that picture with him to Dallas, but even the best photo wasn’t the same as a glimpse of the fellow in the flesh, and in his native habitat.
And a lush habitat it was. Keller hadn’t been inside the house yet, but it was clearly immense, a sprawling multilevel affair of innumerable large rooms. The grounds sprawled as well, covering an acre or two, with enough plants and shrubbery to stock an arboretum. Keller didn’t know anything about flowers, but five minutes in a garden like this one had him thinking he ought to know more about the subject. Maybe they had evening classes at Hunter or NYU; maybe they’d take you on field trips to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.