Lennox took a hard drag from his cigarette and thought of the .22 stuffed beneath the front seat. He imagined pressing the barrel to Teddy’s left ear and squeezing the trigger and knew that doing it would push away the worry, the same way saying his prayers before bedtime had kept nightmares at bay when he was a boy.
“What about Fred and Wilma?” Teddy asked as they pulled even with a minivan and a fat, dark-haired man and his redheaded wife. “Gut shoot them, right? Make them suffer a little bit.”
“It’s not about making people suffer,” Lennox said. “I’m not disturbed.”
Teddy cocked his eyebrow and slouched back against the scat. Lennox snubbed his cigarette. He didn’t know how to make the kid understand or see the order and self-control of his murders. Lennox wasn’t a sadist, and he wasn’t excessive. One a year. Twenty-four murders so far, the first a vagrant who slept behind a liquor store in Lexington, Kentucky, the last a seventeen-year-old runaway who solicited travelers at a Waffle House in Dalton, Georgia. Lennox had been so discreet in choosing his victims and so cautious in his methods that the police had never guessed all of the murders were connected.
“You make them beg?” Teddy asked.
The boy would never understand. Lennox wasn’t sure he understood it. Occasionally, he tried to figure out why he’d started killing, but he’d never come up with a satisfactory answer. Sometimes, he thought it was just the road. Years of driving the same, unchanging highway and staring at the same billboards and same cityscapes and the patches of pine trees and grass that were always the same whether the signs told you that you were in northern Ohio or southern Georgia and eating in the same restaurants and diners and listening to the same songs on a dozen different radio stations and vomiting the same spiel a dozen times a day to bored Bowl-A-Rama managers made life as meaningless as the fragments of graffiti he read on overpasses and bathroom walls — Jesus Saves or Sandra’s a Slut, perhaps. One murder a year gave him a reason for his life on the road. The boy would never understand. With his endless chatter and his crudeness, Teddy was making even murder seem meaningless.
“Sure you do,” Teddy said. “You make them beg. I bet you get off on it.”
“Shut up,” Lennox said, surprising even himself with his anger.
Teddy blinked his bright blue eyes. “You don’t have to get pissy,” he said. “I was just talking.”
“That’s the problem.”
Teddy pretended to be fascinated by the billboards advertising Cincinnati FM stations and Budweiser. Lennox shouldn’t have told the boy about the murders and wasn’t sure why he did other than there was something about Teddy that drew Lennox to him. He’d felt it when he spotted the boy hanging around a payphone at a rest area just south of Toledo, and the feeling had been so strong that Lennox had broken his own rule and offered the boy a ride, telling himself it was because in his baggy jeans, windbreaker, and sock cap Teddy was likely to freeze on a snowy January day but knowing that he didn’t want to be alone today, not when the world was as gray and cold as Muriel would be under the hospital’s fluorescent lights.
He’d regretted it five minutes after Teddy got in the car when the boy leered at him, scooted across the seat, and offered to give him a blowjob. Lennox had recoiled, threatened to put him out on the side of the road. He told Teddy that one thing Tom Lennox was not was a faggot. Didn’t he see the wedding ring on his finger? Teddy had shrugged and said there was no reason to get angry. A lot of straight guys wouldn’t turn down a blowjob, and he’d just wanted to say thanks for the ride. Ten miles later, Teddy launched into a long discourse on why he always wore a sock cap. He said if you took your cap off your heat leaked out, which was bad, but sometimes your soul went with it and then where the hell were you, walking around without a soul? That was crazy talk, and it scared Lennox. But Teddy had just smiled as if the whole thing were a joke, and Lennox couldn’t decide if the boy was putting him on or if he was really crazy. Twenty minutes later, Teddy told Lennox that he’d served five years in a juvenile home for armed robbery and that while he was there he’d knifed two boys, but no one had been able to prove it so he walked away free as a bird. Something about Teddy was like a key turning inside Lennox’s mind, and when the boy finished his story, Lennox told his own. Now, Lennox looked at Teddy slumped against the door and felt guilty for the way he’d spoken to him. He wasn’t sure why, just that indefinable something.
“I’m sorry,” Lennox said. “Never mind what I said.”
Teddy’s head popped up, and he reached for a cigarette without asking. “You’re probably just tense,” he said. “You sure you don’t want me to blow you?”
Lennox squinted through the snow at the high rises and bridges that marked the beginnings of Cincinnati. “I told you I’m not a homosexual.”
Teddy blew a smoke ring. “Me neither. I mean not really. But I don’t mind doing a guy a favor.”
Then Teddy said he had a great idea. Why didn’t they kill someone. Make it a special occasion. If they killed somebody together, Lennox would know his secret was safe. The only other way to guarantee it was if Lennox killed him.
“And I don’t meant to be offensive or anything,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure I could take you.”
Lennox told him to stop talking. Traffic was picking up, the road was icy, and he needed to concentrate. They headed south through Cincinnati. With its snow tires and steady wipers, the Buick glided through traffic as anonymous as the first wayward cells of cancer.
They stopped at a Ramada just south of Richmond, Kentucky, and Lennox had Teddy lie across the front seat while he registered. Except for his diet and his smoking, Lennox was cautious in all things. If anything went wrong tonight, he wanted no one to be able to connect him with Teddy.
The sky was stained a molded gray, and snow swirled in a whipping wind that whistled from the foothills outside of town. Three-quarters of the parking lot was already full and yellow lights glowed from dozens of steamed windows.
“Nice room,” Teddy said when Lennox unlocked the door.
It was just a motel room — worn carpet, heavy green drapes, a paisley bedspread on a hard, queen-size bed, a couple of vinyl chairs, a burn-scarred writing table, and a television bolted to a stand on the dresser. Lennox unpacked while Teddy paced the room, turning the faucet on and off, bouncing on the bed, (lipping through channels on the television.
Lennox pulled off his sweater, uncomfortably aware of the way his gut sagged over his Dockers. It was five-thirty EST, which meant Muriel should be home from the doctor. Lennox pulled a pint of Jack Daniel’s from the side pocket of his suitcase, broke the seal, and poured a double shot into a plastic cup and then offered Teddy the bottle.
“I never drink the stuff,” he said. “A beer now and then, but that’s it. That junk will kill you. You don’t believe me ask my old man.”
Lennox downed his whiskey. He poured another two fingers into his cup.
“Don’t get soused,” Teddy said.
“I can handle my whiskey.”
Teddy fiddled with his sock cap. “I’m not preaching or anything.”
Lennox drank, refilled his cup, and told Teddy to keep quiet while he called home. Then he sat on the bed and dialed the number and was surprised that his hands weren’t shaking. The phone rang four times before the answering machine kicked on.