Текст книги "Finders Keepers"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

2009

The first argument about money in the Saubers household – the first one the kids overheard, at least – happened on an evening in April. It wasn’t a big argument, but even the greatest storms begin as gentle breezes. Peter and Tina Saubers were in the living room, Pete doing homework and Tina watching a SpongeBob DVD. It was one she’d seen before, many times, but she never seemed to tire of it. This was fortunate, because these days there was no access to the Cartoon Network in the Saubers household. Tom Saubers had canceled the cable service two months ago.

Tom and Linda Saubers were in the kitchen, where Tom was cinching his old pack shut after loading it up with PowerBars, a Tupperware filled with cut veggies, two bottles of water, and a can of Coke.

‘You’re nuts,’ Linda said. ‘I mean, I’ve always known you were a Type A personality, but this takes it to a whole new level. If you want to set the alarm for five, fine. You can pick up Todd, be at City Center by six, and you’ll still be first in line.’

‘I wish,’ Tom said. ‘Todd says there was one of these job fairs in Brook Park last month, and people started lining up the day before. The day before, Lin!’

‘Todd says a lot of things. And you listen. Remember when Todd said Pete and Tina would just love that Monster Truck Jam thingie—’

‘This isn’t a Monster Truck Jam, or a concert in the park, or a fireworks show. This is our lives.’

Pete looked up from his homework and briefly met his little sister’s eyes. Tina’s shrug was eloquent: Just the parents. He went back to his algebra. Four more problems and he could go down to Howie’s house. See if Howie had any new comic books. Pete certainly had none to trade; his allowance had gone the way of the cable TV.

In the kitchen, Tom had begun to pace. Linda caught up with him and took his arm gently. ‘I know it’s our lives,’ she said.

Speaking low, partly so the kids wouldn’t hear and be nervous (she knew Pete already was), mostly to lower the temperature. She knew how Tom felt, and her heart went out to him. Being afraid was bad; being humiliated because he could no longer fulfill what he saw as his primary responsibility to support his family was worse. And humiliation really wasn’t the right word. What he felt was shame. For the ten years he’d been at Lakefront Realty, he’d consistently been one of their top salesmen, often with his smiling photo at the front of the shop. The money she brought in teaching third grade was just icing on the cake. Then, in the fall of 2008, the bottom fell out of the economy, and the Sauberses became a single-income family.

It wasn’t as if Tom had been let go and might be called back when things improved; Lakefront Realty was now an empty building with graffiti on the walls and a FOR SALE OR LEASE sign out front. The Reardon brothers, who had inherited the business from their father (and their father from his), had been deeply invested in stocks, and lost nearly everything when the market tanked. It was little comfort to Linda that Tom’s best friend, Todd Paine, was in the same boat. She thought Todd was a dingbat.

‘Have you seen the weather forecast? I have. It’s going to be cold. Fog off the lake by morning, maybe even freezing drizzle. Freezing drizzle, Tom.’

‘Good. I hope it happens. It’ll keep the numbers down and improve the odds.’ He took her by the forearms, but gently. There was no shaking, no shouting. That came later. ‘I’ve got to get something, Lin, and the job fair is my best shot this spring. I’ve been pounding the pavement—’

‘I know—’

‘And there’s nothing. I mean zilch. Oh, a few jobs down at the docks, and a little construction at the shopping center out by the airport, but can you see me doing that kind of work? I’m thirty pounds overweight and twenty years out of shape. I might find something downtown this summer – clerking, maybe – if things ease up a little … but that kind of job would be low-paying and probably temporary. So Todd and me’re going at midnight, and we’re going to stand in line until the doors open tomorrow morning, and I promise you I’m going to come back with a job that pays actual money.’

‘And probably with some bug we can all catch. Then we can scrimp on groceries to pay the doctor’s bills.’

That was when he grew really angry with her. ‘I would like a little support here.’

‘Tom, for God’s sake, I’m try—’

‘Maybe even an attaboy. “Way to show some initiative, Tom. We’re glad you’re going the extra mile for the family, Tom.” That sort of thing. If it’s not too much to ask.’

‘All I’m saying—’

But the kitchen door opened and closed before she could finish. He’d gone out back to smoke a cigarette. When Pete looked up this time, he saw distress and worry on Tina’s face. She was only eight, after all. Pete smiled and dropped her a wink. Tina gave him a doubtful smile in return, then went back to the doings in the deepwater kingdom called Bikini Bottom, where dads did not lose their jobs or raise their voices, and kids did not lose their allowances. Unless they were bad, that was.

Before leaving that night, Tom carried his daughter up to bed and kissed her goodnight. He added one for Mrs Beasley, Tina’s favorite doll – for good luck, he said.

‘Daddy? Is everything going to be okay?’

‘You bet, sugar,’ he said. She remembered that. The confidence in his voice. ‘Everything’s going to be just fine. Now go to sleep.’ He left, walking normally. She remembered that, too, because she never saw him walk that way again.

At the top of the steep drive leading from Marlborough Street to the City Center parking lot, Tom said, ‘Whoa, hold it, stop!’

‘Man, there’s cars behind me,’ Todd said.

‘This’ll just take a second.’ Tom raised his phone and snapped a picture of the people standing in line. There had to be a hundred already. At least that many. Running above the auditorium doors was a banner reading 1000 JOBS GUARANTEED! And ‘We Stand With the People of Our City!’ – MAYOR RALPH KINSLER.

Behind Todd Paine’s rusty ’04 Subaru, someone laid on his horn.

‘Tommy, I hate to be a party pooper while you’re memorializing this wonderful occasion, but—’

‘Go, go. I got it.’ And, as Todd drove into the parking lot, where the spaces nearest the building had already been filled: ‘I can’t wait to show that picture to Linda. You know what she said? That if we got here by six, we’d be first in line.’

‘Told you, my man. The Toddster does not lie.’ The Toddster parked. The Subaru died with a fart and a wheeze. ‘By daybreak, there’s gonna be, like, a couple-thousand people here. TV, too. All the stations. City at Six, Morning Report, MetroScan. We might get interviewed.’

‘I’ll settle for a job.’

Linda had been right about one thing, it was damp. You could smell the lake in the air: that faintly sewery aroma. And it was almost cold enough for him to see his breath. Posts with yellow DO NOT CROSS tape had been set up, folding the job-seekers back and forth like pleats in a human accordion. Tom and Todd took their places between the final posts. Others fell in behind them at once, mostly men, some in heavy fleece workmen’s jackets, some in Mr Businessman topcoats and Mr Businessman haircuts that were beginning to lose their finely barbered edge. Tom guessed that the line would stretch all the way to the end of the parking lot by dawn, and that would still be at least four hours before the doors opened.

His eye was caught by a woman with a baby hanging off the front of her. They were a couple of zigzags over. Tom wondered how desperate you had to be to come out in the middle of a cold, damp night like this one with an infant. The kiddo was in one of those Papoose carriers. The woman was talking to a burly man with a sleeping bag slung over his shoulder, and the baby was peering from one to the other, like the world’s smallest tennis fan. Sort of comical.

‘Want a little warm-up, Tommy?’ Todd had taken a pint of Bell’s from his pack and was holding it out.

Tom almost said no, remembering Linda’s parting shot – Don’t you come home with booze on your breath, mister – and then took the bottle. It was cold out here, and a short one wouldn’t hurt. He felt the whiskey go down, heating his throat and belly.

Rinse your mouth before you hit any of the job booths, he reminded himself. Guys who smell of whiskey don’t get hired for anything.

When Todd offered him another nip – this was around two o’clock – Tom refused. But when he offered again at three, Tom took the bottle. Checking the level, he guessed the Toddster had been fortifying himself against the cold quite liberally.

Well, what the hell, Tom thought, and bit off quite a bit more than a nip; this one was a solid mouthful.

‘Atta-baby,’ Todd said, sounding the teensiest bit slurry. ‘Go with your bad self.’

Job hunters continued to arrive, their cars nosing up from Marlborough Street through the thickening fog. The line was well past the posts now, and no longer zigzagging. Tom had believed he understood the economic difficulties currently besetting the country – hadn’t he lost a job himself, a very good job? – but as the cars kept coming and the line kept growing (he could no longer see where it ended), he began to get a new and frightening perspective. Maybe difficulties wasn’t the right word. Maybe the right word was calamity.

To his right, in the maze of posts and tape leading to the doors of the darkened auditorium, the baby began to cry. Tom looked around and saw the man with the sleeping bag holding the sides of the papoose carrier so the woman (God, Tom thought, she doesn’t look like she’s out of her teens yet) could pull the kid out.

‘What the fuck’s zat?’ Todd asked, sounding slurrier than ever.

‘A kid,’ Tom said. ‘Woman with a kid. Girl with a kid.’

Todd peered. ‘Christ on a pony,’ he said. ‘I call that pretty irra … irry … you know, not responsible.’

‘Are you drunk?’ Linda disliked Todd, she didn’t see his good side, and right now Tom wasn’t sure he saw it, either.

‘L’il bit. I’ll be fine by the time the doors open. Got some breath mints, too.’

Tom thought of asking the Toddster if he’d also brought some Visine – his eyes were looking mighty red – and decided he didn’t want to have that discussion just now. He turned his attention back to where the woman with the crying baby had been. At first he thought they were gone. Then he looked lower and saw her sliding into the burly man’s sleeping bag with the baby on her chest. The burly man was holding the mouth of the bag open for her. The infant was still bawling his or her head off.

‘Can’t you shut that kid up?’ a man called.

‘Someone ought to call Social Services,’ a woman added.

Tom thought of Tina at that age, imagined her out on this cold and foggy predawn morning, and restrained an urge to tell the man and woman to shut up … or better yet, lend a hand somehow. After all, they were in this together, weren’t they? The whole screwed-up, bad-luck bunch of them.

The crying softened, stopped.

‘She’s probably feeding im,’ Todd said. He squeezed his chest to demonstrate.

‘Yeah.’

‘Tommy?’

‘What?’

‘You know Ellen lost her job, right?’

‘Jesus, no. I didn’t know that.’ Pretending he didn’t see the fear in Todd’s face. Or the glimmering of moisture in his eyes. Possibly from the booze or the cold. Possibly not.

‘They said they’d call her back when things get better, but they said the same thing to me, and I’ve been out of work going on half a year now. I cashed my insurance. That’s gone. And you know what we got left in the bank? Five hundred dollars. You know how long five hundred dollars lasts when a loaf of bread at Kroger’s costs a buck?’

‘Not long.’

‘You’re fucking A it doesn’t. I have to get something here. Have to.’

‘You will. We both will.’

Todd lifted his chin at the burly man, who now appeared to be standing guard over the sleeping bag, so no one would accidentally step on the woman and baby inside. ‘Think they’re married?’

Tom hadn’t considered it. Now he did. ‘Probably.’

‘Then they both must be out of work. Otherwise, one of em would have stayed home with the kid.’

‘Maybe,’ Tom said, ‘they think showing up with the baby will improve their chances.’

Todd brightened. ‘The pity card! Not a bad idea!’ He held out the pint. ‘Want a nip?’

He took a small one, thinking, If I don’t drink it, Todd will.

Tom was awakened from a whiskey-assisted doze by an exuberant shout: ‘Life is discovered on other planets!’ This sally was followed by laughter and applause.

He looked around and saw daylight. Thin and fog-draped, but daylight, just the same. Beyond the bank of auditorium doors, a fellow in gray fatigues – a man with a job, lucky fellow – was pushing a mop-bucket across the lobby.

‘Whuddup?’ Todd asked.

‘Nothing,’ Tom said. ‘Just a janitor.’

Todd peered in the direction of Marlborough Street. ‘Jesus, and still they come.’

‘Yeah,’ Tom said. Thinking, And if I’d listened to Linda, we’d be at the end of a line that stretches halfway to Cleveland. That was a good thought, a little vindication was always good, but he wished he’d said no to Todd’s pint. His mouth tasted like kitty litter. Not that he’d ever actually eaten any, but—

Someone a couple of zigzags over – not far from the sleeping bag – asked, ‘Is that a Benz? It looks like a Benz.’

Tom saw a long shape at the head of the entrance drive leading up from Marlborough, its yellow fog-lamps blazing. It wasn’t moving; it just sat there.

‘What’s he think he’s doing?’ Todd asked.

The driver of the car immediately behind must have wondered the same thing, because he laid on his horn – a long, pissed-off blat that made people stir and snort and look around. For a moment the car with the yellow fog-lamps stayed where it was. Then it shot forward. Not to the left, toward the now full-to-overflowing parking lot, but directly at the people penned within the maze of tapes and posts.

‘Hey!’ someone shouted.

The crowd swayed backward in a tidal motion. Tom was shoved against Todd, who went down on his ass. Tom fought for balance, almost found it, and then the man in front of him – yelling, no, screaming – drove his butt into Tom’s crotch and one flailing elbow into his chest. Tom fell on top of his buddy, heard the bottle of Bell’s shatter somewhere between them, and smelled the sharp reek of the remaining whiskey as it ran across the pavement.

Great, now I’ll smell like a barroom on Saturday night.

He struggled to his feet in time to see the car – it was a Mercedes, all right, a big sedan as gray as this foggy morning – plowing into the crowd, spinning bodies out of its way as it came, describing a drunken arc. Blood dripped from the grille. A woman went skidding and rolling across the hood with her hands out and her shoes gone. She slapped at the glass, grabbed at one of the windshield wipers, missed, and tumbled off to one side. Yellow DO NOT CROSS tapes snapped. A post clanged against the side of the big sedan, which did not slow its roll in the slightest. Tom saw the front wheels pass over the sleeping bag and the burly man, who had been crouched protectively over it with one hand raised.

Now it was coming right at him.

‘Todd!’ he shouted. ‘Todd, get up!’

He grabbed at Todd’s hands, got one of them, and pulled. Someone slammed into him and he was driven back to his knees. He could hear the rogue car’s motor, revving full-out. Very close now. He tried to crawl, and a foot clobbered him in the temple. He saw stars.

‘Tom?’ Todd was behind him now. How had that happened? ‘Tom, what the fuck?’

A body landed on top of him, and then something else was on top of him, a huge weight that pressed down, threatening to turn him to jelly. His hips snapped. They sounded like dry turkey bones. Then the weight was gone. Pain with its own kind of weight rushed in to replace it.

Tom tried to raise his head and managed to get it off the pavement just long enough to see taillights dwindling into the fog. He saw glittering shards of glass from the busted pint. He saw Todd sprawled on his back with blood coming out of his head and pooling on the pavement. Crimson tire-tracks ran away into the foggy half-light.

He thought, Linda was right. I should have stayed home.

He thought, I’m going to die, and maybe that’s for the best. Because, unlike Todd Paine, I never got around to cashing in my insurance.

He thought, Although I probably would have, in time.

Then, blackness.

When Tom Saubers woke up in the hospital forty-eight hours later, Linda was sitting beside him. She was holding his hand. He asked her if he was going to live. She smiled, squeezed his hand, and said you bet your patootie.

‘Am I paralyzed? Tell me the truth.’

‘No, honey, but you’ve got a lot of broken bones.’

‘What about Todd?’

She looked away, biting her lips. ‘He’s in a coma, but they think he’s going to come out of it eventually. They can tell by his brainwaves, or something.’

‘There was a car. I couldn’t get out of the way.’

‘I know. You weren’t the only one. It was some madman. He got away with it, at least so far.’

Tom could have cared less about the man driving the Mercedes-Benz. Not paralyzed was good, but—

‘How bad did I get it? No bullshit – be honest.’

She met his eyes but couldn’t hold them. Once more looking at the get-well cards on his bureau, she said, ‘You … well. It’s going to be awhile before you can walk again.’

‘How long?’

She raised his hand, which was badly scraped, and kissed it. ‘They don’t know.’

Tom Saubers closed his eyes and began to cry. Linda listened to that awhile, and when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she leaned forward and began to punch the button on the morphine pump. She kept doing it until the machine stopped giving. By then he was asleep.

1978

Morris grabbed a blanket from the top shelf of the bedroom closet and used it to cover Rothstein, who now sprawled askew in the easy chair with the top of his head gone. The brains that had conceived Jimmy Gold, Jimmy’s sister Emma, and Jimmy’s self-involved, semi-alcoholic parents – so much like Morris’s own – were now drying on the wallpaper. Morris wasn’t shocked, exactly, but he was certainly amazed. He had expected some blood, and a hole between the eyes, but not this gaudy expectoration of gristle and bone. It was a failure of imagination, he supposed, the reason why he could read the giants of modern American literature – read them and appreciate them – but never be one.

Freddy Dow came out of the study with a loaded duffel bag over each shoulder. Curtis followed, head down and carrying nothing at all. All at once he sped up, hooked around Freddy, and bolted into the kitchen. The door to the backyard banged against the side of the house as the wind took it. Then came the sound of retching.

‘He’s feelin kinda sick,’ Freddy said. He had a talent for stating the obvious.

‘You all right?’ Morris asked.

‘Yuh.’ Freddy went out through the front door without looking back, pausing to pick up the crowbar leaning against the porch glider. They had come prepared to break in, but the front door had been unlocked. The kitchen door, as well. Rothstein had put all his confidence in the Gardall safe, it seemed. Talk about failures of the imagination.

Morris went into the study, looked at Rothstein’s neat desk and covered typewriter. Looked at the pictures on the wall. Both ex-wives hung there, laughing and young and beautiful in their fifties clothes and hairdos. It was sort of interesting that Rothstein would keep those discarded women where they could look at him while he was writing, but Morris had no time to consider this, or to investigate the contents of the writer’s desk, which he would dearly have loved to do. But was such investigation even necessary? He had the notebooks, after all. He had the contents of the writer’s mind. Everything he’d written since he stopped publishing eighteen years ago.

Freddy had taken the stacks of cash envelopes in the first load (of course; cash was what Freddy and Curtis understood), but there were still plenty of notebooks on the shelves of the safe. They were Moleskines, the kind Hemingway had used, the kind Morris had dreamed of while in the reformatory, where he had also dreamed of becoming a writer himself. But in Riverview Youth Detention he had been rationed to five sheets of pulpy Blue Horse paper each week, hardly enough to begin writing the Great American Novel. Begging for more did no good. The one time he’d offered Elkins, the commissary trustee, a blowjob for a dozen extra sheets, Elkins had punched him in the face. Sort of funny, when you considered all the non-consensual sex he had been forced to participate in during his nine-month stretch, usually on his knees and on more than one occasion with his own dirty undershorts stuffed in his mouth.

He didn’t hold his mother entirely responsible for those rapes, but she deserved her share of the blame. Anita Bellamy, the famous history professor whose book on Henry Clay Frick had been nominated for a Pulitzer. So famous that she presumed to know all about modern American literature, as well. It was an argument about the Gold trilogy that had sent him out one night, furious and determined to get drunk. Which he did, although he was underage and looked it.

Drinking did not agree with Morris. He did things when he was drinking that he couldn’t remember later, and they were never good things. That night it had been breaking and entering, vandalism, and fighting with a neighborhood rent-a-cop who tried to hold him until the regular cops got there.

That was almost six years ago, but the memory was still fresh. It had all been so stupid. Stealing a car, joyriding across town, then abandoning it (perhaps after pissing all over the dashboard) was one thing. Not smart, but with a little luck, you could walk away from that sort of deal. But breaking into a place in Sugar Heights? Double stupid. He had wanted nothing in that house (at least nothing he could remember later). And when he did want something? When he offered up his mouth for a few lousy sheets of Blue Horse paper? Punched in the face. So he’d laughed, because that was what Jimmy Gold would have done (at least before Jimmy grew up and sold out for what he called the Golden Buck), and what happened next? Punched in the face again, even harder. It was the muffled crack of his nose breaking that had started him crying.

Jimmy never would have cried.

He was still looking greedily at the Moleskines when Freddy Dow returned with the other two duffel bags. He also had a scuffed leather carryall. ‘This was in the pantry. Along with like a billion cans of beans and tuna fish. Go figure, huh? Weird guy. Maybe he was waiting for the Acropolipse. Come on, Morrie, put it in gear. Someone might have heard that shot.’

‘There aren’t any neighbors. Nearest farm is two miles away. Relax.’

‘Jails’re full of guys who were relaxed. We need to get out of here.’

Morris began gathering up handfuls of notebooks, but couldn’t resist looking in one, just to make sure. Rothstein had been a weird guy, and it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he had stacked his safe with blank books, thinking he might write something in them eventually.

But no.

This one, at least, was loaded with Rothstein’s small, neat handwriting, every page filled, top to bottom and side to side, the margins as thin as threads.

—wasn’t sure why it mattered to him and why he couldn’t sleep as the empty boxcar of this late freight bore him on through rural oblivion toward Kansas City and the sleeping country beyond, the full belly of America resting beneath its customary comforter of night, yet Jimmy’s thoughts persisted in turning back to—

Freddy thumped him on the shoulder, and not gently. ‘Get your nose out of that thing and pack up. We already got one puking his guts out and pretty much useless.’

Morris dropped the notebook into one of the duffels and grabbed another double handful without a word, his thoughts brilliant with possibility. He forgot about the mess under the blanket in the living room, forgot about Curtis Rogers puking his guts in the roses or zinnias or petunias or whatever was growing out back. Jimmy Gold! Headed west, in a boxcar! Rothstein hadn’t been done with him, after all!

‘These’re full,’ he told Freddy. ‘Take them out. I’ll put the rest in the valise.’

‘That what you call that kind of bag?’

‘I think so, yeah.’ He knew so. ‘Go on. Almost done here.’

Freddy shouldered the duffels by their straps, but lingered a moment longer. ‘Are you sure about these things? Because Rothstein said—’

‘He was a hoarder trying to save his hoard. He would have said anything. Go on.’

Freddy went. Morris loaded the last batch of Moleskines into the valise and backed out of the closet. Curtis was standing by Rothstein’s desk. He had taken off his balaclava; they all had. His face was paper-pale and there were dark shock circles around his eyes.

‘You didn’t have to kill him. You weren’t supposed to. It wasn’t in the plan. Why’d you do that?’

Because he made me feel stupid. Because he cursed my mother and that’s my job. Because he called me a kid. Because he needed to be punished for turning Jimmy Gold into one of them. Mostly because nobody with his kind of talent has a right to hide it from the world. Only Curtis wouldn’t understand that.

‘Because it’ll make the notebooks worth more when we sell them.’ Which wouldn’t be until he’d read every word in them, but Curtis wouldn’t understand the need to do that, and didn’t need to know. Nor did Freddy. He tried to sound patient and reasonable. ‘We now have all the John Rothstein output there’s ever going to be. That makes the unpublished stuff even more valuable. You see that, don’t you?’

Curtis scratched one pale cheek. ‘Well … I guess … yeah.’

‘Also, he can never claim they’re forgeries when they turn up. Which he would have done, just out of spite. I’ve read a lot about him, Curtis, just about everything, and he was one spiteful motherfucker.’

‘Well …’

Morrie restrained himself from saying That’s an extremely deep subject for a mind as shallow as yours. He held out the valise instead. ‘Take it. And keep your gloves on until we’re in the car.’

‘You should have talked it over with us, Morrie. We’re your partners.’

Curtis started out, then turned back. ‘I got a question.’

‘What is it?’

‘Do you know if New Hampshire has the death penalty?’

They took secondary roads across the narrow chimney of New Hampshire and into Vermont. Freddy drove the Chevy Biscayne, which was old and unremarkable. Morris rode shotgun with a Rand McNally open on his lap, thumbing on the dome light from time to time to make sure they didn’t wander off their pre-planned route. He didn’t need to remind Freddy to keep to the speed limit. This wasn’t Freddy Dow’s first rodeo.

Curtis lay in the backseat, and soon they heard the sound of his snores. Morris considered him lucky; he seemed to have puked out his horror. Morris thought it might be awhile before he himself got another good night’s sleep. He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn’t the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?

‘So you really think we’ll be able to sell those little books of his?’ Freddy asked. He was back to that. ‘For real money, I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘And get away with it?’

‘Yes, Freddy, I’m sure.’

Freddy Dow was quiet for so long that Morris thought the issue was settled. Then he spoke to the subject again. Two words. Dry and toneless. ‘I’m doubtful.’

Later on, once more incarcerated – not in Youth Detention this time, either – Morris would think, That’s when I decided to kill them.

But sometimes at night, when he couldn’t sleep, his asshole slick and burning from one of a dozen soap-assisted shower-room buggeries, he would admit that wasn’t the truth. He’d known all along. They were dumb, and career criminals. Sooner or later (probably sooner) one of them would be caught for something else, and there would be the temptation to trade what they knew about this night for a lighter sentence or no sentence at all.

I just knew they had to go, he would think on those cellblock nights when the full belly of America rested beneath its customary comforter of night. It was inevitable.

In upstate New York, with dawn not yet come but beginning to show the horizon’s dark outline behind them, they turned west on Route 92, a highway that roughly paralleled I-90 as far as Illinois, where it turned south and petered out in the industrial city of Rockford. The road was still mostly deserted at this hour, although they could hear (and sometimes see) heavy truck traffic on the interstate to their left.

They passed a sign reading REST AREA 2 MI., and Morris thought of Macbeth. If it were to be done, then ’twere well it were done quickly. Not an exact quote, maybe, but close enough for government work.

‘Pull in there,’ he told Freddy. ‘I need to drain the dragon.’

‘They probably got vending machines, too,’ said the puker in the backseat. Curtis was sitting up now, his hair crazy around his head. ‘I could get behind some of those peanut butter crackers.’

Morris knew he’d have to let it go if there were other cars in the rest area. I-90 had sucked away most of the through traffic that used to travel on this road, but once daybreak arrived, there would be lots of local traffic, pooting along from one Hicksville to the next.

For now the rest area was deserted, at least in part because of the sign reading OVERNIGHT RVS PROHIBITED. They parked and got out. Birds chirruped in the trees, discussing the night just past and plans for the day. A few leaves – in this part of the world they were just beginning to turn – drifted down and scuttered across the lot.

Curtis went to inspect the vending machines while Morris and Freddy walked side by side to the men’s half of the restroom facility. Morris didn’t feel particularly nervous. Maybe what they said was true, after the first one it got easier.