“No,” she breathed softly. “You’re not going to drive me away like that. You say any shitty thing you want. I’m sticking, Jude.”
She carefully set the glass she was holding on the edge of his desk. She started away from him, then paused at the door. She turned her head but didn’t quite seem able to look into his face.
“I’m going to get some sleep. You come on to bed, too.” Telling him, not asking.
Jude opened his mouth to reply and found he had nothing to say. When she left the room, he gently leaned his guitar against the wall and stood up. His pulse was jacked, and his legs were unsteady, the physical manifestations of an emotion it took him some time to place—he was that unused to the sensation of relief.
17
Georgia was gone. That was the first thing he knew. She was gone, and it was still night. He exhaled, and his breath made a cloud of white smoke in the room. He shoved off the one thin sheet and got out of bed, then hugged himself through a brief shivering fit.
The idea that she was up and wandering the house alarmed him. His head was still muddy with sleep, and it had to be close to freezing in the room. It would’ve been reasonable to think Georgia had gone to figure out what was wrong with the heat, but Jude knew that wasn’t it. She’d been sleeping badly as well, tossing and muttering. She might have come awake and gone to watch TV—but he didn’t believe that either.
He almost shouted her name, then thought better of it. He quailed at the idea that she might not reply, that his voice might be met with a ringing silence. No. No yelling. No rushing around. He felt if he went slamming out of the bedroom and rushing through the unlit house, calling for her, it would tip him irrevocably toward panic. Also, the darkness and quiet of the bedroom appalled him, and he understood that he was afraid to go looking for her, afraid of what might be waiting beyond the door.
As he stood there, he became aware of a guttural rumble, the sound of an idling engine. He rolled his eyes back, looked at the ceiling. It was lit an icy white, someone’s headlights, pointing in from the driveway below. He could hear the dogs barking.
Jude crossed to the window and shifted aside the curtain.
The pickup parked out front had been blue once, but it was at least twenty years old and had not seen another coat in all that time, had faded to the color of smoke. It was a Chevy, a working truck. Jude had whiled away two years of his life twisting a wrench in an auto garage for $1.75 an hour, and he knew from the deep, ferocious mutter of the idling engine that it had a big block under the hood. The front end was all aggression and menace, with a wide silver bumper like a boxer’s mouthpiece and an iron brush guard bolted over the grill. What he had taken at first for headlights were a pair of floods attached to the brush guard, two round spots pouring their glare into the night. The pickup sat almost a full foot off the ground on four 35s, a truck built for running on washed-out swamp roads, banging through the ruts and choking brush of the Deep South, the bottoms. The engine was running. No one was in it.
The dogs flung themselves against the chain-link wall of the pen, a steady crash and clang, yapping at the empty pickup. Jude peered down the driveway, in the direction of the road. The gates were closed. You had to know a six-digit security code to get them open.
It was the dead man’s truck. Jude knew the moment he saw it, knew with a calm, utter certainty. His next thought was, Where we going, old man?
The phone by the bed chirped, and Jude half jumped in surprise, letting go of the curtain. He turned and stared. The clock beside the phone read 3:12. The phone rang again.
Jude moved toward it, tiptoeing quickly across cold floorboards. Stared down at it. It rang a third time. He didn’t want to answer. He had an idea it would be the dead man, and Jude didn’t want to talk to him. Jude didn’t want to hear Craddock’s voice.
“Fuck it,” he said, and he answered. “Who is it?”
“Hey, Chief. It’s Dan.”
“Danny? It’s three in the morning.”
“Oh. I didn’t know it was so late. Were you asleep?”
“No.” Jude fell silent, waited.
“I’m sorry I left like I did.”
“Are you drunk?” Jude asked. He looked at the window again, the blue-tinted glare of the floodlights shining around the edges of the curtains. “Are you calling drunk because you want your job back? Because if you are, this is the wrong fuckin’ time—”
“No. I can’t…I can’t come back, Jude. I was just calling to say I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry I said anything about the ghost for sale. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”
“Go to bed.”
“I can’t.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’m out walking in the dark. I don’t even know where I am.”
Jude felt the back of his arms prickling with goose bumps. The thought of Danny out on the streets somewhere, shuffling around in the dark, disturbed him more than it should’ve, more than made sense.
“How’d you get there?”
“I just went walking. I don’t even know why.”
“Jesus, you’re drunk. Take a look around for a street sign and call a fuckin’ cab,” Jude said, and hung up.
He was glad to let go of the phone. He hadn’t liked Danny’s tone of spaced-out, unhappy confusion.
It wasn’t that Danny had said anything so incredible or unlikely. It was just that they’d never had a conversation like it before. Danny had never called in the night, and he’d never called drunk. It was difficult to imagine him going for a walk at 3:00 A.M., or walking so far from his home as to get lost. And whatever his other flaws, Danny was a problem solver. That was why Jude had kept him on the payroll for eight years. Even shitfaced, Danny probably wouldn’t call Jude first if he didn’t know where he was. He’d walk to a 7-Eleven and get directions. He’d flag down a cop car.
No. It was all wrong. The phone call and the dead man’s truck in the driveway were two parts of the same thing. Jude knew. His nerves told him so. The empty bed told him so.
He glanced again at the curtain, lit from behind by those floods. The dogs were going crazy out there.
Georgia. What mattered now was finding Georgia. Then they could figure out about that truck. Together they could get a handle on the situation.
Jude looked at the door to the hallway. He flexed his fingers, his hands numb from the cold. He didn’t want to go out there, didn’t want to open the door and see Craddock sitting in that chair with his hat on his knee and that razor on a chain dangling from one hand.
But the thought of seeing the dead man again—of facing whatever was next—held him for only a moment more. Then he came unstuck, went to the door, and opened it.
“Let’s do it,” he said to the hallway before he had even seen if anyone was there.
No one was.
Jude paused, listening past his own just slightly haggard breathing to the quiet of the house. The long hall was draped in shadows, the Shaker chair against the wall empty. No. Not empty. A black fedora rested in the seat.
Noises—muffled and distant—caught his attention: the murmur of voices on a television, the distant crash of surf. He pulled his gaze away from the fedora and looked to the end of the hallway. Blue light flickered and raced at the edges of the door to the studio. Georgia was in there, then, watching TV after all.
Jude hesitated at the door, listening. He heard a voice shouting in Spanish, a TV voice. The sound of surf was louder. Jude meant to call her name then, Marybeth—not Georgia, Marybeth—but something bad happened when he tried: His breath gave out on him. He was able to produce only a wheeze in the faint sound of her name.
He opened the door.
Georgia was across the room in the recliner, in front of his flat-screen TV. From where he stood, he couldn’t see anything of her but the back of her head, the fluffy swirl of her black hair surrounded by a nimbus of unnatural blue light. Her head also largely blocked the view of whatever was on the TV, although he
could see palm trees and tropical blue sky. It was dark, the lights in the room switched off.
She didn’t respond when he said, “Georgia,” and his next thought was that she was dead. When he got to her, her eyes would be rolled up in their sockets.
He started toward her, but had only gone a couple of steps when the phone rang on the desk.
Jude could view enough of the TV now to see a chubby Mex in sunglasses and a beige jogging suit, standing at the side of a dirt track in jungly hill country somewhere. Jude knew what she was watching then, although he hadn’t looked at it in several years. It was the snuff film.
At the sound of the phone, Georgia’s head seemed to move just slightly, and he thought he heard her exhale, a strained, effortful breath. Not dead, then. But she didn’t otherwise react, didn’t look around, didn’t get up to answer.
He took a step to the desk, caught the phone on the second ring.
“That you, Danny? Are you still lost?” Jude asked.
“Yeah,” Danny said with a weak laugh. “Still lost. I’m on this pay phone in the middle of nowhere. It’s funny, you almost never see pay phones anymore.”
Georgia did not glance around at the sound of Jude’s voice, did not shift her gaze from the TV.
“I hope you aren’t calling because you want me to come looking for you,” Jude said. “I’ve got my hands full at the moment. If I have to come looking for you, you better hope you stay lost.”
“I figured it out, Chief. How I got here. Out on this road in the dark.”
“How’s that?”
“I killed myself. I hung myself a few hours ago. This road in the dark…this is dead.”
Jude’s scalp crawled, a trickling, icy sensation, almost painful.
Danny said, “My mother hung herself just the same way. She did a better job, though. She broke her neck. Died instantly. I lost my nerve at the last second. I didn’t fall hard enough. I strangled to death.”
From the television across the room came gagging sounds, as if someone were strangling to death.
“It took a long time, Jude,” Danny went on. “I remember swinging for a long time. Looking at my feet. I’m remembering lots of things now.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“He made me. The dead man. He came to see me. I was going to come back to the office and find those letters for you. I was thinking I could at least do that much. I was thinking I shouldn’t have bailed out on you like I did. But when I went in my bedroom to get my coat, he was waiting there. I didn’t even know how to knot a noose until he showed me,” Danny said. “That’s how he’s going to get you. He’s going to make you kill yourself.”
“No he’s not.”
“It’s hard not to listen to his voice. I couldn’t fight it. He knew too much. He knew I gave my sister the heroin she OD’d on. He said that was why my mother killed herself, because she couldn’t live knowing what I had done. He said I should’ve been the one to hang, not my mom. He said if I had any decency, I would’ve killed myself a long time ago. He was right.”
“No, Danny,” Jude said. “No. He wasn’t right. You shouldn’t—”
Danny sounded short of breath. “I did. I had to. There was no arguing with him. You can’t argue with a voice like that.”
“We’ll see,” Jude said.
Danny had no reply for that. In the snuff film, two men were bickering in Spanish. The choking sounds went on and on. Georgia still did not look away. She was moving just slightly, shoulders hitching now and then in a series of random, almost spastic shrugs.
“I have to go, Danny.” Still Danny said nothing. Jude listened to the faint crackle on the line for a moment, sensing that Danny was waiting for something, some final word, and at last he added, “You keep walking, boy. That road must go somewhere.”
Danny laughed. “You aren’t as bad as you think, Jude. You know that?”
“Yeah. Don’t tell.”
“Your secret is safe,” Danny said. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Danny.”
Jude leaned forward, gently set the phone back in its cradle. As he was bent across the desk, he glanced down and behind it and saw that the floor safe was open. His initial thought was the ghost had opened it, an idea he discarded almost immediately. Georgia, more likely. She knew the combination.
He pivoted, looked at the back of her head, at the halo of flickering blue light, at the television beyond.
“Georgia? What are you doin’, darlin’?”
She didn’t reply.
He came forward, moving silently across the thick carpet. The picture on the flat-screen came into view first. The killers were finishing off the skinny white kid. Later they would get his girlfriend in a cinder-block hut close to a beach. Now, though, they were on an overgrown track somewhere in the bush, in the hills above the Gulf of California. The kid was on his stomach, his wrists bound together by a pair of white plastic flexi-cuffs. His skin was fish-belly pale in the tropical sunlight. A diminutive, walleyed Anglo, with a clownish Afro of crinkly red hair, stood with one cowboy boot on the kid’s neck. Parked down the road was a black van, the back doors thrown open. Next to the rear fender was the chubby Mex in the warm-up suit, an affronted expression hung on his face.
“Nos estamos yendo,” said the man in the sunglasses. “Ahora.”
The walleyed redhead made a face and shook his head, as if in disagreement, but then pointed the little revolver at the skinny kid’s head and pulled the trigger. The muzzle flashed. The kid’s head snapped forward, hit the ground, bounced back. The air around his head was suddenly clouded with a fine spray of blood.
The Anglo took his boot off the boy’s neck and stepped daintily away, careful to get no blood on his cowboy boots.
Georgia’s face was a pale, rigid blank, her eyes wide and unblinking, gaze fixed on the television. She wore the Ramones T-shirt she’d had on earlier, but no underwear, and her legs were open. In one hand—the bad hand—she had clumsy hold of Jude’s pistol, and the barrel was pushed deep into her mouth. Her other hand was between her legs, thumb moving up and down.
“Georgia,” he said, and for an instant she shot a sidelong glance at him—a helpless, pleading glance—then immediately looked back to the TV. Her bad hand rotated the gun, turning it upside down, to point the barrel against the roof of her mouth. She made a weak choking sound on it.
The remote control was on the armrest. Jude hit the power button. The television blinked off. Her shoulders leaped, a nervous, reflexive shrug. The left hand kept working between her legs. She shivered, made a strained, unhappy sound in her throat.
“Stop it,” Jude said.
She pulled the hammer back with her thumb. It made a loud snap in the silence of the studio.
Jude reached past her and gently pried the gun out of her grip. Her whole body went abruptly, perfectly still. Her breath whistled, short and fast. Her mouth was wet, glistening faintly, and it came to him then that he was semihard. His cock had begun to stiffen at the smell of her in the air and the sight of her fingers teasing her clit, and she was at just the right height. If he moved in front of the chair, she could suck his dick while he held the gun to her head, he could stick the barrel in her ear while he shoved his cock—
He saw a flicker of motion, reflected in the partly open window beyond his desk, and his gaze jumped to the image in the glass. He could see himself there and the dead man standing beside him, hunched and whispering in his ear. In the reflection Jude could see that his own arm had come up, and he was holding the pistol to Georgia’s head.
His heart lurched, all the blood rushing to it in a sudden, adrenalized burst. He looked down, saw it was true, he was holding the gun to her head, saw his finger squeezing the trigger. He tried to stop himself, but it was already too late—he pulled it, waited in horror for the hammer to fall.
It didn’t fall. The trigger wouldn’t depress the last quarter inch. The safety was on.
“Fuck,” Jude hissed, and lowered the gun, t
rembling furiously now. He used his thumb to ease the hammer back down. When he had settled it into place, he flung the pistol away from himself.
It banged heavily against the desk, and Georgia flinched at the sound. Her stare, however, remained fixed on some abstract point off in the darkness before her.
Jude turned, looking for Craddock’s ghost. No one stood beside him. The room was empty, except for himself and Georgia. He turned back to her and tugged on her slender white wrist.
“Get up,” he said. “Come on. We’re going. Right now. I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re getting out of here. We’re going someplace where there are lots of people and bright lights, and we’re going to try to figure this out. You hear me?” He could no longer recall his logic for staying. Logic was out the window.
“He isn’t done with us,” she said, her voice a shuddering whisper.
He pulled, but she didn’t rise, her body rigid in the chair, uncooperative. She still wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t look anywhere except straight ahead.
“Come on,” he said. “While there’s time.”
“There is no more time,” she said.
The television blinked on again.
18
It was the evening news. Bill Beutel, who had started his journalism career when the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the breaking story of the day, sat stiffly behind the news desk. His face was a network of spiderweb wrinkles, radiating out from around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. His features were set in their grief expression, the look that said there was more bad news in the Middle East or that a school bus had gone off the interstate and rolled, killing all passengers, or a tornado in the South had inhaled a trailer park and coughed out a mess of ironing boards, splintered shutters, and human bodies.
“…there will be no survivors. We’ll bring you more as the situation continues to unfold,” Beutel said. He turned his head slightly, and the reflected blue screen of the teleprompter floated in the lenses of his bifocals for a moment. “Late this afternoon the Dutchess County sheriff ’s department confirmed that Judas Coyne, the popular lead singer of Jude’s Hammer, apparently shot and killed his girlfriend, Marybeth Stacy Kimball, before turning the weapon on himself to take his own life.”