Her sweat turned cold. What she had just done fell upon her, and it made her stagger. But she regained her balance, her mouth grim-lipped and her eyes fixed toward the distant horizon. It had been his bad karma to cross her path, she thought. It had not been her fault that the boy was there; it was just karma, that's all. The boy was a minor piece of a larger picture, and that was what she had to focus on. His daddy might have wondered why a woman was stalking in the woods with a pistol on a Sunday afternoon. His daddy might have known a pig, or even a federal pig. One telephone call could start the pig machinery, and she'd hidden too long and been too smart to allow that to happen. The boy had to be laid low. Period.
A little whirlpool of anger had opened within her. Damn it! she raged. Shit! Why had that damned boy been there? It was a test, she thought. A karmic test. You fall down, and you stand up again. You keep going no matter what. She wished it were springtime, and that there were flowers in the woods. If there were flowers in the woods, she would've put one in the dead boy's hand.
She knew why she had killed him. Of course she did. The boy had seen Mary Terror without her mask. That was reason enough for execution.
She couldn't make it on the run all the way back to her truck. She walked the last three hundred yards, her lungs rasping and her sweatsuit soaked. She leaned the rifle against the seat and put the handgun on the floorboard beneath her legs. There were the marks of other tires in the dirt, so she didn't have to worry about brushing out the tracks. The pigs might get a footprint or two, but so what? They'd think it was a man's footprints. She started the engine, backed off the logging road to the paved highway where a sign said NO DUMPING and litter was everywhere. Then Mary drove home, knowing she had a lot of training to do but confident that she had not lost her touch.
2: A Friend's Message
Laura slid the top drawer of Doug's dresser open, lifted up his sweaters, and looked at the gun.
It was an ugly thing. A Charter Arms.32 automatic, black metal with a black grip. Doug had shown her how it worked: the little metal thingamajig that held the seven bullets – the magazine clip, Doug had said – fit up into the grip, and you had to push the safety hickey with your thumb to engage the firing dololley. There was a box of extra clips, with the words Fast Loading and Rugged Construction on it. The gun was unloaded at the moment; a clip of bullets lay next to it. Laura touched the automatic's grainy grip. The gun smelted faintly of oil, and she worried that the oil would leak onto Doug's sweaters. She ran her fingers over the cool metal. It was a dangerous, evil-looking beast, and Laura saw how men could become fascinated by guns: there was power in it, waiting to be released.
She put her hand around the grip and picked the gun up. It wasn't as heavy as it looked, but it was still a handful. She held it at arm's length, her wrist already beginning to tremble, and she sighted along the gun at the wall. Her index finger found the trigger's seductive curve. She moved her arm to the right, and sighted at the framed wedding picture of her and Doug atop the dresser. She aimed at Doug's smiling face, and she said, "Bang."
The little murder done, Laura put the automatic back under Doug's sweaters and slid the drawer shut. She left the bedroom, going to the den, where her typewriter was set up on a desk in a sunny spot. Her review of Burn This Book was about half finished. She switched on the TV, turned it to the Cable News Network, and sat down to work, the swell of her belly against the desk's edge. She'd written a few more sentences when she heard the words "… was found in a wooded area outside Atlanta on Sunday night…" and she turned around to watch.
It had been on the news all day, about the boy found shot to death in the woods near Mableton last night. Laura had seen the segment several times before: the sheet-covered corpse being put into the back of an ambulance, the blue lights flashing, a police captain named Ottinger talking about how the boy's father and neighbors had found the body around seven o'clock. There was a scene of reporters surging forward around a distraught-looking man in overalls and a Red Man cap, and a frail woman with curly hair and shocked, dark-hollowed eyes. The man – Lewis Peterson, the boy's father – waved the reporters away, and he and his wife went into their white frame house, the screen door banging shut behind them.
"… senseless killing," Ottinger was saying. "Right now we have no suspects and no motive, but we're going to do everything in our power to find this young boy's killer."
Laura turned away from the television and went back to work. In the light of all the crime in the Atlanta area, having a gun made good sense. She would never have believed she could think that way, because she hated guns, but crime in the city was out of control. Well, it was out of control across the country, wasn't it? Across the world, for that matter. Things had turned savage, and there were beasts on the prowl. Take the example of that boy, for instance. A senseless killing, the police captain had said. The boy lived near those woods, had probably been down in there a thousand times. But on that particular day he'd met someone who had put a bullet through his head for no reason. A beast on the prowl, hunting for bloody meat. On Sunday, the paths of the boy and the beast had crossed, and the beast had won.
She focused on her review again. Mark Treggs and the echoes of the sixties. Writing sloppy in places, keen in others. The death of J.F.K. as a foreshadowing of dark disease in America. Free love was now AIDS, acid tripping was now crack. Haight-Ashbury, Patty Hearst, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, the Weather Underground, Days of Rage, the Storm Front, Woodstock and Altamont as the heaven and hell of the peace movement. Laura finished the review, judging Burn This Book as interesting but not necessarily incendiary, typed "30" at the end of it, and rolled the paper out of the Royal.
The telephone rang. After two rings, her own voice answered: "Hello, you've reached the residence of Douglas and Laura Clayborne. Please leave a message at the tone, and thank you for calling."
Beep. Click.
So much for that. Laura rolled another sheet of paper in, preparatory to doing her review of The Address. She paused to listen to the weather report: more clouds rolling in, and colder temperatures. Then she began on the first line of the review, and the telephone rang again. She kept working as her voice invited the caller to leave a message.
Beep. "Laura? It's a friend."
Laura stopped typing. The voice was muffled. Disguised, she thought it must be.
"Ask Doug who lives in Number 5-E at the Hillandale Apartments." Click.
And that was all.
Laura sat there for a moment, stunned. She got up, went to the answering machine, and played the message back. A woman's voice? Someone speaking with a handkerchief pressed against the receiver, maybe. She hit the playback button again. Yes, a woman's voice, but she couldn't tell whose it was. Her hands were trembling and her knees felt weak. When she played the message back a third time, she wrote down 5-E, Hillandale Apts on a piece of paper. Then she opened the telephone book and looked up the address of the apartment complex. It was across town to the east. Very close to the Canterbury Six theaters, she realized. Well.
Laura erased the message from the answering machine. A friend, indeed. Someone who worked with Doug? How many people knew about this? She felt her heartbeat getting out of control, and David suddenly kicked in her belly. She forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, one hand pressed to David's bulge. A moment of indecision: should she go to the bathroom to throw up, or would the nausea pass? She waited, her eyes closed and cold sweat on her cheeks, and the sickness did pass. Then she opened her eyes again, and she stared at the address on the piece of paper in her hand. Her vision seemed to blur in and out, her temples squeezed by what felt like an iron vise, and she had to go sit down before she fell down.