With jerky hands he plucked it from his back pocket and put it on the dashboard. With calm hands worthy of Ross Anderson, I lowered the gun to my lap and fingered my way through the photo and credit-card compartments. Seeing three young women in graduation gowns and a couple in ’40’s wedding attire, I winced; seeing a pictureless Nebraska driver’s license, valid draft card and Visa, American Express, and Diner’s Club, I smiled and said, “Get out of the van.”
Martin got out and stood by the door, shaking and murmuring prayers. I put the wallet in my pocket and joined him on the roadside, savoring mental images of my three new sisters until their about-to-be-excommunicated brother started to weep. Then, jarred, I poked the silencered snout of my weapon into his back and said, “Walk.”
I marched him exactly sixty-two paces, one step for each year of our lives, then said, “Turn around and open your mouth.” With chattering teeth he did, and I stuck the barrel in and pulled the trigger. His pitch backward almost wrenched the gun from my hand, but I managed to hold on.
The cold prairie air singed my lungs as I mentally regrouped. I thought of making a search for the expended round, then rejected the idea — my only other hit with Ross’s piece had been in Illinois seven months before; there was no way the killings would be connected.
I was walking back to Deathmobile II and my shovel when I saw headlights approaching from the direction of Lincoln. The abruptness of it spooked me, and I got in, hang a U-turn and headed to work. I was on the job early, and I spent the entire shift memorizing the photographs of my new family. In the morning I burned them to ash in the ground-floor men’s room, and when I flushed the sooty remains I knew the faces were imprinted in my memory bank forever.
18
Forever lasted eleven days.
Those days were happy, peaceful. I had earned a family to fill up empty spaces in my past, and although Russell Luxxlor’s body was discovered, nullifying my attempt to steal his identity, I still had Dad and Mom and Molly and Laurie and Susan as consolation prizes. Salable credit cards were a bonus on top of that, and I decided to unload them when I left Lincoln for good — a prescheduled two weeks after the killing.
Luxxlor’s death made the local media, and one newspaper account had police accurately speculating that he was killed for his ID; I was even mentioned as having been seen with him at Tommy’s. Still, I wasn’t questioned, nor was I worried — it was the homosexual community that would bear the brunt of the heat.
So, for eleven days I existed in a realistic fantasy world devoid of violence and sexual urges I laughed with favorite sister Molly and comforted sister Laurie when her husband gave her grief; I encouraged sister Susan to stay sober and teased Mom and Dad about their religious fervor. I was running on a fuel mixture that was 80 % fantasy, 20 % a detachment that knew the game the rest of me was playing. The point spread existed harmoniously within me and my new family drifted through my sleeping dreams in a jumble that made them seem old and well thumbed.
On my twelfth post-killing morning I woke up and couldn’t remember Molly’s face. Wracking my memory wouldn’t bring it back; small chores to ease my mind were no help. Fantasizing with other family members made my 20 % detachment zoom to 90 % plus, and toward evening every time I memory-searched for Molly I came up with the bloodied faces of old women victims.
That night I panicked.
Sister Laurie was starting to slip into blankness, and I loaded all my belongings into Deathmobile II and headed out of Lincoln on the Cornhusker Highway. Recalling a newspaper article on the local crime scene and its meeting places, I stopped at a roadhouse called Henderson’s Hot Spot and tried to sell Russell Luxxlor’s credit cards to two men playing pool. Nervous and twitchy, I said all the wrong things and spooked them. When their hardboiled fish eyes zoomed in on me, I ran to the Deathmobile and sped out of Nebraska at ten miles over the speed limit.
The incident sent me into a tailspin, and where before I would have killed boldly to counteract my feelings of powerlessness, now I sought solace, creature comforts, the quenching of an extraordinary curiosity as to how other people lived.
For eight months I traveled slowly northeast, staying for weeks at a time at expensive motor inns, exploring the local terrain. I slept in big soft beds and watched cable T.V.; I ate expensive meals that devoured my bankroll. The remaining members of my adopted family dropped from my mind, one at a time, as I notched eastbound miles; to replace them I picked up hitchhikers, plied them with marijuana and got them to talk about themselves and their families. Letting them out unharmed, their past mine in 80 %/20 % fashion, I always felt just a little bit more secure, more safe. Ross began to seem like a distant apparition.
Then 80/20 revolted against me, becoming 100 % nightmare.
It happened suddenly. I was asleep in a big, soft Howard Johnson’s bed in Clear Lake, Iowa. Recent hitchhikers were walking through my slumber, their faces getting more and more distinct. My anticipation grew as I sensed all of them were blond; I moved in their direction. Then I saw that they were wearing powder-white wigs; then I saw that they were all child versions of people I had killed; then they all bared long, sharp fangs and went for my genitals.
I woke up screaming, and was on the road inside of two minutes,
Frightened out of another city, again I fought the fear out of character.
I stayed awake for 106 straight hours; I let my beard grow; I changed my hairstyle. I smoked big pipefuls of my own marijuana, experiencing its effects for the second time; I laughed giddily and ate like a pig under its spell. When I finally knew I could no longer remain conscious, I pulled off the roadside, only to have Ross Anderson snuggle up next to me in my dreams.
“You’re getting soft, soft, softer”;
“You’re getting soft on people”;
“You’re getting soft on people so you won’t have to kill them”;
“If you quit killing you’ll die.”
“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;
“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;
“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;
“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;
“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;
“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME.”
19
A nightmarish week later I met Rheinhardt Wildebrand, and in the end, superbly refortified, I killed him without hesitation — despite admiring his superb lack of niceness. The prologue to my symbolic grandfather was seven days of fitful sleep filled with victim-faced animals snapping at me and constant kill-urgings from Ross. My tailspin was moving into its nadir — I was running out of money; my beard was growing out patchy and incongruously light; and Deathmobile II was coming down with engine trouble, pings and rattles that reflected my own inside/outside deluge. Pulling into Benton Heights, Michigan, it threw a piston, and I pushed it to a nearby repair shop and placed half of my remaining cash down as a deposit on a ring job and a complete engine overhaul. Handing me an itemized list of the van’s maladies, the head mechanic said, “You been drivin’ mean, boyo. You ever hear about, oil changes and transmission fluid? You’re lucky the fucker didn’t blow up on you.”
If only he knew.
It was now a question of finding a place to stay and a job for money to restore the Deathmobile. With my .38 in my pocket, I walked around Benton Heights. It stood on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, and the constant view of sludgy dark water reminded me of Bobby Borgie, dead in Evanston some hundreds of miles across it. Knowing his presence would haunt me in the place, I hopped a bus to the nearest large city — Kalamazoo.