“You know,” he said, “I was going to ask you something earlier, but I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Oh?”
“Aren’t you nervous hitching rides with strangers? Don’t you think it’s dangerous?”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, you know, everybody does it.”
“I see.”
“And I’ve always been okay so far.”
“A young woman alone-”
“Well, I usually team up with somebody. A boy, or at least another girl. But this time, well…”
“You figured you’d take a chance.”
She flashed a smile. “It worked out okay, didn’t it?”
He was silent for a moment, but held her with his eyes. Then he said, “Remember the fish we were talking about?”
“The fish?”
“How it feels when it slips back into the water. And whether it learns anything from the experience.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Not everyone is a catch-and-release fisherman,” he said. “That’s probably something you ought to keep in mind.”
She was still standing there, looking puzzled, while he put the SUV in gear and pulled away.
HE DROVE HOME, FEELING fulfilled. He had never moved from the house he was born in, and it had been his alone ever since his mother’s death ten years ago.
He checked the mail, which yielded half a dozen envelopes with checks in them. He had a mail-order business, selling fishing lures, and he spent the better part of an hour preparing the checks for deposit and packing the orders for shipment. He’d make more money if he put his business online and let people pay with credit cards, but he didn’t need much money, and he found it easier to let things remain as they were. He ran the same ads every month in the same magazines, and his old customers reordered, and enough new customers turned up to keep him going.
He cooked some pasta, heated some meat sauce, chopped some lettuce for a salad, drizzled a little olive oil over it. He ate at the kitchen table, washed the dishes, watched the TV news. When it ended he left the picture on but muted the sound, and thought about the girl.
Now, though, he gave himself over to the fantasy she inspired. A lonely road. A piece of tape across her mouth. A struggle ending with her arms broken.
Stripping her. Piercing each of her openings in turn. Giving her physical pain to keep her terror company.
And finishing her with a knife. No, with his hands, strangling her. No, better yet, with his forearm across her throat, and his weight pressing down, throttling her.
Ah, the joy of it, the thrill of it, the sweet release of it. And now it was almost as real to him as if it had happened.
But it hadn’t happened. He’d left her at her door, untouched, with only a hint of what might have been. And, because it hadn’t happened, there was no ice chest full of fish to clean--no body to dispose of, no evidence to get rid of, not even that feeling of regret that had undercut his pleasure on so many otherwise perfect occasions.
Catch and release. That was the ticket, catch and release.
THE ROADHOUSE HAD A name, Toddle Inn, but nobody ever called it anything but Roy’s, after the man who’d owned it for close to fifty years until his liver quit on him.
That was something he would probably never have to worry about, as he’d never been much of a drinker. Tonight, three days after he’d dropped the young hitchhiker at her door, he’d had the impulse to go barhopping, and Roy’s was his fourth stop. He’d ordered a beer at the first place and drank two sips of it, left the second bar without ordering anything, and drank most of the Coke he ordered at bar number three.
Roy’s had beer on draft, and he stood at the bar and ordered a glass of it. There was an English song he’d heard once, of which he recalled only one verse:
The man who buys a pint of beer
Gets half a pint of water;
The only thing the landlord’s got
That’s any good’s his daughter.
The beer was watery, to be sure, but it didn’t matter because he didn’t care about beer, good or bad. But the bar held something to interest him, the very thing he’d come out for.
She was two stools away from him, and she was drinking something in a stemmed glass, with an orange slice in it. At first glance she looked like the hitchhiker, or like her older sister, the one who’d gone wrong. Her blouse was a size too small, and she’d tried to cope by unbuttoning an extra button. The lipstick was smeared on her full-lipped mouth, and her nail polish was chipped.
She picked up her drink and was surprised to find that she’d finished it. She shook her head, as if wondering how to contend with this unanticipated development, and while she was working it out he lifted a hand to catch the barman’s eye, then pointed at the girl’s empty glass.
She waited until the fresh drink was in front of her, then picked it up and turned toward her benefactor. “Thank you,” she said, “you’re a gentleman.”
He closed the distance between them. “And a fisherman,” he said.
SOMETIMES IT DIDN’T MATTER what you had on your hook. Sometimes it wasn’t even necessary to wet a line. Sometimes all you had to do was sit there and they’d jump right into the boat.
She’d had several drinks before the one he’d bought her, and she didn’t really need the two others he bought her after that. But she thought she did, and he didn’t mind spending the money or sitting there while she drank them.
Her name, she told him repeatedly, was Marni. He was in no danger of forgetting that fact, nor did she seem to be in any danger of remembering his name, which she kept asking him over and over. He’d said it was Jack-it wasn’t-and she kept apologizing for her inability to retain that information. “I’m Marni,” she’d say on each occasion. “With an i,” she added, more often than not.
He found himself remembering a woman he’d picked up years ago in a bar with much the same ambience. She’d been a very different sort of drunk, although she’d been punishing the Harvey Wallbangers as industriously as Marni was knocking back the gandy dancers. She’d grown quieter and quieter, and her eyes went glassy, and by the time he’d driven them to the place he’d selected in advance, she was out cold. He’d had some very interesting plans for her, and here she was, the next thing to comatose, and wholly incapable of knowing what was being done to her.
So he’d let himself imagine that she was dead, and took her that way, and kept waiting for her to wake up, but she didn’t. And it was exciting, more exciting than he’d have guessed, but at the end he held himself back.
And paused for a moment to consider the situation, and then very deliberately broke her neck. And then took her again, imagining that she was only sleeping.
And that was good, too.
“AT LEAST I GOT the house,” she was saying. “My ex took the kids away from me, can you imagine that? Got some lawyer saying I was an un-t mother. Can you imagine that?”
The house her ex-husband had let her keep certainly looked like a drunk lived in it. It wasn’t filthy, just remarkably untidy. She grabbed him by the hand and led him up a flight of stairs and into her bedroom, which was no neater than the rest of the place, then turned and threw herself into his arms.
He disengaged, and she seemed puzzled. He asked if there was anything in the house to drink, and she said there was beer in the fridge, and there might be some vodka in the freezer. He said he’d be right back.
He gave her five minutes, and when he returned with a can of Rolling Rock and a half-pint of vodka, she was sprawled naked on her back, snoring. He set the beer can and the vodka bottle on the bedside table, and drew the blanket to cover her.