You stupid cunt, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
And: You don’t understand. It’s a mistake.
It was a mistake, all right. Everything she’d done tonight had been a mistake.
No, not everything. She was in on it. She knew.
“Did you know?” Tess asked the man she had killed. She reached out to grab Strehlke’s arm, then drew away. It would be still warm under his sleeve. Still thinking it was alive. “Did you?”
He didn’t answer.
“Let me try,” Doreen said. And in her kindliest, you-can-tell-me-everything old lady voice, the one that always worked in the books, she asked: “How much did you know, Mr. Driver?”
“I sometimes suspected,” he said. “Mostly I didn’t think about it. I had a business to run.”
“Did you ever ask your mother?”
“I might have,” he said, and Tess thought his strangely cocked right eye evasive. But in that wild moonlight, who could tell about such things? Who could tell for sure?
“When girls disappeared? Is that when you asked?”
To this Big Driver made no reply, perhaps because Doreen had begun to sound like Fritzy. And like Tom the Tomtom, of course.
“But there was never any proof, was there?” This time it was Tess herself. She wasn’t sure he would answer her voice, but he did.
“No. No proof.”
“And you didn’t want proof, did you?”
No answer this time, so Tess got up and walked unsteadily to the bleach-spattered brown hat, which had blown across the driveway and onto the lawn. Just as she picked it up, the pole light went off again. Inside, the dog stopped barking. This made her think of Sherlock Holmes, and standing there in the windy moonlight, Tess heard herself voicing the saddest chuckle to ever come from a human throat. She took off her hat, stuffed it into her jacket pocket, and put his on in its place. It was too big for her, so she took it off again long enough to adjust the strap in back. She returned to the man she had killed, the one she judged perhaps not quite innocent… but surely too innocent to deserve the punishment the Courageous Woman had meted out.
She tapped the brim of the brown hat and asked, “Is this the one you wear when you go on the road?” Knowing it wasn’t.
Strehlke didn’t answer, but Doreen Marquis, doyenne of the Knitting Society, did. “Of course not. When you’re driving for Red Hawk, you wear a Red Hawk cap, don’t you, dear?”
“Yes,” Strehlke said.
“And you don’t wear your ring, either, do you?”
“No. Too gaudy for customers. Not businesslike. And what if someone at one of those skanky truck-stops—someone too drunk or stoned to know better—saw it and thought it was real? No one would risk mugging me, I’m too big and strong for that—at least I was until tonight—but someone might shoot me. And I don’t deserve to be shot. Not for a fake ring, and not for the terrible things my brother might have done.”
“And you and your brother never drive for the company at the same time, do you, dear?”
“No. When he’s out on the road, I mind the office. When I’m out on the road, he… well. I guess you know what he does when I’m out on the road.”
“You should have told!” Tess screamed down at him. “Even if you only suspected, you should have told!”
“He was scared,” Doreen said in her kindly voice. “Weren’t you, dear?”
“Yes,” Al said. “I was scared.”
“Of your brother?” Tess asked, either unbelieving or not wanting to believe. “Scared of your kid brother?”
“Not him,” Al Strehlke said. “Her.”
– 39 –
When Tess got back in her car and started the motor, Tom said: “There was no way you could know, Tess. And it all happened so fast.”
That was true, but it ignored the central looming fact: by going after her rapist like a vigilante in a movie, she had sent herself to hell.
She raised the gun to her temple, then lowered it again. She couldn’t, not now. She still had an obligation to the women in the pipe, and any other women who might join them if Lester Strehlke escaped. And after what she had just done, it was more important than ever that he not escape.
She had one more stop to make. But not in her Expedition.
– 40 –
The driveway at 101 Township Road wasn’t long, and it wasn’t paved. It was just a pair of ruts with bushes growing close enough to scrape the sides of the blue F-150 pickup truck as she drove it up to the little house. Nothing neat about this one; this one was a huddled old creep-manse that could have been straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. How life did imitate art, sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation.
Tess made no attempt at stealth—why bother to kill the headlights when Lester Strehlke would know the sound of his brother’s truck almost as well as the sound of his brother’s voice?
She was still wearing the bleach-splattered brown cap Big Driver wore when he wasn’t on the road, the lucky cap that turned out to be unlucky in the end. The ring with the fake ruby stone was far too big for any of her fingers, so she had put it into the left front pocket of her cargo pants. Little Driver had dressed and driven as his big brother when he went out hunting, and while he might never have time enough (or brains enough) to appreciate the irony of his last victim coming to him with the same accessories, Tess did.
She parked by the back door, turned off the engine, and got out. She carried the gun in one hand. The door was unlocked. She stepped into a shed that smelled of beer and spoiled food. A single sixty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling on a length of dirty cord. Straight ahead were four overflowing plastic garbage cans, the thirty-two-gallon kind you could buy at Walmart. Behind them, stacked against the shed wall, were what looked like five years’ worth of Uncle Henry’s swap guide. To the left was another door, up a single step. It would lead to the kitchen. It had an old-fashioned latch rather than a knob. The door squalled on unoiled hinges when she depressed the latch and pushed it open. An hour ago, such a squall would have terrified her into immobility. Now it didn’t bother her in the slightest. She had work to do. That was all it came down to, and it was a relief to be free of all that emotional baggage. She stepped into the smell of whatever greasy meat Little Driver had fried for his supper. She could hear a TV laugh-track. Some sitcom. Seinfeld, she thought.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Lester Strehlke called from the vicinity of the laugh-track. “I ain’t got but a beer and a half left, if that’s what you came for. I’m gonna drink up and then go to bed.” She followed the sound of his voice. “If you’da called, I coulda saved you the tr—”
She came into the room. He saw her. Tess hadn’t speculated on what his reaction might be to the reappearance of his last victim, carrying a gun and wearing the hat Lester himself wore when his urges came over him. Even if she had, she could never have predicted the extremity of the one she saw. His mouth dropped open, and then his entire face froze. The can of beer he was holding dropped from his hand and fell into his lap, spraying foam onto his only article of clothing, a pair of yellowing Jockey shorts.
He’s seeing a ghost, she thought as she walked toward him, raising the gun. Good.
There was time to see that, although the living room was a bachelor mess and there were no snowglobes or cutie-poo figurines, the TV-watching setup was the same as the one at his mother’s house on Lacemaker Lane: the La-Z-Boy, the TV tray (here holding a final unopened can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a bag of Doritos instead of Diet Coke and Cheez Doodles), the same TV Guide, the one with Simon Cowell on it.
“You’re dead,” he whispered.
“No,” Tess replied. She put the barrel of the Lemon Squeezer against the side of his head. He made one feeble effort to grab her wrist, but it was far too little and much too late. “That’s you.”
She pulled the trigger. Blood came out of his ear and his head snapped briskly to the side. He looked like a man trying to free up a kink in his neck. On the TV, George Costanza said, “I was in the pool, I was in the pool.” The audience laughed.
– 41 –
It was almost midnight, and the wind was blowing harder than ever. When it gusted, Lester Strehlke’s whole house shook, and each time Tess thought of the little pig who had built his house out of sticks.