Mr. Murder

They’re coming.

Abandoning the shoes in a litter of rubber shavings on the kitchen counter, he urgently searches Jack’s body and takes the money out of the old man’s wallet. Sixty-two bucks. He searches for Frannie’s purse, finds it in the bedroom. Forty-nine dollars.

When he leaves the motorhome, the mottled gray-black sky is convex, bent low with the weight of the thunder-heads. Rain by the megaton batters the earth.

Coils of fog serpentine among the trunks of the pine trees and seem to be reaching for him as he splashes to the Honda.

On the interstate again, speeding through the perpetual twilight beneath the storm, he turns the car heater to its highest setting and soon crosses the state line into Texas, where the flat land becomes impossibly flatter. Having shed the last of the meager belongings from his old life, he feels liberated. Soaked by the cold rain, he shivers uncontrollably, but he is also trembling with anticipation and excitement.

His destiny lies somewhere to the west.

He peels the plastic wrapper off a Slim Jim and eats while he drives. A subtle flavor, threaded through the primary taste of the cured meat, reminds him of the metallic odor of blood in the house in Kansas City, where he left the nameless dead couple in their enormous Georgian bed.

The killer pushes the Honda as fast as he dares on the rain-slick highway, prepared to kill any cop who pulls him over. Reaching Amarillo, Texas, just after dusk on Sunday evening, he discovers that the Honda is virtually running on empty. He pulls into a truckstop only long enough to tank up, use the bathroom, and buy more food to take with him.

After Amarillo, rocketing westward into the night, he passes Wildorado, with the New Mexico border ahead, and suddenly he realizes that he is crossing the badlands, in the heart of the Old West, where so many wonderful movies have been set. John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River, Walter Brennan stealing scenes left and right. Rio Bravo. And Shane was set back there in Kansas—wasn’t it?—Jack Palance blowing away Elisha Cook, Jr. decades before Dorothy took the tornado to Oz. Stagecoach, The Gunfighter, True Grit, Destry Rides Again, The Unforgiven, High Plains Drifter, Yellow Sky, so many great movies, not all of them set in Texas but at least in the spirit of Texas, with John Wayne and Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart and Clint Eastwood, legends, mythical places now made real and waiting out there beyond the highway, obscured by rain and mist and darkness. It was almost possible to believe that those stories were being played out right now, in the frontier towns he was passing, and that he was Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid or some other gunman of an earlier century, a killer but not really a bad guy, misunderstood by society, forced to kill because of what had been done to him, a posse on his trail . . .

Memories from theater screens and late-night movies on TV—which constitute by far the largest portion of the memories he possesses—flood his troubled mind, soothing him, and for a while he is lost so completely in those fantasies that he pays too little attention to his driving. Gradually he becomes aware that his speed has fallen to forty miles an hour. Trucks and cars explode past him, the wind of their passage buffeting the Honda, splashing dirty water across his windshield, their red taillights swiftly receding into the gloom.

Assuring himself that his mysterious destiny will prove to be as great as any that John Wayne pursued in films, he accelerates.

Empty and half-empty packages of food, crumpled and smeary and full of crumbs, are heaped on the passenger seat. They cascade onto the floor, under the dashboard, completely filling the leg space on that side of the car.

From the litter, he extracts a new box of doughnuts. To wash them down he opens a warmish Pepsi.

Westward. Steadily westward.

An identity awaits him. He is going to be someone.

15

Later Sunday, at home, after huge bowls of popcorn and two videos, Paige tucked the girls into bed, kissed them goodnight, and retreated to the open doorway to watch Marty as he settled down for that moment of the day he most cherished. Story time.

He continued with the poem about Santa’s evil twin, and the girls were instantly enraptured.

“Reindeer sweep down out of the night. See how each is brimming with fright? Tossing their heads, rolling their eyes, these gentle animals are so very wise— they know this Santa isn’t their friend, but an imposter and far ’round the bend. They would stampede for all they’re worth, dump this nut off the edge of the earth. But Santa’s bad brother carries a whip, a club, a harpoon, a gun at his hip, a blackjack, an Uzi—you better run!— and a terrible, horrible, wicked raygun.”

“Raygun?” Charlotte said. “Then he’s an alien!”

“Don’t be silly,” Emily admonished her. “He’s Santa’s twin, so if he’s an alien, Santa is an alien too, which he isn’t.”

With the smug condescension of a nine-year-old who had long ago discovered Santa Claus wasn’t real, Charlotte said, “Em, you have a lot to learn. Daddy, what’s the raygun do? Turn you to mush?”

“To stone,” Emily said. She withdrew one hand from under the covers and revealed the polished stone on which she had painted a pair of eyes. “That’s what happened to Peepers.”

“They land on the roof, quiet and sneaky. Oh, but this Santa is fearfully freaky. He whispers a warning to each reindeer, leaning close to make sure they hear: ‘You have relatives back at the Pole— antlered, gentle, quite innocent souls. So if you fly away while I’m inside, back to the Pole on a plane I will ride. I’ll have a picnic in the midnight sun: reindeer pie, pate, reindeer in a bun, reindeer salad and hot reindeer soup, oh, all sorts of tasty reindeer goop.’ ”

“I hate this guy,” Charlotte announced emphatically. She pulled her covers up to her nose as she had done the previous evening, but she wasn’t genuinely frightened, just having a good time pretending to be spooked.

“This guy, he was just born bad,” Emily decided. “For sure, he couldn’t be this way just ’cause his mommy and daddy weren’t as nice to him as they should’ve been.”

Paige marveled at Marty’s ability to strike the perfect note to elicit the kids’ total involvement. If he’d given her the poem to review before he’d started reading it, Paige would have advised that it was a little too strong and dark to appeal to young girls.

So much for the question of which was superior—the insights of the psychologist or the instinct of the storyteller.

“At the chimney, he looks down the bricks, but that entrance is strictly for hicks. With all his tools, a way in can be found for a fat bearded burglar out on the town. From roof to yard to the kitchen door, he chuckles about what he has in store for the lovely family sleeping within. He grins one of his most nasty grins. Oh, what a creep, a scum, and a louse. He’s breaking into the Stillwater house.”

“Our place!” Charlotte squealed.

“I knew!” Emily said.

Charlotte said, “You did not.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did not.”

“Did too. That’s why I’m sleeping with Peepers, so he can protect me until after Christmas.”

They insisted that their father read the whole thing from the beginning, all verses from both nights. As Marty began to oblige, Paige faded out of the doorway and went downstairs to put away the leftover popcorn and straighten up the kitchen.

The day had been perfect as far as the kids were concerned, and it had been good for her as well. Marty had not suffered another episode, which allowed her to convince herself that the fugue had been a singularity— frightening, inexplicable, but not an indication of a serious degenerative condition or disease.

Surely no man could keep pace with two such energetic children, entertain them, and prevent them from getting cranky for an entire busy day unless he was in extraordinarily good health. Speaking as the other half of the Fabulous Stillwater Parenting Machine, Paige was exhausted.