“No! Go away.”
“April, I’m Ben Raines. I had the… ah… misfortune to encounter your friend, the professor. He told me about you and then the old fool took cyanide. He’s dead.”
Footsteps on the stairs and a heart-shaped face peered around the corner. A very pretty face with large dark eyes. Huge glasses in front of the eyes. “He’s really dead?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me, too.” She stepped from around the corner of the stairwell. “But that son of a bitch was about to worry me to death. Always complaining about my titties.”
She came a bit closer. She was dressed in jeans and denim shirt. Maybe her titties weren’t large enough to suit the professor, but the pert little lady was unmistakably female and well enough endowed to suit Ben.
“He said you were a student of his—last year.”
She laughed. “Yeah, he would. Hell, mister, he wasn’t a professor. That was just his nickname. He was a dealer.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A dealer, man. Like in dope. Hell, every kid on this campus knew the old ‘Professor.’”
Ben shook his head. “Well, every man is entitled to make a fool of himself once in a while. He sure had me fooled.”
“Oh, he was well-educated, for a fact. And he
Ben stepped closer. She did not seem afraid of him. “He did seem genuinely concerned about you.”
“I think he was, in his own strange way. He was all right until about two months ago. That’s when his wife died.”
“He told me his wife had been dead a long time!”
“Yeah? Well, he lied a lot. His wife’s upstairs in a box.”
“Jesus!”
“Yeah, you can say that again. That’s when he started slippin’ downhill. Quickly. Called me his daughter at one point and then wanted me to give him a hand job with the next breath. As if he could get it up.”
Ben could but shake his head.
Her eyes went from Ben to Juno. “That’s a pretty dog. Does he bite?”
“I guess he would if you made him angry. April what?”
“Simpson. I guess the professor told you to take care of me, right?”
“He mentioned something to that effect, yes.”
“Well… you don’t look too old. Can you get it up?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Keep a hard-on. Man, I’m horny!”
“I’ll do my best,” Ben said dryly.
“I’ll get my things. What are you going to do with the professor?”
“What do you want done with him?”
She shrugged. “He loved the campus. I’d leave him where he is.”
“All right.”
“Ben Raines, right?”
“Yes.”
“So I’ll be with you in a shake, Ben Raines.”
And Ben had found yet another survivor.
TWELVE
Heading back to his house just a mile south of Ike’s place, now deserted, Ben answered the girl’s seemingly endless chain of questions and asked a few of his own.
“Why didn’t you leave campus, April? If the professor was giving you such a bad time?”
“Where would I go? Where could I go? And do what?” She put her dark eyes on him. “I went home once, right after… it happened, after I got well from being so sick. Back to Orlando. Found my parents. Dead. I didn’t know what to do so I just went back to what I’d grown accustomed to: the campus. I’d been there four years; all my friends were there. Or had been, that is. I tell you one thing, though. The professor might not have had all his beans baked, but he knew people, and he saw something in you he could trust. Lots of guys had been there before you came—all looking for women. But he never said anything about me.”
“How often did you leave the campus?”
“Only once after I got back from Orlando. That was when Penny had joined us in the dorm. Penny Butler, from Miami. Seventeen years old. Things had sort of calmed down, and we went for a walk, just to look around, you know? Some guys started chasing us—all of them drunk and mean-looking. They caught Penny. I can still hear her screaming while they were dragging her into a department store. I hid in a grocery store right next to the department store. I was afraid to move; so scared I thought I’d die. I didn’t know what to do. I found a pistol under the cash register, but I didn’t know what to do with it. It was kind of like the one you have on your belt. How do you work the damned thing? I’ve never fired a pistol in my life—any kind of gun, for that matter.
“They took turns raping her; and it wasn’t just rape. They did… ugly things to her. I could hear them through the walls, laughing and shouting. They… buggered her, you know? Then they beat her when she wouldn’t… suck them off. I guess she agreed to do anything they wanted, ‘cause the beating stopped. I heard them talking about her taking three guys at once. You know, one in the mouth, one up the ass, and one the… normal way. One of them must have been real big, ‘cause Penny kept screaming in pain and then they’d beat her again.”
She sighed. “I… guess they beat her too much. All of a sudden it got real quiet. She wasn’t screaming. The guys laughed some more, then walked out of the building, up a street. I slipped out the back door of one building and in through the back door of the department store. She was just lying there on the floor, naked, her eyes open, but she was dead. Her neck was at a funny angle. I guess it was broken. I checked her pulse, wrist and neck, but she was dead. Ben?”
“Uh-huh?”
“How come there’s so many shitty people in the world? How come they lived and the good people died?”
Jerre had asked pretty much the same question. All Ben could do was shake his head.
April kept pretty much to herself in the big house by the beach. She was impressed by Ben’s determination to write a chronicle of the disaster, and she helped whenever she could. But when it got down to the actual writing of the journal, Ben told her to take a hike; he worked alone.
She did not take offense, seemed to understand. So she walked the lonely beaches, picking up driftwood and sand dollars and shells.
Ben had sensed their time together would not be long, for in their conversations, April had let it be known, loud, clear, and proud, that she was a liberal; she opposed capital punishment, believed in gun control, loved the ACLU, was thrilled with Hilton Logan, hated the military, et cetera.
Ben had listened to her blather and babble and then had told her that if she so much as mentioned Hilton Logan or the ACLU to him again, she would find herself back on the road—alone.
She got the message.
On the first day of April, 1989, Ben told her to get her gear together, they were pulling out.
She asked no questions.
They drove up to Perry, then took highway 221 to Georgia. They saw no one along the way, but Ben felt certain someone had seen them. His senses were working overtime, and he could not shake the feeling of being watched… tracked.
April surprised him by saying, “I think we’re being followed, Ben.”
“When did you pick up on it?”
