He stops the car, lets the boy in. He’s a good-looking young man, his hair blond, his face and forearms lightly tanned. There’s downy hair on his arms, and his face is as smooth as a girl’s.
Is the boy a hustler? That’s possible, hitchhiking is a time-honored way for boys to arrange liaisons with older men. This one seems innocent, however.
He chats with the boy, asks him about sports, about school. “How about girls?” he says. “You like girls?” I like men better, the boy might say, but he doesn’t, he says girls are okay. He is, by all indications, entirely oblivious to what’s going on.
At a stop sign, he brings the car to a halt and points to the floor on the passenger side. “There’s a glove there,” he says. “Can you reach it?” The boy bends forward, looking for the glove that isn’t there, and he swings the rubber mallet in an easy arc and hits the boy solidly on the back of the skull. Hard enough to kill him? No, but hard enough to knock him out. In no time at all the boy’s hands are taped behind his back, and another piece of duct tape covers his mouth.
Five minutes later they’re at the preselected killing ground.
And, he discovers, there’s no need to employ a surrogate penis. His own is more than equal to the task. The boy’s skin is as soft and smooth as a woman’s, and his helplessness, his utter vulnerability, is exciting. He hasn’t thought to bring a condom, an absurd oversight resulting from his assumption that the boy wouldn’t arouse him. Never assume, he reminds himself. Never take anything for granted. Prepare for all contingencies.
78
Lawrence Block
So he takes his pleasure with the boy, but stops short of orgasm. And takes up the knife, the beautiful knife that Randall made.
After the knife, a scissors, to snip a lock of hair. After the scissors, the garden spade. Not to dig the grave, he did that ahead of time, anticipating a need for it, but to fill it in. The killing ground’s an abandoned farm, west of the city and just beyond the Southside Speedway. Its own private family cemetery is off to the side of the ruined old farmhouse. The grave-stones are so badly weathered you can’t make out the inscriptions, and now there’s one new grave among the other dozen or so, and he fills it in and presses the sod in place over it. Right now it’s a fresh grave, but soon it will be indistinguishable from the others.
By nightfall he’s placed the battered old Camry in the storage shed he rented the previous day. If anyone finds it there, they’ll find a vehicle with no fingerprints on it. There’ll be no prints on the tools in the trunk, either—the spade, the mallet, the splendid knife. The roll of duct tape.
He retrieves his own car, a beige square-back Ford Tempo with his lug-gage in its trunk. He drives west on I-64 and north on I-81, the cruise control set at four miles over the speed limit. He doesn’t stop except for gas until he’s across the Pennsylvania state line. There, in a mom-and-pop motel with a front office that smells of curry, he takes a long hot shower and makes a bundle of all the clothes he wore, to be donated to Goodwill in the morning. He slips into bed naked and lets himself relive each moment of the afternoon’s entertainment, starting with the boy’s getting into the car and ending with the last stroke of the knife.
This time there’s no need to deny himself. His climax is fierce in its intensity, and he cries out like a girl in pain.
9
It’s noon, and no one has yet made an appearance on the other side of the long window. It is as if the curtain has risen upon an insistently empty stage.
Where is everybody?
Has there been a call from the governor? No, surely not, because the governor wants to go on being governor, and may even hope for higher office someday. He won’t be making any calls. Nor is there a lawyer out there with a last-ditch appeal to a high court. The appeal process has long since ended for Preston Applewhite.
Is Applewhite all right? He’s a young man, a man just over the threshold of middle age, but old enough for a stroke, old enough for a heart attack. He pictures the man struck down in his cell at the eleventh hour, imagines the ambulance ride, the race to save his life. And then of course the stay of execution, until he’s deemed in good enough condition to be put to death.
But surely it’s just his own imagination, having a field day. The other spectators aren’t fidgeting in their chairs or checking their watches. Perhaps executions are like rock concerts, perhaps everyone knows they never start precisely on time.
It’s not as though anyone has a train to catch. But there would seem to be time for a further stroll down Memory Lane . . .
.
.
.
80
Lawrence Block
Two days after the Willis boy’s death, he rents a furnished house in York, Pennsylvania. It’s a few days short of a month before he returns to Richmond.
But it’s not an idle month. He has a DSL line installed for his computer, and he’s often online, researching subjects on the Internet, checking his e-mail, keeping up with his news groups.
At least once a day he disconnects his own laptop and boots up the one he’s bought, which he thinks of as Preston Applewhite’s computer. In MS-Word, he writes out a breathless account of the boy’s abduction and murder, departing from reality only in that he tells of the weeks he spends leading up to the event, how he wrestles with the impulse, how he determines he has no choice but to go through with it.
And he’s deliberately vague about the killing ground: I took him to a fine and private place. I knew no one would disturb us there. He’ll simply disappear. No one will think to look for him there.
Online, he opens an e-mail account for Applewhite, ScoutMasterBates at Hotmail.com. On the registration form, he calls himself John Smith, unimaginatively enough, but the street address he provides is 476
Elm Street. Applewhite’s actual street number, while not on Elm Street, is indeed 476. For city and state he enters Los Angeles, California, but includes Applewhite’s Richmond zip code.
