Mind prey

CHAPTER 18

Gloria was walking up to Mail's front porch when the sheriff's car pulled into the driveway. She turned, smiling, and waited. The cop wrote something on a clipboard on the passenger seat, then got out of the car, smiled, nodded politely.

"Ma'am? Are you the owner?"

"Yes? Is there a problem?"

"Well, we're just checking ownership records of houses down here," the police officer said. "You're…" He looked at his clipboard and waited.

"Gloria LaDoux," Gloria said. "My husband is Martin, but he's not home yet."

"He works up in the Cities?"

"Yup." She thought quickly, picking out the most boring job she could think of. "He's at the Mall of America? At Brothers Shoes?"

The cop nodded, made a mark on the board. "Have you seen anything that would be, like, unusual along the road here? We're looking for a man in a van…"

Mail was a half-mile from the house, the passenger seat full of groceries, when he saw the car in the driveway.

He stopped on the side of the road and closed his eyes for a moment. He knew the car, a rusty brown Chevy Cavalier. It belonged to a guy named Bob Something, who had a ponytail and a nose ring and bit his fingernails down to the quick. Bob didn't know where he lived, but Gloria did-and Gloria drove Bob's car when she needed one.

Gloria.

She'd been a good contact at the hospital. She worked in the clinic. She could steal cigarettes, small change, candy, and sometimes a few painkillers. Outside, she'd been trouble. She'd helped him with the Marty LaDoux thing, she'd switched the dental records, she'd collected John Mail's life insurance when the body was found in the river. Then she started going on about their relationship. And though she'd never made any direct threats, she'd hinted that her knowledge of Martin LaDoux made her special.

He'd worried about that. He hadn't done anything, because she was as implicated as he was, and she was smart enough to know it. On the other hand, she had liked it inside. She'd told him that when she was inside, she felt secure.

And she loved to talk.

If she'd figured out the Manette kidnapping, she wouldn't leave it alone. Eventually she'd tell someone. Gloria was always in therapy. She'd never get enough of talking about her problems, of hearing someone else analyze them.

Shit. Gloria…

Mail pulled the van off the shoulder and went down the road to the house.

Gloria Crosby felt expansive. For weeks, she'd felt as though she were living in a box. One day was much like the next as she waited for something to happen, for a direction to emerge. Now it was happening. John had Andi Manette and the lads, she was sure of that: and he must have a plan to get at the Manette money. When they had it, they'd have to leave. Go south, maybe. He was smart, he had ideas, but he wasn't good at details. She could do the detail work, just like she had with Martin LaDoux.

Martin LaDoux had been a robo-geek, the worst of the worst, frightened by everybody, allergic to everything, crowded by Others who'd keep him up all night, talking to him. Her mental picture of Martin was of a tall, thin, pimply teenager with a handkerchief, rubbing his Rudolph-red nose while his eyes watered, trying to smile…

He was useless until the state swept them all out of the hospital and gave them, in a ludicrous gesture at their presumed normalcy, both medical and life insurance, along with their places in a halfway house. The life insurance had doomed Martin LaDoux.

Gloria was sitting on Mail's front porch, waiting, not at all impatient. The house was locked, but John was around-through the front window, she could see the pieces of a microwave meal sitting on a TV tray in the living room.

The question was, where was he keeping Manette and the kids? The house felt empty. There was nothing living inside. A feather of unease touched Gloria's heart. Could he have gotten rid of them already?

No. She knew about John and Manette. He'd keep her for a while, she was sure of that.

Gloria was sitting on the front steps, chewing on a grass stem. When Mail pulled the van into the yard, she stood up-dressed all in black, she looked like the wicked witch's apprentice-and sauntered down to meet him.

"John," she said. Her face was pallid, soft, an indoor face, an institutional face. "How are you?"

"Okay," he said, shortly. "What's going on?"

"I came out to see how you're doing? Got a beer?"

He looked at her for a moment, and her face shone with knowledge and expectation. She knew. He nodded to the question. "Yeah, sure. Come on in."

She followed him inside, looked around. "Same old place," she said. She plunked down on his computer chair and looked at the blind eyes of the computer monitors. "Got some new ones," she said. "Any new games?"

"I've been off games," he said.

He got two beers from the refrigerator and handed one to the woman, and she twisted the top off, watching him.

"You've got a Davenport game," she said, picking up a software box. There was a pamphlet inside, and three loose discs.

"Yeah." He took a hit of the beer. "How's your head?" he asked.

"Been okay." She thumbed through the game pamphlet.

"Still on your meds?"

"Ehh, sometimes." She frowned. "But I left them back at my apartment."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I don't think I can go back there." She said it as a teaser. She wanted him to ask why not. She tossed the pamphlet back in the software box and looked up at him.

"Why not?"

"The cops were there," she said. She took a drink from the bottle, eyes fixed on him. "Looking for you."

"For me?"

"Yup. They had a picture. I don't know who told them that I know you, but they knew. I managed to put them off and slid out of there."

"Jesus, are you sure? That they didn't follow…" He looked at the front window, half-expecting squad cars.

"Yeah. They were stupid; it was easy. Hey, you know who one of them was?"

"Davenport."

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Goddamnit, Gloria."

"I jumped a bus, rode it eight blocks, hopped off, walked through Janis's apartment building, and took the walkway to Bob's, borrowed the car key from Bob…"

"Did you tell him you were coming to see me?"

"Nope." She was proud of herself. "I told him I had to bring some school stuff home. Anyway, I got the key, went down into the parking garage, and got his car. There was nobody around when I left."

He watched her as she talked, and when she finished, he nodded. "All right. I've been having some trouble with the cops."

"I know," she said. And she popped it out, a surprise: "They were here, too."

"Here?" Now he was worried.

"A cop pulled in just after I got here-they're checking all the farmhouses. I don't think he was too interested after I told him I was your wife, and we lived here together."

Mail looked at her for a moment, and then said, "You did."

"I did," she said. "And he left."

"All right," he said, his voice flat.

She caught the hems of her dress and did a mock curtsey, oddly crowlike in its bobbing dip. "You took the Manette lady and her kids."

He was dumbstruck by the baldness of it. He tried to recover: "What?"

"Come on, John," she said. "This is Gloria. You can't lie to me. Where've you got them?"

"Gloria…"

But she was shaking her head. "We took down fifteen thousand, remember?"

"Yeah."

"That was sweet," she said. "I'd like to help you collect on Manette… if you'll let me."

"Jesus." He looked at her and scratched his head.

"Can I see them? I mean, you know, put a stocking over my head or something? I assume they haven't seen your face or anything."

"Gloria, this isn't about money," Mail said. "This is about what she did to me in the old days."

That stopped her. She said, "Oh." Then: "What're you doing to her?"

Mail thought about it for ten seconds, then said, "Whatever I want."

"God," Gloria said. "That's so"-she wiggled in the chair-"neat."

Mail smiled now and said, "C'mon. I'll show you."

On the way out the back, Gloria said, "You told me you'd stopped thinking about her."

"I started again," Mail said.

"How come?"

Mail thought about not answering, but Gloria had been inside with him. As dreary and unlikable as she was, she was one of the few people who really might know how his mind worked, how he felt.

"A woman started calling me," he said. "Somebody who doesn't like Andi Manette. I don't know who-just that it's a woman. She said Manette still talks about me, about what I was like. She said Manette said I was interested in her sexually, and that she could feel the sex coming out of me. She must have called fifteen times."

"God, that's a little weird," Gloria said.

"Yeah." Mail scratched his chin, thinking about it. "The really strange thing is, she called me here. She knows who I am, but she won't tell me who she is. I can't figure that out. But she doesn't like Andi, that's for sure. She kept pushing, and I kept thinking, and pretty soon… you know how it gets. It's like you can't get a song out of your head."

"Yeah. Like when I was counting to a thousand." Gloria had once spent a year counting to one thousand, over and over. Then, one day, the counting stopped. She didn't feel like she'd had much to do with it, either starting or stopping it, but she was grateful for the silence in her brain.

Mail grinned: "Drives you nuts…"

On the way down the stairs, into the musty basement, Gloria realized who the woman was-who was calling John Mail. She opened her mouth to tell him, but then decided, Later. That would be something to tease him with, not something simply to blurt out. John had to be controlled, to some extent; you had to fight to maintain your equality.

"I built a room," Mail said, gesturing at a steel door in the basement wall. "Used to be a root cellar. Damn near killed me, working in that hole. I'd have to stop every ten minutes and run outside."

Gloria nodded: she knew about his claustrophobia. "Open it," she said.

Andi and Grace had used the snap tab from Grace's bra to work on the nail in the overhead joist but could work only a half-hour or so before the skin on their fingers grew too painful to continue. They were making progress-a half-inch of the nail was in the clear-but Andi thought it might take another week to extract it.

She didn't think they had a week: Mail was becoming more animated, and darker, at the same time. She could feel the devils driving him, she could see them in his eyes. He was losing control.

"Never get it out," Grace said. She was standing on the Porta-Potti. "Mom, we're never gonna get it." She dropped the snap tab and sat down on the Potti cover and put her face in her hands. She didn't cry: both of them had gone dry-eyed, as though they'd run out of tears.

Andi squatted next to her, took her daughter's hand, and rolled it: the skin where she'd been holding the too-small tab was pinched and scarlet, overlying a deeper, dark-blue bruise. "You'll have to stop. Don't do any more until the red goes away." She looked up at the joist, rubbing; her thumb against the shredded skin of her own forefinger. "I'll try to do a little more."

"No good anyway," Grace said. "He's too big for us. He's a monster."

"We've got to try," Andi said. "If we can only get a weapon, we can…"

They heard the thumps of feet overhead. "He's coming," Grace said. She shrank back to the mattress, to the corner.

Andi closed her eyes for a moment, opened them, said, "Remember: no eye contact."

She spit into her hand, dabbed a finger into a dusty corner, reached up and rubbed the combination of dirt and saliva on the raw wood where Grace had been digging around the nail. The moisture darkened the wood and made the rawness less noticeable. When she was satisfied-when the footsteps were on the stairs, and she could wait no longer-she stepped down, pushed the Porta-Potti against a wall, and sat on it.

"Don't talk unless he talks to you, and keep your head down. I'll start talking as soon as he comes in. Okay? Grace, okay?"

"Okay." Grace rolled onto the mattress, facing the wall, pulled her tattered dress around her legs.

Mail was at the door.

"John," Andi said, her voice dull, her face slack. She was desperately trying to project an image of weariness, of lifelessness. She wanted to do nothing that would provoke him.

"Come on, up, we've got a visitor." Andi's head snapped up despite herself, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Grace roll over. Mail stepped down into the cell, and as Andi got to her feet, he took her arm, and she shuffled to the door.

"Can I come?" Grace squeaked. Andi's heart sank.

"No," Mail said. He never looked at the girl, and Andi said, quickly, so he wouldn't have a chance to think of her, "Who is it, John?"

"An old nuthouse friend of mine," Mail said. He thrust her through the door, stepped out behind her, and closed the door and bolted it. A woman, all dressed in black, was standing at the bottom of the dusty basement stairs. She had a long, thin stick in her hand; a tree branch. In her other hand, she held a bottle of beer by the neck.

Witch, Andi thought. And then, Executioner.

"God, John," the woman breathed. She came closer and walked around Andi, looking her up and down, as though she were a mannequin. "Do you hit her a lot?"

"Not a lot; I mostly fuck her."

"Does she let you, or do you make her?" The woman was only inches away, and Andi could smell her breath, the sourness of the beer.

"Mostly, I just go ahead and do it," Mail said. "When she gives me any trouble, I pound her a little." Andi stood dumbly, not knowing what to do. And Mail said, "I try not to break anything. Mostly I just use my open hand. Like this."

He swatted Andi's face, hard, and she went down, but her head was clear. Mail hit her almost every time he took her out of the room, and she had learned to anticipate the motion. By moving with it, just a bit, the blow was softened. By falling, she assuaged whatever it was that made him hit her.

Sometimes he helped her pick herself up. Not this time. This time he stood over her, with the woman in black.

"Brought some rope," he said to Andi. He showed her several four-foot lengths of yellow plastic water-ski rope. "Put your hands up-no, don't stand up. Just put your hands up."

Andi did what he told her, and he tied her hands at the wrist. The rope was stiff and cut into her skin.

"John, don't hurt me," she said as calmly as she could.

"I'm not going to," Mail said.

He tied a second length of the rope to the bindings at her wrist, led it over a joist-mounted rack in the ceiling, and pulled on the end until Andi's hands and arms were above her head, then tied it off.

"There you go," Mail said to Gloria. "Just the way you wanted her."

"God," Gloria said. She walked around Andi, and Andi turned with her, watching. "Don't turn, or you'll really get it," Gloria snapped.

Andi stopped, closed her eyes. A second later, she heard a thin, quick whistle and then the tree branch hit her in the back. Most of the impact was soaked up by her dress, but it hurt, and she screeched, "Ahhhh," and arced away from the other woman.

Gloria's voice was hot, excited. "God. Can we get her dress off? I want to hit her on the tits."

"Go ahead," Mail said. "She can't do anything to you."

Gloria walked straight up to Andi, and, as she reached for her blouse, said, "You should have taken her clothes away from her, anyway. We oughta cut them off with a knife. Same with the kid, we oughta…"

Mail had come up directly behind her, a third length of the rope held between his hands. He flipped it over Gloria's neck and twisted: the rope cut into the woman's throat, and she tried to turn, tried to grab the rope. Her face, eyes bulging, was inches from Andi's. Andi tried to swing away, to turn, but Mail shouted, "No, watch this. Watch."

She turned back. The woman's tongue was out now, and she did a little dance, her feet tapping on the floor, her arms windmilling for a moment, then her fingers would pluck at the rope, then she'd windmill again.

The muscles stood out in Mail's arms and face as he twisted the rope and controlled the woman at the same time; eventually, he held her slack body like a puppet, held her, held her, until her bladder relaxed and the smell of urine floated through the room. He held her for another ten seconds, but now he was watching Andi's face.

Andi was watching, but without much feeling: her capacity for horror had dried out as thoroughly as her tears. She'd imagined John Mail killing herself, or Grace, much in this way. And she'd dreamed of Genevieve, not at home, but in a grave somewhere, in her first-day-of-school dress. The murder of Gloria seemed almost insignificant.

Mail let go of the rope, and Gloria fell face-first to the floor, wide-eyed, and never flinched when it came up to meet her. Mail put a knee in her back, tightened the rope again, held it for another minute, threw a quick sailor's knot into it, then stood up and made a hand-dusting gesture.

"She was a pain in the ass," he said, looking down at the body. Then he smiled at Andi. "You see? I take care of you. She would've beat the shit out of you."

Andi's hands were still over her head, and she said, "This is hurting my shoulders…"

"Really? Tough shit." He walked behind her, put his hands around her waist, pressed his teeth against the back of her shoulder, and looked down at the body. "This is kind of-"he looked for a word and remembered Gloria's-"kind of neat," he said.