The Ax

20

I get a late start, having had trouble rousing myself this morning, after last night. But I'm on the road finally a little after nine, and make the turnoff to Footbridge Road at quarter to ten.

Last night. After the trouble I had getting to sleep, with all those thoughts circling, suddenly I woke up in the middle of the night, in pitch-black darkness because of that cloud cover — which is still here today, but not as though it's going to rain — and I woke up into that blackness with a sudden feeling of terror.

At first I couldn't imagine what it was that had me so terrified, and I lay there rigid, on my back, staring up at black emptiness, listening to the tiny inhabited silences of the house, while my brain tried to find its way back from panic, tried to sort out what the problem was. And when at last it did, and I figured out what it was that had so frightened me that it had driven me up out of sleep, what I was afraid of was me.

The boyfriend. Somehow, in my sleeping mind, the boyfriend had appeared, or I mean the idea of the boyfriend; I still don't know who he is. But that thought, the idea of the boyfriend, was circling in my sleeping brain, along with the idea that I was going to kill him when I found out who he was, and how easy that idea was, how unlike the angry way that people say, "I could kill him!" or "I'll kill that guy!"

Mine hadn't been like that. What I had said, in my mind, calmly, was, "Oh, okay, he's a problem, so I'll kill him," and I had absolutely meant it. Absolutely.

And that's why I woke up in terror, thinking, What am I becoming? What have I become?

I'm not a killer. I'm not a murderer, I never was, I don't want to be such a thing, soulless and ruthless and empty. That's not me. What I'm doing now I was forced into, by the logic of events; the shareholders' logic, and the executives' logic, and the logic of the marketplace, and the logic of the workforce, and the logic of the millennium, and finally by my own logic.

Show me an alternative, and I'll take it. What I'm doing now is horrible, difficult, frightening, but I have to do it to save my own life.

If I kill the boyfriend, it will be something else. Not exactly casual, but normal. As though killing has become a normal response for me, one of the ways I deal with a problem. Simple; I murder a human being.

The untroubled ease with which I'd thought that thought — kill him, why not — is what's frightening, what scares me. I'm harboring an armed and dangerous man, a merciless killer, a monster, and he's inside me.

That's another reason why I have to get through this process very soon, I can't let it drag on. It's changing me, and I don't like the change. The sooner this business is done, and the sooner I'm in that job in Arcadia, then the sooner this new change can start to bleach away, like the most recent fat melting off when you first go on a diet.

Which is why I just can't accommodate the Asches' togetherness forever. They're going to have to move apart from one another soon, or else. I have a horror of killing the wife, very like the horror of that decision to kill the boyfriend, but my greater horror is in staying in this swamp too long, being changed permanently by it, becoming forever somebody I wouldn't be able to stand to be around.

So I've come to that decision this morning, as I drive toward Dyer's Eddy. It wasn't an easy decision, a blithe decision, like deciding to kill the boyfriend, but it's solid, and it's unswerving. If those two insist on living together, every second of every day, they'll just have to die together.

Footbridge Road. I make the right turn, and drive slowly up the easy slope, and the first thing I notice when I reach their property is that the Accord is gone from the driveway. Have they driven off somewhere together? Will they be out all day? Damn; I should have got an earlier start.

I continue to drive upward, slowly, and there she is, the wife, in the garden, in a pale yellow T-shirt and white headband. She has a clipboard and seems to be doing a drawing. A chart of the garden, I suppose, to show where everything is.

She's there. The Accord is gone. He's in it. Damn, damn, and double damn, if only I'd been here earlier, when he left.

The nursery. It comes to me in a sudden leap, an immediate understanding. The garden nursery down there in the mall, across the parking lot from the Italian restaurant where I ate yesterday. He's there, I know he is.

I make my U-turn at the same place as yesterday. I drive more rapidly down the hill. It won't do me any good to meet him coming back. If I'm ever to come across him on the road, it will have to be when we're both traveling in the same direction, so I can pull up next to him and shoot him. Not to meet him head-on.

I certainly can't do what I did to Everett Dynes in Lichgate, with the car, if KBA is in a car.

Traffic delays me at the turn into New Haven Road. Why does it have to be a left? Cars come from one direction, then cars come from the other direction, then back to the first direction. There's never quite enough space in between for me to get out there, and I expect at any second one of those cars coming down the main road from the left will be a black Honda Accord.

No. A space at last, and I take it, jerking out into New Haven Road, swinging to the left, then running along in convoy with all these other cars. What is it about Friday around here?

It's another left turn into the mall with the nursery, and again I have to wait. I'm punching the steering wheel with my right fist. I know he's in there, I know it as surely as if I'd seen him drive in. And now, in my mind's eye, I can see him paying for his purchases, coming out to the car, getting in, driving out, making that easy right turn over there while I sit here, stuck.

Another break; I lunge through it, make the turn, drive into the mall.

It seems as though most of this mall is parking lot, fringed with a collar of low buildings. The nursery is at the front left, so I drive over there, slowly cruise the aisles. I know his license number.

And there it is. The black Honda Accord, sitting there, waiting, not far from the entrance to the nursery. I knew I was right, I knew it.

There isn't another parking spot near his, but I see a heavyset woman stuffing packages into a green Ford Taurus, one row over from KBA and about three slots to the right. I drive around there, and now she's being a good citizen, slowly waddling her shopping cart back to one of the collection points. Most people don't do that, lady. Most people leave the goddam cart where it is, and get into their goddam automobile, and drive away.

I can see the Accord over there, just the top of it. Still there. KBA isn't near it. Not yet, he isn't.

She comes back to her car, and for a second our eyes meet. I nod and smile, to let her know I'm waiting for her space, and she continues ponderously on, with no reaction, in no hurry. I wait while she finds her car keys in that great horse's feedbag she has dangling from her shoulder. I wait while she arranges herself behind the wheel just so, and the feedbag on the seat beside her just so, and the rearview mirror just so, and by now I'm ready to shoot her and come back to get KBA tomorrow.

I have plenty of time to think about this, waiting for her to get the hell away from here. What if I were to do such a thing, kill a few of the more obnoxious people one comes across? Then, when I kill KBA, it will just seem like more of the same. And if they draw any connection between KBA and my first resume, Herbert Everly, it's just the work of a random killer. The famous serial killer.

People believe in serial killers these days. Movies and novels have come out populated almost entirely by serial killers, as though it's a tribe, or a fraternal organization, like the Elks. The great thing about serial killers, I guess, for the people who make up those stories, is that they never have to worry about motivation. Why did that person kill that person? It's unfair to ask that, in such a story, because the answer always is, he did it because that's what he does.

I have a motive. I have a motive, and a very specific category of person I have to get rid of. Which means, unless I'm very careful, I could be vulnerable. A clever detective might begin to get me in his sights. But if Everly and KBA, my only two gunshot victims in Connecticut, were merely part of the pattern of a serial killer, wouldn't that make me safe?

And does this woman in the green Ford Taurus deserve to live, any longer?

She backs out of the parking space. She doesn't bother to look at me, or acknowledge me. She drives away, and she will never know just how close a call that was.

I ease the Voyager into the space, and stop. Still in the car, I put on the raincoat, then transfer the Luger to its right pocket. This is the kind of raincoat that in college we called the shoplifter's special, because the pockets are open at the top inside, to give access from both the inside and the outside of the raincoat, which means you can put your hand in the pocket and through the pocket. And that's what I do, and hold the Luger waiting in my lap, as I keep my eye on the Honda Accord.

Serial killer. That had been a strange thought. It was never serious, though.

I wait ten minutes, and then I see him. He's pushing a shopping cart, laden with small boxes and white plastic shopping bags, with a big sack of peat moss lying over everything else. The Accord is parked facing in, so he stops at the back of it and opens the trunk, while I climb out of the Voyager, holding the Luger against my right leg, and walk forward between the cars until I'm on the same row as he is, just three cars to my left.

He's wrestled the peat moss bag into the trunk, and now he's surrounding it with the rest of his purchases. He's bent forward, head partly under the open trunk lid, as he moves his new boxes and bags.

I stop behind him. I say, "Are you Mr. Kane Asche?"

He turns, with a questioning smile. "Yes?"

"I know you are," I say, and bring the Luger up past the right flap of my raincoat, the raincoat bunching up around my right wrist, and I shoot him.

The bullet doesn't hit his eye, it hits his right cheek and makes a mess there. The raincoat pulled my arm down, just that little bit. His eyes stare, as he falls backward, half in the trunk, half sagging down across the rear bumper.

This is no good. This is messy, bloody, awful. And he's alive. I lean closer, put the barrel of the Luger almost against that staring terrified right eye, and I shoot again, and his head snaps back, and now he lies there, mostly on his back, sprawled, mouth wide open, one eye wide open.

I walk, not briskly, back to the Voyager. I get in, leaving the Luger in my lap, covered by the flap of my raincoat. I start the Voyager, shift into reverse, back out of there, drive away.

There's very little traffic, all the way home.