The Cold Nowhere

56

Ken McCarty waited with the headlights off. Sweat trickled down his forehead from his buzz cut, and his eyes danced back and forth to the mirror, watching for cars. It was late; they were alone. He kept his gun in his left hand, pointed across the steering wheel at Brooke. Cat squirmed in the back seat behind them, her mouth, wrists, and ankles bound with duct tape.

They sat behind the guardrails at the lift bridge. All the while, he talked. That was one thing Brooke remembered about Ken. He liked to talk. He talked about his parents, his dog, his car, his girlfriends, his stereo, his apartment, his clothes, his sunglasses, and his penis. He talked when he was threatening her. He talked when he was fucking her.

Now, when he was getting ready to shoot her, he was still talking.

‘What are the odds, huh?’ he said, his knee bouncing nervously inside the car. ‘That son of a bitch Marty Gamble swipes a ring, and he has to pick the only thing that would ever blow up in our faces. Jesus, if only I’d had more time to find the girl that night.’

‘You’d have killed Cat?’ Brooke murmured. ‘A little girl? I can’t believe even you would do that.’

‘Loose ends, Brookie. You see what happens when you have loose ends? It’s not pretty.’

‘You planned to kill Marty all along, didn’t you?’

Ken craned his neck to stare up at the bridge. The deck hovered above them at the top of the span. She wondered if they could feel it sway up there, as the wind blew through the canal. In front of them, she saw ship lights. It wouldn’t be long now. She was running out of time.

‘Hey, everybody knew that he’d go off the deep end sooner or later,’ he said. ‘I just helped it along. I took him out for a drive to celebrate Fong’s arrest and got him so drunk he could hardly walk. That’s when I started telling him about Stride and Michaela and how Stride was bragging about his affair with her. Marty would have believed anything I told him. Next thing I knew he was screaming at me to drive over there. I let him go inside and I could hear him whaling on her. When I went inside, he was sitting against the wall, and she was bleeding from like a million holes.’

In the back seat, Cat kicked viciously at Ken. The car shook with her fury. Her bound legs reared up and landed a glancing blow on his head, dizzying him. Brooke grabbed for the gun, but she was too slow. Furious, Ken spun around; he held Brooke back with a hand around her throat and pointed the gun over the seats at Cat’s face.

‘Hey! Knock it off, you little bitch! Do you have any idea how much fucking trouble you’ve caused me? One little teenage hooker! Unbelievable! Believe me, we’re going to have some fun before you disappear, baby, because I’ve earned it.’

He thumped back into his seat, breathing hard. He was losing control. The gun bounced in his hand as he drummed the steering wheel. He shouted at the bridge. ‘Come on, goddamn it! Come on!’

Brooke saw flashing lights beyond the open gap of the canal. She hoped it was a police car, but it was an ambulance, and she knew where it was heading. She wondered if the policewoman at Stride’s house was dead, if he’d killed her, if she had another victim on her conscience. How many was this now? She’d lost count.

‘For a long time, I wondered if you’d kill me,’ Brooke said.

‘I thought about it.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

Ken grinned. ‘Hey, I always liked you, Brookie. Let’s face it, you were a great fuck, too.’

He reached across the car and squeezed her breast like it was a stress ball. She winced inside at his touch, but she didn’t show him her revulsion. The sex between them had gone on for years. She never knew when he would show up or what he would do to her. Each time, she wondered if it was the last — if he would fuck her and then strangle her and make her disappear. The sight of him terrified her; the touch of his hands made her want to leap out a window and kill herself. Even so, she couldn’t say a word to anyone.

‘I didn’t need people poking around in your background if you disappeared,’ he said. ‘Besides, I figured you had as much to lose as me, right? A girl who fucks rich old goats for tuition money knows the sacrifices you have to make, and you weren’t going to give it all up. I was right, too, wasn’t I? When Margot showed up talking about Cat and the ring, you called me. I knew you’d never let that pretty face rot in jail. Good girl, Brookie.’

Good girl?

She’d thrown open Pandora’s box. She had no soul.

‘What happens now?’

He shrugged. ‘That’s up to you. It doesn’t look like I can trust you. You were ready to rat me out.’

‘People keep dying,’ she murmured.

‘You think I wanted it that way? Sometimes you do what you have to do.’

‘The police are going to figure it out. They probably already have.’

‘That’s your fault. You should have kept your cool. Now they know where to look.’

‘You won’t get away.’

‘You think I don’t know how to disappear? You think I haven’t made plans? No one’s going to find me. You can come along for the ride or you can wind up in a hole somewhere.’ He jerked his thumb at the back seat. ‘Right next to her.’

‘You’d let me come with you?’

He didn’t answer. He eyed the bridge again and pumped his fist. The bridge began to come down, not just on the canal, but on ten years of her life. He turned on the engine, which purred. Soon they would be out of the city, on the rural back roads. He probably already had his route planned. There would be a cabin waiting for them on the Wisconsin side, near a pretty lake. Secluded. Quiet. She had no illusions that he would let her live beyond the first night, no matter what he said. He would fuck them both, and then he would kill them both.

Even so, she wanted him to think that she believed him. That they were partners.

‘Time to go,’ he said.

He let the ambulance roll past them in the opposite direction, and then he drove across the bridge as if nothing in the world were wrong. The gun was pointed at her chest again. He drove into the empty streets of Canal Park, and the wind made it look like a desert ghost town, blowing snow like dust and tumbleweeds across their path, from Grandma’s Restaurant toward the old brick factories.

‘Do you remember the first time?’ she asked.

He looked at her.

‘You and me,’ she said.

He grinned.

The first time. He’d left a message on her phone to meet him in a campus parking lot near one of the athletic fields. A cop in an unmarked sports car. At night. She’d had her heart in her mouth, wondering what he wanted, but there was no mystery in that. He knew. This young cop, barely older than her, knew all her secrets. He’d followed her and photographed her; he had everything it would take to expose her hidden life. She’d bawled like a kid, and then he’d said, with that sly grin, ‘It doesn’t have to go that way.’

He’d unzipped his fly, and she understood the way it would go. She didn’t care. She’d serviced him for months, and she’d thought of it as nothing more than an insurance policy, until he came to her on a snowy December night with a different plan. You need to do something for me.

A week later, she gave him the alarm code at Lenny’s house. 1789.

Ken stopped at the light. He waited to turn left on Railroad Street, which led south beside the concrete overpasses of I-35. She knew the road; it took them past Bayfront Park into the industrial zone, where the ships loaded and unloaded and the ore-filled rail cars rattled over the tracks. From there, the Blatnik Bridge arched over the bay into Superior, Wisconsin, in a part of the state that was mostly a wilderness of single-lane roads and deep forests.

You can wind up in a hole somewhere.

‘Are you tense?’ she asked, with a faint smile on her lips.

His head swiveled. ‘Huh?’

‘You know.’ She touched his thigh.

‘Hell, yeah.’

‘You’re right, I don’t want to sit in jail,’ she said. ‘I want to come with you.’

‘Show me how much.’

He unzipped. It was like the old days. The light changed, and he accelerated. She slid across the seat and bent her torso over him. Ken waggled the gun at her.

‘Don’t be stupid.’

She removed his shaft from his jeans and stroked him with her nails, getting him hard. His breath caught in his throat. She knew how to get a reaction. Beneath her, the car engine growled; he was going faster.

Faster.

She took him in her mouth, tasting salt and sweat. Underneath her bobbing head, her hands massaged the wrinkly skin of his scrotum and the firm chestnuts floating inside. He moaned. His hand pushed her head down, so far that she felt herself gagging. He had one hand, his gun hand, on the wheel. She felt the veer of the car; he couldn’t steer straight.

Faster.

Brooke knew it was now or never. She snapped her fingers shut like a hawk’s claw, digging her sharp nails into his testicles, eliciting a primal scream. Simultaneously, she cracked her head upward into his chin, rifling his neck backward. She threw her left hand into his skull and drove it into the cold, hard window of the car. With her other hand she let go of his balls and spun the wheel, wrenching the car into a sharp turn. The car, still going forty miles an hour, shot off the road onto the dirt and ice of the grassy field beside the freeway.

The car hit a light pole, which broke with a screech of metal and hit the hood like a falling body. Brooke flew forward, hitting the dashboard, bouncing backwards. With a chemical sear, the airbag exploded into Ken’s face and the car lurched to a stop. Disoriented, Brooke found herself face-down near his feet. Something hard and heavy — the gun — grazed her skull and disappeared under the seat as if sliding on ice.

Her head spun, but she pushed herself up and yanked the handle on the passenger door. It opened and she tumbled outward, falling into snow and weeds. She spotted Ken slumped in the driver’s seat, already groaning and recovering. With no time to waste, she opened the rear door and dragged Cat outside into the cold. The girl was bruised from the impact, but she wasn’t hurt. Brooke tore at the duct tape around the girl’s ankles and as the tape split, Cat thrust her legs apart, freeing herself. Brooke didn’t take the time to work on the girl’s hands. She helped Cat stand.

‘Hurry,’ she hissed.

As they began to run, Brooke saw Ken’s eyes inside the car. They were open now, and there was murder in them.

She and Cat sprinted along a snow-covered line of railroad tracks only steps from the twin overpasses of I-35. The roar of engines above their heads was a constant throb. They were no more than a hundred yards from the streets of downtown Duluth on the other side of the freeway.

People would find them there. People would rescue them.

She pulled Cat across the tracks toward the city. The crushed rock under their feet was slick. The ground sloped downhill toward the freeway foundations, and they made tiny, dancing steps on the frozen earth, skidding to a stop at the giant wall of the northbound overpass. Dead brush around them was wet with snow drifts. They hugged the wall, inching sideways on a slippery stretch of concrete no more than a foot wide. Where the wall ended, they reached a narrow creek that tunneled between the two overpasses. The water was glazed over with ice. Lights on the highway overhead cast long shadows. They could see an SOO train parked on the tracks of the Depot, and beyond it the city loomed, bright and close. Freedom was a quick skate across the water.

Brooke stepped onto the creek. So did Cat. The ice gave way with a crack; their feet landed in three inches of murky, numbing water. Before they could take another step, a loud crack boomed above the noise of the cars. The wall on the other side of the creek exploded in dust.

Another crack. Another.

He was shooting at them. The next bullet was so close that she felt a sting on her ear. When she touched her hand there, her fingers came away with blood. Brooke was paralyzed, but Cat yanked her under a concrete arch that made a roof over the frozen creek, where they were blocked from view. They were below the freeway, like pygmies in a giant land, with miles of roadbed stretching no more than four feet over their head.

A one-sided iron ladder, propped against the wall, led out of the water and into the secret no-man’s land between the two sides of the interstate.

‘Come on,’ Cat urged her. ‘We’ll hide in the graffiti graveyard.’