Bad People (17 page)

Luke let him believe this, but it was false. Words could be spelled anyway as long as they still made sense. He did not argue to point because it wasn’t worth it. When he was rich he would hire someone to make his business correspondence conform to the arbitrary and inconsistent rules of spelling.

However, after not very long—a matter of months—Luke discovered Jay Porter was
only
books,
only
thought, never action. Luke had confronted Jay on this and Jay readily admitted it.

So Jay Porter’s admission that he wanted to be killed and he wanted Luke to do it was no great revelation, no. Luke had raised his eyebrow for another reason, for now he knew that he had learned everything he could from Jay Porter. He understood in that precise moment that he, Luke, bore another talent, perhaps his greatest one. He could absorb all that was useful in a person, and transcend that person. He almost laughed upon discovering the revelation—and it
was
a revelation. Once he’d thought Jay Porter was brilliant, then Luke found him merely interesting, and finally boring.

But here was something more interesting again. Luke understood that nothing had changed. Jay was the same Jay. The same grayish pallor, the same sunken eyes, the same string of vocabulary. Jay Porter had not changed. Jay hadn’t weakened at all. Luke had become stronger. This flashing revelation was the exact instant he discovered the true center of the universe, the true nature of the phenomenon he called The Mind. The Mind was everything. The Mind encompassed Luke and Luke encompassed the Mind.

So he answered Jay’s question without resentment at what Jay was asking him to do, the risk Jay was asking Luke to take and the trouble Jay was—for his own selfish reasons—asking Luke to undertake.

“Yes, Jay,” said Luke instead. “That’s what we need to do.” And he instructed Jay to explain to him how it would be accomplished. Luke listened, commented, poked holes at the flaws, which they debated. Jay insisted that for Luke’s safety the body (as the conversation went into the night, Jay began to refer to himself dispassionately as “the body”)—that for Luke’s safety the body must be completely destroyed, or removed to someplace where it would never be found. This was easy to accomplish, however, as Jay would willingly go alone to the place of his own killing, so that aspect wouldn’t have to be managed after the fact.

A willing victim solved a plethora of problems: no struggle—no blood or other fluids spilling over an inconvenient location like the victim’s garage, that was certain.

They discussed methods. Luke would have imagined Jay would have chosen some kind of poison, but he asked for a knife—a line across the throat “like a lamb” he described it, whispering through moist lips.

Jay Porter talked in a kind of ecstasy about dying.

Eventually they decided to travel to the woods, to an area north of the city that, according to Jay, had been near a place Ted Bundy had brought some of his victims. They took Jay’s car, which was a little better than Ardiss’s. Luke would have liked to have had it to use afterwards, but that would have been a mistake. He would have another car soon enough. He would have liked to have some of Jay’s money too—he assumed the business was worth something, at least the value of the stock. Jay had a copy of the first regular run of the Fantastic Four and Luke would have liked having that. Not to keep, but to sell. The lank drawings of Jack Kirby in that era disgusted him. The Human Torch looked like a concentration camp victim and Ben Grimm looked like a shapeless sludge of orange clay. Comics-heroes’ bodies should be round-muscled, cut. The Fantastic Four as Kirby drew them in the beginning were too small. Disgusting.

He would have liked to have had Jay’s run of Buscema Conans to keep. Though unlikely to cause Luke any trouble, they still an unnecessary risk. The whole reason to kill Jay was to eliminate risk, but having to murder Jay without any tangible gain was a test that Luke would put himself to. He resolved to make his memory of the event his only reward. To swallow in the act, to notice every instant, every smell, every sound.

To exist in that moment.

On the ride up to the woods he considered sharing these thoughts with Jay. Jay would have found them interesting. Luke’s discipline and forethought would have impressed Jay. Instead, Luke stayed silent, to better take in the last hours leading up to the act. Jay chattered on about Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Luke ignored the sense of the words and concentrated on the sounds, and Jay’s almost non-existent Adam’s apple jerking up and down to make them, until they were the just noises of a creature. Luke noticed the way one side of the shirt collar stuck wet to the creature’s unmasculine, long, neck.

Soon the creature Jay would not exist. It didn’t matter what he said or thought right then. Now. He had already ceased being alive.

The only thing to finish was the execution chores of it. The actual act.
The be-here-now
moment.

When they got to the woods, Jay was still manageable. There was a side road, muddy. The little car would make tire tracks, but they were Jay’s car’s tire tracks, and rains would wash them away. Many rains would come before anyone started looking for Jay Porter. He had no family. The shop wasn’t even a real shop anymore, he had started opening only by appointment a few months ago, and he wasn’t taking appointments. The rent was paid up for two months. There was some kind of family money, but Luke put that out of his mind again. Discipline, which people lacked.

No one would start looking for Jay, and he left his I.D. in the car when he led Luke to the spot. Jay stammered, speaking about the spot. He was proud of the spot he had picked. The ground was soft, it would be easy digging. Jay’s shovels. Garbage bags for Jay’s clothing, and the thrift store shoes and pants that he had bought for Luke to wear. And the knife. Part of Jay’s plan was to undress beforehand, and kneel over the grave. The clothes would be thrown out later, the naked body, if found, having less to lead it back to Luke. “I will kneel over the grave-hole and you will come up behind me,” Jay had explained in the planning talks. “The blood will flow forward, into the grave, and I will fall into the grave.”

Before they even started digging, Jay took out the knife. Luke had seen it earlier, but had never handled it. Now Jay cautiously surrendered it to Luke.

“I want to be buried with it…afterwards,” said Jay. The word “afterwards” making no sense in the context, certainly
afterwards
. When else?

Luke took the knife, long and colorless metal, and laid it on a log. They had to start digging. It would be light in a couple hours, and this all needed to be done before then.

Jay had chosen this morning because of the size and fullness of the moon. A clear black sky, as well, so the moonlight provided all the required illumination. They had a long black flashlight, but it was better to be able to operate without it. There would not likely be other people up here, but you never knew.

They dug, and Jay was really of little value in grave digging. He clearly was unused to any kind of physical labor, certainly had never used a shovel before—nor had Luke, but Luke could at least manage for himself. The shovel blades kept smashing each other in the dark. This frustrated Luke, and caused Jay to giggle and stammer apologies, which was disgusting. Jay had no dignity, and Luke began to grit his teeth. It was taking too long. Jay seemed nervous. He began to flip dirt from his shovel too close to the edge of the grave, so that the dirt slid right back in. Some of his shovelfuls failed to clear the side of the grave at all. After an hour the grave stood barely two feet deep, yet their intention had been to dig at six feet. Was Jay stalling?

Luke lifted his shovel and slammed the flat of the blade into Jay’s head. Jay fell, releasing a
waahhh
sound. Luke hit him again with the flat, in the same place before Jay, still surprised, could raise his arms in defensive gestures. Three more swings of the shovel and Jay stopped moving. Hard to tell in the dark if he was dead, he might have been breathing faintly, but the wind had come up, moving through the dark trees, making it impossible to hear anything as faint as a dying breath. Luke flipped Jay over onto his face, then took up the knife. He slit Jay’s throat, allowing him to bleed out in the floor of the grave. He did not bother removing the clothes, which were blood and mud -soaked now and unwieldy. He picked up Jay’s shovel. He covered the grave, which contained Jay’s body and the bloody shovel, over. It went quickly, because the grave was shallow. It seemed even shallower now than he had estimated before he had decided to kill Jay without waiting.

A rotten log lay nearby and Luke had the idea to roll it over the grave, using the shovel as a lever. The log was very heavy and the shovel sunk into the weak wet ground, so this proved impossible. He dropped the shovel and kicked some leaves over it where it lay.

If the coming season proved to be dry enough, maybe he could come back at some point and burn the woods for cover.

The rest of the morning Luke proceeded as he and Jay had discussed. He changed out of his mud-soaked clothes before getting back into Jay’s car and collected them into a garbage bag, just as they had intended he do with both of their sets of clothing. This garbage bag he later dumped in the manner he had done after killing Robb.

Luke drove back to the city. After wiping down the seat, steering wheel, and doors, Luke left the car on a street near Jay’s home. He was not seen. He considered using Jay’s keys, going into the townhouse and looking around, however he did not consider it seriously. No more than a fantasy; he knew he would be asking for trouble if he indulged in it. Instead he threw the set of keys down a drain. He did walk past the townhouse however, in the early morning sunlight, and glanced at the draped windows. Then he went home and slept until afternoon.

That had been weeks ago, and since then his life had failed to take any kind of root. Ardiss was still hanging around, still sleeping on the floor. They still had sex. He did not want to have sex with her, but it was easy, and he had to have sex with somebody. There was nothing in it for him. And sex just made her want him more. That was something he had learned from Ardiss. For a certain kind of female, sex was a need too, but a mental need. The combination of the boredom he felt around her—which he saw no point in disguising; he had already explained to her that he did not want her—coupled with the physical act, confused her. Somehow she had become a broken thing. Luke allowed however, that quality in her might be useful at some point.

Luke had once had a job in an office temping for a few months. The office was in a warehouse. Luke had initially been hired to work in the warehouse but soon managed to move himself into the office, where the work was cleaner, and it was more difficult for anyone to tell who was responsible for what, or how much work any individual actually did. Luke had heard some of the computer stations referred to as “slave terminals.” These terminals were not PC’s, they were linked to a master PC.

The phrase had stuck with him. How efficient it would be to have another body to control with the Mind. The question was, how weak would Ardiss get; the question was could she be wholly submitted to Luke’s will. For now she came and she went, at the edges of his life, which was mainly useful for her car. When things heated up again with Connie than he would handle Ardiss. Order her to leave town if need be.

Still following Connie in Ardiss’s car now, Luke discovered that she was going downtown. The Paramount theater. He had been there once, taking Ardiss to see one of her music shows, but they evidently had events for older people too, some sort of play.

Luke lost track of Connie when she pulled into an underground parking garage near the theater. He couldn’t follow as he wouldn’t have had the cash to get the car back out again, but as he circled around the unparkable streets he spotted Barry, looking like a penguin, waddling nervously into the theater. Too great a coincidence to see him there, so he assumed correctly Connie was there to meet him.

They could be dating, but Luke found that absurd. Still he gripped the steering wheel tighter and imagined himself flooring the breaks and swerving up the sidewalk, crashing into the lobby and watching Barry fall amid a pile of other bodies.

Irrational. The sight of Barry made Luke irrational for no reason.

Barry posed no threat to him, however, Barry had reaped huge rewards from Luke’s labor.

Barry had made a good deal. He had gotten everything he wanted from their dealings. Barry’s enemy Robb was dead, while Luke had nothing. The money had floated him some months, but now he was reduced to what Ardiss brought in and some credit cards. Credit had been surprisingly easy to get. Once he had applied for a couple cards and paid them steadily awhile, he was able to get several more. He had five now, two VISAs and one of each of the others. He had recently been turned down for a second MasterCard applying online, so the pressure was beginning to mount on bringing in more income.

Barry, fat and middle-aged, had no financial problems, he had envelopes of cash to throw around even before taking the business away from Robb. Now he was clearly enjoying himself, wining and dining Connie at the opera, while Luke sat in Ardiss’s filthy cold car, no better off than he was last summer. Barry had cried making the payoff in the library—but that had been an act. A pose to make sure Luke stayed away from him. Unacceptable.

To find free parking Luke had to drive blocks away, practically halfway back up to Fire Hill. By the time he returned on foot to the theater, the sidewalks and the lobby were empty and the performance had started.