Endless Night (21 page)

Naturally, they know where I live.

And they had to know that I’d botched the job. The witnesses I was supposed to have killed had gotten away and told on us. I’d have to be punished one way or another.

Maybe with their own brand of “the final solution.”

Or maybe not.

One thing was for sure: I’d blown it. The guys couldn’t possibly be happy about it.

The best thing I could do, I figured, was to lay low until I could find out how things stood.

That’s why I ended up here at the Palm Court. It’s the dumpiest motel I could find after cruising up and down La Cienega a couple of times. It looked like a good place for pulling a disappearing act.

The guy in the office looked young enough to be in high school. He had a face so greasy you could fry eggs on it, and a big juicy whitehead at the comer of one nostril. He kept staring at my chest and sliding his tongue across his lips while I filled out the registration card.

I used the name Simone De Soleil and gave an address in Deland, Florida.

I paid with cash, compliments of Hillary and Benedict, for three nights.

The kid had a weird, scratchy voice. “My name’s Justin, ma’am. If there’s anything I can do for you ...”

“I’ll be sure to let you know,” I told him.

The plastic tab dangling off the room key was so slippery that I wondered if Justin had been rubbing it on his nose. It showed that I’d been given room eight.

Palm Court has about twenty units, all of them facing the court—which is really nothing but a driveway wide enough for parking spaces in front of the rooms. From the looks of things, the place must’ve had about fifteen vacancies when I checked in.

My room was at the end. I parked in front of it. My Jag can be seen from La Cienega, but just barely. A cop driving by would have to be very lucky to catch a glimpse of it back here.

The room isn’t much. But it seems to have everything I need—if you don’t count sanitary conditions.

The first thing I did was shut the curtains. Then I turned on the air conditioner. Yes, even a dump like this has air conditioning. It’s a window unit that wheezes and clumps and groans ... I’m sure you can hear it on the tape. Hear it?

Anyway, I don’t mind the noise because it’ll keep anyone from catching what I say in here.

Before getting started, I peeled off my hair. Or Hillary’s hair. Whose is it, anyway? The question of ownership becomes rather fuzzy sometimes, doesn’t it?

Whatever. It’s mine now.

And I was enormously relieved to free my bare head from its moist, tacky grasp. As soon as it was off, I bent over the bathroom sink and washed my pate with soap and water. Not because I felt
dirty,
mind you; emotionally, the contact with her skin gives me real pleasure. It’s the
itchiness
that drives me up the wall.

While I scrubbed my head, I decided I’d better lay my hands on a wig. A wig, not somebody’s scalp. Hillary’s hair had done a fine job in helping me escape from her cop-infested neighborhood, but now I would need something better. Besides, hers wasn’t likely to improve with age.

Her mop of hair is within easy reach, right now, just in case Justin or someone should happen to come to the door.

I’ve kept my clothes on, of course. God knows, I wouldn’t want my skin to come into contact with the chair. The nubby brown upholstery looks anything but clean. I haven’t even taken off my shoes, though I’d like to except for the fact that they protect me from whatever gobs and tidbits and sharp objects reside in the carpet.

Okay, I think that brings me pretty much up to date.

The room does have a telephone.

It sits on a small table beside the bed. It’s pink, and smudged.

I know Tom’s number by heart.

I know I’ve gotta phone him. And the sooner, the better.

It makes me feel sick to think about doing it, though. Not just because I’d need to touch the filthy phone, though the idea of that is fairly disgusting.

I don’t want to talk to him.

He left me out to dry.

No, that’s not it. That’s part of it. He stabbed me in the back. They all did. And that has to be part of it. But the real thing is that I’m scared.

It’d be like phoning a doctor to get the results of a lab test when you just know he’s gonna say you’ve got cancer or AIDS or something.

Tom is gonna tell me I blew it. If he’s feeling generous, he’ll spare my connections—Lisa and the others.

But you’ve gotta go, Simon.

All the pleading in the world won’t change a thing. It won’t matter that we’ve been buddies forever. Nothing will matter except that I let the witnesses get away from me, and they told.

I can’t make that call. Not right now, anyway.

Fact is, I don’t feel like doing anything. I want to just sit here and talk and nothing else.

Maybe I
can
use the tapes for leverage.

I already told who all the members are, so that’s taken care of. Now let’s give out some real goodies, some really
incriminating
stuff that the cops can sink their teeth into if they ever get hold of these tapes.

Let’s start at the start. With the first killing.

Chapter Twenty

It didn’t start out to be a killing.

This was when we were in junior high, about twelve years ago. Tommy, me, Ranch and Brian were in the eighth grade together, and we’d been best friends forever.

Brian’s last name was Fisher. That’s why we called him Minnow. Because of his name and size. He was a skinny little guy and still is.

Anyway, he developed a bad case of the hots for Denise Dennison. Easy to understand why. She was so cute it almost hurt to look at her. Her hair was like gold, her skin like honey, and she had eyes like the sky on a hot summer morning. If that wasn’t enough, she had great tits and never wore a bra, so you could see them every once in a while when she bent over.

I guess maybe we
all
had the hots for Denise.

The rest of us were smart enough to know we didn’t stand a chance with her, but not Minnow. He was, is, and always will be a nerd, a klutz, a doofus, and a complete optimist. In other words, a real loser.

“I think she likes me,” he told us one day after school.

“Bull,” I said.

“What’s there to like?” Tommy said.

“Your silken tresses?” Ranch asked. We always liked to rib Minnow about his hair. He wore it down to his shoulders—not real smart when you’re a thirteen-year-old wimp. He thought the long hair made him look radical, but it didn’t. It just made him look dopey and clued in everyone that he was a self-destructive nitwit.

So I said that maybe he could go out with Denise and she could braid his hair for him.

“I’m
gonna
ask her out,” he said.

“Don’t waste your time,” I told him.

“She’ll dump all over you, man,” Ranch said.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Hey, give it a try,” Tommy said. “You got nothing to lose. The worst that can happen is she says no.”

“And maybe makes you feel no better than a worm,” Ranch added.

“A worm’s even lower than a minnow,” I pointed out.

“Ha ha.”

It turned out that when we talked about the “worst that can happen,” we had no idea.

The next day at school the three of us watched Minnow when he walked up to Denise in the lunch line. From where we stood, we had a good view. We just couldn’t hear anything.

She looked great. She had her hair in a pony tail. She wore a pleated skirt that was hardly long enough to hide her butt. She also wore a white blouse, and I can still remember how you could see the pink color of her skin through its back—and no straps.

Minnow stopped right beside her.

“He’s really gonna do it,” Ranch said. He sounded amazed by Minnow’s audacity.

While we watched, Denise swung her head sideways. She seemed to be gazing straight into Minnow’s eyes. She nodded a few times, and had this alert, open look on her face. Then, he must’ve reached the main part of his speech where he asked her to go ice skating with him at the rink on Friday night. All of a sudden, her face went funny. She tried very hard to keep on smiling, but the smile squirmed into what amounted to a pitiful grimace while she turned him down.

He told us later what she’d said. “Thanks for asking, Brian. Really. It’s very nice of you. But I’m sort of going with someone, you know?”

“I’LL GO WITH YOU! I’M HELL ON SKATES!”

That came from Hester Luddgate, who happened to be standing right behind Denise in the food line, and must’ve been listening in on the whole conversation.

I’ve already talked a little bit about Hester. She turned up in that little dream I had last night. The dream where I was having a great old time till the cute gal suddenly turned into an ugly, mutilated thing. That was Hester.

Hester didn’t just look like a pig. She smelled like a sock after you’ve worn it all day—a very hot day, and maybe you’d hiked through a swamp. Basically, she always smelled like that.

Anyway, Hester blurted out, “I’M HELL ON SKATES,” and then grabbed Minnow’s arm. She grabbed it hard. I could see his body go stiff, and later he showed us the bruises her fingers had made.

She gave up her place in line, and hustled Minnow away.

We lost track of them because we were pretty much doubled over laughing and had tears in our eyes.

What we found out, though, was that Hester had gone and dragged him around a comer of the building so they could have some privacy. Minnow’d tried to worm out of the skating date, but she’d used all her charms on him: a combination of tears and threats.

He finally agreed to meet her at the rink on Friday night at eight o’clock.

But when eight o’clock on Friday night came around, Minnow was with us in Tommy’s house. It’s a mansion up in the hills above Sunset. His mother actually owned the place, but she had no say in anything. Tommy ran her. She was scared to death of him, and never got in our way. She used to hide in her bedroom, and we’d have the rest of the house to ourselves.

So that’s where we were when Minnow was supposed to be having his big date with Hester. We had a cardboard poster, and we all sat around it on the floor of Tommy’s recreation room (or “wreck room”) and worked on our collage. We called it, “Death by Torture.” We used pictures of knives and hatchets and arrrows and stuff that we snipped out of sports magazines and a Penney’s catalog, plus pictures of naked babes we got from magazines like
Playboy
and
Penthouse.
It was great. We had a terrific time deciding on how to combine the weapons with the gals—where to stick them. And we cut ourselves and used real blood to mess things up right.

At one point, Minnow stabbed his scissors into a closeup shot and said, “Take that, you stinky swine.”

“She never looked that good,” Ranch told him.

“Poor bitch is probably crying her eyes out,” Tommy said.

I checked my wristwatch. Minnow was already two hours late for his date. “She’s probably quit crying and gone home by now,” I said.

“You really showed her,” Ranch said.

Minnow grinned. “Taught her not to mess with me, huh?” That was Friday night. On Sunday afternoon, Minnow was left at home alone while his folks went to watch a celebrity tennis tournament.

He was in the den watching TV. All of a sudden, Hester stepped through the doorway and pointed a .22 pistol at him. She said, “Where
were
you, Brian? You promised you’d come, and I waited and waited and you didn’t come.” She started out cool, smirking, real superior. But pretty soon she was bawling. Minnow figured he was dead meat. “I
waited
and
waited!”
she kept crying. “You had no right! You liar! You dirty rotten liar. You
promised!”

Then she stepped up to Minnow and told him to open his mouth. He did, and she stuck the gun in.

He was still sitting on the easy chair, never had a chance to get up. And now this big stinky slob has a pistol in his mouth. And she cocks it.

“You think just ‘cause I’m not pretty like Denise you can treat me like poop! Well, you can’t! You can’t! So maybe I’m not real pretty, but I got feelings! You had no right! You had no right!”

Then she pulled the trigger.

There was nothing but a click.

The pistol was a semi-auto. It had a full magazine up its handle, but the chamber was empty. We never did find out whether it was empty on purpose—and she only meant to scare Minnow—or if she’d really tried to shoot him but was just too stupid to work the gun.

When it went click, Minnow thought for a second that he’d been shot. Then he realized the thing hadn’t gone off, after all. So he grabbed the barrel and shoved it away from him and jerked his head back till the muzzle was out of his mouth. They both wrestled for the gun. She kept trying to re-aim it at him. She was bigger and stronger than Minnow, so she ended up pulling him out of the chair, right onto his feet in front of her.

Big mistake. He pumped a knee up into her fat guts. Totally demolished her, took out every inch of fight. She let go of the gun and went to her knees.

After that, he worked her over pretty good.

Then he called up Tommy, and Tommy phoned me, and I phoned Ranch. It took us about ten or fifteen minutes to get there.

Hester was sprawled on the floor of the den, lying real still but moaning and whimpering.

We dragged her out to the garage. We used the remote to open the garage door. Tommy pulled his Mercedes in. Then we shut the door and loaded Hester into the trunk.

Back inside the house, we checked around the den to make sure it looked okay. Hester had left nothing behind except her sour stink and some slobber. We figured the smell would go away on its own. But we cleaned up the slobber, then wiped places where Hester might’ve left fingerprints.

Minnow wrote a note for his parents. It said he’d gone over to Tommy’s to “fool around.”

True enough.

Ranch and I had both walked over, so we had no bikes to deal with. After Tommy had backed his Mercedes out of the garage and the door was shut again, we all piled in. He drove.