The Sleepless (36 page)

Locked together, the two cars whinnied around the curves that carried them south of Johns Pond. The Riviera kept on nudging and taunting, and again and again Joe felt his steering turn to watery slop. 

I’m experienced, I can handle it.
But he knew that he was terrified. He knew that he couldn’t cope. He looked in his rear-view mirror and he saw the two young men laughing at him, really laughing. Their eyes black, their faces white. 

Laughing at him.
 

The police call it ‘red mist’ – that over-stimulated sense of rage and fear and unreality when a driver ceases to act like a reasonable human being, and loses all control. Fired by anger, fired by adrenaline, fired by a burning sense of competition, he will do anything and risk anything. His job, his life, and the lives of everybody else around him. 

Joe was overtaken by “red mist”. And stood on his brakes. 

The Cadillac slewed, skidded and circled. The Riviera clipped the Cadillac’s rear end, took off its nearside brake lights and trim and half of its bumper, and snaked off, howling, up the grassy embankment, and into the maples. 

It struck a stand of trees, and rolled over. There was a moment’s solemn silence, and then it blew up, fifteen gallons of gasoline rolling and blazing into the sky. 

Joe’s car skidded around and around and finally came to a halt beside the highway. The Riviera was already fiercely ablaze. Smoke obliterated Joe’s windscreen: fragments of blazing vinyl floated past, black, like dancing bats: then sparks. Joe managed to unbuckle himself and climb out. The Riviera was softly roaring, like a gas ring. 

Joe managed to walk fifteen or twenty feet towards the wreck. But without warning his knees turned to bags of transparent jelly, and he had to turn back, and lean over the hood of his car for support. His stomach gurgled. The stench of gasoline and burning plastic filled the afternoon air. A flock of sparrows suddenly burst from the hedgerow across the highway, startling him. 

Jesus,’ he said to himself. Jesus.’ He felt shocked and relieved, both at the same time. 

He leaned over the Cadillac’s polished hood and saw his own distorted, distraught reflection. He closed his eyes, breathing deeply. He had killed them, right?, those two white-faced men in their dark, dark glasses. He felt sick but he couldn’t feel guilty. They would have killed him, for sure. They would have hurt his wife. He had seen people like this before – not just once, but many times. He hadn’t noticed them until he had first noticed them – but once he had, he began to realize that they were everywhere – at every social function that really mattered, at every important business conference, at every political get-together. He had seen them come and go from Plymouth Insurance in their black-windowed limousines. He had seen them at parties in Milton and Duxbury and Canton, white-faced, reticent, evasive. Nobody ever spoke about them but nobody ever argued with them, either. They were accepted in Boston society in the same way that people accept dry rot in an antique house. You don’t like it but once it’s taken a grip, there’s nothing very much that you can do about it, except cut out the house’s heart. 

Joe was humorous and vulgar and good at his job. He drank too much but he always took a roll of mints with him. One of the reasons he drank too much was because he had seen something happening in the world around him which he didn’t understand. He had seen white-faced young men, anonymous, unannounced, in the company of Boston’s wealthiest and most influential men and women. He had seen Edgar Bedford opening doors for them, and shaking their hands, and smiling. He had seen them at the mayor’s inauguration ceremony. 

He had seen two of them leaving the FAA offices on the morning of John O’Brien’s fatal helicopter crash, and he had seen others at police headquarters, and one talking with indecipherable earnestness to the mayor. What proof was that? No proof at all. But Joe had decided to keep his butt well covered, and that was why he had chosen Kevin Murray and Artur Rolbein to investigate the crash. Kevin and Artur were intelligent, persistent and unemotional, not to mention independently-minded. Both of them were healthily sceptical of Edgar Bedford and the whole of the Boston political establishment. 

That was why he had been so disconcerted when Edgar Bedford had abruptly directed that he ought to have Michael back on the job. 

He knew that Michael hadn’t yet been able to come to terms with Rocky Woods. In his last quarterly report to Plymouth Insurance, Dr Rice had said that Michael wasn’t even halfway to getting over it – and another investigation that brought him face-to-face with human mutilation could easily make him feel even more angry and even more guilty, and totally alienate him from useful social functioning. How could you smile and say ‘good morning’ to people when you knew what people looked like when they were ripped apart? One more job like Rocky Woods could send Michael right over the edge, next stop the Casa del Coconut. 

He had argued for over an hour, but Edgar Bedford had insisted. ‘The fellow needs another chance ... it’s like being involved in an automobile wreck ... the sooner you get back behind the wheel and start driving again, the better.’ 

Edgar Bedford had paused, dryly rubbing the palms of his hands together. Then he had added, ‘You’ll make it seem like your idea, won’t you? You won’t say that I wanted him. If you tell him that I wanted him – well, he probably wouldn’t come, would he? You know how cussed he can be.’ 

Joe had been left with no choice but to drive down to New Seabury and persuade Michael to take the case. For sure, Michael was a skilled and intuitive investigator with 100 per cent integrity. He was eccentrically brilliant, too – an investigator capable of understanding that woods weren’t made up of nothing but trees, but of the spaces in between the trees, too. Good insurance investigators saw what wasn’t there, as well as what was. 

But Joe had needed somebody who didn’t suffer from nightmares – somebody who didn’t think that they were being hounded by dead, dismembered accident victims. 

Joe had needed somebody who wasn’t afraid of those white-faced men. 

He took a deep breath, and opened his eyes. Then he felt as if somebody were slowly pouring ice-water down the back of his shirt. His reflection on the Cadillac’s hood was flanked by two other reflections – two curved, distorted images of white-faced men, their eyes blacked out, their clothes smoking. 

He turned around. They were standing only six or seven feet away from him, their hair singed, their coats charred, their faces as white as death. Their eyes were blood-red. 

Joe was so frightened that he had to clench his muscles to prevent himself from opening his bowels. 

‘Thought you’d seen the last of us, did you?’ called one of the white-faced men. ‘Thought you’d seen us roast?’ 

Joe edged away, reaching behind him to feel the security of his car. ‘Come on, pal,’ he reasoned. ‘That was an accident. You were bumping me, right?’ 

The white-faced man wagged his index finger from side to side. ‘That was no accident, my friend. That was deliberate. That could have been manslaughter, under other circumstances.’ 

‘Accident,’ Joe repeated, his voice wobbling. 

‘We don’t think so,’ his friend smiled, and smoke came out of his mouth. 

Joe stayed where he was for just a moment, his back pressed against the Cadillac, wide-eyed, sweating, tense. He prayed that another car would come by, and frighten these two charred zombies away. He prayed that a helicopter would pass, and notice the burning wreck of their Riviera, and call for the highway patrol. 

He prayed most of all that they wouldn’t hurt him. 

One of the white-faced men reached inside his coat and drew out two long metal tubes, each as thin as a ballpen refill. ‘Do we frighten you, sir?’ he asked, in a matter-of-fact voice. 

‘Do we make you feel like you’re going to
die
?’
asked the other. 

As they came closer, Joe could see that one of them had a tarnished silver goat’s skull on his left temple. Not just on his left temple, but
in
his left temple – because the only way in which such a decoration could have been fixed would have been by drilling a hole into his forehead. Smoke-blackened saliva dribbled from the sides of his mouth. 

‘Do we frighten you, pal?’ the white-faced man asked him, and then whooped a terrible whoop, like a hog-calling whoop, and more birds burst from the bushes. 

Joe slowly circled around his car, and then, without warning, he suddenly began to run. He ran diagonally up the slope toward the woods, across the stumbling, tufted grass. If he could make the woods, then they wouldn’t stand a chance of finding him. Joe had fought with the 3rd US Marines at Phu Bai. Joe knew what fear was but he also knew how to survive. 

He reached the top of the slope and glanced over his shoulder. They were still sixty or seventy feet below, but they were coming after him, and they may have been burned and they may have been shocked, but they were young, and young legs can run. He crashed through the bushes and bracken and saplings, and thin branches whipped and stung at his face. He could hear his breathing, harsh and quick.
On! on! on! on! He
could almost hear Sergeant Jackson screaming at him now. 

Shielding his face with his upraised arm, he slid down the side of a gully, and then ran along it, his shoes storming up last year’s leaves.
On!
he gasped, and
on!
he gasped, and
on!
 

He reached the end of the gully, and then he had to scramble up a steep, loamy slope, clinging onto roots and weeds to stop himself from sliding back. He heard footsteps churning through the leaves in hot pursuit, but he didn’t look back. Sergeant Jackson had always told him,
don’t look back, it slows you down, and it gives you The Fear, and it gives them your honky white face as a target.
 

Gasping, seriously winded, he dragged himself up between the branches of two silver birches, and then started to run flat-out. The ground was more level here, although it gradually sloped off to the right, and Joe found himself following its natural inclination, which took him further and further away from the highway. 

Behind him, he could hear the white-faced men tearing at the roots and tubers as they scaled the loamy slope. He ran and he kept on running. 

Although their leaves completely obscured the sky, the trees in this wood were oddly far apart, so that Joe had the impression that he was running through a gloomy, pillared ballroom. It was difficult to determine distance and scale, because the woods were deserted, and there was nothing manmade to give him any sense of proportion.
On! on! on! on!
demanded Sergeant Jackson, but Joe was sweating and trembling and all of a sudden all those years of beer and cigar-smoking and
spalla di vitello brasata
began to tell. 

He heard a whoop very close behind him – very much closer than he had believed they could be, those two burned men with their blood-red eyes. His fear gave him wings for just a few more feet. His feet brush-drummed through the leaves, his heavy thighs churned, his belly leaped up and down and from side to side. 

Jesus, where was Marine Joe Garboden, tough and young and fit as shit? Who was this wheezing, perspiring clown, with his rhumba-dancing gut and his weak and watery knees? He fell before he realized he was falling. He snagged his foot on a root and crashed to the ground without even raising his hands to protect himself. He was winded and bruised and
hurt,
for Christ’s sake. He could have burst into tears and curled himself up and begged for mercy. But Sergeant Jackson insisted it was
on! on! on!
and so he heaved himself onto his feet and tried to keep on running. 

Just as the white-faced men caught up with him – silent this time, not whooping, not laughing, and brought him thundering back down to the ground like two lions bringing down a wildebeeste. 

‘Please,’ Joe begged. He didn’t even know what they were going to do. He was sure, however, that they were going to kill him, in one way or another. 

They kept him pressed against the leaves, face down. One of them sat astride the small of his back, while the other stalked about and made fussy preparations. 

Joe sweated and sweated and tried to catch his breath. Only two or three inches in front of his nose, a tiny amber spider was trying to climb along the ridge of a dried-brown leaf. Joe’s panting breath set the leaf trembling, and so the spider had to cling on to it tightly. My God, thought Joe. How the strong can terrify the weak – and how they don’t even realize they’re doing it, most of the time. 

But he almost wished that he could have been that spider, because all that spider had to worry about was balancing, and whether it would rain, and what it was going to eat. 

The white-faced man who was sitting astride his back was surprisingly light, although his knees dug into Joe’s hips so viciously that Joe was unable to move. His trousers were crusted with burnt patches, and he smelled strongly of scorched cotton and sour body-odour and something else: something that reminded Joe of hospitals or funerals, he couldn’t decide which.