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Authors: Howard Owen

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BOOK: Turn Signal
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“Yeah,” Jack says. He's probably the only person here not drinking, but he feels a little light-headed, and something in their conversation doesn't quite compute.

“And the book,” Cully says.

“Yeah,” Mack says, too quickly. “The book. What do you hear from ol' Jerry Prince these days?”

Jack tells them that he's supposed to call on Tuesday, that this should be the end of it.

“They gonna make a movie out of it?” Cully asks. “Got any parts for a well-hung hunk who doesn't look a day over 29?”

“Let me know if you know anybody like that,” Jack says, and they fall into the kind of insults that have been their way of expressing friendship for as long as Jack can remember.

When the third quarter starts, Jack slips away again. Some tiny grain of foreign substance keeps nagging at him. He wishes he could find Gina and go home now. He's pretty sure he already knows who's going to win anyway. One of the things he always liked about football was the inevitability of speed and strength winning out. It had always worked to his advantage. The game is long enough for quality and hard work to outweigh a few trick plays and unlucky breaks.

He glimpses her a couple of times, across rooms, but someone else from his past comes up both times and pulls him in another direction. Gina likes to keep moving at parties. She prides herself on talking to everyone there for at least a minute or two. At the doctors' offices, they think she's wonderful, a real people person. Occasionally at events like this, she will subtly shoo him in one direction while she goes in another.

“We can talk to each other all night long, most any night you want,” she told him once. “Get out there and mingle.”

And now, with all that's befallen them, at least in Gina's eyes, he supposes she is less interested than ever in his company.

The game is almost over when Jack runs into Susan Edmonds in the upstairs hallway. He looks into a half-open bedroom door and sees the judge's feet pointing toward the ceiling. His daughter seems to be holding herself up by leaning against the wall with one hand.

He hears a noise inside the room, and Ricky Coles comes walking out.

“Your daddy ought to either lose some weight,” he tells Susan, “or quit drinking.”

“I think the diet is more likely,” Susan says. She is sipping on what looks like straight bourbon. “Rick, could you leave Jack and me alone for just a minute, sweetie? I promise you I won't give him a blow job or anything nasty like that. But I've got to talk to him about something.”

Ricky Coles pats Jack on the shoulder as he walks by him. Jack has the impression that, whatever Susan is about to tell him, Ricky already knows.

“Come in here,” she says, drawing him into the bedroom where the judge is snoring peacefully. With his red bow tie and suspenders, his London suit and wingtips, Jack can see the way he'll look in the near future at Kinnock's Funeral Home.

“I didn't want to have to tell you this,” she says. They're leaning against the inside wall with the door ajar. “I thought you'd figure it out on your own, but somebody's got to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

And so she tells him.

“Gina and
who?

He has never ruled out the possibility that Gina might be unfaithful, although he hasn't thought about it for a while. He's not flawless himself. He once spent a couple of long afternoons in a motel outside Ashland with an old girlfriend who liked him married better than she had single, when he was still not readjusted to the concept of fidelity. He has always counted himself very lucky that Gina never found out, and he knew that, however good confession might be for the soul, only grief would come of his telling her about it.

“Are you sure?” he says, and she shushes him.

He repeats it in a whisper. She nods.

“The human mind is an amazing thing,” Susan says. “It is capable of seeing what isn't there, or making something else out of what is there.”

“Are you sure?” he asks a third time, as if she might give him a more palatable answer this time.

She nods her head again.

“And if you hadn't slipped into some kind of book coma lately, if you'd come up for air once in a while, you'd know it too.”

Susan, it turns out, is friends with one of the doctors where Gina works. They drink together sometimes. In the course of a long, wet evening, the doctor said more than he'd meant to.

“He let it slip,” Susan says, “that Gina is, uh, letting it slip.”

According to Susan, Gina has been working an hour and a half less than she's been telling Jack, several days a week. She gets off work at 4, not 5:30. Then, according to the doctor, who says everyone at the medical center is on to her, she walks out the back door and through the alleyway bisecting Third and then Fourth streets, which brings her to the back door of Wainwright and Son Insurance Agency.

“Good God,” Jack says, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Milo.”

“Well, they have known each other a long time.”

“Milo,” he says again, staring down at his feet.

He remembers the slight edge to their friendship after he began dating Gina, not really stealing her from Milo but still … he'd thought that was over years ago.

“Milo's bald and fat,” he says, still trying to deny it.

“Well, he's overweight,” Susan says, “but he's not really fat. And he does have a little bit of hair, enough for a comb-over.”

“You're a comfort to me.”

“I'm sorry.” She puts her arm around his shoulder. “But half the assholes here know about this. OK, maybe only a quarter. And nobody's telling you. And you're just so clueless and all.”

“Please,” Jack tells her. “Don't tell me I'm going to thank you for this someday.”

He looks over and sees that her eyes are wet.

“I just hope you'll forgive me someday.”

“You'd better get back downstairs,” he tells her, “before Ricky thinks you
are
giving me a blow job.”

She smiles and kisses him on the cheek.

He thanks her, though he doesn't feel like it, and sits awhile longer on the edge of the bed, listening to the judge's snoring and wondering how all this fits into the plan.

Maybe it could work out anyhow, he thinks, and he's aware that “maybe” has crept into his consciousness. He's known all along that “things” would work out, that “everything” would be alright, once his book was bought.

He has never, though, imagined it all without Gina.

He's been a little distant, sure, a little focused, but all that will change, soon.
I'll make it up to you. I'll forgive you and you'll forgive me
.

But something sly and undermining whispers into his brain:

Maybe
.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

He sits by himself at the kitchen table, staring out the window. A last oak leaf is trying to free itself from a stubborn tree that won't let go despite the cold, sharp gusts that rattle even its largest branches.

Gerald said about 2 o'clock. It's 2:15 now. Jack swears he won't call. He won't.

The last two days have passed in a haze. Jack has found himself looking at his wife more intensely than he has in months, maybe years. A couple of times, she caught him staring and asked him if he was all right.

Last night, he must have lain in bed for two hours, watching her sleep. She seems so wonderful to him when she's lying on her back, her mouth slightly parted, her face more beautiful without the makeup or the worry creases.

He tries not to believe what Susan told him, but he knows, when he lets reason rule, that it is possible, even probable.

Anything, it seems to him now, is possible, even the unimaginable. He has been so sure of himself, so positive that if he put all his faith in one old stranger and a few inherited pages of cursive script, everything would work out the way it was meant to.

Now, he can't help but wonder. What if the old man was just a road-induced dream? What if it has all been for nothing? For the hundredth time, he overrides the voice that whispers to him. He can make it stop if he sits still and breathes in and out slowly, ten times.

Even Shannon seems different to him now, a little more evasive than he remembers. This morning, he offered to drive her to school and she said that she was going to take the bus, not to bother. She's staying with a teammate after school, and her parents will meet her at the game tonight
if Milo's through screwing my wife
and then go out for pizza. He can understand why she would be a little nervous, a little put off. Everyone thinks the Stones are about to lose their home. He wishes his wife and daughter both had a little more faith, but he forgives them. If he were them, he'd probably be a little nervous, too.

Well, it won't be long.

He's checked the mail, finding in their box one final letter from The Octagon Group, marked Urgent. No sense in opening it now. He tosses it in the trash can, where he put the last one.

He's been thinking about the ending. Pettigrew and Lovelady are in one of those abandoned half-moon motor courts you still see alongside the old U.S. highways, the motels and the roads both made obsolete by the interstates. The detective has tracked Lovelady there, six rather inventive murders later, and found him living in a room that turns out to be two units linked by a jagged hole Lovelady has smashed through the cheap masonry walls.

Jack is sure he has caught the essence of Lovelady's sadism and general madness—the fingernails chewed to the quick and bleeding, the red contact lenses he took from the medicine cabinet of the third girl, the one he tortured for two days before he killed her. The meticulous way in which he carved the “LL” into his own forehead with a steak knife, the silk panties he's wearing, which formerly adorned the half-rotted body on the other side of the wall. The stench that combines with floor-vibrating, atonal music to make Pettigrew dizzy and disoriented.

Jack is sure he has staged the final battle between good and evil in such a way as to make a reader throw the book down at the end, repelled and entranced at the same time. At one point, the only time the psychopath and his hunter talk, Lovelady tells him that he has no control over his actions, that he is doing what he was meant to do, what he has been told to do. Jack knows, in a way, how Lovelady feels.

When he finally slept last night, the old man came to him, and he knew everything was all right. He appreciated the reassurance.

Now, though, the demons are starting to creep in again.

At 2:30, the phone rings. It's Gina, wanting to add a couple of items to the grocery list. She asks if the mortgage company has called or written. He tells her no.

“And Gerald?”

“Not yet.”

There is a long pause on the other end, as if Gina's working up enough energy to pretend she still believes, still cares.

“He'll call,” she tells him finally. “You know he'll call. He said he would.”

But she knows he might not. So, at last, does Jack.

Just let this be over, he says, and it feels almost like a prayer. But to whom? The only times they ever go to church are Christmas and Easter. He hadn't felt anything in years that hinted of something beyond the here and now until he picked up the old man.

At 2:45, he breaks down and calls. David tells him that, actually, Mr. Prince is in a very important meeting now. He takes Jack's message.

Half an hour of silence later, Jack thinks of something.

Gerald does have his e-mail address, has even used it once (albeit tersely) after Jack sent him a note confirming that today was the day Gerald would get back to him about the book.

Maybe Gerald has already responded.

Jack goes to his computer and logs on. It takes him a long five minutes to gain access to the Internet. When he gets there, the little mailbox in the upper-left corner of his screen is open.

“You've got mail,” a mildly enthusiastic masculine voice informs him.

The first two messages are junk advertising from a site that once lured him in by promising to put him in touch with old high school classmates, as if he didn't know where most of them were anyhow, but he thought he might relocate Puffer Sensibaugh or some other rare missing person from the Class of '70.

The third message on his screen reads:

1/30/01 [email protected] G'Day
.

Jack sits back and takes 10 very slow, very deliberate breaths.

He clicks, and the message opens.

He tries to read it slowly, but he's like a beagle with a slice of cheese in front of him:

Hey, Babe
.

Got your message. What a day. Just met with that prick Schachter, and now I've got a phone message from freakin' Jack Stone
.

Godalmighty, if there's anything worse than old so-called friends, it's old friends with no talent
.

He's just so damn pathetic. And the book! Second-rate Thomas Harris. Make that third-rate
.

This guy, he's like that Tasmanian Devil cartoon character Caleb used to love so much. A regular whirling dervish. This whole thing has brought back memories of high school (and you know how I do love those so!)
.

This one is going to be hard to shake. Still can't believe he rewrote the whole thing in first person just because I suggested it. As if that made it any better. Maybe I should tell him I was wrong, that it really ought to be third person after all. Hah!

I can tell in 30 pages whether a book's any good. Hell, I could tell about this one in 10
.

Sorry if I sound like a shit
.

Just three more days 'til Virgin Gorda. Home by 7, I promise
.

Jack reads it again, or as much as he can bear.

He's something of a novice on the computer. He only got it because everyone told him it made writing, or more specifically rewriting, much easier. He never would have bothered to get Internet access, but Gina and Shannon both wanted it. He never gets much farther than his e-mail. The things Milo
bastard!
tells him about the porno sites, where you can see things they can't even put in Hustler, don't really interest him.

BOOK: Turn Signal
13.91Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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