Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Well, you got a point,” Waldron said.

He went tohis room, showered, put on swim trunks, and picked up a towel. He went back and forth from the sauna to the pool and into the Jacuzzi and back into the pool again. He swam some laps, then stretched out on a chaise next to the pool. He listened, eyes closed, while a man with a soft hill-country accent was trying to teach his young son to swim. Then he must have dozed off, and when he opened his eyes he was alone in the pool area. He returned to his room, showered, shaved, put on fresh clothes, and went to the bar.

It was a nice room — low lighting, comfortable chairs, and bar stools. Some decorator had tricked it out with a library motif, and there were bookshelves here and there with real books in them. At least Waldron supposed they were real books. He’d never seen anyone reading one of them.

He settled in at the bar with bourbon and dry-roast peanuts from the dish on the bartop. An hour later he was in a conversation, and thirty minutes after that he was back in his room, bedded down with an old girl named Claire who said she was assistant manager of the gift shop at the airport. She was partial to truckers, she told him. She’d even married one, and although it hadn’t worked out they remained good friends. “Man drives for a living, chances are he’s thoughtful and considerate and sure of himself, you know what I mean?”

Waldron saw those deep-set brown eyes looking over the steering wheel. And that slow smile.

After that heseemed to catch a lot of cross-country hauling and he stopped pretty regularly at the Rodeway. It was convenient enough, and the Jacuzzi was a big attraction during the winter months. It really took the road tension out of you.

Claire was an attraction, too. He didn’t see her every visit, but if the hour was right he sometimes gave her a call and they sometimes got together. She’d come by for a drink or a swim, and one night he put on a jacket and took her to dinner in town at the King Cole.

She knew he was married and felt neither jealousy nor guilt about it. “Me and my ex,” she said, “it wasn’t what he did on the road that broke us up. It was what he didn’t do when he was home.”

It was mid-March when he finally found the man. And it was nowhere near Indianapolis.

It was atruck stop just east of Tucumcari, New Mexico, and he’d had no intention of stopping there. He’d had breakfast a while back in a Tex-Mex diner midway between Gallup and Albuquerque, and by the time he hit Tucumcari his gut was rumbling and he was ready for an unscheduled pit stop. He picked a place he’d never stopped at. If it had a name he didn’t know what it was. The signs said nothing but diesel fuel and truckers welcome. He clambered down from the cab and used the john, then went in for a cup of coffee he didn’t particularly want.

And saw the man right away.

He’d been able to picture the eyes and the smile, and a pair of hands on a wheel. Now the image enlarged to include a round, close-cropped head with a receding hairline, a bulldog jaw, a massive pair of shoulders. The man sat on a stool at the counter, drinking coffee and reading a magazine, and Waldron just stood for a moment, looking at him.

There was a point where he almost turned and walked out. It passed, and instead he took the adjoining stool and ordered coffee. When the girl brought it, he let it sit there. Beside him, the man with the deep-set eyes was reading an article about bonefishing in the Florida Keys.

“Nice day out there,” Waldron said.

The man raised his eyes, nodded.

“I think I met you sometime last summer. Indianapolis, the Rodeway Inn.”

“I’ve been there.”

“I met you in Lundy’s room in the back. There were three men there besides Lundy. One of them was drinking a can of Hudepohl.”

“You got a memory,” the man said.

“Well, the night stuck in my mind. I had a close one out on the highway, I came in jawing about it. A jerk in a car playing tag with me and I came in mad enough to talk about running him off the road, killing him.”

“I remember that night,” the man said, and he smiled the way Waldron remembered. “Now I remember you.”

Waldron sipped his coffee.

“ ‘Like a bug on a windshield,’ ” the man said. “I remember you saying that. Next little while, every time some insect went and gummed up the glass, it came to me, you saying that. You ever find them?”

“Find who?”

“Whoever was playing tag with you.”

“I never looked for them.”

“You were mad enough to,” the man said. “That night you were.”

“I got over it.”

“Well, people get over things.”

There was a whole unspoken conversation going on and Waldron wanted to cut through and get to it. “Who I been looking for,” he said, “is I been looking for you.”

“Oh?”

“I get things in my mind I can’t get rid of,” Waldron said. “I’ll get a thought working and I won’t be able to let go of it for a hundred miles. And my stomach’s been turning on me.”

“You lost me on a curve there.”

“What we talked about. What I said that night, just running my mouth, and you picked up on it.” Waldron’s hands worked, forming into fists, opening again. “I read the papers,” he said. “I find stories, I clip them out of the papers.” He met the man’s eyes. “I know what you’re doing,” he said.

“Oh?”

“And I gave you the idea,” he said.

“You think so, huh?”

“The thought keeps coming to me,” Waldron said. “I can’t shake it off. I drop it and it comes back.”

“You want the rest of that coffee?” Waldron looked at his cup, put it down unfinished. “C’mon then,” the man said, and put money on the counter to cover both their checks.

Waldron kept hisnewspaper clippings in a manila envelope in the zippered side pocket of his bag. The bag rode on the floor of the cab in front of the passenger seat. They were standing beside the cab now, facing away from the sun. The man was going through some of the clippings and Waldron was holding the rest of them.

“You must read a lot of papers,” the man said.

Waldron didn’t say anything.

“You think I been killing people. With my truck.”

“I thought so, all these months.”

“And now?”

“I still think so.”

“You think I did all these here. And you think you started it all by getting mad at some fool driver in Indiana.”

Waldron felt the sun on the back of his neck. The world had gone silent and all he could hear was his own breathing.

Then the man said, “This here one was mine. Little panel truck, electrical contractor or some damn thing. Rode him right off a mountain. I didn’t figure he’d walk away from it, but then I didn’t stay around to find out, you know, and I don’t get around to reading the papers much.” He put the clipping on the pile. “A few of these are mine,” he said.

Waldron felt a pressure in his chest, as if his heart had turned to iron and was being drawn by a magnet.

“But most of these,” the man went on, “the hell, I’d have to work night and day doing nothing else. I mean, figure it out, huh? Some of these are accidents, just like they’re written up.”

“And the rest?”

“The rest are a whole lot of guys like you and me taking a whack at somebody once in a while. You think it’s one man doing all of it and you said something to get him started, hell, put your mind to rest. I did it a couple of times before you ever said a word. And I wasn’t the first trucker ever thought of it, or the first ever did it.”

“Why?”

“Why do it?”

Waldron nodded.