Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

But this time he planned more carefully. He parked the car on the shoulder at a bend in the road. There was a steep drop into a boulder-strewn ravine just a few yards from the side of the road.

The Coronet’s glove compartment provided a couple of emergency flares and a flashlight. He set up the flares and stood out in the middle of the road with the flashlight, and the first car that came along had the choice of stopping or running him down. The car stopped and the driver rolled down his window and Jimmie John shot him.

He stuffed the dead man, minus his wallet, into the Coronet’s trunk. He unbolted the license plates from the Coronet and tossed them, along with their bags, into the trunk of the new car. Then he got the Coronet running and walked along beside it, steering it, then jumping nimbly out of the way while it went the rest of the way over the cliff.

The noise was shattering. She closed her eyes at the sound, opened them to see Jimmie John standing at the cliff looking down at the wreck.

“C’mon,” he was saying. “Go ahead and bum, you son of a bitch.”

Seconds later she heard the explosion. Flames leaped from the wrecked Coronet. He turned to her with satisfaction, took her arm, got her into the new car.

“Now just let ’em piss up a rope,” he said. “Let ’em try to identify that poor bastard, assuming they so much as find him. The hell, be a few days before they even know that’s the Dodge they’re lookin’ for, and here we are in a what-is-it, a Pontiac, and do you want to know something? This time we did it, Betty. This time we’re gonna be a couple thousand miles out of here without them having the slightest notion of what happened to us.” He slapped his leg. “Hey, girl — we made it!”

She put the radio on and found a station with their kind of music. An hour later there was another bit of news. A rancher in Texas had turned up the body of Walker P. Ferris, and the medical examiner had established the cause of death as repeated blows to the head with a blunt instrument.

She didn’t say anything. After a while he said, “I could tell you it was bullshit about the cause of death and how he had a heart attack and I knew he was dead and left him in a field because I couldn’t afford to get in trouble with the law. But the hell with all that. It’s like they said.”

She nodded.

“Make you mad?”

“No,” she said.

And it didn’t. Because, for one thing, she had already taken it for granted that he had killed Ferris. And because, for another, she no longer cared how many strangers had to die. She knew she should care but she didn’t, not now. The day they had just spent was worth all those lives.

“I get goose bumps just thinking about it. And what you folks must be feeling.”

“Well, you can’t imagine.”

“Were you frightened?”

“It wasn’t a question of being frightened at the time, because we had no way of knowing who it was and all then. But sometimes now I will be thinking of something else and it will come up on me unawares and I will just about faint away. Can’t help thinking what could have happened and all.”

“We’re not safe in our own homes, not a one of us.”

“No sooner did I open the door than I knew someone had been inside. Don’t ask me how I knew.”

“Sometimes you just know things.”

“Torn says maybe there’s a sixth sense operating in cases like this.”

“There’s a lot we don’t understand in this world, is what I always say.”

“I walked in and I thought at first someone was still there, and I told Tom and he called out and there was no answer and he said I was just being silly, what with being exhausted from the trip, and he went on in and turned lights on and all. And I knew someone had been inside and gone. If you ask what was different, I don’t believe I could say. You might think it was something was moved around or something of the sort, but you know as well as I do, when there’s children in a house nothing’s in the same place all the time. Like you might think a china pitcher was always kept on the left-hand side of the breakfront and it turns out one of the children moved it to set up a checkerboard or what-all. Then I went in the kitchen and saw the note and the money and like to fainted.”

“It was true about them leaving money, then.”

“Almost a hundred dollars. The note said it was to pay for what they ate, but if they ate five dollars’ worth of anything I would be hard put to prove it. And do you know how the note was signed?”

“Something about secret friends?”

“’Your secret friends.’ Tom just laughed and said as to how our secret friends could come back again paying out sums like that, and he took and put the money in his wallet without a by-your-leave. I’ll tell you, I felt pretty strange at the thought of strangers coming into my house when I was gone, but we talked it over and decided it was some college students on a vacation or something, and maybe they had car trouble and had to put up overnight.”

“But when you found out—”

“Oh, Lord. I still get the shivers.”

“Just your good fortune you weren’t home.”

“Well, I would surely say so. But you know, I wonder if they were all as bad as they’re painted. Tom thinks I’m crazy for saying as much, but I can’t help but wonder. Not stealing a thing, and leaving money when they didn’t have to, and I tell you, they washed up the dishes and left the place as neat as you could ask. I know they did what they did and all but I wonder isn’t there more to them than we know.”

“I still say you’d have been murdered in your beds if you were home when they came.”

“Maybe so. I just don’t know. Do you want to know something? I just think it’s a shame Tom picked up that money and tucked it away, all mixed in with his own so there was no way of telling it apart. It’s silly, a dollar being a dollar, but I wish I could have kept that money apart for a souvenir.”

“You have the note, don’t you?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t take anything for that note. I’ll get a little frame for it next I get to town, if I don’t forget.”

There were moments when it felt as though he had been driving forever, as though he had been born at the wheel of a car some hundreds and hundreds of years ago and would spend eternity driving through this dark void. They sped south through Colorado toward the New Mexico line. They drove miles at a time without seeing a single light except for an occasional oncoming car. For most of the time clouds obscured the moon, and the black asphalt pavement seemed to absorb the headlight beams and reflect nothing. For a couple of hours the radio babbled, music and news, music and news, until he couldn’t take any more of it and turned it off. It was nothing but records he had heard a thousand times, broken every half hour by the same damned news items, over and over and over. Ordinarily he could tune out the music and the news as well, but tonight it was impossible. It was an irritant, and he seemed to be irritating easily now.

With the radio off, the silence was even worse. He almost turned the damn thing back on again. Betty sat motionless in her seat, barely speaking at all, and for his part he kept wanting a conversation to get started but didn’t know how to put it in gear.

He would say that it was a hell of a dark night and she would agree that it certainly was. Or she would say that a certain hill was a pretty steep one and he would grunt his assent. He sort of wished she would talk to him. It wouldn’t even matter what she said, if only she could launch into a nice loose monologue that he could just float along with. But you couldn’t ask a person to talk to you without being prepared to talk back in return.