Jack Ketchum - The Passenger

“ ’Course I do,” she said.

She’d chosen the house because, unlike the Justice Building, where every footfall echoed like pistol fire across the marble floors, where even the walls were polished on a weekly basis, where the air was processed and always traced with disinfectant, the house was as much of nature as in the midst of it. Over 120 years old, it stood surrounded by tall untended grass atop a hill at the end of a two-lane dirt track that wound past a small country graveyard and an abandoned church of even earlier origin. Its beams were hand-hewn. Both fireplaces worked. The occasional bat still fluttered upstairs in the attic.

Her nearest neighbors were over a mile away. The house was quiet. It was private.

Now it was remote.

“How many phones?” Emil said. He’d walked in with his gun drawn. He shoved it in his belt.

“Just the one in the kitchen.”

“Truth, now.”

“Just the kitchen.”

“Ray? You want to take care of that?”

“Sure.”

Ray walked into the kitchen, put the paper bag containing the whiskey down on the counter and the beer in the refrigerator and unplugged the wall jack. The blinking light on her answering machine blinked out.

“Any guns?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. You want to hide the carving knives? I promise not to look.”

Emil smiled. “I just might do that.”

Billy plopped down in her armchair like a man after a hard day at work. Emil went to the refrigerator to get himself a beer. He popped one for Ray and handed it to him, then another for himself and closed the door.

“Hey,” said Marion.

“Oh, right.”

He got her a beer, opened it and stepped out of the kitchen and handed it to her.

“Sorry, Marie.”

“Marion.”

“Sorry. You care for one?”

“No,” Janet said.

She needed something a whole lot stronger. Not too much, god knows she had to keep her wits about her. But Jesus, something. She went to the kitchen cabinet and took down the fifth of Glenlivet and a glass and uncorked the bottle.

“Scotch?” Ray said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Hey, we got scotch too. Have some of ours. Be our guest.”

“No thanks. This is scotch. You bought rubbing alcohol.”

She poured herself a double. Ray took the bottle from her hand.

“So educate me,” he said.

She got him a glass. He poured and drank.

“Smooth. What is it?”

“Single malt.”

“Good stuff,” he said.

“Where’s the bathroom?” said Marion.

Janet pointed. “Through there. Through the bedroom.”

“What’s over there?” Emil said.

He was pointing to the closed door to the study. Neither Emil nor Marion knew what she happened to do for a living yet and for some reason she didn’t want them to. So far the others hadn’t said anything. But if he went browsing around in there he could probably figure it out for himself.

“A study. Books and papers.”

He moved to the door and opened it and flicked on the wall switch and his eyes went to the cluttered desk.

“You work here?”

“Sometimes.”

“You some kind of writer or something?”

“I write.”

She walked over and as she turned the light off again and closed the door in front of him she saw Alan’s forgotten briefs on the end table.

He needed them tomorrow.

He’s supposed to be staying in town tonight.

“Please,” she said. “This room’s private.”

He shrugged and smiled. “Sure. Okay. You figure on writing about me?”

“Would you want me to?”

She glanced at Billy, slumped in the armchair, opening and closing a big sharp-looking folding knife, his brow furrowed as though deep in thought. Billy’s got a knife, she thought. You damn well remember that too.

“Sure I’d want you to. Farm boy makes good, right? You know I’m the seventh son of a seventh son? Supposed to be magic or spiritual or something, real powerful. Now Billy here’s a preacher’s son. A very spiritual being in his own right. And Ray..

He turned to Ray, who was drinking Glenlivet straight out of the bottle.

So much for a second one for me, she thought.

“Hey, Ray, what’s your story anyhow?”

“No story, Emil.”

He laughed. “That’s what I thought.”

Then the door to the bedroom opened and Marion appeared and her anger at all four of them flared from dull to blazing. She was wearing the black Versace nightgown, the one Alan had more than splurged for in Manhattan last Christmas, the one she’d worn just four times since-that night and then on his birthday, her birthday and the Christmas following and the garter belt was hers too and the panties and the black silk stockings.

“I borrowed some things,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

Oh, I mind, she thought. You bitch. You bet I mind and you damn well know I do.

“Lord, Maria! Look at you!”

He went to her and Janet had cause to wonder exactly how much jealousy was floating around here in the room just then between these guys because Ray moved toward them too from the kitchen, the expression on his face unreadable as Billy stood up gawking while Emil ran his hands over her, showing off for them and for Janet too, Marion laughing and wrapping her arms around him as he dragged her back through the doorway to the bedroom and pulled her down on top of him across the bed, hips already grinding.

She saw Marion break the kiss, his big hands roving her breasts, and saw her turn and stare at her and knew that Marion was showing her something at that particular moment too. It was something about power and spite, she thought, that the girl from the wrong side of the tracks was all grown up now and somebody to be reckoned with. She got that message clearly. And never broke the look as she purposefully and calmly walked over to the bedroom and closed the door.

Billy slumped back into his chair. Began fiddling with his evil-looking knife again. She crossed to the couch nearby and sat. He wasn’t going to scare her. Damned if he was. In the kitchen she could hear Ray swilling at the bottle. In the bedroom she could hear them. They all could. She had the feeling that it bothered each of them in one way or the other. She reached into her purse.

“You mind if I smoke?”

“Unh-unh. It’s your domesticity.”

She lit it, crossed her legs and tried to relax.

“Your TV work?” he said.

“Remote’s right over there.”

He took it off the table and pushed the power button. Some innocuous family comedy sprang out at them and the sounds from the bedroom disappeared beneath canned laughter. He started surfing the channels. His attention span seemed to be just about what she’d expect it to be: nil.

“Cinemax? HBO? Showtime?”

“No.”

She saw him take in the furnishings-the Boston rocker, the rows of hand-carved decoys, the country primitive desk and pie safe and chairs and table, the 1821 children’s sampler, the hundred-year-old map of the Hudson River, the heavy carved-oak shelving, the Tiffany-style lamps.

“I wouldn’t think you were that penurious,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I wouldn’t think you were that penurious. That you’d just have basic cable, I mean. You have so many encumbrances here.”

She sure did.

It seemed forever sitting there with Billy flicking his goddamn knife open and shut with one hand and the channels with the other but it was probably no more than fifteen minutes because she was only on her second smoke when the bedroom door opened and there was Marion, this time draped in a bedsheet. Her bedsheet.

“Janet? Come on in a minute, would ya?”

Her bedroom seemed sullied to her now. Foreign. Enemy territory. She didn’t care for the notion of going in.