‘That guy at the mall today really creeped me out,’ she told him.
Jonny stopped and looked at her. He didn’t chastise her again. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘He threatened me,’ Cindy went on, ‘and it didn’t feel empty. He told me bad things happen to people who pry into his business. That’s what Jay Ferris did for a living, Jonny. He pried into other people’s lives. What if Jay found out who this guy was?’
Ross Klayman arrived at his mother’s house after dark.
The old RCA television in the living room was on. It was always on, driving him crazy. The same sewer of reality programs. Empty-headed sluts squeezing their silicone tits into bikini tops. Rich trust-fund babies playing drinking games. Celebrities grinning for the cameras and pretending they had ordinary lives. They were destroying the country. Chipping away the foundation brick by brick, until soon they would all be living in anarchy. Unless good people tried to stop it.
‘How can you watch this filth?’ Ross asked his mother.
Jessie shrugged and didn’t answer. She was draped across the sofa in a roomy T-shirt and yellow panties. Her feet were bare. She drank from a can of Miller Lite, and she already had two empties stacked on top of each other on the coffee table, next to an empty plastic tray from a Lean Cuisine dinner. Her eyes didn’t leave the television set.
‘Where were you today?’ she asked.
‘Out.’
‘Out where?’
‘The mall.’
He sat down next to her. The television was a noisy drone in his ears. She propped her feet on his thigh.
‘Did you eat?’ she asked.
‘I had a power bar.’
‘Do you want a beer?’
‘No.’
Ross rarely drank. Alcohol was poison. It clouded his mind, and he wanted his mind sharp. If you were a soldier and hunter, your only real weapon was the clearness of your brain. Your gun was an extension of your arm, which was an extension of your mind. You had to know how to focus. To plan. To execute. The drugs that fouled other people’s heads were the enemy.
‘I’ve got a temp shift working a concert at the DECC tomorrow,’ his mother said.
‘Uh huh.’
‘Might turn into something more.’
‘Good,’ he said.
But it wouldn’t. It never did. She couldn’t hold a job.
He found himself staring at his mother’s feet. She kept her nails painted red, and a callous bulged from her big toe. He knew what she wanted, so he massaged her arches, pressing deeply with his thumbs until she twitched on the edge of discomfort. It was their evening ritual. When she worked, she spent hours standing, leaving her flat feet sore by the time she came home.
Jessie gave him a crooked, slightly drunken smile. Her red hair, streaked with gray at the roots, was pulled back tightly behind her head, framing her oval face. She had a chirpy, too-happy voice. ‘You really are the best son in the world, you know that, don’t you?’
Ross rubbed her feet without answering.
‘The scale says I’m down a pound,’ she told him.
‘Good for you.’
He didn’t think one pound would make any difference. Twenty pounds might, but that wasn’t going to happen. His mother binged on diets to lose ten pounds, and then she binged on junk food to put on fifteen. She wasn’t fat, but her panties and T-shirt were both a size too small for her current weight.
It was just the two of them. Ross and Jessie. That was the way it had been since he was eight years old, when his father took a page from a Springsteen song and went out for a drive and never came home. Fifteen years had passed since then. Jessie in and out of jobs. Ross in and out of school. They’d spent most of those years in a little apartment in Fargo. His mother worked security at a local mall, and her boss was a former high school coach confined to a wheelchair. She spent most of her time straddling his lap. Wheels didn’t turn bad people into angels.
When the boss’s wife found out about the affair, he fired Jessie. She found a bus-stop-bench lawyer who wheedled a settlement out of the mall owner, and they used the money to get out of Fargo and buy a small house in the town of Gary, southwest of Duluth. That was a year ago. Jessie took part-time security jobs when she could get them. Some months were flush. Some weren’t.
Ross had applied for jobs, but he couldn’t wash the contempt off his face at interviews, and after a while, he gave up. He spent most days hiking in the woods. Sometimes he went far north, almost to Canada, taking with him only what he could carry on his back and living off the land for days at a time. That was how it was supposed to be. Man. Nature. Values.
He lifted his mother’s feet off his legs and stood up. He slipped off his camouflage jacket and hung it on a hook behind the front door. Jessie noted the shoulder holster and revolver without comment. Her own philosophy was to make sure you had a gun within reaching distance of your fingers at all times.
He went to her bedroom at the end of the hall, where the twin bed was unmade. The gun safe was on the wall. He undid the combination lock and stored the handgun in a sleeve on the door. There were six others. The safe allowed room for more than a dozen rifles, too. It was full.
With the safe open and the hardware in front of him, Ross heard a knocking on the front door.
That was the moment he’d long dreaded. The knock on the door. He thought about the woman at the mall. The cop’s wife. It seemed impossible that she could have recognized him, or that they could have tracked him down so quickly. He was a phantom in Duluth. The only one who had ever come close was the black bastard at the newspaper who’d stumbled onto his practice field. He wasn’t a problem anymore.
Even so. Be prepared.
Another knock.
‘Ross,’ his mother called.
‘Who is it?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not decent.’
Ross had no way of knowing if this was the moment. This might be the beginning of the end.
He left the safe open and crept to the doorway of the living room, where he could see windows facing the nighttime yard. No flashing lights. No cars on the street. Then fingernails tap-tapped on the glass, and he saw a girl’s face. Two girls. They called through the window to him.
‘Hey, hello!’
He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled.
Ross crossed to the front door and yanked it open. The girls jumped and giggled. They were taller than he was, both around sixteen or seventeen, probably sisters. Their hair was too long, their makeup too loud, their jeans too tight. He had no expression on his face, and he watched them catch their breath, smirk, roll their eyes, and whisper back and forth. They weren’t scared of him. They were laughing at him and could barely hide it. He felt a roaring in his head, his fury as calm as an ocean wave gathering force as it rolled toward shore.
‘Hi,’ the first girl said. She had red hair, cheap earrings. She twisted a curl around her fingers.
‘Hi,’ her sister echoed.
He said nothing at all. They were strangers, but he knew their type. These were the girls at school. These were the girls at the mall. These were the girls on television. They were all the same. They didn’t know who he was, but he wanted to shout at their painted faces: I AM GOD.
I am the Decider. I am the Bringer of Life and Death.
Kneel for your Judgment.
Unbidden, his fingers curled into fists, and his breath came faster.
‘Um,’ the first girl said.
‘We’re your neighbors across the street,’ the second girl added.
He didn’t know the neighbors, and they didn’t know him. I AM GOD. The girls peeked over his shoulder and saw Jessie on the sofa, her T-shirt riding up her stomach. They giggled again, as if looking down their noses at both of them.
Читать дальше