Lawrence Block - Candy

“Why?” I wanted to know.

“Why what?”

“Why the sudden overwhelming concern for my health and welfare? A day or two ago you didn’t care if you never saw me again. Now you want to follow me to the ends of the earth. Hell, you want to lead me to the ends of the earth. What’s your angle?”

She gave me a pouting look that made me feel lower than the underside of a rattler’s belly for so much as asking. She held the look until I wanted to crawl under the rug, and then told me.

“I don’t have anything now,” she said. “Not a damn thing. I had Caroline but you killed her.”

Yeah.

“And I … I like you, Jeff. I told you that you were the best I ever had and I wasn’t kidding. I’d rather be with you than anybody else.”

I wasn’t sure whether or not I believed her. Maybe it made sense and maybe it didn’t.

“Besides,” she said, “you killed Caroline because of me. I didn’t … didn’t know you loved me that much. It makes me feel kind of funny.”

I nodded slowly.

“Jeff?”

I looked at her. It wasn’t hard to do—she was as beautiful as ever, more beautiful than ever, and soft and pink and naked and wonderful. And now we were together, inseparably together, lost together and on our way to hell together.

I kissed her.

“We can’t waste time,” she said. She tried to say it briskly and efficiently but a trace of sexy huskiness crept into her voice. She swept on as if she was unaware of the huskiness—or as if she was trying to deny it.

“We’ve got to hurry. We can catch a bus out right away and we’ll be out of New York before they discover the body. Carrie never had many friends and the ones she did have never came to our apartment. She had a town house, too, you know, and she only had the apartment so the two of us would have a place to be together. But there’s a maid who comes in every morning to clean up and the body’ll be discovered tomorrow morning at the very latest. We can’t afford to stay around that long.”

I fumbled for a cigarette and got a match to it. I drew on the butt and blew out a cloud of smoke. I took a second puff, then bent over and ground the cigarette out in the carpet.

“I’ve got one suitcase packed for myself,” she said. “I don’t think we should chance going back to your hotel or anything. If they discovered the body they’ll be waiting for you there and we can’t afford to take the chance. Just wear what you’ve got on and … what’s so funny?”

“I don’t have anything on. Neither do you.”

She giggled, then broke the giggle off in midstream. “You know what I mean,” she said. “When we leave the bus we’ll buy a fresh change of clothing same place we get the car. Same town, I mean.”

“I’ve got money at the hotel.”

“How much?”

“A few hundred.”

She shook her head. “It’s not worth the risk, Jeff. For a few hundred we’re risking your life. There’s no sense doing that.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Of course I am. Let’s get dressed now and hurry on down to that bus station.”

I looked at her again. I reached out a hand and touched her throat. I let the hand slip down over her body, over her breasts and her round belly.

“Don’t rush me.”

“We don’t have time,” she said. “I told you we don’t have time.”

“Of course we do.”

“Jeff—”

“We have plenty of time,” I told her. “For some things there’ll always be time.”

I cupped her breast with one hand. Her cheeks were flushed and she was trying to keep from breathing hard. The battle was won.

“Please,” she said. “Jeff, there’ll be time for that later. After we get off the bus, Jeff. And when we get to Mexico we’ll have the rest of our lives. That’s a long time, Jeff.”

“Not long enough.”

She couldn’t sit up any more. She was lying down and her breathing was out of control.

So was mine.

“Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. Oh, you fool. Jeff, we have to get out of here. We have to—”

I stopped her mouth with mine.

“Jeff—”

I was touching her everywhere and her whole body was responding like a fish to a lure.

“Jeff—”

I didn’t take her. I kept handling her, kissing her, fondling her, working her up to a pitch so that if I stopped it would have killed her.

Then, when she was panting so loud that they must have heard it in Outer Mongolia, when sweat covered her breasts and ran down the valley between them, then I hoisted myself up on one elbow and turned away from her.

“You’re right,” I said with difficulty. “There’ll be loads of time later. We’ll have the rest of our lives for this sort of thing. No point in wasting valuable time here and now. You’re one hundred percent right, Candy.”

Her nails dug into my back and drew blood. She called me the filthiest names anybody could possibly think of and sank her teeth into my upper lip.

Then all the desperation and all the excitement and all the tension in our two fevered bodies exploded and the world fell off its axis and the day turned to night and the floodwaters rose and the sun blazed and the moon eclipsed it and the rock of Gibraltar crumbled into dust.

Time vanished, space spread out and disappeared. I forgot my name and my life and the world.

I forgot that I was a rapist and a murderer.

A bus is sort of a subway on dry land. A subway is bad enough but there just ain’t no subway that goes more than ten or twenty miles. The Greyhound took us to Louisville and that was a damn sight further.

It was a drag.

It was worse than a drag. It was boredom and agony and hell without flames, and it would have been sheer torture even if we hadn’t been running away from the electric chair. Even without the tension, a trip like that would have been miserable, and the way I felt it was as though the bus was standing still. It wasn’t—Greyhounds make better time than most cars and this guy driving our crate hit close to seventy a good part of the time.

But that wasn’t fast enough the way I felt. A jet plane wouldn’t have been fast enough. A rocket would have seemed like crawling. I was so tense I couldn’t see straight, and despite the relative speed of the bus it was a far cry from a rocket or a jet plane.

I did not like that bus.

We had seats near the back, seats together, and there was just me and Candy and her suitcase. As soon as Candy was settled in her seat next to the window with the suitcase on her lap she was out like a light, sleeping like a babe in arms. She was the type of person who could do that. She was under the same strain I was, or at least she should have been, but she had the ability to put it all out of her mind and make like a junkie on the nod.

Not me.

It was night on the bus. The lights were out and the bulk of the passengers, like Candy, were busy counting sheep and sawing wood. I felt annoyingly lonely, a stranger and afraid in a world I had neatly unmade, and I wanted to crawl out of the bus and lie down in the road and let the bus run over me.

I told myself that it was ridiculous; that I should give myself up and let them throw the switch and send me to hell where I belonged. I told myself that I wasn’t built to run away, that this just wasn’t my scene.

That’s what I told myself.

And for a while I believed it.

But then I started devoting some concentrated thought to the matter—which is always a good way to louse yourself up, and at this point I began to see that running away was old stuff for Jeff Flanders. Old stuff—hell, it was my way of life. I’d been spending my whole life running away from something or other and I ought to take to the current situation like a duck to water.