Lawrence Block - Candy

Running. Not always from John Law—this was in the nature of a brand-new experience. But always from somebody and generally from myself. I was running away from myself when I took up with Candy in the first place instead of straightening up and flying right and sticking with Lucy. I was running away from myself when I moved out of the apartment on 100th Street and into the Kismet. And if the bouts with the bottle hadn’t been running, what the hell were they?

Now the preliminaries were over. This was the big race, the one I’d been spending my whole life shaping up for. Now I was running for the comparative safety of the Mexican border with the New York police baying at my heels and the world’s greatest lay sitting beside me.

Uh-huh.

I chain-smoked the night away. I lit one cigarette from the butt of another and prayed that I’d live long enough to die of lung cancer. I dropped the used-up cigarettes on the floor of the bus and ground them into shredded tobacco-and-paper and kicked the shreds into the center aisle.

It’s hard to say just when the full impact of it all hit home. Shocks of this magnitude don’t hit at first; you think you know what it’s all about and two hours later you start shaking. It’s like the time the car I was driving and the car somebody else was driving had a car-fight. It was the other guy’s fault—he missed a stop sign and I got a glimpse of his car out of the corner of my eye and we both hit our brakes about the same time. There was a disgusting brake-squeal and a moment’s silence and an incredible montage of unpleasant sounds as the two automobiles chewed each other up.

I reached for my door handle and it wouldn’t open—the crash had knocked things together. So I nonchalantly got out the other side, strolled over to the moron who had done such terrible things to my new car, lit a cigarette and offered one to him.

That was that.

And two hours later I was trembling so terribly that I couldn’t stay on my feet.

It was the same thing now, years later. What Candy had told me jarred me right at the start, knocked me off my pins, and I thought it was as much of a shock as I was going to get. But I still hadn’t adjusted to it at the time and I was calm enough to make love to her a few minutes after she clued me in on the happy fact that I was a murderer.

You see, I never completely accepted it. I made the neat mental entry on the immaculate mental file card, the pen-scribble that testified that one Jeff Flanders had brutally murdered one Caroline Christie. But the entry on the little white card was simply a definition, an equation. Jeff Flanders—murderer. That’s the equation, and in itself it was not reassuring.

The mental picture that took time to develop was even less reassuring and it damn near jolted me out of the bus. It did not hit all at once; it grew on me, snuck up on me until suddenly it was there and was awesome in the full force of its presence.

It was Caroline Christie, the attractive dyke with money in the bank and Candy in the bed, and she was lying on the floor of her apartment as dead as a lox. What had killed her? It might have been the beating, or the rape, or any one of a number of things I had done to her. How did she look now? Would there be the odor of death from her body when they found her?

How will the roses smell

When we are all blown to hell?

I looked down at my hands and they were the hands that had murdered Caroline Christie. I wanted to cut them off and fling them out the window.

And then, true to form, I began to think seriously of my own skin.

My own skin. Not the most ideal skin in the world, but one which had been with me for quite some time. I had grown rather attached to it over the years.

I could read the newspaper headlines in my mind, could imagine the tabloidic progress reports on the relentless pursuit and inevitable capture. The Daily News, direct and brutal, would say:

COPS CAPTURE

CHRISTIE KILLER

while the Mirror , in a rare display of ingenuity, would headline it:

CHRISTIE KILLER

CAUGHT BY COPS

We’d all have fun.

I thought about the trial. Maybe Lucy would cry, and maybe that bird Hardesty would be on hand to defend me, and the papers would have a field day with the whole scene. There’d be a conviction, and an appeal, and a denial of the appeal, and another appeal, and denial of that appeal. And then I’d sit in a cell on Death Row at Sing Sing and wait and wait and wait until they came along and took me to a room and strapped me in a chair and threw a switch.

It would burn for a minute or two, I supposed, and then nothing would happen at all. Jeff Flanders would have paid his debt to society and gone to heaven or to hell or, as I prefer to believe, into the gaseous cosmos.

I was sweating and the sweat was cold on my forehead. I wiped it off and sweated some more and lit another cigarette and smoked and sweated and smoked and sweated and looked at Candy while she slept and watched the sky lighten and the dawn come up through the rarely-washed green-tinted window of the big Greyhound bus.

When we pulled into Louisville, Candy’s eyes snapped open and she was instantly awake. We left the bus. I was unsteady on my feet but she made up for it with her absolute composure. She held the suitcase tight in her hot little hand and led me out of the dusty bus terminal and into the thoroughly uninviting daylight.

The dealer wanted twelve hundred for a green Buick sedan that wasn’t worth a grand. He got a grand—Candy did the talking and I stood around saying silent prayers. Only Candy could have beaten the guy down on the price. Price didn’t matter, we had fifteen times the price and needed the car desperately. Two hundred dollars weighed against the possibility of discovery was infinitesmal and I couldn’t have argued for a minute but I had to admit to myself that she was playing it the way it had to be played. If we didn’t haggle he would be much more suspicious than if we did. And she knew it.

So we had a car and it drove nicely enough, a nice big car with the registration made out to Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor. Well, to Mr. David Trevor, actually. Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor were the names Candy had picked out for us, and I figured they were as good as any other names. I was a little put off by the fact that my driver’s license and my registration had nothing at all in common but there wasn’t much I could do about it. If the joker’s sales book had Jeff Flander’s name in it the jig would be up fairly soon.

I was too tired to keep my eyes open and too tense to close them so we got the hell out of Louisville after a quick bite to eat in a ptomainerie which shall remain forever nameless. The roads were good and the Buick hugged them like a long-lost brother. The car ran well even if it wasn’t much for looks and I hit ninety-five on one stretch of straightaway until Candy reminded me that getting picked up for speeding wouldn’t do us a hell of a lot of good. After that I drove a steady three miles under the speed limit and we made good time.

By nightfall I was too dead to keep going. We switched off on the driving—she was a damned fine driver—but I was still bushed and we put in at a motel and showered happily. I took a shave that I needed desperately and crawled into bed so tired that I could have slept on a bed of nails with ease.

Then Candy crawled in next to me and we didn’t get to sleep for a good half hour.

It was a strange type of lovemaking. We were too tired to be imaginative and too tense to really relax and enjoy it—at the same time our tension needed the release of sex or our sleep wouldn’t have done us much good. She was clean and sweet-smelling from the shower and I took her quickly and perhaps a little sadistically. We were two fools going to hell in an open boat and determined to get there in a hurry.