Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

36

He started awake,heart beating too fast, to the sound of the dogs barking, and his first thought was, It’s the ghost. The ghost is coming.

The dogs were back in the car, had slept in the rear. Angus and Bon stood on the backseat together, the both of them peering out the windows at an ugly yellow Labrador. The Lab stood with her back rigid and her tail up, yapping repetitively at the Mustang. Angus and Bon watched her with avid, anticipatory expressions and barked occasionally themselves, booming, harsh woofs that hurt Jude’s ears in the close confines of the Mustang. Marybeth twisted in the passenger seat, grimacing, not asleep anymore, but wishing she were.

Jude told them all to shut the fuck up. They didn’t listen.

He looked out the windshield and straight into the sun, a copper hole punched through the sky, a bright and merciless spotlight pointed into his face. He made a complaining sound at the glare, but before he could lift a hand to shade his eyes, a man stepped in front of the car, and his head blocked the sun.

Jude squinted at a young man wearing a leather tool belt. He was a literal redneck, skin cooked to a fine, deep shade of carmine. He frowned at Jude. Jude waved and nodded to him and started the Mustang. When the clock on the radio face lit up, he saw it was seven in the morning.

The carpenter stepped aside, and Jude rolled out of the garage and around the carpenter’s parked pickup. The yellow Lab chased them down the driveway, still yapping, then stopped at the edge of the yard. Bon woofed back at her one last time as they pulled away. Jude eased past the Price house. No one had put the garbage out yet.

He decided there was still time and drove out of Jessica Price’s little corner of suburbia. He walked first Angus, then Bon, in the town square, and got tea and doughnuts at a Honey Dew Drive-Thru. Marybeth rebandaged her right hand with some gauze from the dwindling supplies in the first-aid kit. She left her other hand, which at least had no visible sores, as it was. He gassed up the car at a Mobil, and then they parked at one edge of the concrete apron and snacked. He tossed plain crullers to the dogs.

Jude steered them back to Jessica Price’s. He parked on the corner, half a block from her house, on the opposite side of the street and a long walk down the road from the construction site. He didn’t want to take a chance on being seen by the laborer who’d been hovering over the car when they woke up.

It was after seven-thirty, and he hoped Jessica would bring the garbage out soon. The longer they sat, the more likely they were to draw attention, the two of them in their black Mustang, dressed in their black leather and black jeans, with their visible wounds and their tattoos. They looked like what they were: two dangerous lowlifes staking out a place where they planned to commit a crime. A NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH sign on a nearby lamppost stared them in the face.

By then his blood was flowing and his head was clear. He was ready, but there was nothing to do except wait. He wondered if the carpenter had recognized him, what he would say to the other men when they arrived on-site. I still can’t believe it. This guy who looks just like Judas Coyne, sleepin’ it off in the garage. Him and some amazingly hot chick. He looked so much like the real guy, I almost asked him if he was takin’ requests. And then Jude thought that the carpenter was also one more person who could positively identify them, after they were done doing whatever it was they were about to do. It was hard to live the outlaw life when you were famous.

He wondered idly who among rock stars had spent the most time in jail. Rick James, maybe. He did—what?—three years? Two? Ike Turner had done a couple years at least. Leadbelly had been in for murder, broke rocks for ten years, then was pardoned after putting on a good show for the governor and his family. Well. Jude thought if he played his cards right, he could do more time than all three of them put together.

Prison didn’t frighten him especially. He had a lot of fans in there.

The garage door at the end of Jessica McDermott Price’s concrete driveway rumbled open. A weedy girl, about eleven or twelve years old, her golden hair clipped into a short, flouncy bob, hauled a garbage can down to the side of the road. The sight of her gave him a tingle of surprise, the resemblance to Anna was so close. With her strong, pointy chin, towhead, and wide-spaced blue eyes, it was as if Anna had stepped out of her childhood in the eighties and straight into the bright, full morning of today.

She left the trash can, crossed the yard to the front door, and let herself in. Her mother met her just inside. The girl left the door open, allowing Jude and Marybeth to watch mother and daughter together.

Jessica McDermott Price was taller than Anna had been, her hair a shade darker, and her mouth bracketed by frown lines. She wore a peasant blouse, with loose, frilly cuffs, and a crinkly flower-print skirt, an outfit that Jude surmised was meant to make her look like a free spirit, an earthy and empathic Gypsy. But her face had been too carefully and professionally made up, and what he could see of the house was all dark, oiled, expensive-looking furniture and seasoned wood paneling. It was the home and the face of an investment banker, not a seer.

Jessica handed her little girl a backpack—a shiny purple-and-pink thing that matched her windbreaker and sneakers as well as the bike outdoors—and air-kissed her daughter’s forehead. The girl tripped out, slammed the door, and hurried over the yard, pulling the pack onto her shoulders. She was across the street from Jude and Marybeth, and on her way by she shot them a look, measuring them up. She wrinkled her nose, as if they were some litter she’d spotted in someone’s yard, and then she was around the corner and gone.

The moment she was out of sight, Jude’s sides began to prickle, under his arms, and he became aware of the tacky sweat gluing his shirt to his back.

“Here we go,” he said.

He knew it would be dangerous to hesitate, to give himself time to think. He climbed out of the car. Angus bounded after him. Marybeth got out on the other side.

“Wait here,” Jude said.

“Hell, no.”

Jude walked around to the trunk.

“How we goin’ in?” Marybeth asked. “Were we just gonna knock on the front door? Hi, we’ve come to kill you?”

He opened the trunk and pulled out the tire iron. He pointed it at the garage, which had been left open. Then he slammed the trunk and started across the street. Angus dashed ahead, came back, raced ahead again, lifted a leg, and pissed on someone’s mailbox.

It was still early, the sun hot on the back of Jude’s neck. He held one end of the tire iron in his fist, the socket-wrench end, and clasped the rest of it against the inner part of his forearm, trying to hide it alongside his body. Behind him a car door slammed. Bon lunged past him. Then Marybeth was at his side, short of breath and trotting to keep up.

“Jude. Jude. What if we just…just try and talk to her? Maybe we can…persuade her to help us willingly. Tell her you never…never wanted to hurt Anna. Never wanted her to kill herself.”

“Anna didn’t kill herself, and her sister knows it. That’s not what this is about. Never has been.” Jude glanced at Marybeth and saw she had fallen a few steps behind him, was regarding him with a look of unhappy shock. “There’s always been more to this than we figured at first. I’m not so sure we’re the bad guys in this story.”

He walked up the driveway, the dogs loping along, one on either side of him, like an honor guard. He took a passing glance at the front of the house, at windows with white lace curtains in them and shadows behind. If she was watching them, he couldn’t tell. Then they were in the gloom of the garage, where a cherry two-door convertible with a vanity plate that read HYPNOIT was parked on the clean-swept concrete floor.