Big Driver Read online

  “Hey, Fritz,” Tess said, bending over to stroke him. “I guess you got double rations tonight. Pretty clever of y—”

  Wings of grayness came over her vision, and if she hadn’t caught hold of the kitchen table, she would have gone sprawling full length on the linoleum. She uttered a cry of surprise that sounded faint and faraway. Fritzy twitched his ears back, gave her a narrow, assessing look, seemed to decide she wasn’t going to fall over (at least not on him), and went back to his second supper.

  Tess straightened up slowly, holding onto the table for safety’s sake, and opened the fridge. There was no tuna salad, but there was cottage cheese with strawberry jam. She ate it eagerly, scraping the plastic container with her spoon to get every last curd. It was cool and smooth on her hurt throat. She wasn’t sure she could have eaten flesh, anyway. Not even tuna out of a can.

  She drank apple juice straight from the bottle, belched, then trudged to the downstairs bathroom. She took the gun along, curling her fingers outside the trigger guard, as she had been taught.

  There was an oval magnifying mirror standing on the shelf above the washbasin, a Christmas gift from her brother in New Mexico. Written in gold-gilt script above it were the words PRETTY ME. The Old Tess had used it for tweezing her eyebrows and doing quick fixes to her makeup. The new one used it to examine her eyes. They were bloodshot, of course, but the pupils looked the same size. She turned off the bathroom light, counted to twenty, then turned it back on and watched her pupils contract. That looked okay, too. So, probably no skull fracture. Maybe a concussion, a light concussion, but—

  As if I’d know. I’ve got a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Connecticut and an advanced degree in old lady detectives who spend at least a quarter of each book exchanging recipes I crib from the Internet and then change just enough so I won’t get sued for plagiarism. I could go into a coma or die of a brain hemorrhage in the night. Patsy would find me the next time she came in to feed the cat. You need to see a doctor, Tessa Jean. And you know it.

  What she knew was that if she went to her doctor, her misfortune really could become public property. Doctors guaranteed confidentiality, it was a part of their oath, and a woman who made her living as a lawyer or a cleaning woman or a Realtor could probably count on getting it. Tess might get it herself, it was certainly possible. Probable, even. On the other hand, look what had happened to Farrah Fawcett: tabloid-fodder when some hospital employee blabbed. Tess herself had heard rumors about the psychiatric misadventures of a male novelist who had been a chart staple for years with his tales of lusty derring-do. Her own agent had passed the juiciest of these rumors on to Tess over lunch not two months ago … and Tess had listened.

  I did more than listen, she thought as she looked at her magnified, beaten self. I passed that puppy on just as soon as I could.

  Even if the doctor and his staff kept mum about the lady mystery writer who had been beaten, raped, and robbed on her way home from a public appearance, what about the other patients who might see her in the waiting room? To some of them she wouldn’t be just another woman with a bruised face that practically screamed beating; she would be Stoke Village’s resident novelist, you know the one, they made a TV movie about her old lady detectives a year or two ago, it was on Lifetime Channel, and my God, you should have seen her.

  Her nose wasn’t broken, after all. It was hard to believe anything could hurt that badly and not be broken, but it wasn’t. Swollen (of course, poor thing), and it hurt, but she could breathe through it and she had some Vicodin upstairs that would manage the pain tonight. But she had a couple of blooming shiners, a bruised and swollen cheek, and a ring of bruises around her throat. That was the worst, the sort of necklace people got in only one way. There were also assorted bumps, bruises, and scratches on her back, legs, and tushie. But clothes and hose would hide the worst of those.

  Great. I’m a poet and I don’t know it.

  “The throat … I could wear a turtleneck …”

  Absolutely. October was turtleneck weather. As for Patsy, she could say she’d fallen downstairs and hit her face in the night. Say that—

  “That I thought I heard a noise and Fritzy got between my feet when I went downstairs to check.”

  Fritzy heard his name and meowed from the bathroom door.

  “Say I hit my stupid face on the newel post at the bottom. I could even …”

  Even put a little mark on the post, of course she could. Possibly with the meat-tenderizing hammer she had in one of her kitchen drawers. Nothing gaudy, just a tap or two to chip the paint. Such a story wouldn’t fool a doctor (or a sharp old lady detective like Doreen Marquis, doyenne of the Knitting Society), but it would fool sweet Patsy McC, whose husband had surely never raised a hand to her a single time in the twenty years they’d been together.

  “It’s not that I have anything to be ashamed about,” she whispered at the woman in the mirror. The New Woman with the crooked nose and the puffy lips. “It’s not that.” True, but public exposure would make her ashamed. She would be naked. A naked victim.

  But what about the women, Tessa Jean? The women in the pipe?

  She would have to think about them, but not tonight. Tonight she was tired, in pain, and harrowed to the bottom of her soul.

  Deep inside her (in her harrowed soul) she felt a glowing ember of fury at the man responsible for this. The man who had put her in this position. She looked at the pistol lying beside the basin, and knew that if he were here, she would use it on him without a moment’s hesitation. Knowing that made her feel confused about herself. It also made her feel a little stronger.

  - 18 -

  She chipped at the newel post with the meat-tenderizing hammer, by then so tired she felt like a dream in some other woman’s head. She examined the mark, decided it looked too deliberate, and gave several more light taps around the edges of the blow. When she thought it looked like something she might have done with the side of her face—where the worst bruise was—she went slowly up the stairs and down the hall, holding her gun in one hand.

  For a moment she hesitated outside her bedroom door, which was standing ajar. What if he was in there? If he had her purse, he had her address. The burglar alarm had not been set until she got back (so sloppy). He could have parked his old F-150 around the corner. He could have forced the kitchen door lock. It probably wouldn’t have taken much more than a chisel.

  If he was here, I’d smell him. That mansweat. And I’d shoot him. No “Lie down on the floor,” no “Keep your hands up while I dial 911,” no horror-movie bullshit. I’d just shoot him. But you know what I’d say first?

  “You like it, it likes you,” she said in her low rasp of a voice. Yes. That was it exactly. He wouldn’t understand, but she would.

  She discovered she sort of wanted him in her room. That probably meant the New Woman was more than a little crazy, but so what? If it all came out then, it would be worth it. Shooting him would make public humiliation bearable. And look at the bright side! It would probably help sales!

  I’d like to see the terror in his eyes when he realized I really meant to do it. That might make at least some of this right.

  It seemed to take her groping hand an age to find the bedroom light-switch, and of course she kept expecting her fingers to be grabbed while she fumbled. She took off her clothes slowly, uttering one watery, miserable sob when she unzipped her pants and saw dried blood in her pubic hair.

  She ran the shower as hot as she could stand it, washing the places that could bear to be washed, letting the water rinse the rest. The clean hot water. She wanted his smell off her, and the mildewy smell of the carpet remnant, too. Afterward, she sat on the toilet. This time peeing hurt less, but the bolt of pain that went through her head when she tried—very tentatively—to straighten her leaning nose made her cry out. Well, so what? Nell Gwyn, the famous Elizabethan actress, had had a bent nose. Tess was sure she had read that somewhere.

  She put on flannel pajamas and shuffled to
bed, where she lay with all the lights on and the Lemon Squeezer .38 on the night table, thinking she would never sleep, that her inflamed imagination would turn every sound from the street into the approach of the giant. But then Fritzy jumped up on the bed, curled himself beside her, and began to purr. That was better.

  I’m home, she thought. I’m home, I’m home, I’m home.

  - 19 -

  When she woke up, the inarguably sane light of six AM was streaming through the windows. There were things that needed to be done and decisions that needed to be made, but for the moment it was enough to be alive and in her own bed instead of stuffed into a culvert.

  This time peeing felt almost normal, and there was no blood. She got into the shower again, once more running the water as hot as she could stand it, closing her eyes and letting it beat on her throbbing face. When she’d had all of that she could take, she worked shampoo into her hair, doing it slowly and methodically, using her fingers to massage her scalp, skipping the painful spot where he must have hit her. At first the deep scratch on her back stung, but that passed and she felt a kind of bliss. She hardly thought of the shower scene in Psycho at all.

  The shower was always where she had done her best thinking, a womblike environment, and if she had ever needed to think both hard and well, it was now.

  I don’t want to see Dr. Hedstrom, and I don’t need to see Dr. Hedstrom. That decision’s been made, although later—a couple of weeks from now, maybe, when my face looks more or less normal again—I’ll have to get checked out for STDs …

  “Don’t forget the AIDS test,” she said, and the thought made her grimace hard enough to hurt her mouth. It was a scary thought. Nevertheless, the test would have to be taken. For her own peace of mind. And none of that addressed what she now recognized as this morning’s central issue. What she did or didn’t do about her own violation was her own business, but that was not true of the women in the pipe. They had lost far more than she. And what about the next woman the giant attacked? That there would be another she had no doubt. Maybe not for a month or a year, but there would be. As she turned off the shower Tess realized (again) that it might even be her, if he went back to check the culvert and found her gone. And her clothes gone from the store, of course. If he’d looked through her purse, and surely he had, then he did have her address.

  “Also my diamond earrings,” she said. “Fucking pervert sonofabitch stole my earrings.”

  Even if he steered clear of the store and the culvert for awhile, those women belonged to her now. They were her responsibility, and she couldn’t shirk it just because her picture might appear on the cover of Inside View.

  In the calm morning light of a suburban Connecticut morning, the answer was ridiculously simple: an anonymous call to the police. The fact that a professional novelist with ten years’ experience hadn’t thought of it right away almost deserved a yellow penalty card. She would give them the location—the deserted YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU store on Stagg Road—and she would describe the giant. How hard could it be to locate a man like that? Or a blue Ford F-150 pickup with Bondo around the headlights?

  Easy-as-can-beezy.

  But while she was drying her hair, her eyes fell on her Lemon Squeezer .38 and she thought, Too easy-as-can-beezy. Because …

  “What’s in it for me?” she asked Fritzy, who was sitting in the doorway and looking at her with his luminous green eyes. “Just what’s in that for me?”

  - 20 -

  Standing in the kitchen an hour and a half later. Her cereal bowl soaking in the sink. Her second cup of coffee growing cold on the counter. Talking on the phone.

  “Oh my God!” Patsy exclaimed. “I’m coming right over!”

  “No, no, I’m fine, Pats. And you’ll be late for work.”

  “Saturday mornings are strictly optional, and you should go to the doctor! What if you’re concussed, or something?”

  “I’m not concussed, just colorful. And I’d be ashamed to go to the doctor, because I was three drinks over the limit. At least three. The only sensible thing I did all night was call a limo to bring me home.”

  “You’re sure your nose isn’t broken?”

  “Positive.” Well … almost positive.

  “Is Fritzy all right?”

  Tess burst into perfectly genuine laughter. “I go downstairs half-shot in the middle of the night because the smoke detector’s beeping, trip over the cat and almost kill myself, and your sympathies are with the cat. Nice.”

  “Honey, no—”

  “I’m just teasing,” Tess said. “Go on to work and stop worrying. I just didn’t want you to scream when you saw me. I’ve got a couple of absolutely beautiful shiners. If I had an ex-husband, you’d probably think he’d paid me a visit.”

  “Nobody would dare to put a hand on you,” Patsy said. “You’re feisty, girl.”

  “That’s right,” Tess said. “I take no shit.”

  “You sound hoarse.”

  “On top of everything else, I’m getting a cold.”

  “Well … if you need something tonight … chicken soup … a couple of old Percocets … a Johnny Depp DVD …”

  “I’ll call if I do. Now go on. Fashion-conscious women seeking the elusive size six Ann Taylor are depending on you.”

  “Piss off, woman,” Patsy said, and hung up, laughing.

  Tess took her coffee to the kitchen table. The gun was sitting on it, next to the sugar bowl: not quite a Dalí image, but damn close. Then the image doubled as she burst into tears. It was the memory of her own cheery voice that did it. The sound of the lie she would now live until it felt like the truth. “You bastard!” she shouted. “You fuck-bastard! I hate you!”

  She had showered twice in less than seven hours and still felt dirty. She had douched, but she thought she could still feel him in there, his …

  “His cockslime.”

  She bolted to her feet, from the corner of her eye glimpsed her alarmed cat racing down the front hall, and arrived at the sink just in time to avoid making a mess on the floor. Her coffee and Cheerios came up in a single hard contraction. When she was sure she was done, she collected her pistol and went upstairs to take another shower.

  - 21 -

  When she was done and wrapped in a comforting terry-cloth robe, she lay down on her bed to think about where she should go to make her anonymous call. Someplace big and busy would be best. Someplace with a parking lot so she could hang up and then scat. Stoke Village Mall sounded right. There was also the question of which authorities to call. Colewich, or would that be too Deputy Dawg? Maybe the State Police would be better. And she should write down what she meant to say … the call would go quicker … she’d be less likely to forget anyth …

  Tess drifted off, lying on her bed in a bar of sunlight.

  - 22 -

  The telephone was ringing far away, in some adjacent universe. Then it stopped and Tess heard her own voice, the pleasantly impersonal recording that started You have reached … This was followed by someone leaving a message. A woman. By the time Tess struggled back to wakefulness, the caller had clicked off.

  She looked at the clock on the night table and saw it was quarter to ten. She’d slept another two hours. For a moment she was alarmed: maybe she’d suffered a concussion or a fracture after all. Then she relaxed. She’d had a lot of exercise the previous night. Much of it had been extremely unpleasant, but exercise was exercise. Falling asleep again was natural. She might even take another nap this afternoon (another shower for sure), but she had an errand to run first. A responsibility to fulfill.

  She put on a long tweed skirt and a turtleneck that was actually too big for her; it lapped the underside of her chin. That was fine with Tess. She had applied concealer to the bruise on her cheek. It didn’t cover it completely, nor would even her biggest pair of sunglasses completely obscure her black eyes (the swollen lips were a lost cause), but the makeup helped, just the same. The very act of applying it made her feel more anchored in her life.
More in charge.

  Downstairs, she pushed the Play button on her answering machine, thinking the call had probably been from Ramona Norville, doing the obligatory day-after follow-up: we had fun, hope you had fun, the feedback was great, please come again (not bloody likely), blah-blah-blah. But it wasn’t Ramona. The message was from a woman who identified herself as Betsy Neal. She said she was calling from The Stagger Inn.

  “As part of our effort to discourage drinking and driving, our policy is to courtesy-call people who leave their cars in our lot after closing,” Betsy Neal said. “Your Ford Expedition, Connecticut license plate 775 NSD, will be available for pickup until five PM this evening. After five it will be towed to Excellent Auto Repair, 1500 John Higgins Road, North Colewich, at your expense. Please note that we don’t have your keys, ma’am. You must have taken them with you.” Betsy Neal paused. “We have other property of yours, so please come to the office. Remember that I’ll need to see some ID. Thank you and have a nice day.”

  Tess sat down on her sofa and laughed. Before listening to the Neal woman’s canned speech, she had been planning to drive her Expedition to the mall. She didn’t have her purse, she didn’t have her key-ring, she didn’t have her damn car, but she had still planned to just walk out to the driveway, climb in, and—

  She sat back against the cushion, whooping and pounding a fist on her thigh. Fritzy was under the easy chair on the other side of the room, looking at her as if she were mad. We’re all mad here, so have another cup of tea, she thought, and laughed harder than ever.

  When she finally stopped (only it felt more like running down), she played the message again. This time what she focused on was the Neal woman saying they had other property of hers. Her purse? Perhaps even her diamond earrings? But that would be too good to be true. Wouldn’t it?

  Arriving at The Stagger Inn in a black car from Royal Limo might be a little too memorable, so she called Stoke Village Taxi. The dispatcher said they’d be glad to run her out to what he called “The Stagger” for a flat fifty-dollar fee. “Sorry to charge you so much,” he said, “but the driver’s got to come back empty.”