Meeting Evil: A Novel Page 5

  John had impatiently started the engine and was waiting for a break in the bumper-to-bumper traffic that inevitably appears from nowhere when you want to pull away from any curb anywhere in the world though all had been clear a moment earlier. He waved the bag away when, from the corner of his eye, he saw Richie offer it.

  “Where to, sir?” Richie asked his shoulder.

  “I’m driving myself home,” John said firmly. “Where I’m getting out and staying.” He felt like adding And you won’t be invited in, but he really found it difficult to be rude, so settled for, “Where you two go from there is your business.” But then he regretted saying that, which maybe would seem callous with respect to Sharon, whose fears might be unwarranted but were no less psychologically real. “No, I’ve changed my mind. I want to drop you off first.” He had turned to address Richie.

  Richie narrowed his eyes, but from the tone of his voice it seemed he might be joking. “So what have you two cooked up behind my back?” he asked. “If you want a little privacy, I can always look the other way.”

  “All right,” John said sourly.

  Richie was grinning. “I’m an understanding guy.”

  Sharon had moved forward until her anxious, pale, red-framed face was near their respective shoulders. “We’re not doing anything behind your back,” she said fearfully.

  Richie did not acknowledge her. He continued to grin at John. “You’re not as straitlaced as you want me to believe. You won’t turn down a piece of free tail. Hell, why should you?”

  John refused to participate in this banter. He was back to watching for a chance to pull the car out.

  Sharon tried again. “We’re not—”

  Richie said, “Shut your mouth.”

  John swung around. “Don’t talk to her that way. This is her car, remember?”

  “Yeah,” Richie said wryly. “They stole mine.”

  “It’s not her fault.”

  As usual Richie was quick to placate. “Anything you say, boss!” By now John was becoming accustomed to the deference habitually paid him by the man, who appeared to be the cowardly sort who would readily defer to other males but would bully women when they could get away with it.

  “I don’t have any designs on Sharon,” John said. He had a hunch that behind his back the traffic had now opened up, but he wanted to make this clear once and for all, lest Richie continue to make tasteless and embarrassing remarks. “She should have nothing to fear from either of us. That’s why I want to drop you off first.” He stared at Richie, who as always backed down.

  “You’re the doctor!”

  “Well, where to? Where do you live?”

  “I don’t want to put you to any bother like that. Just let me off at the nearest movie.”

  There was something basically feckless about the man and hence, to John, who was himself of the absolutely opposite character, something at least a bit likable—in spite of all. “There aren’t any movies open at this time of day in the suburbs. It won’t be any bother to run you home.”

  “Hillsdale?” Richie asked skeptically.

  Hillsdale was fifteen miles away, making for a round trip of thirty, which in the morning traffic meant the better part of an hour. John regretted extending the offer, but he had done so and was a man of his word.

  “Why, sure,” he answered, concealing his disappointment under a rising tone. “Hillsdale it is! But first I really do have to call my wife.” He turned to Sharon. “I still need to borrow a quarter.”

  Coin in hand, he left the car and went to the telephone niche in the outer wall of the bank. His knee no longer hurt as much as it had earlier.

  Joanie was seething, and he in turn was annoyed that she did not want to hear an explanation. “I know it sounds crazy, but take my word for it. I guarantee I’ll be back before you’re due at Elaine’s: that’s the important thing, isn’t it?”

  But she hung up abruptly. He only hoped that no one who could recognize him had seen him in the company of Sharon. She did not much resemble the kind of people who were his normal clients. Nor did Richie, to be sure.

  When John got back to the car, he asked Richie what time it was.

  “Damn if I know,” Richie said indifferently.

  “My wife’s going to be really mad if I don’t come home soon. She’s got an appointment.” He suppressed the information that where she had to go was the hairdresser’s, because it might sound trivial to someone like Richie, whom he looked down on but nevertheless did not want to give an occasion to sneer.

  “Swing around by your house and pick her up,” Richie said. “I don’t have to be anyplace soon.”

  John said frostily, “That won’t be necessary.” He looked back at Sharon, who managed to look small even when in such a compartment. “You’re wearing a watch.”

  “Huh?”

  “What time is it?”

  She took an extra moment to find her wrist. “Eleven-ten.”

  “God Almighty,” John cried. “No wonder Joanie’s mad. I can’t believe it! I’ve been at this two hours?” He started the car again. Joanie’s appointment was at one. There was just enough time to make the round trip to Hillsdale if nothing happened that was untoward.

  Richie held a container of coffee. John, who had breakfasted lightly almost four hours earlier, found the aroma seductive, but when Richie offered him the bag again, he again refused it: he wanted nothing from this guy.

  “Joanie?” Richie asked now. “That’s your wife’s name? Cute. She about your age? What color hair?” He put the bag between his feet. “Must be nice being married to the right person. How many kids?”

  John simply ignored the questions about his wife, for any answer at all would have compromised him with Richie—though he could not have explained why he felt that way—but decided to mention his kids, for suddenly they seemed a strength. “Two.”

  Richie nodded enthusiastically. “You don’t say? That’s fantastic. You made ‘em, eh, John? You’re all right.”

  Immediately John began to regret having admitted that much. He could finally see a break in the traffic, and he gave his attention to it.

  Richie meanwhile asked, “Boys? Girls?”

  John pulled away from the curb and was rolling cautiously toward a traffic signal that he suspected was on the verge of changing.

  Richie continued. “Do you want some more? But I hope you’re planning these things. We don’t need more kids coming into the world by mistake.”

  As it happened, John agreed with the principle, but it went against his grain to discuss the subject with this man. The traffic light, too, was trying his patience, staying red interminably. He eventually had to come to a full stop.

  “It’s stuck,” Richie said. “Run it.”

  In fact John felt like doing so, he who rarely suffered unduly from impatience. Perhaps some of Richie’s anarchistic tendencies were rubbing off on him. Just as the car came totally to rest, the light turned green. Had he taken Richie’s advice, he would probably have gotten away with it. As it was, he did not put the vehicle in motion again quickly enough to forestall a chorus of horns behind him, led by the belligerent tuba of a colossal tractor trailer, the enormous chromed radiator-grille of which was too large and too close to fit within the rearview mirror.

  Richie’s reaction to the episode was focused in anger on the truckdriver, whose cab was too elevated for him to be seen at so short a range. “When we get out of this squeeze,” he told John, “pull him over. I don’t take shit from his kind.”

  John regarded this as empty bluster. “Sure,” he said derisively. “I’ll run him off the road with this tank. That’ll show him.”

  Without transition Richie returned to his former topic. “Know what I approve of? Your wife is home with the kids, not out of the house all day at some job like some bitches think they ought to be.”

  If the truth be known, John was in a certain agreement with this sentiment, though he would never have expressed it openly to his wife. At the m
oment no trustworthy child-care facilities were available for Melanie, at least in Joanie’s opinion, in these days when all one heard of were those in which the children were abused. And little Phil was still too young to be deprived of his mother for long. Even so, John disliked Richie’s idiom and did not want to encourage him in the further expression of his ideas on this or any other subject. But it would make for an oppressive atmosphere if he tried to get him to shut up until they reached Hillsdale. Including Sharon in the conversation might be an answer to the problem.

  He looked for her in the mirror. “How about you, Sharon? Are you married?” She was not wearing a ring on the relevant finger, but then some married persons did not, especially women of a pronounced feminist bent, along with the usual men who assumed they were thereby duping potential pickups. To John this kind of deceit was almost as deplorable as adulterous sex. He had always told himself that if he were attracted to another woman than his wife, he would at least be honest enough to define himself, taking the consequences.

  “Not any more,” she answered.

  Richie sent some air derisively through his lips and kicked his feet in the assertive running shoes. “Don’t tell us your troubles. So your old man found a boy who was better-looking.”

  John admonished him. “Will you stop being so insulting?” He addressed Sharon again. “You just go ahead, say anything you want.”

  He saw her silently shake her head and wondered what kind of medication she was on, if that could explain the state into which she had fallen. But then he was distracted again. The street had become a three-lane county highway, on which it was possible for him to increase speed, the traffic ahead having suddenly melted away. But though he went to the posted limit, forty-five, and then to fifty, the tractor trailer stayed virtually against his rear bumper, an ominous situation to be in, for the middle lane at the moment was monopolized by a series of cars traveling in the opposite direction, and he was as far to the right as he could be, almost onto the narrow shoulder, beyond which was a drainage ditch.

  Again Richie was quickly aware. “Don’t speed up. Gradually slow down, drive him nuts. He won’t hit you unless you stop without warning.”

  This took a lot of nerve, for as soon as John began subtly to decelerate, the truckdriver sounded shattering blasts of his horn. The only way to persist in the tactic was to avoid looking in the mirror, grit your teeth, and put your being on automatic pilot. He had once successfully employed the technique as a passenger on a light aircraft in stormy skies. Whether it would have worked again he was not to determine now, for after another mile, by which point he was still going better than forty, the highway became positively spacious, with two full lanes separated by a grassy median strip from the two that went the other way.

  His sigh of relief, however, proved premature: the truck stayed directly behind him even when both vehicles had gained the wider road. Furthermore, the deafening sound of the horn had become constant.

  When he quickly changed lanes, so did the truck.

  “Okay,” Richie cried in elation. “We got him now!”

  What scared John about this sort of dueling was the irrationality of it. He put the accelerator to the floor. The car responded more vigorously than he had anticipated and sprang out to a substantial lead on the truck. But the driver of the larger vehicle was quick to answer what he took as a challenge. It was unfortunate that, as John could see only now that the highway began an ascent, the powerful tractor had no trailer in tow, which undoubtedly meant that Sharon’s little car would be no match for its brute power even when going uphill.

  “Christ, why doesn’t a cop come along now?” He regretted the need to express fear in Richie’s presence. Though he was going flat out, the truck was overtaking him, its windshield reflecting the sun in an impenetrable glare. He still could not see the driver.

  “We’re in luck,” Richie shouted, over the noise of an engine at maximum power. “A cop would only take the bastard’s side. Don’t worry. We’ve got him now!”

  An empty boast if there ever was one! John had reached the crest of the rise and looked down a long slope of highway on which its weight would give the truck an even greater advantage in speed. Furthermore, several cars were in sight ahead, in each lane, so that he might be trapped behind them in either. To be sure, were they driven by good citizens, perhaps by some effort of them all in concert the truck would be the one so confined or captured. Then, too, car phones and emergency CB sets were commonplace. An observant and law-loving driver might well alert the state police to such conspicuous and illegal slipstreaming.

  Yet while entertaining such fantasies, John was aware that no help would be forthcoming. Though accompanied by, and in fact responsible for the well-being of, two other souls (both of them strangers, so that while providing little effective company, they denied him privacy), he stood alone.

  But Richie suddenly helped. “Let him get right up against you in the right lane, then suddenly switch to the left. You can maneuver a lot quicker than him. He can’t turn that fast at speed without being in danger of losing it. Soon as you get over, slow down some. He’ll have to go on by. Once we get behind him, we’ll own his ass.”

  But who wanted it? John looked forward only to seeing the last of the menace. To him the driver was a potential homicide, without a motive: he yearned for no revenge on such a depraved human being. Naturally, if he saw a cop he would report the incident, but that was another thing entirely. As to “letting” the truck ride his back bumper, it had arrived there once more without his permission and would stay there. What Richie had suggested was better than that.

  He gave a warning to his passengers, and Richie heeded it, seizing the handhold above the upper left corner of his door, but Sharon apparently did not, and when he made his abrupt lane-switch, he heard the sound of her body being flung across the backseat by centrifugal force.

  Richie’s tactic worked! The truck thundered by in the right lane, its rushing bulk and giant brutal wheels even more frightening than its seemingly static and one-dimensional image had been in the mirror. By such a simple device, the thing that could have flattened them was now rendered harmless. Perhaps the madman behind its wheel would roar on to threaten other defenseless motorists. If so, who cared? Quite a natural feeling at this instant. In the next, he would continue to look for a policeman.

  Now he was able to ask Sharon, “Are you okay back there?”

  She mumbled an affirmative. At such a time there was surely an advantage in being tranquilized.

  “Okay,” Richie said eagerly. “Now let’s nail him.”

  The truck was already fifty yards ahead, John having diminished his speed so as to fall far behind and thus recede from the immediate memory of the driver, who might just be crazy enough to retain a grudge. Nowadays you were always hearing about people who on the occasion of traffic squabbles produced the guns they carried in their cars for just such a purpose, and shot adversary motorists or even others who were faultless.

  “Forget about the bastard,” John said. “Good riddance.” He was relieved to see Richie accept this with a stoical shrug and fall back into the seat, slumping so low that he could barely see over the dashboard. John had feared that a need for revenge might be the man’s dominant emotion. What was his own? He was conscious of a lifetime urge to do right. This put him at a frequent disadvantage, as in the case of the tailgating truck. It was true that he had now escaped from the situation, but it was unfair that he had been in it in the first place. He had given no rational offense. How could one do so by driving in an orderly manner at the speed limit? To behave otherwise would endanger the lives of human beings: that was what had been at issue, not the narrow concerns of traffic law.

  Richie grumbled, down in his slump, kicking the firewall. “Those kind of people make me mad: they don’t have any respect.”

  All John wanted to do was get to Hillsdale, and back, without further incident. What Richie said might be true, but nothing could be done about it
beyond complaining, and John hated to waste his time in negative lament.

  “How big a town is Hillsdale?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you lived there long?” John glanced at him. “Do you live there at all?”

  Richie grinned. “I said I did, didn’t I?”

  “Well, that’s where I’m taking you.”

  “Then that’s where I’m going.” Without emerging from his slump, Richie made a long reach for the knobs of the radio.

  “Do you mind?” John asked. “I don’t want to hear any music now.” He did not quite understand why he had said that. Had he been alone he would have switched on the radio and listened to almost anything but elevator music, though what he preferred were the records popular when he was in the latter years of high school, which to younger people were already far out of date.

  “Do you ever enjoy yourself?” It was Richie’s sudden question and bore an implication John did not care for.

  “I’ve done some things in my day. I wasn’t always married, with little kids. I’ve been around.”

  “I’m talking of right now,” Richie said. “You interested in some partying? We’ll pick up a couple bottles.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “She’s got everything else. Maybe go to a motel, do it right.”

  “Oh, come on,” John complained. “Just let that—”

  “Think I’m kidding? Should of seen what she had in her purse. That’s why she was so worried about the cop back there. Junkie bitch.”

  John was hit hard by this information. He lacked the spirit to ask Sharon to confirm or deny, but assumed she would have protested had the charge been baseless. He did not even wish to know what sort of drugs were at issue.

  “I’m dropping you off in Hillsdale and then going straight home. Since this is the only form of transportation available to me, I’m driving myself home in this car.” He had made the latter statement for Sharon’s benefit, should she herself be (despite her professed fear of Richie) inclined to acquiesce in the proposal, and looked for her in the mirror, but she was presumably lying on the seat and could not be seen.