The Traveller (38 page)

‘Bang-bang?’

‘Yes. It happens bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!’ runner slides, bang! The catcher tags, bang! He’s safe! Bang! Or he’s out, bang! I always liked that cliche.’

He spotted a peanut vendor and waved wildlv to attract the man’s attention. He gave her a bag and after she started cracking the shells and eating, he reached down and from

his ever-present camera bag, plucked his Nikon. ‘Smile,’ he said, pivoting in his chair toward her.

He clicked off a series of pictures.

She felt embarrassed. ‘My hair,’ she said. ‘This silly hat…’

But he just gestured toward the playing field. ‘Pay attention to the game,’ he said. ‘You may need to remember some details later.’

This frightened her, and she tried to concentrate on the action in front of her. I understand baseball, she said to herself. I know about squeeze plays and pitchouts and hitting behind the runner. I was the shortstop on my high-school softball team and I learned the rules.

But the figures on the artificial green of the playing surface seemed mysterious to her, no matter how hard she tried to analyse what was happening before her.

She dared to watch Jeffers. He seemed intent on the game and on the action on the field, but she knew that this devotion obscured some other purpose. Her mind would not form concrete possibilities.

She shivered in the sticky humidity.

Her head felt dizzy and she swallowed with difficulty. Once, when she saw him bend toward the bag at his feet, she almost choked in sudden confusion.

Finally, as the teams were changing sides, she asked in a voice that seemed to her hollow, ‘Why are we here, please?’

Jeffers turned to her and stared. Then he burst out in a huge laugh. ‘We’re here because this is America, this is the national pastime, this is the Mets and the Cards and the pennant is on the line. But mostly we’re here because I’m a baseball fan.’

He laughed again and looked at her.

‘So you see,’ he continued, ‘right now we’re killing nothing. Except time.’

He hesitated. ‘Later,’ he said.

She did not ask any more questions.

They stayed until the top of the eighth. Jeffers waited until the Mets scored four to blow open the tight game.

Then he grabbed her by the hand and led her, along with the other early and easily disgruntled fans, out of the stadium. As they walked away, a great shout went up from the stadium behind them. He heard a young couple walking a few feet away, listening to a radio, announce to no one and everyone at the same time: ‘Jack Clark home run with two on!’ And he nodded. ‘They should know,’ he said softly to Anne Hampton, ‘that it’s never over until it’s over. A great American said that once.’

‘Who?’ she asked.

‘Caryl Chessman,’ Jeffers replied.

Jeffers made certain that Anne Hampton was strapped in her seat, then he went to the rear of the car and opened the trunk. He rummaged about for an instant in what he called his miscellany bag, finally coming up with a set of Missouri license plates. To these he’d previously attached metal clips, so he was able to bend down and place them firmly, directly over the car’s actual plates. He took a cheap tag frame that he’d acquired in an auto goods store and locked it over the top, so there was no way the telltale yellow of his New York plates would show, but so he would swiftly be able to remove the set from Missouri, stolen sometime before. Then he opened the bag containing the weapons and pulled out a cheap .25-caliber automatic. Taped on the inside of the bag was a specially prepared clip of bullets. He made certain that the soft points were notched, then slid the clip into his camera bag. He searched around for another second before putting his hands on a simple leather briefcase. This he took out before locking the trunk.

Inside the car he switched on the interior light.

She watched as he pulled a small yellow file from the briefcase and opened it on his lap.

The file contained a set of newspaper and magazine clippings beneath a typed checklist. She saw the words: Gun
Typewriter
Access
Egress
Emergency Backup
Lawyer
ID. Each word category had several lesser categories listed beneath it, but she was not quick enough

and the light was too shallow for her to see what they said. A number of items had been crossed off, and others had received large check marks next to them. A few had handwritten notes next to them. She saw that the file contained two maps, one hand-drawn, the other a grid map of the city. As she watched, Jeffers seemed to be reviewing the lists and the maps. She glanced at the newspaper clips and saw a half-page article from Time Magazine. It was from their Nation section and the headline read: random murder of gays creates FUROR in st louis. She saw that the other stories were from the St Louis Post-Dispatch.

‘All right,’ Jeffers said with a slightly excited tinge to his voice. ‘All right. We’re set.’

He looked over at her. ‘Ready?’ She did not know how to respond. ‘Ready?’ he demanded harshly. She nodded.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘The hunt begins.’ He drove into the city darkness.

She was turned around and lost within moments. One second they were up on a thruway, cutting amidst skyscrapers that seemed to leap up into the nighttime next to her, then they were circling through shabby, ill-lit streets that glistened with reflected headlights. After what she thought was at least thirty minutes, Jeffers slowed. Anne Hampton stared from the window and saw occasional knots of men standing outside of bars in the warm summer evening air, talking, gesturing. Jeffers was taking it all in wordlessly. But, she thought, he still seems to know where he’s heading. She forced her mind into a benign blank. After circling through a ten-block area for another half hour, Jeffers steered the car down a darkened side street, finally pulling to the curb near the end of the block. It seemed a residential neighborhood, not houses, but apartments carved from older buildings, with trees planted in sections cut from the sidewalk. But she saw that they were only a few blocks from the brighter lights of the main thoroughfare. She watched Jeffers slide around the front of the car and open the door for her. She thought his movements

spidery, predatory. In an instant she found herself virtually lifted from the vehicle and, arm in arm, walking down the sidewalk. As always, she was taken aback by the taut strength of his hands and arms. She could feel his bunched muscles rigid with excitement.

‘Say nothing,’ Jeffers said in a low, awful voice. ‘Avoid eye contact until I make my choice. But smile and look happy.’

She tried but knew she looked merely pathetic.

She concentrated instead on walking steadily.

She knew what was happening, or, at least, she suddenly knew that she was about to add another nightmare to that possessed by the derelict, but she felt helpless to do anything. Not that anything occurred to her to do, save cooperate.

Look out at the sky, she said to herself. Stare up into the few lights around. She saw the moon hanging above the branches of a tree and suddenly remembered a tune from childhood: The fox went out on a chilly night… And he prayed to the moon to give him light … For he’d many a mile to go that night… Before he reached the town-o, town-o, town-o. The music flowed through her mind like a comforting wave.

They walked around the block three times, each time passing a pair or a threesome of men hurrying through the blackness of the secondary street. On their fourth turn around the block, as they were approaching their car, she felt Jeffers stiffen next to her. She could sense his muscles tightening, and she realized he’d put his hand into his camera bag.

‘This could be it,’ Jeffers said.

They continued to walk toward the solitary man, who was hurrying in their direction.

‘Slow a little,’ Jeffers said. ‘I want to pass this guy in the shadow of that tree.’

She saw that equidistant between them and the man was a large tree that added shadow to the night.

‘Keep smiling,’ Jeffers said.

She had a sudden vision of herself being swept out to sea

by a violent undertow. She clung to his arm, suddenly afraid that she would stumble or faint.

Jeffers arranged all his sensations. His eyes darted about the area, taking in all the emptiness. His ears were tuned to noises, searching for some telltale, out-of-the-ordinary sound. He even sniffed the air. He thought he was on fire, or that he was in love, and that every nerve end in his body was on edge, throbbing. Beneath his hand the metal of the pistol seemed glowing hot. He forced himself to measure his pace, slow, so that he would come abreast with the man at the precise moment, the darkest moment. A death march, he thought abruptly.

They moved together.

Jeffers estimated the distance: fifty feet. Then, suddenly, twenty feet. Then ten, and he nodded at the man and smiled.

The man was young, probably no more than twenty-five. Who are you? Jeffers wondered in an instant. Have you loved your life? The man’s blond hair was cropped close over his ears and neck. Jeffers noticed that the man had a small gold stud in one ear. He wore a simple open sportshirt and slacks, with a sweater tossed over his shoulders in studied casual appearance.

Jeffers nodded again at the man, and the man returned the look with a small, wan, slightly nervous smile. Jeffers squeezed hard on Anne Hampton’s arm and he saw her smile as well.

The man walked abreast, then past.

As the man stepped through Jeffers’ peripheral vision, Jeffers slipped the gun from his bag, his finger resting on the trigger.

Jeffers had time only to say to himself: Be calm.

Then he spun around, directly behind the man, dropping Anne Hampton’s arm so that he could raise both hands to the pistol grip. When the barrel reached out level with the man’s head, Jeffers fired twice.

The cracking sound echoed down the street.

The man pitched forward, slamming to the sidewalk.

Anne Hampton stood frozen. She tried to lift her hands

to her eyes to cover them, then stopped, staring out in terror.

Jeffers leaped over the man, who lay facedown in a growing pool of blood. He was careful not to touch the man or the blood. The man did not move. Jeffers bent down, fired one more shot into the man’s back, searching for the heart. Then, in the same fluid, continuous movement, he put the gun back into his bag and came out with the Nikon. He raised it to his eye and she heard the motordrive whir as the film advanced. Just as swiftly, he finished, returning the camera to the bag.

He grabbed Anne Hampton’s arm and half-dragged her down toward their car.

He pulled open the door and thrust her swiftly into the seat. In an instant he’d jumped around to the driver’s side. He did not squeal the tires, but started the car simply and efficiently, rolling slowly past the body on the sidewalk, down the empty street.

She turned and stared at the inert body as they slid past.

Within a few seconds they were away.

She saw that Jeffers was driving a preset route. She could feel the force of his concentration, as if he were creating a palpable sense out of his intelligence. After fifteen minutes she saw they had reached a deserted spot in a downtown warehouse area. Jeffers stopped the car and exited wordlessly. She waited for him to let her out, but he did not.

At the back of the car, Jeffers removed the Missouri license plate, wiped it with a rag, and threw it into a dark plastic bag. He then tossed the bag into a dumpster, climbing up to make sure that the bag with the plate was well situated amidst other garbage.

He got back into the car and they drove through the city into a suburban area. Jeffers stopped at a convenience store and used the light from the front of the building to see what he was doing. First he replaced his surgical gloves on his hands. Then he took out the envelope with the letter he’d written earlier in the day. Then he opened his file folder and pulled out a small brown manila envelope. He shook it open and Anne Hampton saw that there were

several words cut from a newspaper. Jeffers produced a small plastic squeeze container of commonly used glue and fastened the words to the envelope. He used the glue to close the envelope. Then he spoke.

‘Can’t be too careful. Now, I know they can’t raise fingerprints from paper unless I put ink all over my fingers. But the FBI has all this new spectrographic equipment which I’m just getting familiar with and it can break down enzymes and Lord knows what. That’s why no saliva. If I licked that envelope shut, they could come up with my blood type, for example. Hell, for all I know, they could come up with my Social Security number. So, caution is the word.’

He looked at her. His words had spun out in an excited, almost little-boy delight.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. We’re finished. We got away. Just a few odds and ends and we’re home free.’

He finished with the envelope and put the car back in gear. In a moment he pulled up to the front of a large postal building. He jumped out of the car and put the envelope in one of the mail boxes.

Back in the car he said, ‘Now just the gun and bullets, and everything’s set. But we won’t do those until tomorrow. At our leisure.’

His adrenaline still flowing freely, he maneuvered the car back onto the interstate. Anne Hampton pivoted once in her seat, looking out the rear window toward the fading lights of the city.

He saw her shiver.

‘Cold?’

She nodded.

He did nothing,

‘Tired?’

She realized she was drained. She nodded again.

‘Hungry?’

She thought she would be sick.

‘I’m famished,’ he said. ‘I could eat the proverbial horse.’

She thought: It’s endless. It’s forever.

After a moment he spoke again. ‘It’s the strangest thing,” he began evenly. ‘The homophobe who has killed all those gays in St Louis, I think seven before tonight, always writes in rhyme. At least according to the Post-Dispatch.’

Jeffers shook his head.

‘The newspapers haven’t given him a nickname, which I think is kinda strange. I mean, usually when you have a series of killings like that, they slap some sobriquet on the poor guy. Like Gay Killer or Homo Homicides or something equally dumb and borderline-offensive.’