Full Dark, No Stars

She rushed around the front of the pickup, lost her balance, went to one knee, got up, and yanked open the driver’s side door. Strehlke fell out and hit his dead head on the smooth asphalt of his driveway. His hat fell off. His right eye, pulled out of true by the bullet that had entered his head just above it, stared up at the moon. The left one stared at Tess. And it wasn’t the face that finally convinced her—the face with lines on it she was seeing for the very first time, the face pitted with old acne scars that hadn’t been there on Friday afternoon.

Was he big or real big? Betsy Neal had asked.

Real big, Tess had replied, and he had been… but not as big as this man. Her rapist had been six-six, she had thought when he got out of the truck (this truck, she was in no doubt about that). Deep in the belly, thick in the thighs, and as wide as a doorway. But this man had to be at least six-nine. She had come hunting a giant and killed a leviathan.

“Oh my God,” Tess said, and the wind whipped her words away. “Oh my dear God, what have I done?”

“You killed me, Tess,” the man on the ground said… and that certainly made sense, given the hole in his head and the one in his throat. “You went and killed Big Driver, just like you meant to.”

The strength left her muscles. She went to her knees beside him. Overhead, the moon beamed down from the roaring sky.

“The ring,” she whispered. “The hat. The truck.”

“He wears the ring and the hat when he goes hunting,” Big Driver said. “And he drives the pickup. When he goes hunting, I’m on the road in a Red Hawk cab-over and if anyone sees him—especially if he’s sitting down—they think they’re seeing me.”

“Why would he do that?” Tess asked the dead man. “You’re his brother.”

“Because he’s crazy,” Big Driver said patiently.

“And because it worked before,” Doreen Marquis said. “When they were younger and Lester got in trouble with the police. The question is whether Roscoe Strehlke committed suicide because of that first trouble, or because Ramona made big brother Al take the blame for it. Or maybe Roscoe was going to tell and Ramona killed him. Made it look like suicide. Which way was it, Al?”

But on this subject Al was quiet. Dead quiet, in fact.

“I’ll tell you how I think it was,” Doreen said in the moonlight. “I think Ramona knew that if your little brother wound up in an interrogation room with an even half-smart policeman, he might confess to something a lot worse than touching a girl on the schoolbus or peeking into cars on the local lovers’ lane or whatever ten-cent crime it was he’d been accused of. I think she talked you into taking the blame, and she talked her husband into dummying up. Or browbeat him into it, that’s more like it. And either because the police never asked the girl to make a positive identification or because she wouldn’t press charges, they got away with it.”

Al said nothing.

Tess thought, I’m kneeling here talking in imaginary voices. I’ve lost my mind.

Yet part of her knew she was trying to keep her mind. The only way to do it was to understand, and she thought the story she was telling in Doreen’s voice was either true or close to true. It was based on guesswork and slopped—on deduction, but it made sense. It fit in with what Ramona had said in her last moments.

You stupid cunt, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

And: You don’t understand. It’s a mistake.

It was a mistake, all right. Everything she’d done tonight had been a mistake.

No, not everything. She was in on it. She knew.

“Did you know?” Tess asked the man she had killed. She reached out to grab Strehlke’s arm, then drew away. It would be still warm under his sleeve. Still thinking it was alive. “Did you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Let me try,” Doreen said. And in her kindliest, you-can-tell-me-everything old lady voice, the one that always worked in the books, she asked: “How much did you know, Mr. Driver?”

“I sometimes suspected,” he said. “Mostly I didn’t think about it. I had a business to run.”

“Did you ever ask your mother?”

“I might have,” he said, and Tess thought his strangely cocked right eye evasive. But in that wild moonlight, who could tell about such things? Who could tell for sure?

“When girls disappeared? Is that when you asked?”

To this Big Driver made no reply, perhaps because Doreen had begun to sound like Fritzy. And like Tom the Tomtom, of course.

“But there was never any proof, was there?” This time it was Tess herself. She wasn’t sure he would answer her voice, but he did.

“No. No proof.”

“And you didn’t want proof, did you?”