Full Dark, No Stars

She raised the gun to her temple, then lowered it again. She couldn’t, not now. She stil had an obligation to the women in the pipe, and any other women who might join them if Lester Strehlke

escaped. And after what she had just done, it was more important than ever that he not escape.

She had one more stop to make. But not in her Expedition.

- 40 -

The driveway at 101 Township Road wasn’t long, and it wasn’t paved. It was just a pair of ruts with bushes growing close enough to scrape the sides of the blue F-150 pickup truck as she drove it up

to the little house. Nothing neat about this one; this one was a huddled old creep-manse that could have been straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. How life did imitate art, sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation.

Tess made no attempt at stealth—why bother to kil the headlights when Lester Strehlke would know the sound of his brother’s truck almost as wel as the sound of his brother’s voice?

She was stil wearing the bleach-splattered brown cap Big Driver wore when he wasn’t on the road, the lucky cap that turned out to be unlucky in the end. The ring with the fake ruby stone was far too

big for any of her fingers, so she had put it into the left front pocket of her cargo pants. Little Driver had dressed and driven as his big brother when he went out hunting, and while he might never have time enough (or brains enough) to appreciate the irony of his last victim coming to him with the same accessories, Tess did.

She parked by the back door, turned off the engine, and got out. She carried the gun in one hand. The door was unlocked. She stepped into a shed that smel ed of beer and spoiled food. A single

sixty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling on a length of dirty cord. Straight ahead were four overflowing plastic garbage cans, the thirty-two-gal on kind you could buy at Walmart. Behind them, stacked against the shed wal , were what looked like five years’ worth of Uncle Henry’s swap guide. To the left was another door, up a single step. It would lead to the kitchen. It had an old-fashioned latch rather than a knob. The door squal ed on unoiled hinges when she depressed the latch and pushed it open. An hour ago, such a squal would have terrified her into immobility. Now it didn’t bother her in the slightest.

She had work to do. That was al it came down to, and it was a relief to be free of al that emotional baggage. She stepped into the smel of whatever greasy meat Little Driver had fried for his supper. She could hear a TV laugh-track. Some sitcom. Seinfeld, she thought.

“What the hel are you doing here?” Lester Strehlke cal ed from the vicinity of the laugh-track. “I ain’t got but a beer and a half left, if that’s what you came for. I’m gonna drink up and then go to bed.”

She fol owed the sound of his voice. “If you’da cal ed, I coulda saved you the tr—”

She came into the room. He saw her. Tess hadn’t speculated on what his reaction might be to the reappearance of his last victim, carrying a gun and wearing the hat Lester himself wore when his

urges came over him. Even if she had, she could never have predicted the extremity of the one she saw. His mouth dropped open, and then his entire face froze. The can of beer he was holding dropped

from his hand and fel into his lap, spraying foam onto his only article of clothing, a pair of yel owing Jockey shorts.

He’s seeing a ghost, she thought as she walked toward him, raising the gun. Good.

There was time to see that, although the living room was a bachelor mess and there were no snowglobes or cutie-poo figurines, the TV-watching setup was the same as the one at his mother’s house

on Lacemaker Lane: the La-Z-Boy, the TV tray (here holding a final unopened can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a bag of Doritos instead of Diet Coke and Cheez Doodles), the same TV Guide, the one with Simon Cowel on it.

“You’re dead,” he whispered.

“No,” Tess replied. She put the barrel of the Lemon Squeezer against the side of his head. He made one feeble effort to grab her wrist, but it was far too little and much too late. “That’s you.”

She pul ed the trigger. Blood came out of his ear and his head snapped briskly to the side. He looked like a man trying to free up a kink in his neck. On the TV, George Costanza said, “I was in the

pool, I was in the pool.” The audience laughed.

- 41 -

It was almost midnight, and the wind was blowing harder than ever. When it gusted, Lester Strehlke’s whole house shook, and each time Tess thought of the little pig who had built his house out of

sticks.

The little piggy who had lived in this one would never have to worry about his shitty house blowing away, because he was dead in his La-Z-Boy. And he wasn’t a little piggy, anyway, Tess thought. He was a big bad wolf.