Page 111 of I Will Ruin You

And thought, I already figured out how to open this once before.

Fifty-One

Richard

I was stunned. I could not believe what I was seeing.

Herb Willow dropped to the pavement like a bag of wet leaves. No protestations, no wild gyrations, no screams. Herb simply hit the ground after Stuart shot him.

My mouth hung open. I might have said something. Probably “Holy shit” or “Oh my God.” Could have been any number of things. I honestly don’t know. I said something, and I said it reflexively. I probably should have run. I probably should have tried to tackle Stuart, wrested the gun away from him.

Something.

But my feet were rooted to the asphalt. I was frozen in shock.

“We gotta go,” Stuart said.

I blinked a couple of times, turned, and looked at him as if the words he’d spoken were in some language I didn’t understand. I managed, at this point, to form a sentence.

“You fucking shot him,” I said.

“You’re driving, remember? Can you drive?”

I looked down at my right hand. There was a set of keys in them. Stuart grabbed me roughly by the arm, steered me over to the door of his truck, opened it, and shoved me in behind the wheel. If I’d been more familiar with the vehicle and known immediately where to insert the key, I’d have tried to start it and slam it into drive before Stuart had a chance to run around to the other side and open the passenger door. But I was disoriented. I looked at the keys in my hand, trying to figure out which was for the ignition, and once Stuart was sitting next to me he grabbed the keys from my hand and slid the correct one into the slot on the steering column.

“You think you can turn it, dick bag?” he asked.

I turned it. The engine rumbled to life.

“Don’t forget your seat belt,” Stuart said. “Can’t be too careful.”

I reached around for the belt and buckled up. I figured Stuart cared less about my safety and more about slowing me down if I tried to make a run for it.

The truck had a column-mounted shifter, a type I hadn’t seen since I’d learned to drive on my father’s Ford Galaxie. I pulled it back and down into drive and hit the gas. The truck had been left parked in such a way that I could pull out straight ahead. The windows were down, and as I headed to the street, Stuart pointing his gun at me, I could hear shouting in the background. Someone screaming that a teacher had been shot. Another calling out for 911.

Stuart hadn’t told me which way to go once we hit the street, so I simply went right and kept on going.

“Hang a left at the light,” he said, and wiped his nose with his sleeve. I didn’t know whether he had a coke problem or just a runny nose.

I considered driving erratically, that doing so might catch the attention of a police car should we happen to encounter one. But Stuart had that gun aimed right at me, and it wouldn’t take much for him to pull that trigger, so I steered that truck down the road like I was taking my driver’s test.

“Yeah, here,” he said as I moved into the left lane, put on the blinker, and made the turn. “You know where the Eastway Motel is?”

I did not, and shook my head in answer.

“So, you keep going this way, then a right at the third light, and it’s up that way.” He moved the gun to his left hand and went into his pocket with his right for a phone. He brought it up, tapped the screen, and put the phone to his ear. When someone answered, he said, “Yeah, hi, can you put me through to room two-nineteen?”

He waited. And waited. “Come on, pick up. Pick up. Pick up the fucking phone. Shit.” He ended the call, lowered the cell, and said, more to himself than to me, “I guess I did tell her not to answer the phone.” Stuart sighed. “Okay, not a problem.” He put the phone back into his pocket and transferred the gun to his right hand.

We were almost to the third light. I slowed, put on the blinker again, made the turn. I could see the motel up ahead, on the right. I recognized it, had driven past it a thousand times here in Milford, one of those places that’s always there that you never notice. The neon sign said ea tway mot l, and as I turned into the lot, I quickly sized it up as a place where you might rent a room for an hour, or by the month, but nothing much in between. It was a two-story building, the second-floor units accessed by an exterior set of stairs and a long balcony-type walkway.

“Stop right here,” Stuart said, indicating the middle of the lot. I could have pulled up closer to the building, between an old Volkswagen Beetle and a panel van, but then we wouldn’t have had a view of the second-story units. “Keep the engine running and hit the horn a few times.” He was looking up at the window to a specific unit, Room 219, I guessed.

I tapped the horn a couple of times while Stuart kept an eye on the drape-covered window of the room.

“Come on, come on,” he said. “Come to the window. Hit the horn again.”

I did. Someone pulled the drape back a few inches for a quick peek. Stuart waved his right hand wildly out his window and shouted: “Lucy!”