Let"s start at the start. With the first killing.
Chapter Twenty.
It didn"t start out to be a killing.
This was when we were in junior high, about twelve years ago. Tommy, me, Ranch and Brian were in the eighth grade together, and we"d been best friends forever.
Brian"s last name was Fisher. That"s why we called him Minnow. Because of his name and size. He was a skinny little guy and still is.
Anyway, he developed a bad case of the hots for Denise Dennison. Easy to understand why. She was so cute it almost hurt to look at her. Her hair was like gold, her skin like honey, and she had eyes like the sky on a hot summer morning. If that wasn"t enough, she had great t.i.ts and never wore a bra, so you could see them every once in a while when she bent over.
I guess maybe we all had the hots for Denise.
The rest of us were smart enough to know we didn"t stand a chance with her, but not Minnow. He was, is, and always will be a nerd, a klutz, a doofus, and a complete optimist. In other words, a real loser.
"I think she likes me," he told us one day after school.
"Bull," I said.
"What"s there to like?" Tommy said.
"Your silken tresses?" Ranch asked. We always liked to rib Minnow about his hair. He wore it down to his shoulders-not real smart when you"re a thirteen-year-old wimp. He thought the long hair made him look radical, but it didn"t. It just made him look dopey and clued in everyone that he was a self-destructive nitwit.
So I said that maybe he could go out with Denise and she could braid his hair for him.
"I"m gonna ask her out," he said.
"Don"t waste your time," I told him.
"She"ll dump all over you, man," Ranch said.
"Maybe, maybe not."
"Hey, give it a try," Tommy said. "You got nothing to lose. The worst that can happen is she says no."
"And maybe makes you feel no better than a worm," Ranch added.
"A worm"s even lower than a minnow," I pointed out.
"Ha ha."
It turned out that when we talked about the "worst that can happen," we had no idea.
The next day at school the three of us watched Minnow when he walked up to Denise in the lunch line. From where we stood, we had a good view. We just couldn"t hear anything.
She looked great. She had her hair in a pony tail. She wore a pleated skirt that was hardly long enough to hide her b.u.t.t. She also wore a white blouse, and I can still remember how you could see the pink color of her skin through its back-and no straps.
Minnow stopped right beside her.
"He"s really gonna do it," Ranch said. He sounded amazed by Minnow"s audacity.
While we watched, Denise swung her head sideways. She seemed to be gazing straight into Minnow"s eyes. She nodded a few times, and had this alert, open look on her face. Then, he must"ve reached the main part of his speech where he asked her to go ice skating with him at the rink on Friday night. All of a sudden, her face went funny. She tried very hard to keep on smiling, but the smile squirmed into what amounted to a pitiful grimace while she turned him down.
He told us later what she"d said. "Thanks for asking, Brian. Really. It"s very nice of you. But I"m sort of going with someone, you know?"
"I"LL GO WITH YOU! I"M h.e.l.l ON SKATES!"
That came from Hester Luddgate, who happened to be standing right behind Denise in the food line, and must"ve been listening in on the whole conversation.
I"ve already talked a little bit about Hester. She turned up in that little dream I had last night. The dream where I was having a great old time till the cute gal suddenly turned into an ugly, mutilated thing. That was Hester.
Hester didn"t just look like a pig. She smelled like a sock after you"ve worn it all day-a very hot day, and maybe you"d hiked through a swamp. Basically, she always smelled like that.
Anyway, Hester blurted out, "I"M h.e.l.l ON SKATES," and then grabbed Minnow"s arm. She grabbed it hard. I could see his body go stiff, and later he showed us the bruises her fingers had made.
She gave up her place in line, and hustled Minnow away.
We lost track of them because we were pretty much doubled over laughing and had tears in our eyes.
What we found out, though, was that Hester had gone and dragged him around a comer of the building so they could have some privacy. Minnow"d tried to worm out of the skating date, but she"d used all her charms on him: a combination of tears and threats.
He finally agreed to meet her at the rink on Friday night at eight o"clock.
But when eight o"clock on Friday night came around, Minnow was with us in Tommy"s house. It"s a mansion up in the hills above Sunset. His mother actually owned the place, but she had no say in anything. Tommy ran her. She was scared to death of him, and never got in our way. She used to hide in her bedroom, and we"d have the rest of the house to ourselves.
So that"s where we were when Minnow was supposed to be having his big date with Hester. We had a cardboard poster, and we all sat around it on the floor of Tommy"s recreation room (or "wreck room") and worked on our collage. We called it, "Death by Torture." We used pictures of knives and hatchets and arrrows and stuff that we snipped out of sports magazines and a Penney"s catalog, plus pictures of naked babes we got from magazines like Playboy and Penthouse. It was great. We had a terrific time deciding on how to combine the weapons with the gals-where to stick them. And we cut ourselves and used real blood to mess things up right.
At one point, Minnow stabbed his scissors into a closeup shot and said, "Take that, you stinky swine."
"She never looked that good," Ranch told him.
"Poor b.i.t.c.h is probably crying her eyes out," Tommy said.
I checked my wrist.w.a.tch. Minnow was already two hours late for his date. "She"s probably quit crying and gone home by now," I said.
"You really showed her," Ranch said.
Minnow grinned. "Taught her not to mess with me, huh?" That was Friday night. On Sunday afternoon, Minnow was left at home alone while his folks went to watch a celebrity tennis tournament.
He was in the den watching TV. All of a sudden, Hester stepped through the doorway and pointed a .22 pistol at him. She said, "Where were you, Brian? You promised you"d come, and I waited and waited and you didn"t come." She started out cool, smirking, real superior. But pretty soon she was bawling. Minnow figured he was dead meat. "I waited and waited!" she kept crying. "You had no right! You liar! You dirty rotten liar. You promised!"
Then she stepped up to Minnow and told him to open his mouth. He did, and she stuck the gun in.
He was still sitting on the easy chair, never had a chance to get up. And now this big stinky slob has a pistol in his mouth. And she c.o.c.ks it.
"You think just *cause I"m not pretty like Denise you can treat me like p.o.o.p! Well, you can"t! You can"t! So maybe I"m not real pretty, but I got feelings! You had no right! You had no right!"
Then she pulled the trigger.
There was nothing but a click.
The pistol was a semi-auto. It had a full magazine up its handle, but the chamber was empty. We never did find out whether it was empty on purpose-and she only meant to scare Minnow-or if she"d really tried to shoot him but was just too stupid to work the gun.
When it went click, Minnow thought for a second that he"d been shot. Then he realized the thing hadn"t gone off, after all. So he grabbed the barrel and shoved it away from him and jerked his head back till the muzzle was out of his mouth. They both wrestled for the gun. She kept trying to re-aim it at him. She was bigger and stronger than Minnow, so she ended up pulling him out of the chair, right onto his feet in front of her.
Big mistake. He pumped a knee up into her fat guts. Totally demolished her, took out every inch of fight. She let go of the gun and went to her knees.
After that, he worked her over pretty good.
Then he called up Tommy, and Tommy phoned me, and I phoned Ranch. It took us about ten or fifteen minutes to get there.
Hester was sprawled on the floor of the den, lying real still but moaning and whimpering.
We dragged her out to the garage. We used the remote to open the garage door. Tommy pulled his Mercedes in. Then we shut the door and loaded Hester into the trunk.
Back inside the house, we checked around the den to make sure it looked okay. Hester had left nothing behind except her sour stink and some s...o...b..r. We figured the smell would go away on its own. But we cleaned up the s...o...b..r, then wiped places where Hester might"ve left fingerprints.
Minnow wrote a note for his parents. It said he"d gone over to Tommy"s to "fool around."
True enough.
Ranch and I had both walked over, so we had no bikes to deal with. After Tommy had backed his Mercedes out of the garage and the door was shut again, we all piled in. He drove.
Tommy was only thirteen, so it wasn"t especially legal. He wasn"t the sort of guy to let that stop him, though. This wasn"t the first time he"d borrowed his mother"s car and tooled around in it.
The whole thing was nuts, really.
Tommy was mature for his age, I guess. Mentally. Physically, though, he looked thirteen. Any cop catching a glimpse of him behind the wheel would"ve pulled us over and pulled us in-and would"ve found Hester in the trunk. Of course, she was still alive at that point. They couldn"t have gotten us for murder.
Anyway, it didn"t happen.
We were all pretty tense, but we lucked out. Maybe everyone in L.A.-cops included-was over at the celebrity tennis tournament.
We relaxed as soon as we got through the security gate at Tommy"s.
He"s got a very long, winding driveway. We stopped before the house came into sight. By this time, Minnow had fiddled with the gun and pumped a round into its chamber. He used it to make Hester do what we wanted.
We made her climb out of the trunk and walk ahead of us into the trees. She was shaking and blubbering a lot. Pretty disgusting. But she didn"t try to scream or run away. I guess she was afraid Minnow might shoot her.
It was really a beautiful autumn afternoon. Some people say Los Angeles hasn"t got seasons, but it does. On autumn afternoons, the sunlight gets a mellow, dusty look. It"s more reddish than usual, and throws a soft golden haze over everything.
The afternoon was hot, but had a good breeze-a wonderful breeze that blew my hair and fluttered my clothes. It felt even better when my clothes were off.
Like I said a while back, it didn"t start out to be a killing.
I don"t think so, anyway.
The way I looked at it, we planned to teach her a lesson-teach her not to mess with any of us, and also give Minnow a chance to get even for the grief she"d caused him. Not kill her.
I guess I thought we might rough her up a little. Nothing serious, though.
That was before we started following her into the trees. Somehow, it all changed, then. For all of us, maybe.
The thing is, n.o.body knew we had her and n.o.body could see us.
We could do anything to her.
I suddenly knew it, and I could tell by the silence and the way we all gave each other nervous, eager looks that Tommy and Ranch and Minnow knew it, too.
We could do whatever we wanted, and n.o.body would ever find out.
Even Hester caught on.
She looked over her shoulder at us. All sad and pitiful and pouting. For about two seconds. Then she must"ve noticed the change in us. She suddenly had panic in her eyes. She gasped and ran.
Minnow shot her.
The pistol made a bam not much louder than the sound of an enthusiastic clap.
I heard the bullet smack her. Then she made an "Oof!" noise and fell to her knees.
The bullet had hit her behind the right shoulder. I saw a dot of blood on her white T-shirt.
She twisted her head around and tried to see the hole. She reached over with her left hand. Her fingers wiggled against her shoulder blade, but couldn"t get down to the hole.
We started walking toward her. "You shot me!" she cried out. "What"s the matter with you? You shot me! Are you nuts?"
"Yeah," Minnow said. "How did you like it?" He took aim at her.
"Don"t shoot me again! Please! No! It hurts! Jesus!"
He was all set to shoot her again, anyway, but Tommy whispered, "Don"t. We don"t want her dead. Not yet."
Ranch rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. "What"re we gonna do with her?" he asked. His voice was shaking.
"Everything," Tommy said. "First we strip. Don"t want to get any stains on our clothes."
We stripped. We piled our clothes out of the way so they wouldn"t get messed up. We always carried pocket knives, so we took them with us.
It felt great being naked. The sun, the breeze. The way the twigs and leaves crackled under our feet.
Hester didn"t put up any fight.