NIGHT CRUISING Read online

  NIGHT CRUISING

  By

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  A Jove Bantam book published as NIGHT CRUISE, November l992.

  Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman l992.

  E-book Digital Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 20l2, All Rights Reserved

  Nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Novel, l992

  OTHER BOOKS BY BILLIE SUE MOSIMAN

  BANISHED

  WIDOW

  BAD TRIP SOUTH

  WIREMAN

  UNIDENTIFIED

  GOLD RUSH DREAM

  ANGELIQUE

  INTERVIEW WITH A PSYCHO

  SCROLLS OF THE DEAD

  LEGIONS OF THE DARK

  RISE OF THE LEGEND

  HUNTER OF THE DEAD

  HORROR TALES

  HORROR TALES 2

  FROM A HIGH WINDOW

  LIFE NEAR THE BONE

  CREATURES

  DARK REALITY

  SPARKLE

  PROSPER BANE

  CRYPT TALES-9 SCARY STORIES

  THE SCREAM

  THE LONELY WALK

  This cautionary tale is for my children, the best daughters a mother could want.

  Death tugs at my ear and says, "Live, I am coming."

  ----Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

  THE FIRST NIGHT--l989--IN AMERICA

  The highways and byways of the great United States belonged to Herod "Cruise" Lavanic. There had been others before him who claimed possession of the roads, notably one Henry Lee Lucas, the lying bastard. Bragged to the Texas cops that he'd murdered hundreds--three hundred, five hundred--the dude could never make up his puny, maladjusted mind. Now look where he was. Sitting on Death Row where the son of a bitch belonged.

  Then there was Ted Bundy killing his way from one coast to the other, from Washington State to Florida, with a couple of stops in between, but Bundy was Mickey Mouse. Preened pretty for the press. Had a good face. Showed some cleverness before the cameras. Should have been a movie star. Now the only roads he owned were the roads of hell. He was fried and buried. Cruise and everyone else in the world knew the cowardly cock went down begging and lying just as vain and wild as Henry Lee.

  So these days the highways and byways truly belonged to Cruise. No one knew it, of course. If they knew it, they'd stop him. Or try to. There was not yet an inkling of uneasiness about Cruise Lavanic. He knew his qualities, and they were the ones keeping him out of jail. He had been told, and he believed, that he possessed sunny features, a strong, masculine face, an art for sweet talk, and an ability to think on his feet. With his boy-next-door mannerisms and his lack of an arrest record, he was unknown, unsuspected. Except to his victims. They knew him. In their last moments on earth, they knew him better than anyone.

  This night, he searched for a hostage. A witness, really. Traveling wasn't any fun without a witness along to see him work. He cruised in a l979 silver-blue Chrysler Newport, 3l8 engine with a four barrel. Big square car, looked like an old undercover cop car. Cruise kept a magnetized CB antenna on the trunk to make the car look even more official. He'd taken out the front bench seat and put in a set of blue bucket seats. Never liked the witness to get too near him when he was driving. Between the bucket seats he had installed a small blue igloo cooler for bottled Cokes. Pepsi was too sweet. Coke, even the rip-off Classic brew the Coca-Cola Company claimed was made from the original recipe though it didn't taste that way to Cruise, had a carbonated kick his stomach lived for.

  Cruise crisscrossed the country and lived hand-to-mouth. Sometimes, when he killed, he took money from the victim, but it was never a big take. He didn't kill those too high up the social ladder, people with too much class or influence--or too much to lose. Cops would chase him then, put out APBs, write up a profile, start up a task force. Staying free entailed all kinds of precautions and rule number one, as Henry Lee might point out, was to kill the little people nobody'd miss.

  He had left New York City the week before, driven down the Eastern Seaboard into the Carolinas, and caught Interstate l0 in Florida to head west. He did all his driving at night, stayed in motels, truck stops, or his car during the day. If Cruise possessed an outstanding eccentricity, it was his love of the dark hours. He had not slept at night since he was a boy. He had not killed during the day for seven years.

  In his wallet he carried one hundred ten dollars. Next to him sat the igloo cooler of Coke. No one was looking for him. He should have been more content, but he was lonesome. Shit, he was singing songs to himself to cheer up, he was so lonesome. "Camptown Races." Do da. "Little Deuce Coupe." You don't know what I've got.

  It was sickening. He was getting on his own nerves.

  Outside of Mobile, Alabama, he drove five miles below the speed limit, not slow enough to attract attention, not fast enough to miss something important. Just cruising, eyes watching the cars that passed him, watching the roadside, the pine forests blue-black in the night, the long straight stretch of white pavement rolling ahead. Mind on idle.

  Billboards loomed and flashed past. BELINGRATH GARDENS. MICKEY'S BARBECUE. STUCKEY'S. GENERAY'S TRUCK STOP.

  Cruise took the off ramp, slowed at the stop sign, and turned toward the truck stop where the tall utility poles held up the huge orange GENE RAY'S sign. Eighteen-wheelers rolled slowly around the lot or sat like dull dinosaurs in the diesel slots. Several trucks were parked behind the low brown building. The moon had not risen from behind a pine thicket. Night shadows and the orange sign overhead conspired to turn the red clay ringing the paved area into splotches the color of dried blood The joint smelled of fuel and grease and exhaust. Just how Cruise liked his fresh air.

  With the Newport rolling quietly forward, he checked his gas gauge, remembered he'd filled up in Spanish Fort on the other side of Mobile. Well, gas needs didn't dictate his stops and never had. He was cruising. He didn't have to have a reason for stopping. He could always order a Coke in the truck stop cafe and make them put in plenty of ice. Slurp it through a straw. Get his tongue carbonated all to hell and back.

  He angled the Newport into a parking slot facing away from the building. The spots on each side were empty. This didn't look like a place where too many car travelers spent any time. It was strictly Cowboy Trucker City.

  As he smoothly maneuvered the bulk of his six-foot-four, two-hundred-seventy pound frame from the bucket seat, Cruise took his time closing the driver's door. He noticed a couple of Lot Lizards. One working the back area where the truckers took their rigs to rest awhile before hitting the road again. One standing near the front entrance to the cafe.

  The one in back didn't fit in. She was a kid, fourteen, fifteen. Too young for truckers. Inexperienced too if he was to judge by the way she slumped her skinny shoulders as if against a gale tearing at her back. Kid looked ashamed. Scared, maybe. Ought to be home with Mommy and Daddy watching Wheel of Fortune and munching Fritos.

  Cruise kept her in sight as he walked to the cafe door. If she was still there when he came out, she'd make a good witness. Most times he took young boys. Less trouble in the long run, but he had a need for girls, too, on occasion. Runaways of either gender were tender meat, easy to snag, and effortless to dispose of when the journey ended.

  Besides. This little no-account redhead looked lost. She needed a guide to help her get by in the cold, cruel, friendless world.

  She needed to cruise.

  #

  Nothing in all the world belonged to Molly Killany. Or so she thought at the uninformed age of sixteen. Oh, at home with her father she had her own bedroom, but it wasn't really hers. She realized by the time she was around nine years old that she was a boarder in the house and nothing she touched belonged to her. Not the stuffed animals or the Panasonic stereo she had received
for a Christmas present when she was fifteen, or even the clothes hanging in the closet. Kids were chattel possessed by parents. That was a new word she'd learned in vocabulary lessons. Chattel. In the archaic form it meant "slave." The life of a minor was not his own, so he was a slave to the whims of a parent.

  Her father, a retired colonel from the U.S. Marines, often told his only daughter that lives weren't always shaped by self-will, but by circumstance. He used this argument when speaking of her mother's death when Molly was born. "We never planned that you'd grow up motherless, Molly. I never thought I'd raise you alone, that I'd never be able to . . . to love another woman."

  When Molly ran away from home it had more than a little to do with feeling owned and without possession. It also had to do with the high school she attended where everyone was a snob. They thought they owned the world and everything in it. They didn't have a clue about the reality of their situation—how they were owned lock, stock, and Reeboks.

  Most of all, it had to do with Mark Killany, her father. Once he retired, after spending twenty years with the Marines, he made too much effort to control her destiny. She became his focus, his darling. His chattel. Not that he ever beat or mistreated her. It could be that he cared too much and that was the real problem. All he did was lecture her constantly. Don't do this, don't do that, watch out for the wrong crowd, don't stay out past eleven, don't even think about sex. Everything was taboo. Everything potentially threatening. Molly felt so suffocated she nearly stopped eating. Look at her. Skinny as a fence post. Even her breasts, which had been her crowning glory in the physical beauty department (although most people cited her glowing red shoulder-length hair), had squeezed themselves down to little nubs on her washboard-ribbed chest. She'd taken to wearing padded bras to give her any shape at all.

  Even now as she walked around in the orange glow of the truck stop, she hunched her shoulders so as not to bring attention to The Nubs, as she thought of them.

  Her intention at the truck stop would have given her father a fit. In fact, the idea was giving her a fit too. Though she had made up her mind that no one owned her, that she owned herself and it was herself that she would sell, if she had to, she was finding it impossible not to think about. How was she going to do it? How could she? The thought not only depressed her, but repulsed her more than she had thought it would. The only way she was going to face it was to turn her mind off, but so far she'd had no luck. Her head kept rattling thoughts around, some of them silent screams, some of them whispered worries. You can't have sex with some guy, just any guy! (If you do, you're garbage, you're scum, and you're going to regret it.) It's going to be awful! (He will touch you and play with you and you will probably get sick all over him.)

  If she'd had jewelry to hock or if someone would have given her an honest job at her age, she wouldn't do it, but she didn't and they hadn't and she was on her own with nothing to her name, not a slim dime, nothing for barter but her bony, nubby, redheaded self. Yet even these realities wouldn't quite kick in and save her from the war going on in her mind. She kept trying to think of another way. She just couldn't find one.

  It was amazing that she'd made it all the way from Florida to Alabama hitchhiking without already having to trade on her flesh.

  Just outside of Jacksonville, she'd asked if they needed help in the restaurant where her ride stopped for a meal.

  "To do what?" The waitress was sincerely befuddled.

  "Uh, you know, a job."

  "Like being a waitress or something?" More befuddlement.

  Molly began to wonder if the woman's brain had taken a hike.

  "Sure, like a waitress," Molly said. "Like a dishwasher, like a salad maker, like anything. I need work."

  "You need work?" the waitress repeated.

  My God Almighty. This woman needed major head surgery. She just couldn't seem to get it together. "Yes," Molly explained clearly and slowly. "I'd like to know if your boss is hiring, please." She added the last word with an emphasis the waitress couldn't miss.

  The woman seemed to snap out of it. "Listen, you don't stand a chance. How old are you, kid? Thirteen? You can't work when you're just thirteen. Why, it's against the law!"

  Molly stood as tall as she could, never mind the front of her poking out so miserably small. "I'm sixteen years old," she said. "I am not a little kid."

  The woman shook her head either in amazement or disbelief, Molly didn't know which. "You'd have to have your parents sign a permission form. And besides, we don't need anybody here. Sorry."

  But she hadn't been sorry at all, that was the bad part. She thought Molly was a thirteen-year-old, and she hadn't believed a word Molly said.

  Still undefeated, Molly tried getting work again in Pensacola at a service station off the freeway. "Do you need a cashier? I saw your sign." She indicated the HELP WANTED sign in the window.

  The paunchy middle-aged man who ran the place looked over his black-framed glasses at her and smiled slowly. "You?"

  Damn. No, she felt like saying, I'm standing here alone asking if you'll hire my invisible rabbit, Harvey. "Yes me. I need a job. And I'm older than I look." She thought she'd better get that in quickly as possible.

  "And how old would that be?"

  Another skeptic. "Sixteen. I'll be seventeen soon."

  He was already shaking his head. "Nope. Can't use you. Need a big strapping boy to help run the station." Then he turned his back and waddled away to sell a quart of oil.

  Molly knew then getting work was beyond possibility. They wouldn't believe she was sixteen, or else they'd want parental permission. Either way the job market was a closed world.

  So it had come down to sex. Selling it. As bad as it worried her—her stomach wasn't in such good shape just thinking about it—as bad as she didn't want to, she simply couldn't survive any other way. She'd lost her virginity to an awkward, unsmiling boy back in the summer of her fourteenth year on a deserted beach in Dania, Florida. Don't even think about sex. Her father's words. How could she not think about it? Every girl she knew had rid herself of virginity just as quickly as she could. Though her father didn't know it, an intact hymen had lost its importance a long time ago. Maybe before she was born. As for selling sex, though, that was something else again. The guys could be old, hairy, heavy, and filthy. They were strangers. She didn't know how she'd endure the grunting, sweating ten or fifteen minutes to get enough money to move on down the line. She just knew she had to.

  She had never tried scoring at truck stops, never tried scoring anywhere yet. Before she was even out of the pickup that dropped her at Gene Ray's, a sloe-eyed girl at the corner of the building gave her a long heated look. Right off Molly knew she was hooking. Everyone, Molly guessed, knew that. The girl wore shorts short enough to bare her ass when she stooped over, and a fluorescent green halter top with her breasts swelling out the top and sides like the white coconut goo found in a Mound's bar.

  It took some courage for Molly to sidle over and ask advice. She dropped down into what she thought of as her toughest, most adult-sounding voice. "Is there enough action for me to work here with you awhile?"

  The girl shifted her weight onto the other leg as if she'd been standing a long time. She smelled like cigarette smoke, damp sex, and spearmint. Molly saw her thoughtfully chewing gum, more like a cow chews a cud, intermittently, and with relish.

  You wanna be a Lot Lizard?"

  Molly thought about that. She didn't really, no, that's not what she'd aspire to given any choices, but she hadn't a choice so she supposed that yes, for now, she wanted to be a Lot Lizard. Sounded prehistoric and slimy, but what could you do.

  "If that's what it's called, yeah."

  "These truckers, honey, they're horny as wild boars. You look a little outta shape to stand the rigor."

  What she meant, Molly knew, was that she looked either too young or too skinny. That was plain insulting and, by God, she was getting steamed at how everyone insulted her. Even if she didn't want to hook, even
if it scared the living daylights out of her, she still hated being treated like some innocent numb-nut kid. "I'm okay. I can handle it." She squared her shoulders and stared defiantly into the other girl's eyes.

  The girl shrugged and chewed her gum. She glanced idly around the parking area and over to the side where the massive trucks pulled up for fueling. "It's your choice, kid. There's plenty of men to service tonight and JoJean ain't showed up yet. You got rubbers?"

  Molly nodded, then blushed. Did this dimwit think she'd be selling herself raw? She didn't want AIDS, for chrissakes, end up dying before she could get out of her teens. Not to mention the garden variety venereal diseases some people walked around with. She wasn't totally without a brain. In her carryall bag she had a box of lubricated Trojans. She didn't know how she was going to get the guys to use them, but if they didn't, she meant to hightail it, leave them gawking.

  The girl had sneaked a look from the corner of her mascara-laden eyes at how Molly nodded to answer the question. "Okay, go on. No skin off'n my ass. Go around back and just bang on the door of a cab' till one of 'em opens. I always take the Peterbilts and the Western Stars so stay away from those, but anything else, you go for it big as you can go."

  Again Molly nodded, accepting the rules, and left the girl's side. She skirted red muddy puddles behind the building to reach the dozing, idling trucks. She gathered her courage and climbed to the driver's door of the first truck she came to, a moving van company truck, and balling her knuckly fist, she started in. After sixty seconds of steady banging she was about to hop down to try another cab when a face showed in the closed window. He was old. Maybe Sixty. Bald. Probably didn't know what an erection was anymore, Molly thought with some despair. She couldn't do this. She'd never be able to give herself to some old grubby man. She bit her lower lip, leaned out of the way so he could open the door.

  "Have you been baptized?" he asked.