Blvd. of Blood
Book 4, chapters 4–5
(Upcoming appearances: July 15, 6–7:30, author talk, Hagaman Library, East Haven CT) | July 19, 10–3, Book Walk, Main St., Old Wethersfield CT)
Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.
(The story so far: It’s April 10: showtime. Carol Wernick, spying on her strangely behaving boyfriend, has seen Colin Lang leave his house that night, unaware that he is heading out to steal a car and proceed to Bernie Feldstein’s, for purposes most evil.)
4.
First thing Colin had done was drive the stolen car down the street to his own car. He parallel parked directly behind it—the street was so empty that practically this meant he just had to drive up and pull over and the two cars were a foot apart. No one was around to see Colin hop out of the still-idling car and open a trunk with a key. The trunk was lined with black plastic garbage bags, and sitting on those black garbage bags were a gym bag and that old duffel bag he’d found. Colin placed these into the stolen car, passenger side, and then closed the trunk quietly, putting his full weight on it to make it click; in a matter of seconds he was off, down the deserted street. He was going slow. He was using his turn signal. He did not drive towards Bernard Feldstein’s house.
His first stop was Michaelson Road, at the point where the creek flowed through a pipe right under the road. It was called a creek, but in the spring it was more like a small river, four or five feet deep all the way to where it flowed into the Susquehanna. Colin just wanted to make sure it was full tonight. He pulled over and climbed out of the idling car, looking down over the low railing, but it was too dark to see the water. He walked over to where his headlights illuminated the roadside and picked up a glass beer bottle. He tossed it over the railing, and heard the splash. It sounded deep all right.
Back in the car, and next up was a Sarasota Avenue, a side street that connected two other side streets. Their garbage pickup, library research had told him, was tomorrow morning. Garbage toters sat at the end of every driveway, like sentries. Colin unfastened his seat belt as he drove, then pulled over to the left side of the street. His window was already down—or rather it was missing, but it looked like it was down—and in the dark he leaned out and dropped the garbage bag with the tape and the shattered window and the scarf into one almost-full toter. Nothing really suspicious about that. Just a motorist getting rid of some garbage in a socially responsible way. No litterbugging! He drove away, across town. Now he was driving toward’s Bernard’s.
Said Bernard lived on Coronet Street, a dead end not savvy enough to rebrand itself as a cul de sac. It was not a street Colin had even been down before. It was shaped like a comma.
Colin slowed along the curve. None of the houses had a garbage toter out, except one. He could see a car in the driveway, Pennsylvania plates. Bumper sticker hard to read. Headlights on the mailbox confirmed the address, the napkin address.
He drove to the end of the street, K-turned, and shut off his headlights, trusting to the moon. He unbuckled his seat belt and moved the two bags onto his lap. As he drove slowly back in the dark he veered over to the left side of the street. The looming shadow of the toter gave him a point to steer towards. Brake. Once again he was leaning out a window as he slid the bags into the garbage can. One thumped and one clattered, but they were quiet enough. Colin drove away, and hit the headlights again as he rounded the curve.
A short drive and one more turn, slowly and with a turn signal of course.
Rano Boulevard, you will recall, runs parallel to Coronet. Colin parked on Rano. He rolled down all the windows, one at a time, manually with a crank; the rear windows only went down halfway. He left the car idling. With any luck it would be stolen in a couple of hours. Teenage Colin would have stolen it. Rano was a busy enough street; there must be teenagers there.
Now Colin wandered down Rano looking for a house with all the windows dark. Here! He walked up its side yard. He, Colin, must have been hard to see, or so he figured; maybe just a glint of blonde wig in the shadows. Once around the house in the backyard, he walked along, at a healthy distance from the rear of the house, moving from lot to lot. The backyards were dark. There were no fences between next-door neighbors here, or at most a low hedge he could step, or rather stumble, over. He also stumbled over gardens, sandboxes, patio chairs left out, cushionless, all winter. He hoped he was not leaving footprints, although probably it didn’t matter. These boots were going in the trash tomorrow.
Despite all the barked shins and distractions, Colin was counting lots carefully, and he soon found himself in the very back of the back yard of one particular house. The house had a light on inside, the blue flickering ghostlight of a television set playing through a window; but it hardly reached where he was standing. Directly behind this house, their backyard’s abutting was the home and person of Bernard Feldstein. By touch more than sight Colin found the low chain link fence that separated the two properties. As he had practiced so many times before, he put his hand on it, and vaulted. This was more difficult in the dark—he should have practiced it blindfolded, or at least with his eyes closed—and his foot caught. He spun in the air and landed with a thump that knocked the wind out of him.
“That was an oversight,” he said, but silently. He subvocalized. “But that will be the last oversight.” He stood up and brushed himself off. Bernie’s house was all lit up, and he walked gingerly across an untidy backyard. There was one large and odorous pile of garbage, coffee grounds and wadded tissues and rotting food. Colin rolled his eyes at Bernard’s resourcefulness. Then he was up three stairs to the rear door. An aluminum canopy shaded it from the eyes of heaven. Colin knocked on the window. There was no answer so he tried the knob.
“I should have told him to leave the back door open,” Colin said, silently again. But Feldstein was always the hard part of the plan. Colin had barely had anything thought out when they’d met that one time at Munster, and it would never have done to initiate too many points of contact. This lapse was forgivable.
With a sigh more audible than his subvocalizations had been, Colin in the shadows rounded the house—there was no garage; the car, he noted, had no front plate—to ring from behind a shrubbery, only his arm extending out over the porch, the doorbell.
5.
Carol thought she was just going to drive home, or to her parents’s house to cry on her mother’s shoulder, like a heroine from a 1940s melodrama. But she didn’t drive home, or anywhere. She sat in her car, idly checking her phone, waiting for Colin to return.
Perhaps he was gay, as Aggie predicted, which might explain some things: the secrecy, the hidden depths. But then she kicked herself for confusing homosexuality with transvestism. If he was just a transvestite, off to a transvestite…bar? for transvestite…fun? This was worse, wasn’t it? Somehow that felt like more of a betrayal, if only because she was less familiar with its implications. She’d known plenty of closeted gay men, back in the day; she’d known a couple of their aggrieved spouses. If she knew any closeted transvestites, she didn’t know she knew them.
Then she thought he might not be a transvestite; he might be transgender. She was too old, she thought, to work through what all of these things meant, both to him and to her.
Regardless, she knew she’d have to find out more before she made any drive to mother’s. She stayed where she was and then, after an hour, pulled into his driveway. That way she couldn’t miss him when he came home. He’d know she knew his secret, whatever it was, but that was all right. Better to get the truth out, and all the truth, before the night was over.
Continued here.