Blvd. of Blood

Book 4, chapters 16–20

(Upcoming appearances: July 15, 6–7:30, author talk, Old Stone Church, 251 Main St., 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: Colin Lang left a stolen car running out on the street. Colin girlfriend Carol Wernick is at Colin’s house, wondering where Colin is and what he might be up to. She does not suspect, of course, the answer, which is that he’s nearby at Bernie Feldstein’s house, preparing for a murder spree the next day.)

16.

Seamus had told the whole story to Officer Boothe while Officer Cechlovsky walked down the street to check out the car. After a few minutes, Boothe joined her.

“No key in the ignition,” Cechlovsky said.

“How’re we supposed to turn it off then? Should we call a tow truck?”

“If we’re going to take it someplace, one of us can just drive it, you know.”

Boothe shook his head. “Mess up the evidence.”

“What evidence? Is there even a crime being committed here?”

“Well, we can’t just leave it here, can we?”

Cechlovsky considered. “You know what I wish? If that idiot Oberman was on duty, he could do that thing he does, where he takes the spark plugs out or something.”

“Beats me,” said Boothe. “I don’t know jack about cars.”

They called a tow truck.

17.

Bernie, for the life of him, could not find the phone. It wasn’t under his mattress. It wasn’t anywhere in his room. He finally found an old bar of soap in the back of a closet. He slipped it into a sock, hoping against hope that the Colonel would not use it to beat him to death.

18.

Carol had discovered that the mystery drawer she’d snooped through back in January was empty. She had discovered nothing else. If there was pornography hidden in the house it was neither under the mattress or behind the drawers, and nothing would answer her questions as much as Colin’s pornography preferences.

She picked up a post-it pad from the kitchen and held it, slantwise, to the light, to see if there were any indentations. Maybe she could see what had been written on the sheet above, catch a clue…

But the sheet was smooth. It might as well have been part of a brand-new pack. It was like the rest of Colin’s house: There was nothing there.

Had there ever been a home so bereft of any scandal? Even the basement—mysteriously left unlocked tonight—where she’d honestly expected to find some sort of man-cave or possibly sex-dungeon—was implausibly clean.

She came back to the kitchen, and there she had her first surprise. Colin’s phone, which he would never leave the house without, was sitting on the counter, charging. She’d walked past it a dozen times searching for clues, but of course it didn’t look odd or out of place. Only the fact that it was here and Colin was not.

With his phone in her hand, she sat down on the living room couch. Perhaps an old email or a text conversation could give her some insights. She kicked off her shoes and lay down against the soft pillows, but the results were disappointing. The only non-work-related texts were from her. There was nothing unusual—there was nothing else at all—on the phone, except for a missed call—a New York number—and a new voice mail. New and unheard.

And here Carol paused. She could listen to the voice mail, but she had no idea, afterwards, how to conceal the fact that she had listened to the voice mail. She’d have to delete it, and then, if the person called back—Colin would know she’d invaded his privacy. It seemed like an extra, fatal step too far. She set the phone down on the ground, and closed her eyes, hoping to get some rest before Colin returned.

But the couch was uncomfortable, the soft pillows too soft, and after a while she went upstairs for one last night in Colin’s bed.

She tossed about and couldn’t sleep, and when she finally decided to listen to the damned voice mail, she realized she’d left the phone all the way downstairs, and screw it.

19.

Colin accepted the proffered sock. “What took you so long?” he asked.

“I couldn’t find a sock with no holes in it,” said that nervous idiot.

Colin waited for Bernie to go back up stairs, and then took the sock to the basement stairs. He threw it down to the bottom, hearing a thump. Whether such a drop would break a phone or not—it didn’t really matter. He closed the door.

He’d held it in while Bernie was awake, but now he went to the bathroom to micturate. He unzipped and was about to go when he realized he might spatter. Was there DNA in urine? He sat down on the toilet. Afterwards he wiped the seat down with sterile wipes. Then, to be certain, the floor.

He got cushions from the couch and made a makeshift bed at the foot of the stairs. For blankets he used coats from the coat closet. He set the timer on the stove as an alarm clock and lay down and closed his eyes and went right to sleep.

20.

School shootings are just a special case of rampage killings, and there are plenty of other, more common rampage killings. Workplace shootings, especially. Postal workers snap and open fire at the office pretty often, don’t they? Lots of people do it. Students do it too.

But everyone has noticed that school shootings tend to be deadlier than other kinds of rampages. Columbine (1999)—15 dead; Virginia Tech (2007)—33 dead; Parkland (2018)—17 dead. Even Charles Whitman, the ur-rampager—13 dead in 1966—was an architecture student at U. of Texas Austin. Most postal workers are lucky if they can kill two or three coworkers before the cops take them out.

Sociologists and aficionados developed a theory for why student murderers tended to be deadlier than office workers. The theory was that most workers, before they kill: get mad, go home, get a gun, go back to work, and open fire. They planned for three minutes, tops. Because if any grown-up human spent more than three minutes thinking about the rampage, he’d stop. He wouldn’t do it. Once those few minutes of blinding rage go away, you’re not going to kill anyone. Your reality principle reasserts itself.

But a teenager, or even a college student, can think about murder for months or years. He just keeps working on the plan. Seung-Hui Cho brought chains and chained the doors of his university building shut. Postal Workers wouldn’t think to do that.

The theory started to unravel after Newtown, Connecticut—27 killed at Sandy Hook Elementary by a man who was not a student—but at least the killer was only twenty years old. But then well-planned, exceptionally deadly mass shootings started cropping up perpetrated by actual grown-ups with jobs and everything. The First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Route 91 Harvest festival on the Las Vegas strip.

It turned out, revised theories held, that the key to a deadly shooting had less to do with the age of the perpetrator than with the location of the shooting. School shootings were deadly only because schools are particularly ripe with possibility for murder: the concentration of population and their captive nature: primary and secondary students are forbidden by law to leave the building. Any place that’s hard to escape from will do as well.

It was all, as the realtors say, location etc. And perhaps that night in their dreams Colin and Bernie both pre-visited that location their luck or destiny had lighted on.

Tomorrow they would drive along Blande Boulevard.

(End of book 4; continued next week.)