The instant he finished what had to be done in the master bedroom, Miles’ body began to shake with an intensity that jarred his teeth and blurred his vision.
This is no dream!
He stared at the blade hanging limply from his outstretched hand, at the carnage of what had only moments before been a chastely intimate bedroom scene, husband and wife sleeping side by side. They still lay side by side. But no longer sleeping.
Hardly registering that fact that he was covered with gore-not all of it his own-and naked and bleeding from a dozen wounds ranging from superficial to near-fatal, the boy fled the room, throwing the knife away from him with such force that it spun dervish-like through the open bathroom door and shattered the mirror over the medicine chest.
He ran through the silent house. His feet left a trail of moistness blacker than black behind him. In the kitchen, he paused only long enough to grab a set of keys from the homemade key rack next to the garage door-a cunning bit of his own work in the shape of a large key cut from plywood and painstakingly stained redwood and polished to a flawless gloss as a Mother’s Day gift nearly four years before.
Then without realizing what he was doing or where he was heading, he found himself in the garage and jerking open the door to Daniel’s Corvette. He sank into the seat, numbly registering the icy coldness of leather against the blistering heat of his naked back and legs. In the darkness his right hand scrabbled in the storage compartment between the seats, blindly, frantically, for a long moment before he felt a flood of relief as his hand struck something small and oblong, with two studs protruding from one end. He grabbed it and aimed it over his shoulder and hit the left stud, grateful that Daniel had at least taught him that bit of technological magic.
The garage door whined as the heavy plywood doors ascended on their well-oiled hinges. Cold night air billowed into the garage. There was no fog, not even any clouds. The sterile stars prickled coldly, malevolently against a midnight sky.
The boy jabbed the key viciously into the ignition and cranked it so hard that the key nearly broke in his hand. The engine turned over once, twice, coughed ominously, then with a screaming roar, caught. He jammed the gear into what he hoped was reverse and hit the gas pedal, hoping against hope that all of the time spent watching Daniel manipulate the gears would help him now. The engine roared unevenly and the car jackrabbited out of the garage, tires squealing against the concrete driveway as the boy struggled with the wheel, finally managing to spin the car around on the circle of pavement directly in front of the house, until the ’Vette was facing directly down Oleander.
He jammed the gear shift into another position and depressed the accelerator again. The car jumped forward a dozen feet, shuddered, then jumped forward again. All the time the engine roared as if it were a mob of hungry lions. Or merely an echo of the bloody thrummm behind Miles’ eyes. His head ached horribly, and he felt as if he were going to throw up all over Daniel’s genuine leather sport seats.
In one of the houses just down the street, a light went on and a curtain wavered, but the boy paid no attention to the face that appeared, stared, then abruptly disappeared again. The light flickered out.
The boy slammed the accelerator again, and the car leaped forward. He didn’t try to shift gears-he was in second, which was why the car had started with such difficulty, but at least he could keep going. He let gravity take its course, and the car rolled faster and faster down Oleander. At the far end, where the street dead-ended onto Mariposa, he swung wide, barely trying to see through eyes almost blinded by blood and tears.
He didn’t know if any other cars were coming or not; he didn’t care. He was beginning to chill now. The heat was evaporating from his body in great waves that steamed over the windows, cutting his visibility even more.
A stuttering left onto Reynolds, then a quick right onto Bingham. He grappled with the gears and the clutch again, just enough to jump from second into fourth. Again the car almost stalled, but he managed to keep it going, building up speed as he slipped through the night.
Thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty, sixty, sixty-five.
The speed limit was a well-posted thirty in this part of town. He didn’t care. He slammed through two red lights without braking. Neither time was there another car in the intersection, but Miles didn’t bother to look. He was escaping at last. He had the man’s car. He wore the man’s blood (and his own-and his mother ’s) crusting on his body like a badge of honor…or disgrace. Like armor inviolable and protective, seamless and corrosive. He wore the man’s life encasing his own. And he was escaping at last.
The car slowed slightly as it began the final ascent out of Tamarind Valley toward the north. From there, Reynolds Boulevard’s four wide lanes shrank suddenly to two, pitted and badly in need of repair. What had been a major artery became instead little more than a twisting, rutted roadway that connected Tamarind Valley with the Santa Reina Valley on the other side of the foothills. That part of the road was known simply as Norwegian Grade.
He took the crest of the hill at seventy-somewhere around fifty miles too fast for safety, fifty-five too fast for comfort. For an instant, the front tires left the pavement, then the ’Vette was flat on the roadway again, squealing as Miles yanked it to the left, then sharply to the right in a frantic attempt to keep on the asphalt.
A quarter of the way down the grade, his right front tire slipped off the splintered tarmac and slewed through loose gravel. Prickly pear cactus with spines six inches long scraped the side of the ’Vette from bumper to bumper. The sound touched something deep in the boy, something that had been suffocating and lay nearly dead. He grinned wildly. Then he blinked-and in an instant of horrifying clarity, understood that he was naked and bleeding and shivering with cold and with shock, and in a car he could not drive, hurtling down Norwegian Grade at impossible speeds, fleeing through the night from…
He remembered everything. His mind froze. And with it, his hands.
The steering wheel twisted like a captive serpent beneath his grasp as the roadway dished up on a nearly ninety-degree curve halfway down the grade. If he had jerked the wheel an inch, even half an inch, there might have been a chance.
But the images of what lay behind him stunned him. He held the vibrating wheel in a death grip and opened his mouth and screamed, long and piercing and desperate, as the ’Vette ripped through the woefully inadequate barbed wire fencing and arced over great patches of ghostly cactus. The car flipped once and almost completed a second flip before it smashed into an outcropping of ragged burnt-brown stone and with a soft whuuump that instantly became a hurricane’s roar, exploded into flames.
From the Tamarind Valley Times, 21 November 1997:
ANOTHER TRAGIC DEATH ON KILLER CURVE
The still-smoldering remains of a late-model sports car were discovered at four o’clock this morning by a passing motorist. The driver had apparently been racing down Norwegian Grade, notorious as one of the most dangerous roads in the entire Tamarind Valley. Because of the inaccessibility of the wreckage at the bottom of the canyon, police investigators were unable to reach the scene of the incident until well past seven o’clock. At this time, the identity of the driver has not been released.
The incident, the fifth fatality on that section of road in less than two years, will likely spur increased controversy in the City Council over whether or not to widen the pavement, at an estimated cost of…
From the Tamarind Valley Times, 22 November 1997:
NORWEGIAN GRADE MYSTERY intensifies
In a bizarre twist, the driver of the late-model Corvette destroyed by fire along the Norwegian Grade two nights ago has been identified as an unlicensed fifteen-year-old, Miles Stanton, of 1066 Oleander Place. Attempts at notifying his parents led to the grisly discovery of the bodies of his mother, Elayne Stanton Warren (35) and his stepfather Daniel Warren (37), in the bedroom of their home on Oleander Place. Both had been stabbed repeatedly. One informed source reported unofficially that the circumstances surrounding the deaths were particularly vicious.
“It was like a slaughterhouse in there,” the source noted. Officers present at the scenes of both incidents refuse to make any additional statements, other than that a preliminary investigation suggests the youth first killed his stepfather, then his mother, and then attempted to escape in the car owned by his stepfather. Elayne Warren leaves no immediate relatives; Daniel Warren, owner of four automobile dealerships in the area, is survived only by his mother, Amanda Warren, of Woodland Hills.
Funeral services for all three are pending.