Joyride by Jack Ketchum Read Free Book Online

he’d learned—not just from Howard’s wife but from people who knew them both—the marriage had existed largely as a reign of terror. Carole was Howard’s partner, half owner of the resort and supposedly very strong on the financial side, while Howard rode herd over his staff and did the political and social schmoozing.
    He supposed they must have been a pretty good team for a while. One day they turned around and they were rich.
    She bought the big house on Stirrup Iron Road. Howard started drinking and fucking around like his idol was Teddy Kennedy.
    She complained to him about it. Once.
    He put her in the hospital with a broken rib.
    That was the beginning.
    Rule didn’t fully understand the battered wife syndrome but he knew it when he saw it. When Carole first got up the nerve to talk to somebody in the department about Howard, she talked first to Officer Joyce Clarke and then she talked to Rule. And that was what he saw. A successful, intelligent woman so demoralized she could barely speak to them above a whisper. They both advised her to press charges. Advised it strongly.
    She said she’d consider it.
    She went home.
    That night he tied her facedown to the bed, raped her, and went at her with belt and belt buckle until her back, legs and butt were so bloody she threw out the sheets in the morning. He passed out drunk on top of her. In the morning he untied her and went to work.
    While Howard was working she was busy too.
    Something about this last one, something about him lying there on top of her, lying in her blood all night, had finally gotten to her.
    She changed the locks, filed for a restraining order and got herself a lawyer.
    Rule remembered serving the order.
    Gardner was sitting at the bar over at Hunger Mountain talking to George Hammond and Bob Walker, twobrand-new Barstow city council men, telling them a story about a blind bank robber over in West Guilford who had pulled his stickup and then asked the teller to please walk him to the door, he was nervous and he was blind, he couldn’t remember exactly where the door was. The teller refused and phoned the police while the guy walked around bumping into walls trying to find his way out of there.
    Rule knew the story. He even knew the arresting officer. Gardner and the council men thought it was a pretty funny story, and so did he. Only now with Howard telling it, it also struck him as cruel.
    “You know the one about the real-estate developer who thinks he’s a prize stud?” he said.
    Gardner looked like he’d swallowed something still alive and twitching.
    “No,” he said. “What.”
    “He got gelded in the courts,” said Rule. And handed him the order.
    It should have ended with that, but it didn’t.
    Gardner after the divorce was as bad as Gardner before the divorce. Worse.
    He’d bought her out of Green Gables as part of the settlement and she’d taken up with a man named Lee Edwards, Howard’s one-time manager over at the Inn and then, since meeting her, manager at Woodchip Pines. A step down but what the hell. She had plenty for both of them.
    The problem was that Howard wasn’t leaving her alone. He acted like he fully expected her back, Edwards or no Edwards.
    He’d even held onto a quarter-million-dollar insurance policy in her name.
    Rule thought the guy was crazy.
    He thought that with an ego that big Howard could probably be president someday…
    He pulled into the circular driveway and cut the motor. His old Chrysler wagon coughed once and then obeyed. He sat in silence for a moment, her white BMW parked in front of him like somebody’s snooty cousin.
    The house stood on a green, well-tended ridge with about three acres of woodland rolling down the hill behind it. He’d been inside a couple of times. The interior was light and elegant, if a little too modern for his tastes and a lot too sprawling. Four bedrooms, two floors. Long and wide. Imported Italian marble sinks with slim gold faucets in the bathrooms.