Joyride by Jack Ketchum Read Free Book Online Page A

Restaurant-size refrigerator in the kitchen. A circular bed and massive new four-posters of brass and mahogany. Sauna and Jacuzzi.
    He remembered pulling Howard off the lawn one winter at four in the morning, the man’s voice carrying for blocks through the clear, crisp air and empty streets. He was calling her a whore one minute and telling her she’d come crawling back to him the next. Waving a liter bottle of Glenlivet with about an inch left in the bottle.
    “Come on, Howard,” Rule had said and took him by the arm. It was an unexpectedly muscular arm beneath the rumpled, hand-tailored jacket.
    “She loves it.” He grinned. “She called you? She called the cops? Hey, that’s just a game she plays.”
    “Sure,” Rule said and cuffed him.
    Howard looked surprised. Then he nodded.
    “You know what?” he said. “You’re very efficient. I like you. You wanna job?”
    He remembered her standing at the door, a beautiful woman, haggard and worn. Edwards standing behindher, holding onto her shoulders as though he was afraid she might break.
    She didn’t break. But that wasn’t the end of it either.
    He went through Howard’s file in his head.
    He’d harassed them by phone every night for two months running, calling at all hours of the morning. Threats. Obscenities. The usual. Except that Howard really had a flair for it. I’m going to carve you slit to slit, he told her, from cunt to lips. Then I’m going to pull you open and fuck your liver.
    What a guy.
    She changed her number. Twice. Both times Howard found it. Finally they put a tracer on her phone. The calls stopped dead. They removed it after two weeks and they started up again. Rule didn’t know how he knew, but he did.
    He paid a fine for drunk and disorderly and for violation of a restraining order for the episode out on the lawn and that was the last the court system ever saw of him.
    Not Rule though.
    In mid-March he got a call saying Carole Gardner was at the station filing a complaint against her husband and would he please come by. He found her in Joyce’s office. She was nearly hysterical.
    Around noon that day Howard had climbed through an open window off the patio. When she came out of the laundry room he put a Colt revolver to her head and moved her onto the couch, where he raped her, punched her, wrapped the cord of a standing lamp around her neck and toyed for a while with the notion of strangulation.
    She said she’d come straight there to the station because she was afraid that if Edwards came home fromwork and she had to tell him about it Edwards might be mad enough to kill him. Howard was not the only one who owned a handgun. There was a .357 Magnum in her top dresser drawer.
    Rule drove to Howard’s office complex with an arrest warrant burning holes in his pocket. Howard was sitting at his desk with Bill Clinton and Harold McDermott, two of the stockholders in Gables, Inc., his company. The stockholders swore that Howard had been with them all day long on a drive to Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, for a look at the Mountolive Inn for possible purchase by their corporation and they were both perfectly willing to sign affidavits to that effect.
    Both men were unshakable and maddeningly smug. Like rape was just fine by them if it happened to be your ex-wife you were raping.
    The fact that both these guys were divorced themselves was not lost on him.
    But he had no case.
    Then finally just last month he had another call from her. It was puzzling.
    She’d sounded extremely upset again, he could barely understand what she was saying. He’d tried to calm her, but then he’d had to put her on hold for a moment while Hamsun, his chief, ran over some detail on the arrest report of a suspect in the breaking-and-entering item that had come in the night before.
    By the time he got back to her all she would say was that she was sorry she’d bothered him, it was really nothing—and when he pressed her, said she was just afraid that Howard was going