Joanna drove across western Kentucky to the Green River. In Rockport it was raining, and she skidded off the road into a fence. No real damage was done, but she was finally forced to do something about her myopia – contact lenses.
The Rockport Post Office provided Eye with her federal Wanted poster; he hadn’t realized just how hot she was. The composite ID portrait was an almost exact facsimile of her face. The nose strip was off, but the rest of her features were a perfect likeness. She was identified as Ella Dory AKA Mrs. Jerome Vight AKA Mary Linda Kane AKA Mrs. Rex Hollander AKA Ada Larkin. Ada Larkin! That really jolted him. It meant they’d probably traced her as far as Miami. How? The bastards, they’d probably checked the passenger lists of every flight out of Savannah the day Hollander’s forty-grand check was cashed. He had to hand it to the motherfuckers – they were really efficient. Would they uncover her Roxane Devorak and Victoria Chandler identities now and follow her to Michigan and Philadelphia and St. Louis? No, he didn’t see how they could do that. And yet …
In his hotel room that night he watched a TV movie about a convict, escaped from a chain gang, pursued by bloodhounds. He kept trudging through streams and swamps to throw the dogs off the scent, but then he had to cross a desert and the posse caught him. That was Joanna’s problem, too. Her trail was too obvious, and she was running out of water to cover her tracks. Changing wigs and names just wasn’t enough anymore.
She drove on toward Louisville – Dan ‘Ken Tuck’ Kenny’s former theater of operations. He tried to bring Kenny to mind but couldn’t recall his face. Christ! How long ago had that been? Fresno, LA, the bookstore, Ralph Forbes, the clinic, Jessica, the cemetery on the banks of the San Joaquin River … Had she killed Kenny? Yes … no … he’d died in the pen. They’d traveled down so many roads together, stopping at so many places! Now they were on Route 60, somewhere south of the Ohio River, passing through towns called Hawesville, Cloverport, Hardinsburg, Irvington …
It was a bright, windy January afternoon. A girl stood on the edge of the highway, hitchhiking. She wore jeans, GI shoes, a pointed cap, and a combat jacket. She was blonde, freckled, no more than seventeen or eighteen. Her name – he learned much later – was Becky Yemassee.
Joanna picked her up.
Miles later they turned off the road into a narrow dirt track and disappeared into a wood. He stopped, afraid to follow them too closely. Where the hell were they going? Was there a village back there in the sticks? Or a farm? Or a house? He waited ten … fifteen … twenty minutes. He was just about to drive after them when the girl reappeared, running. An old Dodge Royal Lancer with a growling motor came speeding up the highway. A boy wearing a bowler with the brim cut off was driving it. He skidded over to the girl, opened the door. She jumped in beside him, and they zoomed away like Bonnie and Clyde.
The Eye drove into the track. He found Joanna’s car parked in a clearing. All her luggage was open and her clothing strewn about the ground. She was lying in the front seat, unconscious, the cut on her forehead a neat, professional knockout blow, probably from a sap. He cleansed it with after-shave lotion. Then he searched her purse, the bags, and the car. He couldn’t find any money. Bonnie Freckles must have taken it all.
She came out of the woods a half-hour later – on foot. She was wearing slacks, boots, and a sweater, carrying an airline bag strapped to her shoulder. She walked toward Irvington. She looked like a farmboy striding to town to buy a sack of oats. She’d removed her wig, and the wind blew her hair across her face. The blow on the forehead didn’t seem to bother her. Neither did the loss of her money. She was whistling … in fact, she was laughing. A mile past the track she stopped, picked up a rock, and dropped it into her bag. Then she began hitchhiking.
A Honda sedan picked her up. The Eye followed it. It turned north and drove along the Ohio. It pulled into a junkyard beside the ruins of a jetty. He watched the driver take her in his arms, watched them kiss, watched her strike him across the skull with the stone. She took his wallet, dumped him into a ditch on his back, then drove back to 60.
She turned into the dirt track, left the sedan in the clearing, and drove her own car out to the highway.
During the next two weeks she repeated the performance twelve times, hitchhiking back and forth from Louisville to Huntingdon and from Danville to Bowling Green. One busy afternoon on Route 68, between Campbellsville and Edmondton, she hit four men in a row. Only two of her victims died.
In late February, while every state trooper in Kentucky was looking for her, she slipped down to Nashville.
She was Nita Iqutos from Peru, with a wig of long black hair plaited in Indian braids. Her English had a warm cello accent. She was a reporter from some Lima or Quito or Santiago magazine, in town doing a series of articles on ‘the sound.’ She probably even had a press card, if anybody asked her for one. But nobody did.
Associating her with the hitchhiking bandit the Kentucky newspapers called ‘the highway Harpy’ was just unthinkable.
The Eye didn’t know how much money she had accumulated, but she was still drinking cognac and smoking Gitanes. And she gambled every night. She moved in with a folksinger named Duke Foote. He was the coyote-voiced balladeer whose jukebox favorite ‘Texas Freeways’ sold nine hundred thousand records. She hooked him as soon as they met because he was impotent and a fairly nice guy and, since he didn’t snort coke or debase minors, the fuzz left him alone. Their photo appeared in the Grapevine section of Playboy, which made their relationship more or less official:
Interviewed during a recent recording session in Nashville, big Duke admitted shyly that he was thinking seriously about ‘goin’ to see the preacher man one o’ these days ’stead o’ always shackin’ up like a dang sinner.’ Fiery and fiercely Catholic Nita is just the gal to lead him back to the path of righteousness.
The Eye cringed and compared her photo to the ID composite he’d stolen from a post office. But there was really nothing to worry about. Nita Iqutos bore no resemblance at all to Ada Larkin or those other women.
In the spring Duke went to New York, leaving her alone in his mansion in Franklin. The Eye had been living in a motel out on route 31, and now he visited her every night, like a lover, prowling through the gardens and looking through the windows, watching her cook supper and read and listen to records and, usually get drunk alone. One evening she pretended she was blind and groped through the rooms for hours, tapping a cane and holding out a cup for alms. And one Saturday night a pack of Duke’s turned-on friends showed up and staged an orgy. While they were carpeting the living room floor with their calisthenics, she sat by herself in another room listening to the ‘Emperor’ Concerto. One of the girls crawled out of the bodies and joined her. She was blond, freckled, winsome; her nakedness wasn’t yet altogether nubile, and she looked slightly lost. ‘Can I come in here with you?’ she asked. ‘I’m not into this group sex bit.’
It was Becky Yemassee.
Joanna locked the door and slapped her. Becky screeched. But everybody was screeching. Her cry of terror sounded like just another orgasm.
‘What did you do with my goddamned money, you fucking brat!’
‘Moby took it!’
‘Who’s Moby?’
‘My guy. He said he had to go up t’ Terre Haute and he cut out and left me in Shelbyville and he took all the bread with him ’cept two hundred dollars he give me and that was the last time I ever seen him!’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Becky Yemassee. And you’re Nita, Duke’s chick?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t recognize you. What’s with your hair, like?’
‘It’s a wig.’
‘Yeah? Can I try it on?’
Joanna pulled off the wig and handed it to her. Becky put it on her head, walked over to the mirror. She looked like an Aztec sacrifice. ‘I’m goin’ to get me one,’ she chattered. ‘Wearin’ this hustlin’ my ass, I can charge the motherfuckers a hundred bucks a throw.’
‘Hustling your ass? Is that what you’re doing?’
‘No way, I’m going to be a singer. As soon as I can find a good secondhand gittar not too expensive. I only hustle when I gotta.’
‘Sing something for me.’
And Becky sang ‘I Heard the Crash on the Highway but I Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray.’
Joanna’s verdict was merciful. ‘Nifty peachy,’ she said dryly.
‘Kind of jagged,’ Becky admitted. ‘But that can be fixed when it’s recorded. Listen to that!’ In the other room the crowd was making zoo noises. ‘That’s the real Nashville sound!’
‘Come and take a shower,’ Joanna said. ‘You smell like an alligator.’
It began to rain.
Later the Eye climbed up the veranda lattice to the bedroom window. They were sitting on the bed, nude. Joanna was holding Becky on her knees, hugging her to her breast, rocking her gently. They were both sobbing. He watched them and thought, By what way is the light parted? Hath the rain a father? Out of whose womb came the ice? He wondered where the hell he’d heard that before.
Becky was from Charleston, South Carolina. Her real name was Azalea Goche. ‘My ma come from Orangeburg,’ she explained. ‘That’s how I got that shitty name Azalea, from the Edisto Gardens there, full o’ azaleas. And Goche. Shit! How do you like that! Azalea Goche! I changed it when I took off. Did you ever read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier? I read it twice. Did you ever see the movie on TV with Joan Fontaine? She’s probably one of the most beautiful things on earth! I was almost goin’ to call myself Rebecca Fontaine, but it sounded too phony. I picked Yemassee instead. It’s a little town down near the Georgia borderline. It makes me keep rememberin’ where I’m from.’
Her mother had worked all her life in whorehouses in Walterboro, Charleston, and Folly Beach. ‘That’s where I grew up. In bordellos. By the time I was ten I knew fifty different ways to give hand jobs. I used to jerk off marines for a quarter. “You watch it,” Ma used to say. “One of ’em may be your daddy.” That was her idea of witty repartee.’
Her mother died when she was eleven. ‘A couple o’ shitheads from Parris Island took her swimmin’ one Sunday. She was bombed and as soon as the waves hit her she dropped dead.’ Becky ran away to Columbia, then to Charlotte, then to Knoxville. ‘I jerked off guys all the way across three fuckin’ states. In railroad stations, in Johns, in airports, in parkin’ lots, in Greyhounds, in drive-ins, in movies, once in the back of a hook-and-ladder with a fireman. In Charlotte I raised my price to a buck and a half. But I never went down on them, because I can’t take that stink. Puttin’ it in my mouth would be like eatin’ moldy baloney. I couldn’t do it even with Moby. He smelled particularly foul down there.’
She met Moby in Knoxville, and he took her to Indianapolis. ‘He was a baseball player. A shortstop for the Yankees, but they bounced him for snortin’ coke. He was also on sugar and copolots and Emma and you name it. He was like zonked out forever in perpetual Happy Landingville. He thought up the hitchhiking gimmick with a blackjack. We tried it out a couple of times in Indiana, then came down to Kentucky where I met you and hit the big loot. When you picked me up that afternoon near Irvington I said to myself. “Jesus H. Christ! She’s prettier than Joan Fontaine!” I didn’t belt you too hard – I hope you appreciate that. I didn’t want to leave a scar on your forehead. Afterwards I told Moby, the prick, “Shit! I hope she forgives me.” You do forgive me, don’t you, Nita?’
‘Sure, Becky.’
‘I adore your accent! It gives me goose pimples! I never met anybody who had so many different ways of talkin’. And so many different ways of bein’ different. You keep changin’ all the time.’
‘The devil hath the power to assume a pleasing shape.’
They lived together for three months while Duke Foote was in New York. The Eye would hang on the lattice by the window all night, listening to them talk and laugh and weep and make love and read to each other. They read Rebecca and Gone with the Wind and Hamlet and Variety. They visited the Shiloh battlefield and Lookout Mountain and the Atomic Museum in Oak Ridge. In May they went to the Cotton Carnival in Memphis. Joanna taught her to drive. She bought her clothes and had her hair fixed.
Gradually Becky turned into a pleasing shape herself. She became sleek and groomed, chic and perfumed. She grew up. And one morning when the Eye saw the two of them walking side by side in Centennial Park, he could hardly tell them apart.
When Duke came back to Franklin he kicked them out of the house. They moved into an apartment in Nashville, but Joanna was running out of money. They bought two pistols with silencers from a shady gunsmith, and one Saturday night, masked and wearing men’s suits, they stuck up a gas station in Lebanon. The take netted them enough to pack their bags and fly to San Francisco.
The money from the sale of Cora Earl’s jewels was still in the safe-deposit box in Oakland. While Joanna went into the bank to collect it, Becky waited outside. So did the Eye, sweating with panic. He examined every foot of the street, but couldn’t spot any stakeouts – which of course, didn’t mean a thing. Maybe the Feds were inside. Or miraculously, maybe they just didn’t know about the box.
A half-hour passed. He was convinced they had her. He almost vomited with terror. He saw tomorrow’s headlines in the sky:
HUSBAND SLAYER CAUGHT! SPIDER WIDOW ARRESTED! FBI TRAPS MULTIMURDERESS! NATIONWIDE HUNT FOR DEATH-BRIDE ENDS IN OAKLAND CAPTURE!
Then she appeared, striding nonchalantly along the pavement, whistling, carrying a sackful of dollars.
At lunch in the airport dining room he listened to them trying to make plans.
‘Where do you want to go, Becky?’
‘How about Miami?’
‘No, not Miami.’
‘Why not?’
‘I have to keep away from Florida.’
‘What about Hawaii then?’
‘That’s no good either.’
‘Then LA. I never been there.’
‘I’d rather avoid LA too.’
‘Shit! Have you got anything against New York?’
‘Fuck!’
They spent three months at Lake Tahoe and six months in New Orleans. Then, in an Opel Manta, they drove through Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and northern Idaho to Washington. They stayed in Seattle for two months.
‘In the whorehouse in Walterboro,’ Becky said, ‘there was this one room filled with toys. Dolls and teddy bears and blocks and little cars and whatnot. Sometimes Ma would lock me in there all day long.’ The two girls were at a topless beach near Townsend on Puget Sound, lying in the sand, eating pears and sunbathing. Joanna was reading Beethoven by Romain Rolland.
‘But first she’d make me take off my clothes. I’d be in there bare-assed, dig. I must’ve been about eight or nine. I didn’t like it. That fuckin’ room scared me. There was something spooky about it. I’d start cryin’ and she’d come in and slap me around and say, “Play with your goddamned toys, you little cunt!” Well, there was holes in the wall, see. I found out later there was always a couple of guys in the next room, watchin’ me. I was part of the floor show. How do you like that?’
‘Didn’t anything pleasant ever happen to you?’ Joanna asked.
‘Just you.’ Becky smiled wistfully. ‘Everything else that happened to me was shitty. But the point is –’ She glanced around them scowling. ‘The point is there’s holes in the wall here too. Somebody’s watchin’ us.’
‘Oh yeah there is. In New Orleans too. And all while we was drivin’ up here. And back in Nashville too. Somebody’s watchin’ us.’
‘I used to think that all the time. But it’s just an effect.’
‘A what? What is it?’
‘A fancy.’
She closed her book and lit a Gitane. ‘We create things, you see. Out of the air and the wind and the people around us and impressions and sensations and all that. And out of ourselves also, our thoughts and our fears and our guilts. And our prayers. And these things take form and come around us and stare at us and even talk to us sometimes. Listen –’ And she looked at the crowd and whispered, ‘Are you still there, old buddy?’ She laughed and sat up. ‘Did you hear that? He answered me!’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said, “Yes, I’m here!”’
‘What’re you, flippin’ or what?’
‘Not in the least!’ She put her arm around her. ‘I hope he’ll always be there. He’s comforting. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving.’
‘Shit.’
They went to Reno and Vegas and lost all their money playing roulette. They sold the Opel and flew across the country to Portland, Maine. Joanna had another cache here, dating from the years before the Eye knew her – four thousand dollars in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Westbrook, rented under the name of Miss Faye Jacobs (dark wig). And two thousand more farther north in another bank in Auburn, where she was known as Mrs. Paula Jason (no wig).
They spent the next ten months driving west in an old Peugeot 604, taking their time, spending three or four or five weeks at every stopover; Syracuse, Toledo, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City (eight weeks!), Carson City.
By the time they got to California they were broke again.
Operating out of Pasadena, they unpacked their pistols and silencers, put on their masks and men’s suits and stuck up a grocery store in Sierra Madre and a haberdashery in Azusa. And a Hugo shoestore (Founded in 1867) in Alta Loma.
It was eight o’clock, closing time. The last customer left, a rancher carrying a new pair of boots. The boy behind the counter was alone. He was in his twenties, spare and long-haired and not very good-looking. His name was Finch. He probably hated his job, hated his boss and the store and Alia Loma and the smell of leather and feet and socks – or so the Eye assumed, reading about the stickup in the papers next day. Actually, though, there was no way of knowing what Finch thought about anything, if he thought at all. But he couldn’t have been very bright. Sacrificing his life for a cash box filled with someone else’s money was extremely noble and conscientious and proved an unmistakable dedication to his employer’s interests, but it was an asinine thing to do. Perhaps, if he had survived, he would have been given a raise. This could have motivated his action. Or perhaps he was in love with the manager’s daughter and hoped to win her hand in marriage as a reward for his heroism. Or then again, perhaps he was just exactly what he appeared to be, a dumb and earnest thrall with a shoe horn hanging from a string around his neck.
As the two girls came through the door aiming their guns at him, he reached under the counter, opened a drawer, and lifted out a .357 Magnum.
‘Shit and corruption!’ Becky shouted.
He shot her in the stomach just as she pulled the trigger and blew away all his vocal cords.
Joanna emptied the cash box into her purse and carried Becky out to the Peugeot. She drove toward San Bernardino at seventy miles per hour.
She left her, bleeding and gibbering, on the doorstep of a hospital in Rialto, then checked into a motel near Riverside. So did the Eye.
Becky’s death was announced on the eleven o’clock news. She was identified from her driver’s license. The newscaster looked appropriately grim when he mentioned her age. She was seventeen years old.
The Eye heard someone knock softly on the door of the unit next to his. ‘Yes?’ a man’s voice called. ‘Who’s there?’
‘Can I come in for a minute, please?’ Joanna answered.
The Eye looked out the window. She was standing before the cabin, one hand behind her back. The door opened, the man grinned at her. ‘Why, sure thing!’ he said. ‘Come on in!’
The Eye heard the ebullient poooooff! of the silencer as she shot him in the face. The body fell back into the room with a crash. She walked to the adjacent cabin and knocked on the door. ‘What’s up?’ another man shouted. ‘Please let me in,’ she said.
She killed seven men that night.