In the night room Page 0,98

great many inventive curses. The lightness feeling made him utter a high-pitched humming sound while his foot flickered in and out of view for a short time. At last, it reappeared without disappearing again, and he slumped, panting, over his belt, his legs stuck out before him.

“Throw him a candy bar,” Tim said.

“Are you kidding?” Willy stepped back toward the duffel bag as though to defend its contents.

“If you don’t, I will. I don’t like seeing people suffer.”

With obvious reluctance, Willy retreated to the bag, knelt down to reach in, and plucked out the foil-wrapped disc of a York peppermint pattie. She threw it at Coverley as if skipping a rock across the surface of a lake, and it skimmed straight into the center of his chest. Coverley disrobed the patty and thrust it into his mouth in a single movement. His face relaxed into momentary ecstasy.

“Do it again,” Tim said.

Willy picked out an Oh Henry! bar and hurled it at Coverley, who caught it with both hands and shucked the wrapper in the second and a half it took him to carry the bar to his mouth.

“I shouldn’t blame him,” Willy said. “He was only doing what you made him do.”

“I have to admit,” said Coverley around a wad of chocolate-peanut mush, “it was pretty difficult to threaten this guy. Basically, all I really wanted to do was work for him instead of Mitchell. But, you know, I had this job. Would you mind if I stood up?”

“Stand up,” Tim said. He glanced at Willy, who, without complaint, bent down and tossed a Mounds bar at Coverley with an underhand pitch.

Coverley took more time with the Mounds bar than he had with the others, turning it into more of a meal. “I don’t suppose you’d consider taking me with you.”

“Sorry,” Tim said.

“I didn’t think so. Tell me this. Where did Roman Richard go?”

“He didn’t go anywhere,” Tim said.

Willy bent down and picked out a candy bar for herself.

“Are you telling me to go off and kill people to get their money?”

“God damn,” Tim said. He took three hundred dollars from his wallet, leaving him with two. “No, I can’t do that. Take this money and live on it until you can get a job. Go to Milwaukee and say you’ll wash dishes.”

Coverley held out his hands like an infant, and Tim placed the bills in their cupped palms. “To tell you the truth,” Coverley said, “we didn’t really kill those people. Roman Richard shot their dog to show them we meant business, but that’s all.”

“Why did you tell me you killed people, then?”

“I wanted to scare you. Well, at that point I would have killed you, that’s true. How about another Oh Henry! Could you manage that?”

“Get out of here,” Tim said, and Coverley dipped the money into his pocket and moved toward the SUV. He would leave it on the street in Milwaukee, and in a day the police would be hearing from its terrified owners.

The rest of the way to Millhaven, Tim sped along a series of roads and highways he had known all his life. Willy went through candy bars at the rate of approximately one every twenty minutes. Tim thought Willy grew more beautiful, more translucent and lit from within, with every mile, and when he considered what lay before them, his heart hurt for her, and for himself, too.

She said, “What happened to Roman Richard, that’s what’s going to happen to me, isn’t it?”

“Let’s hope not,” he said.

Half an hour from Millhaven, Willy fell asleep beside him, her slender hands limp in her lap, her knees sagging to one side, her head on the seat rest so that he could see only the short blond shag of her hair, which had without his noticing become nearly white-blond and seemed to possess, beneath a healthy shine, its own internal radiance. She uttered a few whiffling sounds that sounded like the lost echoes of unspoken words, then fell again into perfect silence.

The next time Tim checked his rearview mirror, he almost drove onto the shoulder of the road. In her blue dress and no doubt wearing a pair of red slippers, his sister, April, was looking at him from the center of the back seat. April’s regard had little of the childish in it. The look in her eye, the expression printed into her unsmiling nine-year-old face, spoke of a steady, familiar impatience. As ever, April hungered to be free, to get out, to be on