Joyride Read Free Page A

out and up simultaneously. The pines weren’t doing too great a job at either. They looked small and beat and scruffy.
    He moved away. The pond wasn’t far.
    He had dreamed last night that he and his mother had driven to a house neither of them knew but which was to be her home from then on and he abandoned her there, old and crippled in the legs, which she had never been, left her standing shaky in the enormous open yard looking confused and frightened and angry. There were cats in the yard and she hated cats. He had driven away laughing. The dream was very vivid. Very real.
    He wondered if Susan would ever fuck him again. It was possible. But not likely.
    Too bad. She was pretty good at fucking and there were fewer notes about her in his notepad than there were on most people. He decided to give it a week or so and then see if maybe he could talk to her. If he could talk to her then he could possibly convince her to start fucking again because even if it wasn’t the whole thing it was something.
    He was considering taking one of the sandwiches out of the backpack, unwrapping it and eating it along the trail because he’d worked up an appetite by then with all this stress when he heard voices—shouts—coming from below. He walked over to the edge again and peered down through the trees.
    He saw movement there, shifted to a more open area and saw the three of them clearly in a tight little circle moving in and then outward, back and forth like a rough awkward dance slightly off the trail in the brush.
    He felt a tingling. Something scuttling crablike down his spine.
    He saw what they were doing and forgot all about Susan and all about his notepad and the dream of his mother and all about his sandwich. He knew suddenly that his life had changed forever and he let it flow over him.
    He watched.
    Between the first and second strokes of the Louisville Slugger, Howard Gardner had time to entertain a number of notions, think a number of thoughts—none of them too deep but most of them important.
    You little bitch you’re not gonna get me was the first thought and probably the most significant. Because that gave him anger, and anger gave him fight.
    Wrong! I’m gonna get you was the second most importantsimply because it was so utterly wrongheaded. His immediate concern was the man with the baseball bat. Not the woman. At the moment the woman was just a distraction. And that was too bad, because Howard did not need any distractions.
    Move and tuck, he thought. Come on. You can get this guy. You’re bleeding, dammit! He could feel it rolling down the side of his face. Fuck it! Get the bastard. You’ve got the reach and you’ve got the weight.
    I’ll kill the little bitch.
    He should have known in the first place.
    Something was wrong with the whole setup. Why in hell would she want to be alone with him after all this time, and alone in the woods no less. For what? Old times’ sake? Because they used to climb up here and picnic once in a while? Those days were long gone and since then she’d taken the house from him and the car and half the business and even had the Barstow PD on his ass, had a restraining order out against him the little fuck so that he wasn’t even supposed to come near her, his own ex-wife! But there was no restraining him then—no way—and there was no restraining him now.
    The dizziness wasn’t good, though.
    The guy Lee had been standing behind him. He’d never even seen the guy. Carole had simply stopped to admire the scenery and suddenly bam ! lights bursting in his head but Lee had misjudged the reach. Caught him midway through the wood instead of at the thick end of the bat so that it slid off his ear and the side of his head down to the collarbone. The collarbone felt broken. But Howard was standing. He was by god standing!
    He feinted left and came in right, beneath the blow—boxing the guy, just like in the Navy. Planted a right fistin a surprisingly tight belly while the bat rolled