For Zen Brubaker, little mattered as he cruised west at 100 mph on I-80 in a cream-colored ’98 Corvette convertible with the top down. The summer sun blazed in a cloudless sky, and the hot breeze, magnified by the speed of the car, played havoc with the 33 year-old’s long blond hair. At this moment, in this car, the myth of the road’s freedom was the ultimate truth for Zen. It was as valid as the fact that the car in which he was racing west was stolen. He had stolen it just last night, when the idea to pick up and go had hit him hard.
The endless Great Plains highway, which ran straight to the horizon, reflected on the dark tinted lenses of his aviator sunglasses. Zen broke into a half-ass imitation of Mick Jagger on “Sympathy for the Devil”. The thought came to him as he sang. It was an obvious thought, yet like so many things with him, he kept it buried deep. He had no idea why he had left Pittsburgh (at least at the moment he couldn’t recall), but he knew where he was going. He was heading to Vacadale, California, the small town where he would find Tara. There she’d be in the same house where he had left her three years ago. Young Jeb would be there too.
Zen pressed his foot down harder on the accelerator pedal and pushed the speedometer past 115 mph. With the manic buzz of speed ringing his ears, he thought about plowing through the highway divider and smashing head-on into an on-coming car. The sound of twisting metal and the blazing image of exploding hellfire gave him a tingle in his groin. But it was too pretty a day to waste on dying.
As he drummed the steering wheel with both of his index fingers, he tried to remember why he had left Tara. He couldn’t recall (another momentary mental block). Their love had been strong at the time, and he was certain that she would still feel the burn for him that he still felt for her, and that she would open her arms and her home to him. Jeb was another story. But he’d deal with the boy when he had to, and not now. Instead, he raced his new car, felt the sun’s sting on his skin and licked the torrid breeze with his stuck-out tongue.
The highway sign ahead advertised a place to eat at the next exit. Zen was starving. He hadn’t eaten since last night. He had sped into Kansas an hour ago, and Pittsburgh, to him, was a lifetime ago. With the old steel town, he had also left Kelly.
Twenty-four and drop-dead gorgeous, Kelly had healed him after Tara. He had met her at a bar weeks after he had arrived in the steel town. His Brad Pitt looks always had the right effect on the ladies; and Kelly with her sandy hair and freckles had wanted him within minutes after laying her emerald green eyes on him. Within hours, they were in bed, making enough noise to wake the neighbors. In a matter of days, they were living together, arguing enough to concern anyone within earshot.
Killing the ’vette’s engine in the parking lot of the bullet-shaped diner, Zen left the car with the top down. He headed into the eatery; its neon lit name, Lawson’s, blinking.
Inside, he took a swivel seat at the counter. The place smelled of burnt coffee, sizzling cooking grease and ammonia. A buxom waitress with a million-dollar smile greeted him with a steaming pot of coffee in her hand.
He motioned for her to pour him some.
“That your car?” She asked in a friendly voice, tinged with too many years in a very small town, as she poured the steaming brew into his cup.
“You bet,” he replied.
“Must be nice.”
“Heaven-sent, especially on a day like this.”
“Giving out any free rides today?”
“Depends on how good your food is.”
She smiled and said: “Then I’ve got no chance in hell.”
They shared a laugh, and then he said: “A plate of scrambled eggs and bacon with white toast, please.”
“Good manners, too,” she said, walking off with his order.
Zen watched her ass bounce right to left, left to right with just enough jiggle to keep his eyes glued. She must have sensed his stare, because when she reached the cook’s station, she glanced back at him and smiled.
He smiled back and then saw something reflected in the mirrored wall on the other side of the counter. A state police car pulled up next to his ’vette and parked. He looked over his shoulder and watched as the brawny, square-jawed trooper stepped out from the patrol car.
The man’s knee-high boots gleamed in the sun; and he appeared transfixed by the ’vette, walking around it, studying it, and finally glancing down at the license plate. Then he turned away and entered the diner, waving at the waitress and saying: “Hey, Gwen.”
“Hi, Taylor,” she answered. “The usual?”
“Old habits die hard,” he said.
Both laughed, and Zen listened, thinking the joke was lame. He played with his coffee spoon and noticed that the cop took a stool two seats away from him. The trooper looked at him and smiled. “Your car?”
Zen thought about lying, but he realized that he and the trooper were the only two eating in the place. He nodded.
“Always wanted one myself, but I can’t afford it. Three kids, a fourth on the way, a home, well, you get the picture.”
“Two jobs, no kids is how I do it,” Zen lied.
“I’ll bet.”
Gwen returned with Zen’s toast, eggs and bacon and said, “Hey, I’m trying to wrangle a free ride out of this guy.” Then she placed his food on the counter before him.
Taylor looked at Zen. “Bet a lot of ladies hit on you for a ride in that car?”
“I get my share of requests.”
Gwen placed a cup of coffee in front of the trooper, and he took a sip from it. “Where you from?” Taylor asked in a friendly tone and then took another sip.
“New York,” Zen said through a piece of bacon he was chewing.
“Boy, you’ve been on the road a long time.” Gwen chimed in.
“Less than a day,” Zen said, realizing his mistake too late as it took more than a day and a half to drive this distance. He wanted to leap off his stool, grab the man’s gun and put a bullet between the eyes. But then he’d have to kill Gwen, and he didn’t want to do that.
“Whew,” Taylor said. “You must’ve been burning rubber to go from there to here so fast.”
“Yeah,” Zen chuckled as if to bury his mistake, his rage, in laughter. “You won’t hit me with a ticket, or throw me in jail.”
Taylor smiled. Then he grew silent.
Gwen placed a plate before the trooper. On it was a slab of meatloaf and lumpy mashed potatoes, drowning in gravy.
Something clicked inside Zen’s brain. It was what he had felt every time he needed to move on. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was a need for survival. Whatever it was, Zen shoveled some more eggs into his mouth and gulped them down. Then he finished his coffee and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. Looking up, he said to Gwen: “How much?”
Gwen faced him. “A fast drive in your car.”
“How fast?”
“Real fast,” she purred through her parted lips.
He smiled. “It’ll have to be on my way back, sweets.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Three bucks then, babe.”
He plunked down a Lincoln on the counter top and said: “Enjoy the day.”
“Good trip,” Gwen said, retrieving the money.
“Likewise,” Taylor said.
Zen walked out of the place, unaware that two hard eyes were fixed on his back. He got into the ’vette, ignited the engine and drove out of the parking lot. In a minute, he was back on I-80 heading west to Tara, but thinking about the trooper. “No way he could’ve known about the car,” he mumbled. Somehow these words allayed his fears for the time, and soon he was imitating Bob Dylan on “Highway 61.”
The sun had dropped in the afternoon sky, and the glare had increased. Zen squinted through his aviator shades to see the road ahead, which was cast in a bright heavenly white light. He half-expected to see Jesus appear on the shoulder of the interstate, hitching. He chuckled to himself, and then his thoughts returned to Tara and Jeb. He still remembered the sadness in her blue eyes, the desperate pleas and the endless tears on the day he had left.
She had grabbed his arm and had tried to stop him but he’d had none of that. After he had silenced her, he had slammed the door on the way out. Jeb’s pitiful screams had filled his ears, only to be drowned out by the pick-up truck’s engine.
He tightened his grip on the ’vette’s steering wheel, knowing that he owed them both a big apology. He would give them that. Another thought crossed his mind. He should call before he got there. He mulled it over for some time. Then he shook his head, as he wanted to surprise them and give them no chance to deny him the reconciliation he so badly wanted.
What he saw in the rearview mirror brought a quick end to his thoughts. The state trooper’s car (he assumed it was Taylor’s) was about fifty yards behind him. When the car’s siren and lights started, Zen believed his gig was up. But the thought of Tara, and the knowledge that he was driving a ’vette, blinded his reason. He stomped the gas pedal as if it was a big, ugly roach.
The ’vette raced off, and the trooper’s car followed in pursuit.
The chase sparked a primal thrill in Zen, who felt like a NASCAR racer. His Daytona was the interstate. He avoided other cars at the last split second, changing lanes on a dime, using the narrow shoulder road when no other lane appeared clear before him. In the rearview, he watched Taylor match him move for move, which made his heart race faster with excitement. He thanked the ’vette’s owner, whom he had only known for a heartbeat, on taking such good care of the car. “Catch me if you can, copper,” he shouted in his best James Cagney imitation, and he hit the gas pedal even harder. Could he drive this car any faster, he wondered. The speedometer answered by topping 125mph. The acceleration made him feel higher still. It was how Tara made him feel in bed.
He had been on top of her, feeling euphoric. Every nerve in his body had been on high alert. She had only to look in his eyes, or run a finger on his glistening skin and he would explode like a billion firecrackers on the Fourth of July. When she finally dug her nails into his shoulders, he screamed with all the fury that his vocal chords would allow, knowing full well that Jeb was awake in the next room, smothering out the screams of pleasure with a pillow wrapped around both his ears.
Suddenly, a pair of terrified eyes fogged this memory. They weren’t his. They belonged to someone else. He quickly shut them out, feeling the cold wetness in his pants. Before him, the traffic on I-80 was slowing down. He swerved hard, causing his tires to screech. The sweet smell of burning rubber filled his nose. Up ahead, he saw the wall of state patrol cars. A feeling of invincibility filled his V-8 heart. In his rearview, he still saw Taylor. A harrowing scream echoed through his stainless steel soul, and then he shouted to the cloudless sky: “Tara!” And he spun out and crashed the ’vette through the guardrail, bouncing down a small embankment onto a country road.
On the highway, troopers scurried back to their cars, and sped off to pursue Zen.
Taylor followed Zen down the embankment and onto the country road.
With sirens ringing Zen’s ears, he turned off the country road and onto a dirt road that cut a cornfield in two, sending a billowing, blinding wall of dust into the dry air. He banged on the steering column in glee, seeing Taylor’s car get swallowed up by the mini-dust storm and disappear thirty yards behind him. It was only moments before the dust cloud engulfed the ’vette, and Zen was also blinded. When one would have experienced fear, Zen felt even more exhilaration. He let loose a scream of pure pleasure, and then he went flying through the car’s windshield upon crashing into something very solid.
As he flew through the dusty air, he heard Amy’s muffled screams as he had strangled the young woman in her ’vette last night. Then he saw Kelly’s terrified face moments after he had stabbed her repeatedly the same night. A rapid succession of nameless frightened faces followed. Then he remembered something that he had buried deep in his subconscious, along with all of the grizzly truth: that Tara would never take him back. Not now. Not ever.
As Zen hit the ground hard, he saw Tara’s bloodied body after he’d beaten her lifeless the night he’d left. Near her corpse, he saw Jeb’s battered and lifeless body after he had returned from the truck and silenced the boy’s screams by stomping him. Then everything in his world stopped cold.
Taylor and the other troopers gathered around Zen’s broken body. He crouched down in a squat position and studied the dead man with the movie star looks. He noticed a tear rolling down his cheek. Then he looked up at the totaled ’vette and the wrecked tractor that had been parked on the dirt road. He gazed at the other troopers and said: “Finally we got the bastard.”
They stared at him without saying a word.
Taylor stood up and walked a few yards, stopped and stared into the setting sun. He lit a cigarette and walked over to the wrecked Corvette, knowing that he had been instrumental in taking down the nation’s worst serial killer in decades. Then he studied the car’s extensive damage and mumbled to himself: “What a waste.”
He paused and then added: “Of a great car.”
The endless Great Plains highway, which ran straight to the horizon, reflected on the dark tinted lenses of his aviator sunglasses. Zen broke into a half-ass imitation of Mick Jagger on “Sympathy for the Devil”. The thought came to him as he sang. It was an obvious thought, yet like so many things with him, he kept it buried deep. He had no idea why he had left Pittsburgh (at least at the moment he couldn’t recall), but he knew where he was going. He was heading to Vacadale, California, the small town where he would find Tara. There she’d be in the same house where he had left her three years ago. Young Jeb would be there too.
Zen pressed his foot down harder on the accelerator pedal and pushed the speedometer past 115 mph. With the manic buzz of speed ringing his ears, he thought about plowing through the highway divider and smashing head-on into an on-coming car. The sound of twisting metal and the blazing image of exploding hellfire gave him a tingle in his groin. But it was too pretty a day to waste on dying.
As he drummed the steering wheel with both of his index fingers, he tried to remember why he had left Tara. He couldn’t recall (another momentary mental block). Their love had been strong at the time, and he was certain that she would still feel the burn for him that he still felt for her, and that she would open her arms and her home to him. Jeb was another story. But he’d deal with the boy when he had to, and not now. Instead, he raced his new car, felt the sun’s sting on his skin and licked the torrid breeze with his stuck-out tongue.
The highway sign ahead advertised a place to eat at the next exit. Zen was starving. He hadn’t eaten since last night. He had sped into Kansas an hour ago, and Pittsburgh, to him, was a lifetime ago. With the old steel town, he had also left Kelly.
Twenty-four and drop-dead gorgeous, Kelly had healed him after Tara. He had met her at a bar weeks after he had arrived in the steel town. His Brad Pitt looks always had the right effect on the ladies; and Kelly with her sandy hair and freckles had wanted him within minutes after laying her emerald green eyes on him. Within hours, they were in bed, making enough noise to wake the neighbors. In a matter of days, they were living together, arguing enough to concern anyone within earshot.
Killing the ’vette’s engine in the parking lot of the bullet-shaped diner, Zen left the car with the top down. He headed into the eatery; its neon lit name, Lawson’s, blinking.
Inside, he took a swivel seat at the counter. The place smelled of burnt coffee, sizzling cooking grease and ammonia. A buxom waitress with a million-dollar smile greeted him with a steaming pot of coffee in her hand.
He motioned for her to pour him some.
“That your car?” She asked in a friendly voice, tinged with too many years in a very small town, as she poured the steaming brew into his cup.
“You bet,” he replied.
“Must be nice.”
“Heaven-sent, especially on a day like this.”
“Giving out any free rides today?”
“Depends on how good your food is.”
She smiled and said: “Then I’ve got no chance in hell.”
They shared a laugh, and then he said: “A plate of scrambled eggs and bacon with white toast, please.”
“Good manners, too,” she said, walking off with his order.
Zen watched her ass bounce right to left, left to right with just enough jiggle to keep his eyes glued. She must have sensed his stare, because when she reached the cook’s station, she glanced back at him and smiled.
He smiled back and then saw something reflected in the mirrored wall on the other side of the counter. A state police car pulled up next to his ’vette and parked. He looked over his shoulder and watched as the brawny, square-jawed trooper stepped out from the patrol car.
The man’s knee-high boots gleamed in the sun; and he appeared transfixed by the ’vette, walking around it, studying it, and finally glancing down at the license plate. Then he turned away and entered the diner, waving at the waitress and saying: “Hey, Gwen.”
“Hi, Taylor,” she answered. “The usual?”
“Old habits die hard,” he said.
Both laughed, and Zen listened, thinking the joke was lame. He played with his coffee spoon and noticed that the cop took a stool two seats away from him. The trooper looked at him and smiled. “Your car?”
Zen thought about lying, but he realized that he and the trooper were the only two eating in the place. He nodded.
“Always wanted one myself, but I can’t afford it. Three kids, a fourth on the way, a home, well, you get the picture.”
“Two jobs, no kids is how I do it,” Zen lied.
“I’ll bet.”
Gwen returned with Zen’s toast, eggs and bacon and said, “Hey, I’m trying to wrangle a free ride out of this guy.” Then she placed his food on the counter before him.
Taylor looked at Zen. “Bet a lot of ladies hit on you for a ride in that car?”
“I get my share of requests.”
Gwen placed a cup of coffee in front of the trooper, and he took a sip from it. “Where you from?” Taylor asked in a friendly tone and then took another sip.
“New York,” Zen said through a piece of bacon he was chewing.
“Boy, you’ve been on the road a long time.” Gwen chimed in.
“Less than a day,” Zen said, realizing his mistake too late as it took more than a day and a half to drive this distance. He wanted to leap off his stool, grab the man’s gun and put a bullet between the eyes. But then he’d have to kill Gwen, and he didn’t want to do that.
“Whew,” Taylor said. “You must’ve been burning rubber to go from there to here so fast.”
“Yeah,” Zen chuckled as if to bury his mistake, his rage, in laughter. “You won’t hit me with a ticket, or throw me in jail.”
Taylor smiled. Then he grew silent.
Gwen placed a plate before the trooper. On it was a slab of meatloaf and lumpy mashed potatoes, drowning in gravy.
Something clicked inside Zen’s brain. It was what he had felt every time he needed to move on. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was a need for survival. Whatever it was, Zen shoveled some more eggs into his mouth and gulped them down. Then he finished his coffee and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. Looking up, he said to Gwen: “How much?”
Gwen faced him. “A fast drive in your car.”
“How fast?”
“Real fast,” she purred through her parted lips.
He smiled. “It’ll have to be on my way back, sweets.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Three bucks then, babe.”
He plunked down a Lincoln on the counter top and said: “Enjoy the day.”
“Good trip,” Gwen said, retrieving the money.
“Likewise,” Taylor said.
Zen walked out of the place, unaware that two hard eyes were fixed on his back. He got into the ’vette, ignited the engine and drove out of the parking lot. In a minute, he was back on I-80 heading west to Tara, but thinking about the trooper. “No way he could’ve known about the car,” he mumbled. Somehow these words allayed his fears for the time, and soon he was imitating Bob Dylan on “Highway 61.”
The sun had dropped in the afternoon sky, and the glare had increased. Zen squinted through his aviator shades to see the road ahead, which was cast in a bright heavenly white light. He half-expected to see Jesus appear on the shoulder of the interstate, hitching. He chuckled to himself, and then his thoughts returned to Tara and Jeb. He still remembered the sadness in her blue eyes, the desperate pleas and the endless tears on the day he had left.
She had grabbed his arm and had tried to stop him but he’d had none of that. After he had silenced her, he had slammed the door on the way out. Jeb’s pitiful screams had filled his ears, only to be drowned out by the pick-up truck’s engine.
He tightened his grip on the ’vette’s steering wheel, knowing that he owed them both a big apology. He would give them that. Another thought crossed his mind. He should call before he got there. He mulled it over for some time. Then he shook his head, as he wanted to surprise them and give them no chance to deny him the reconciliation he so badly wanted.
What he saw in the rearview mirror brought a quick end to his thoughts. The state trooper’s car (he assumed it was Taylor’s) was about fifty yards behind him. When the car’s siren and lights started, Zen believed his gig was up. But the thought of Tara, and the knowledge that he was driving a ’vette, blinded his reason. He stomped the gas pedal as if it was a big, ugly roach.
The ’vette raced off, and the trooper’s car followed in pursuit.
The chase sparked a primal thrill in Zen, who felt like a NASCAR racer. His Daytona was the interstate. He avoided other cars at the last split second, changing lanes on a dime, using the narrow shoulder road when no other lane appeared clear before him. In the rearview, he watched Taylor match him move for move, which made his heart race faster with excitement. He thanked the ’vette’s owner, whom he had only known for a heartbeat, on taking such good care of the car. “Catch me if you can, copper,” he shouted in his best James Cagney imitation, and he hit the gas pedal even harder. Could he drive this car any faster, he wondered. The speedometer answered by topping 125mph. The acceleration made him feel higher still. It was how Tara made him feel in bed.
He had been on top of her, feeling euphoric. Every nerve in his body had been on high alert. She had only to look in his eyes, or run a finger on his glistening skin and he would explode like a billion firecrackers on the Fourth of July. When she finally dug her nails into his shoulders, he screamed with all the fury that his vocal chords would allow, knowing full well that Jeb was awake in the next room, smothering out the screams of pleasure with a pillow wrapped around both his ears.
Suddenly, a pair of terrified eyes fogged this memory. They weren’t his. They belonged to someone else. He quickly shut them out, feeling the cold wetness in his pants. Before him, the traffic on I-80 was slowing down. He swerved hard, causing his tires to screech. The sweet smell of burning rubber filled his nose. Up ahead, he saw the wall of state patrol cars. A feeling of invincibility filled his V-8 heart. In his rearview, he still saw Taylor. A harrowing scream echoed through his stainless steel soul, and then he shouted to the cloudless sky: “Tara!” And he spun out and crashed the ’vette through the guardrail, bouncing down a small embankment onto a country road.
On the highway, troopers scurried back to their cars, and sped off to pursue Zen.
Taylor followed Zen down the embankment and onto the country road.
With sirens ringing Zen’s ears, he turned off the country road and onto a dirt road that cut a cornfield in two, sending a billowing, blinding wall of dust into the dry air. He banged on the steering column in glee, seeing Taylor’s car get swallowed up by the mini-dust storm and disappear thirty yards behind him. It was only moments before the dust cloud engulfed the ’vette, and Zen was also blinded. When one would have experienced fear, Zen felt even more exhilaration. He let loose a scream of pure pleasure, and then he went flying through the car’s windshield upon crashing into something very solid.
As he flew through the dusty air, he heard Amy’s muffled screams as he had strangled the young woman in her ’vette last night. Then he saw Kelly’s terrified face moments after he had stabbed her repeatedly the same night. A rapid succession of nameless frightened faces followed. Then he remembered something that he had buried deep in his subconscious, along with all of the grizzly truth: that Tara would never take him back. Not now. Not ever.
As Zen hit the ground hard, he saw Tara’s bloodied body after he’d beaten her lifeless the night he’d left. Near her corpse, he saw Jeb’s battered and lifeless body after he had returned from the truck and silenced the boy’s screams by stomping him. Then everything in his world stopped cold.
Taylor and the other troopers gathered around Zen’s broken body. He crouched down in a squat position and studied the dead man with the movie star looks. He noticed a tear rolling down his cheek. Then he looked up at the totaled ’vette and the wrecked tractor that had been parked on the dirt road. He gazed at the other troopers and said: “Finally we got the bastard.”
They stared at him without saying a word.
Taylor stood up and walked a few yards, stopped and stared into the setting sun. He lit a cigarette and walked over to the wrecked Corvette, knowing that he had been instrumental in taking down the nation’s worst serial killer in decades. Then he studied the car’s extensive damage and mumbled to himself: “What a waste.”
He paused and then added: “Of a great car.”
