Mirrorman Read online

  Kersh had been hoping it was Sophie. But it turned out to be that timid-looking dame again, May-Beth, who, it seemed, had embarked on a personal crusade to save his soul. Why him? He wasn’t religious. He didn’t and never had ‘believed’. Hell, he hadn’t been inside a church since he was nine years old.

  He flopped down and stretched out his lanky legs. Good to get out of that cell though, even if he had to pay the price of being preached at.

  The woman watched him, brown eyes blinking, her unpainted mouth curved in a small tight smile. She had soft, rounded, regular features. Wouldn’t have been bad-looking, Kersh thought, if only she’d take a little care over her appearance. Dyed and curled that straight mousy hair, for instance. Got rid of that fringe, which put ten years on her. As it was she was twenty-five going on fifty. He imagined her naked, and decided she’d pass muster. She was well blessed, and he liked his women big up there; the bigger the better.

  ‘Hello, Frank. How are you?’ She had a shy, hesitant way of speaking. Normally, Kersh didn’t go for the demure type, though the notion of May-Beth murmuring sex words to him in that little-girl whisper made his groin tighten.

  ‘How do you think I am? One thing for sure, I’m not taking out a subscription to Reader’s Digest.’

  May-Beth’s mouth twitched – as if she knew it was meant to be a joke but didn’t get the point. She dropped her eyes demurely, pressed her lips together. ‘I thought maybe you’d be glad to see me…’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Why?’ Kersh pushed his hand through his thinning fair hair. To compensate for its baby-fine sparseness he’d let it grow long over his collar. He lit up a Marlboro, from his third pack today, and slouched back in the chair. It was close in here, metal grilles over the closed windows, the same stale air circulated by the fans. He felt slightly sick as the smoke hit his stomach.

  May-Beth gazed at him with those pleading, cowlike eyes. ‘I pray for you constantly, Frank.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Kersh dragged in smoke and let it trickle from his nostrils. ‘Good for you,’ he mumbled, staring blatantly at her breasts. He had the itch today, no question about it.

  ‘There is hope. There is salvation. It isn’t too late – the Messengers can help you. Believe in them, Frank, open your heart to them, and they’ll offer you eternal life.’

  ‘Is that before or after I go to the chair?’

  ‘Do you want to die?’

  ‘You mean I gotta choice?’

  ‘The Messengers will show you the way. All you have to do is trust in them.’

  It never ceased to amaze him how people could believe in this salvation crap. Now they were offering him eternal life. Jee-zuzz. He’d killed a dumb kid, fifteen years old, and he was going to burn for it. End of story. Why was she bothering him, for chrissakes?

  ‘Know what he said, the jerk?’ Following his own thoughts, Kersh watched the smoke spiralling upward. ‘Had his hand under the counter, reaching for his piece, and know what he said? “Make my day.” Make my day!’ His lips curled. ‘So I did. It turned out to be his last one.’ The glazed, milky eye watched the writhing smoke.

  ‘All for a measly thirty dollars,’ May-Beth said sadly.

  ‘You forgot the two bits and a quarter,’ Kersh wisecracked glibly.

  That was six years and nine failed appeals ago, though to Kersh it was as near and sharp as yesterday. He blamed the damn car, acting up on him, same as everything else in his life. The Chevy had sounded like it was chewing ten pounds of ball bearings that day and having trouble swallowing them. Then a fart erupted from the tailpipe, making the car jerk forward and suddenly check itself, so that his forehead nearly smashed into the steering wheel. In fury he whacked the wheel with his fist. The Chevy retaliated by swerving off the blacktop and ploughing a furrow with its nearside wheels through the sandy hardfill.

  Cursing, Kersh hauled it back, blinking hard against the glare of the setting sun beaming directly into his one good eye.

  He’d been on highway 190 – Baton Rouge fifty miles behind him – somewhere between Opelousas and Eunice. This was Cajun country. The ‘gator shitkickers of the Louisiana swampland, Kersh thought of them with a derisive snigger. Them good ole boys could neither read nor write and slept with their own sisters. Ate spiced redfish and black beans for breakfast. Ughh! Last thing he wanted was to get stranded out here. They’d bend this city boy over a barrel and pump him raw.

  He was heading for Shreveport and had a long way to go. Over 160 miles by his rough reckoning. He hoped to Christ the battered old Chevy would make it. Now, as well as grinding ball bearings to bits, the engine was giving off a high-pitched whine like a hornet trapped in a fruit jar.

  As usual a feeling of impotent rage gripped him in its iron claws.

  Why always him? Other guys seemed to get the breaks. He was still waiting for his. Nothing ever went the way he planned it. Nothing ever came out right for Frank Kersh. And that included his life.

  An hour later, and the sun gone down, he turned off 190 at Ragley and took route 171 north to De Ridder. He really was in wild and woolly hick territory now. The locals probably had tails and howled at the moon. Even though born and bred in the neighbouring state of Mississippi, this was an alien world to Kersh. Literally. They spoke a different lingo – French or some such, somebody had told him. How in hell could you talk foreign and call yourself American, for chrissakes? It was unpatriotic.

  He switched on the radio for company, but all he could find on every band was a cacophony of frantic footstomping to fiddle and accordion, played so fast it was like one long screech that made his head ache. He turned it off in disgust. Rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll was up his street. Something with a solid backbeat; better than this monkey music any day of the week.

  Kersh peered through the bug-smeared windshield into the yellow tunnel of light formed by the single headlight and its flickering companion. The Chevy, like him, was one-sighted too. Drooping cypresses hung over the road, with stretches of soggy marsh backing off into the remote interior wilderness. Now and then he spied the dim glow of a homestead. When it had swept by, the darkness returned, a solid and impenetrable wall of night that seemed to close in on him from all sides.

  More for comfort than because he actually felt hungry, Kersh stuffed the last of the cold, greasy double cheeseburger and onions into his mouth and flushed it down with a gulp of Carlsberg Export. Eating it reminded him that he’d broken his last ten spot at a truck stop on the outskirts of Baton Rouge to buy it. And thinking that made him glance in panic at the fuel gauge. He was a quarter full – or, according to Kersh’s stinking rotten luck, three-quarters empty. With 120 or so miles yet to go. Jee-zwzz.

  He slowed the Chevy as the faltering yellow beam picked out a sign, white letters on a blue background. LEESVILLE. He missed the population figure underneath, but Kersh didn’t need to know it. Another hick town for definite, couple of bars, clapboard church, wooden houses with peeling paint and sagging porches. Couldn’t be anything otherwise out here on the backside of nowhere. His hands tightened on the wheel. Question is, buddy boy, Kersh thought, is the gas station slap bang on main street or some ways out? The gas station would be quiet at this hour – after ten – but anything too central would be bad news. And he fretted it might be one of those with a night window: the cashier safe and snug behind toughened wiremesh glass, an alarm button next to the register begging a thumb to press it and wake the burg from the dead.

  It was a bad habit of his, creating problems before they arose – or that maybe didn’t even exist anyway. He was freaking himself out without any real cause. Just hang loose, Kersh told himself. Play the scene as it comes, on the wing. Experience had taught him that, if nothing else, in his 32 lousy years of life.

  The gas station was on the final bend before 171 straightened out on its approach into town. Not perfect, not ideal by any means, but it could have been plenty worse. Main street was a ragged cluster of lights about half a mile away. A pick-up truck piled high with swo
llen sacks of grain went by in the opposite direction as Kersh drove in and pulled up alongside the pumps. The Chevy’s engine gave an ominous clunk as he switched off. Hope to Christ the bastard would start up again. If it didn’t he’d drop a lighted match in the fuel tank and boom the motherfucker out of existence. And serve it right.

  A red-haired teenage kid with rolls of flab overlapping his jeans waddled across and unhooked the pump. He had a freckled, moonlike face, big and empty, and dreamy vacant eyes that gently smiled as Kersh told him to fill her up. Watching the kid through the side mirror, Kersh flipped open the glove compartment and slid the semiautomatic into the inside pocket of his dark-blue windbreaker. No need to check if it was fully loaded: it always was. He got out and performed a show of stretching, arching his back and angling his head to take a general look-see from his good side. No one else inside the cabin, its bare and shabby interior lit by cold blue fluorescents. Coke machine, a rack of magazines, a small TV on a shelf above the counter showing one of the Dirty Harry movies. Kersh couldn’t see a cash register, but maybe the place didn’t run to one. Same difference if the cash was kept in a drawer or a tin box.

  With the kid still busy at the pump, he ambled across and stepped up on to the narrow wooden stoop, letting the screen door bang shut behind him. When the kid came in a few minutes later, wiping his hands on a rag, Kersh was at the magazine rack, his back to the door.

  He waited until the kid was behind the counter and then slowly swivelled, one hand inside the windbreaker, the other hanging free at his side. He felt cool and easy. Not even breathing heavy.

  ‘All the cash you have, sonny. Hand it over. Now.’

  The red-haired kid was staring at the lump Kersh’s hand made inside the windbreaker. Then he did something that made Kersh frown: he smiled a big empty smile. What the hell was this? Did the punk think he was playing games? Kersh took a step forward, hand still inside his windbreaker, and then he gawped.

  The kid had reached below the counter-top and was holding a gun in his fat fist. From where Kersh stood it looked like a .41 Magnum. And the damn barrel wasn’t even shaking. Kersh felt his bowels loosen. It was a new and unsettling experience for him – situation reversed as he felt the same cold terror the victims of his petty thieving over the years had felt with a gun pointing at them. Could he run? Could he make the door before a blast from that fearsome weapon spread his guts over the wooden floor? No way, not with sweat running from his armpits and legs like jello.

  And then, more incredibly still, the kid said:

  ‘Go ahead, scumbag –’ mouth widening in a grin that revealed a row of baby teeth with gaps in them make my day.’

  Kersh couldn’t believe he was actually hearing this. Who did this shitkicker think he was, Dirty Harry? The younger generation watched too many movies.

  Kersh looked up at the screen, where Clint Eastwood was chasing one of the bad guys down a dark alley. He looked back at the kid, who was still wearing the same gawpy grin on his fat face, and as he stared at the gun it suddenly came to him. The kid was play-acting. He had a mental age of five or six, and the Magnum he was holding, for God’s sake – was a toy. It was plastic.

  Kersh found a watery grin. It was one of sheer relief. The sense of relief lasted three seconds, and then turned in a trice to a boiling cauldron of rage. To think that a moment ago he’d nearly crapped his pants! This submental shitkicker with the vacant smirk had made him feel, and probably look, too, like a glazed-eyed bunny rabbit quivering before the dripping fangs of a diamondback. Slowly, he brought out his bunched fist from inside the windbreaker and spread his hand to show that it was empty, and at the same time raised his other hand and fired from the hip, the slug taking the kid in the second roll of fat above his jeans. Yessirree. The old sucker punch. Nothing inside the windbreaker, sonny boy, except a bulging fist, the real hardware tucked into the back of his pants, the butt very conveniently placed for his free hand as it swept up behind and performed a fancy twirl to bring it on target, a manoeuvre he’d practised a hundred times in the mirror.

  A look of surprise replaced the grinning gawp. The toy gun dropped from the kid’s fingers, and he clutched himself with both hands: blood leaking from his belly and running down inside and outside his bulging jeans and spreading over the floor. He took a step backward and slithered in it, did a funny shuffling walk in reverse and then tried a cartoon-character backflip which took him down with a crash that shook the floor, smack on to his fat ass.

  Kersh peered over the counter. Flat on his back on the wet floor, the kid looked up at him. He was fully conscious and still surprised.

  Kersh tapped the barrel of his gun on the counter. ‘You gonna cause me trouble, fella?’

  The kid just stared at him. No more trouble there. Problem was, the kid – feeble-brained or not – would remember the lank fair hair and bad eye and thin puckered scar down the cheek. It took a long while to die from a gut wound, Kersh reminded himself – if you died at all. He couldn’t risk the gamble.

  Plus, on top of everything, there was his own feeling to take into account. That he’d quaked in his shoes because a red-haired hicksville cretin with a freckled moon face had pulled a toy gun on him. That rankled. It riled. It fucking inflamed him. Frank Kersh didn’t like being made to look a sucker.

  So to make amends he popped another through the kid’s throat, one into the heaving chest, and finished off the clip with three into the lard-barrel belly.

  Should do it. The kid wasn’t going anywhere from now on, except maybe (if he’d been good to his momma) to sing with the heavenly host. Have a swell trip and don’t bother to write, asswipe.

  Kersh didn’t want to get his boots all messy in that red swamp behind the counter. At full stretch he plucked out the bills from the cash drawer. Not much for his pains, so he scooped out the nickels and dimes as well. At the end of the counter, next to the window, there was a display of candy bars and lifesavers. Kersh picked up two handfuls of his favourite Twinkie bars and filled his pockets. He shook his head, thinking, Make my day! What a jerk-off. Too much TV; too many movies.

  Already pushing through the screen door, he had a sudden second thought. More like a first thought, and a new one. The kid was dead mutton, no doubt about it. But didn’t the cops need a body to bring a murder rap? He was sure he’d read that somewhere. You couldn’t file a homicide charge on the basis of a body that couldn’t be found. Yeah, he was sure that was kosher. Lack of substantive evidence, or some such legal spiel.

  Kersh debated with himself for a long time, nearly fifteen seconds.

  He didn’t look forward to it, what with the awful sticky mess the kid was in, but he was coming to the view that it had to be done. There were swamps all the way along route 171, and that thought finally decided him.

  Tasty midnight snack for the ‘gators on all that white blubber and it was farewell freckle face.

  After wrapping the body in three or four burlap sacks he found in a back storeroom, Kersh got the soggy lump into the trunk and slammed the lid. The Chevy’s springs groaned. Fat fucker. On the bright side, he now had a free full tank of gas, and if his old pal the Chevy bastard behaved itself and started he was long gone out of here.

  It did, and ten minutes later he was beyond Leesville and heading north through a night as black as the devil’s armpit.

  ‘Do you have any regrets about killing that boy, Frank?’

  ‘Is that it, the whole deal?’ Kersh sat up. ‘They want me to feel sorry for what I done?’ He was suddenly angry. ‘Listen. That dumb jerk deserved everything he got, trying to act the tough guy. No, I’m not sorry, you can tell ’em that. I stay the way I am – the one and only original Frank Kersh. They can have my soul and welcome, but I don’t regret a damn thing.’

  ‘That’s all right then.’

  There was silence in the hot, still room. The guard had his head bent, reading from a magazine. Somewhere a fly buzzed, battering against a window pane. At least it had a chance, Kersh thought.
Find a crack somewhere. Zoom up in the air and over the wall of Louisiana State Pen. If only, if only… It was all the dumb jerk’s fault for reaching under the counter. There was no need for it. And added to the kid’s mistake was Kersh’s error in thinking that without a body the DA couldn’t bring a murder-one rap. He was wrong. It was Murder Uno. With or without a body. Bloodstains in the car trunk were enough. The blood group and hair matched the dead kid’s. End of story.

  May-Beth gazed at him calmly, hands folded placidly in her lap. ‘There is a way out, Frank.’

  He said bitterly, ‘Sure, I know that. Hire me a big-shot lawyer. The two-bit shyster they foisted on to me couldn’t have proved Snow White was a virgin. What is it with you? Trying to fill my last nine days with some steady sunshine? Hey, tell you how you can help – sleep with the warden and get me a pardon. On second thought, that wouldn’t help my chances any. A face like yours could stop traffic.’ He sucked the last smoke out of his cigarette and ground it in the tinfoil ashtray. ‘I’m coming out of here a piece of burnt toast. There is no other way. So forget it.’

  May-Beth said quietly, ‘When the Messengers speak of eternal life, they mean it. They have the power to save you. There is a moment between life and death, before the soul leaves the body. You can remain there, frozen in that single instant of time –’

  Kersh interrupted harshly, ‘You don’t freeze when they shoot two thousand volts through you. Ain’t you heard? You fry. Your eyeballs melt. Sparks come outta here –’ He tapped his temple. His lips thinned as his good eye roamed up to her intent stare. ‘It isn’t my soul that needs saving, you stupid bitch. It’s my body.’

  ‘There isn’t much time, Frank. Just say you’ll agree to it.’

  ‘They’re offering me one extra second, right? I don’t reckon much to their eternal salvation if that’s how long it lasts. And what do they get out of it? Another soul they can chalk up on the big scoreboard in the sky?’