time nothing came out. Ripping off his shirt, he had wrapped a torn sleeve around the wound, stemming the blood.
For a while he’d lain still, thinking about all the things he would do to her once he had the strength to move.
Faint voices, panicked, hushed, had reached his ears. It was difficult to tell what they were saying. Whether it was down to his addled mind or sheer intuition he did not know, but something told Lester to get to his feet; to run. Staggering up, he lurched into the night, the moon hovering above, pale and lonely in the open black sky. When he came to the road he fell to his knees, gasping for air. Sleep threatened to take him.
The explosion seemed to happen in his head, so painful it was, that when he looked round to see those bright orange flames dancing in the distance, he thought he was imagining it. It took another moment to connect with the fact that the raging fire was in the direction he’d just come from. His trailer was burning. His funeral pyre.
He had kept running, feet dragging on the road, not knowing where he was going. With each stumble he half expected the cops to pull him over–someone, anyone. They never came. Eventually, wandering blindly further and further, deeper into the night, delirious, he’d fallen down on the road and passed out. He had escaped death once. This time it could claim him.
Next he knew, his aching body was being dragged into the cab of a truck. It was light. His eyes were stinging and he had a taste in his mouth like shit, bitter and cloying. His lips were dry and cracked, his head throbbing.
The truck belonged to a long-distance driver named Big Carl. Big Carl wore a string vest and had arms like hams, mapped over with vein-green tattoos. There was a donkey in a sombrero swinging off the rear-view mirror. They drove for what felt like hours, passing the state border as night was creeping in. Lester drifted in and out of sleep, his tongue lolling fat in his mouth, thick as meat. At a gas station Big Carl produced a bottle of water, which Lester drank thirstily.
Big Carl lived in a beat-up house, down a dirt track in the middle of nowhere. He said he’d put Lester up in return for him looking after the place–Lester hadn’t raised a finger in that direction for years but he had neither the energy nor the inclination to object.
Lester passed a miserable two months like this, slave to the demands of his keeper. Something was changing in his head, like he was wired differently somehow. His memory was patchy, he kept falling over; he was forgetting things like his middle name and three times four. Hours passed where he could only stare at a wall, the rest of the world was too complicated, too plural. Weak and confused, he tried to make sense of what had happened that fateful night. It kept escaping him, like sand running through his fingers.
But over time, as his strength returned, Lester slowly put together the pieces. He worked out why no one was coming for him. They thought he was dead, everybody did. His sister would have told the cops that he’d set fire to the trailer himself. She was a good little liar.
Surely she would be discovered. Somebody had to know where he was … didn’t they?
He would go back to Belleville. Sort Laura out once and for all.
One morning in June, Lester made his escape–Big Carl was on a long-distance trip and Lester had no intention of ever seeing him again. He was free. Revenge was close.
But, walking the streets of a deadbeat town, feeling conspicuous as only a freed man can, Lester’s resolve began to waver. He caught his reflection in a shop window. He had gained weight. His hair was different; he seemed taller. There was a steeliness in his eyes that he admired. He felt stronger than he ever had.
Lester Fallon had defied death–there was nothing he could not do now.
That night he sheltered under a flattened cardboard box, kicking the rats that gnawed at his ankles. He slept fitfully in short, lucid bursts. Then, around dawn, a voice came to him. The voice was other-worldly, primal, and it spoke to his core. It seemed to come from within him and outside him at the same time, and told him simply this–that revenge would come some years from now, and the moment of that revenge would end the world as they knew it.
The end of the world as they knew it …
A new plan began to take shape. What was there to go back for? Belleville and the people in it were as dead to him as he was to them. He would wait for Laura, biding his time. The scene of his vengeance would be all the sweeter for it.
Over the next year, with no possessions or money, Lester decided to reinvent himself. He became Nelson Price, a name he’d seen on a reel of daytime movie credits, and hitched a ride to Bosfield, a town not far outside Indianapolis. There, drinking one night, he had hooked up with a local fraudster named Irvin Chance, owner of a ginger balding head and russet handlebar moustache, as well as a notorious strip joint on East Meridian. In return for waiting tables, Irvin gave him a bed in the house he shared with his wife, an overweight, unhappy-looking broad called Anna-May. The work was hard and unrewarding, but it was a roof over his head.
Things became complicated when Anna-May started spilling her guts, confiding that Irvin hadn’t paid her that kind of attention in months.
‘He used to say I had the sweetest ass in the whole of the state,’ she’d slur, shoving her fat hands into a bag of chips. ‘Now he won’t even look at me.’
At first Lester wished she’d shut the hell up, but as Anna-May’s drunken, rambling confessions took on a new light, things began to get interesting. It turned out that Anna-May was the only daughter, once young and beautiful, of a wealthy oil baron, but had been cast out of her family when they’d discovered her relationship with neighbourhood bad boy Irvin. In fact, Lester discovered, it was she who had financed Irvin’s bar, and she, despite her apparent indolence, who held complete control over their finances.
Lester saw his way in. Sex. Anna-May didn’t get it any more–he could give it to her. It was the perfect transaction. Soon it transpired that Anna-May had never had a man go down on her, and, though it made bile rise in Lester’s throat every time, he grit his teeth and got to it. In only a matter of weeks Irvin was phased out of the marriage–and, with special indulgences from Lester, out of the bar. Lester stepped up as owner, choked back disgust in bed every night with a sweating, insatiable Anna-May, and had soon saved enough to make it on his own.
Eighteen months later, Nelson Price–who, of course, despite Anna-May’s concentrated search efforts, did not exist–disappeared quietly into the night. Just in time, for Anna-May had started gabbing on about marriage, which was about as far away from his intentions as it was possible to get. Over the months his hunger for revenge had not waned–it was fiercer now than ever. He took as much cash and jewellery as he could and headed for New York. That was nearly eight years ago now.
Some time after, downing shots in a bar on West 14th Street, he had seen a face he recognised. She was in a low-budget TV drama about a woman who falls in love with her psychiatrist.
Laura.
A year later, his sister was starring in a sitcom you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing in a store window–one of the best-loved American shows of the last twenty years or some crap. Lester’s heart had turned to stone, hardened by the fist of his loathing. Was she still fucking her murderer boyfriend? He didn’t think she was. It wasn’t until months later that he found out about Robert St Louis and his hotel empire.
They couldn’t run for ever from the fact of their crime: they had killed a man in cold blood and yet they just carried on like nothing had happened. Everybody did.
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