Читать книгу Betrayal In Blood - Michael Benson - Страница 9

CHAPTER 3

Three Gas Stations

The young woman with the dirty-blond ponytail had stayed behind the driver’s wheel while her boyfriend went into the house. She heard a sound—had it been the rifle, the same rifle that had always hurt her ears when she went target shooting?

The sound had not been loud, muffled by the thick walls of the big house, probably not loud enough to cause the neighbors to call the police. Shoot a gun off inside a mobile home and the whole court wakes up, although in some lots it is unlikely that anyone will call the cops.

She would say later that the sharp sound reminded her a bit of a champagne cork popping out of a bottle. Looking at her, you wouldn’t figure her for an expert in champagne corks—except for maybe those she had heard popping on TV.

Only a few minutes after she heard the sound, her boyfriend came out of the house. He had the gun and, surprisingly, had picked up a new weapon as well. He had a big kitchen knife and she could see in the blue light of the full moon that he was wet, shiny with blood.

The young man threw her gun into the backseat of the car and climbed in. She hit the gas and they hightailed it for home. From Pennicott Circle, she turned right onto Five Mile Line Road and headed south.

She navigated toward the expressway to take the quickest route home, but she was not thinking clearly. Later, she would almost laugh when she thought about it. Trying so hard to be cool, and they had gotten lost. She got on the expressway going north rather than south, which she didn’t realize until she saw signs announcing upcoming exits in the town of Irondequoit, a heavily populated middle-class suburb northeast of Rochester.

She got off the expressway and retraced her path on back roads, back to Penfield. After fifteen minutes of getaway driving, the woman had the car to within a mile of the crime scene. She was freaking out. That blood. They needed to stop.

They needed to clean up. They needed cigarettes. They needed beer. The woman pulled into the parking lot of what would turn out to be a series of gas stations, but they never got out of the car.

“You go,” the man said.

The woman, who was very young and appeared even younger, said, “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“No ID.”

Because of her youthful appearance and size, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to buy cigarettes without the kind of photo identification that gas stations demanded. She didn’t say if “no ID” meant she was driving without her license.

“I can’t go,” the man said. He didn’t have to say why. He just looked down at himself. He had blood on his clothes. They left the first gas station and drove around.

The woman told the man that she had brought along a spare pair of clothes for him, so he could change, if he wanted to. This, he did, while she drove around Penfield. The truth was that the woman had brought along a change of clothes for herself, too. That wasn’t unusual. Her lifestyle was such that she was often away from home overnight. But she had made it through the tough part of the night without soiling her clothes and didn’t need to change.

Once he was changed, she pulled into another gas station and the man got out to buy the beer and the cigarettes. The man cracked open the bottle of beer and they shared it. They had cigarettes, and felt a little better.

She pulled out of the gas station parking lot and back onto the road. They had planned to do lines after they got home, but they couldn’t hold out that long. They needed a boost bad. The third stop—to sniff coke—they made only one gas station down the road from the second.

Refreshed by the blast, they again headed south. When the woman got to Old Penfield Road, also known as Route 441, she turned right and headed west for a time. This took her to Route 65, also known as Clover Road, where a left-hand turn took her on a southerly route, headed toward Bloomfield.

On Clover Road, they passed a county park known as Mendon Ponds. There, the man rolled his window all the way down, pulled out the big bloody knife, and tossed it out the window. It would never be found.

Again there was blood on his hands from the knife. It was not the blood of a stranger. The woman who had died at the end of that knife and the man with the bloody hands had shared the same mother. She was his half sister.