18 Seconds Page 3

  A church bell tolled, for it was Sunday, and those who elected to worship were ushered from their blocks into various congregations. Earl Oberlein Sykes, who chose not to, watched the storm’s approach from his cell.

  A buzzer sounded in the bowels of the building, electronic doors opened and closed, followed by shouts and cadent footsteps.

  The April winds howled through the bastions, slapping snap hooks on flagpoles with a monotonous clanking of steel on steel that reminded Sykes of sailboat riggings in the stormy harbors of his youth.

  The inner walls of the prison measured four stories high and six feet thick, a fortress of red brick topped with rolls of razor wire and miles of filament so hot it would liquefy your belt buckle. Two outer perimeters of twenty-foot cyclone fencing were similarly electrified, with three additional coils of razor wire and pressure-sensitive alarms built into the ground. Guards walked the towers with SIG Sauer sniper rifles; heat-sensitive infrareds panned the complex’s concentric tiers of security, all of them autonomous and all of them lethal.

  Beyond the walls lay hundreds of thousands of square miles of barren plain—a no-man’s-land with no signs, no roads, no lights, no landmarks, and no hope of outrunning a helicopter in pitch darkness.

  Sykes no longer dwelled on the walls or on what was on the other side. Oklahoma wasn’t his concern anymore.

  He backed up to his bunk and sat in boxers that were soaked, like his body, with sweat. His sallow flesh sagged for lack of sun and bore faded green tattoos on both arms—one an evil leprechaun, the other a naked woman. He wore LOVE etched across the knuckles of his left hand and HATE across the knuckles of his right. His eyes were a liverish brown and draped with reptilian lids. A thick, wormlike scar ran jaggedly down the front of his neck, where an inmate had cut his throat with soup can lids soldered together. A brown, cauliflower-like tumor had formed behind one ear and another grew on his groin. A quarter-size patch of dead skin, which he would scratch until it bled, rankled the back of his neck.

  Sykes wiped his underarms with a hand towel and dabbed his face. Sweat continued to pour from his temples and his brow and belly and, Jesus, it was hot.

  Rain splattered the window and abruptly stopped. He pushed the towel against his abdomen and bared his teeth, rolling off the cot and moving fast for the toilet. Something repugnant slithered in his belly and his bowels let loose all at once.

  He’d been thinking about Susan Markey again this morning, all the usual things—wondering what she was doing right now, where she was living and with whom. Wondering when she last thought of him, if she’d thought of him, and what she would think of him now. If she knew.

  He saw her in his mind’s eye in his old Chevy van, cross-legged in her hippie skirt, lips smeared red, eating from a basket of strawberries that she would buy—or more likely steal—from the truck stands outside the Pine Barrens. Her green eyes were always wild, waiting in rapt attention for him to tell her where they were going next, what they were going to do; the anticipation drove her crazy.

  A chill ran down his spine. He finished on the toilet and pushed the button to flush, then got unsteadily to his feet and made his way to the bunk, wiping his mouth with the hand towel once more.

  The sweating stopped abruptly, his arms and legs prickled with goose bumps, and he shivered. Hot and cold, cold and hot. It had been like this all week.

  A hollow ringing sounded on the steps. More gates slid open and closed. He stared at the steel bars, then at the steel walls, the ceiling, floor, mirror, sink, toilet, bed—everything steel. He hated the sound of metal more than anything else on this earth. He was a monkey in a cage, marking time by the opening and closing of his master’s doors. The waking time, the feeding time, the exercise time…all preceded by their own unique metallic noise.

  The shivering worsened. It was nerves, he knew. He’d been warned about getting the nerves. They said it would happen like this. Even the toughest of inmates went through it, though he had never imagined it would happen to him.

  Syko Sue, her friends had begun to call her. The play on words stuck and he’d gone around Wildwood painting it on railroad trestles, overpasses, concrete walls, and boardwalks.

  She was anti-everything and liked the name, liked to think of herself as an anarchist and despised authority of any kind. She would have joined the Weathermen or the SLA if she’d moved to a big city. In small-town Wildwood, she did the next best thing. She joined Sykes.

  She was into sex, oh Jesus, she was into sex, but it wasn’t about sex or a lack of inhibition with Susan. Susan wanted to obliterate her past. She wanted to escape the shattered dreams of a once-perfect childhood; of an abusive, pious father, a former police captain who got himself indicted for racketeering; of her pretty mother, who walked into the ocean rather than face the humiliation.

  She wanted to hurt someone, anyone, even herself. She wanted to inflict pain on other human beings. And in the bucolic seaside resort filled with the hippies of the Love Generation, it was only natural that Sykes, who simply radiated wrong-side-of-the-tracks appeal, caught her eye.

  He wasn’t like the others, all beads and blather. He was pure, unadulterated disorder, and it pulled her to him like a moth to the flame.

  He knew she liked the reactions they got when she brought him around her friends from school. She especially liked to shock her father and his cop friends who used to visit the house for holidays and backyard barbecues. Back before the rumors of an indictment came around.

  But Sue Markey wasn’t all show. She had an insatiable appetite for danger. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do, save murder, and she knew that Sykes’s tastes ran even stronger. Susan had been to the bus. Susan knew what happened to those women in the bus.

  He threw the dirty towel in a corner and looked at the Timex Indiglo he wore on the underside of his wrist. Rain hammered on the window once more, this time continuing. He scratched the dead skin at the base of his skull and something wet gave way. If the cancer doesn’t kill you, the cure most surely will. He hacked and spat at the sink.

  Sykes had never had money growing up, not even the middle-class kind of money that Susan Markey was accustomed to, but he knew all too well what money looked like, smelled like. He’d been bused from his ramshackle trailer park out of the Pine Barrens to Central High in Wildwood. He’d seen the Northside mothers picking up their daughters in their shiny new convertibles, gold glittering around their necks, their skin scented with nice perfume; how badly he had wanted them. How badly he had wanted to be one of them.

  “Want a ride?”

  Bianca Ashley was one of them: long hair down to the hem of her miniskirt, brand-spanking-new Mustang convertible for her sixteenth birthday. She’d caught him staring at it after school. The black paint was so liquid it looked like you could put your hand through it.

  She brushed by him and threw her books in the backseat.

  “Say pretty please.”

  They had never spoken before that moment. Bianca had ignored him all of the seven years they had been going to the same schools.

  “Come on, boy. Beg a little and I’ll give you a ride.”

  Sykes had just stared at her, not knowing if she was serious. She jumped behind the wheel and her checkered skirt leaped up to reveal a pair of pink panties that she was slow to hide. His eyes fixed on her long bare legs. “Yeah, cool,” he heard himself say. “Yeah, please. I’d like a ride.”

  She turned the key and when he stepped toward the door she punched the accelerator, flinging mud all over his jeans as she fishtailed her way out of the parking lot. “Yeah, right, Syko,” she’d laughed over her shoulder.

  In that moment, Sykes knew that whatever he wanted in life he was going to have to take. That no one was ever going to give him anything. And he knew that one day he would meet Bianca Ashley again, and when he did, it would be her turn to learn about pain.

  But that was all a very long time ago. Now was what mattered. Sykes had to concentrate on now. On what was
left.

  The small-town cops never connected Sykes and Markey to their crimes. They were far too busy with the thousands of hippies swarming the coastal communities, overwhelmed with human emergencies when most of them had only ever written parking tickets before. The state police were called in to assist on the more serious cases, but the locals were jealous of them and there was so much enmity between the two divisions that little was ever accomplished.

  Meanwhile, Sykes and Markey kidnapped, robbed, and burglarized with impunity.

  Their union was more than mere occasion; one could say it was a cataclysmic event. Individually they posed a societal threat, and each was certainly destined for a life of judicial intervention. Together they formed a uniquely chilling menace. A predator with two minds and one will. Markey wanted the dissolution of society. Sykes wanted to take what he had been denied by birthright. They complemented each other in some twisted way, brains and brawn, different backgrounds, different triggers, but equally extreme and depraved. If Sykes hadn’t panicked and run that bus off the road, the cops might never have caught on to them, at least not for years. Not back then. Not in the chaos of the seventies.

  His recollection of the accident was still hazy. It was winter; Susan and he had been breaking into vacant luxury homes on North Beach for several days while bingeing on speedballs. They used a set of masters he’d bought from a cleaning contractor. They were soaring high when they picked up a shivering hitchhiker and her kid on the road out of town. Markey took care of the toddler while Sykes raped and then disposed of the woman in Blackswamp. When he went back to the van, it was gone, along with the kid. Susan Markey had taken them both.

  He’d walked home, borrowed his neighbor’s car, and driven the strip on Atlantic Avenue. She wasn’t in any of the usual places. No one had seen the van.

  Looking back, there had definitely been something going on with her around the holidays. She was having mood swings and he remembered their fighting over something that last day, though what it might have been, God only knew with all the drugs they had been doing.

  Sykes was driving between his trailer and the boardwalk for the second time that afternoon when a police car rolled up behind him. He stepped on the gas and started to flee because he was still wearing the pants he’d worn when he’d killed the woman. He was just pulling away from the police car, a mile or so from the Atlantic Avenue strip, when he rounded a corner into the lane of a school bus.

  He never did see Susan Markey again. She never showed at any of the hearings or trials. He never read a word about the kid or any of the half-dozen women who had gone missing in the Wildwood area during those years.

  Years later Sykes received a letter from Susan while in prison. She told him she was glad about what had happened. She said she’d found God and prayed that he would do the same. Markey, who once thought the world was God’s pigpen and he its perverted master, had found God. She—who said that no one ought to feel good; who moralized that the world’s populations died of starvation while the rich cheated on taxes, gorged themselves with alcohol and food, whored and sent their children to schools to learn how to become just like them—had told him they deserved to get fucked. Fuck all of them. If Sykes and she happened to come along and fuck up someone else’s life, it was no worse than they deserved.

  Sykes knew she hadn’t ratted him out. If she had, they would have taken him back to New Jersey and tried him for murder. If someone had found all those bodies in the junkyard, it would have made national news. But no one ever did, which meant that Markey hadn’t wanted to confess to her crimes beyond some priest behind a confessional, and that she and God were content to leave well enough alone as long as he was in prison.

  Now it was twenty-nine—nearly thirty—years later, and Sykes had spent most of the days of his life in prison—all for a fucking traffic accident. How ironic was that?

  It had taken him a long time to come to the realization—the realization that he’d gotten life. The public defender assigned to represent Sykes told him to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter, which would get him two years with probation. It was what all the drunk-driving fatalities were getting in the seventies.

  But Wildwood police chief Jim Lynch wanted more and when he presented papers to prosecute Sykes for second-degree murder rather than manslaughter, the voters rallied around him and an election-year judge was all ears. Murder two was defined as “taking a life while engaged in the commission of a crime.” It did not require the specific intent to murder. Chief Lynch proffered the argument that because Sykes was operating a motor vehicle under the influence of illegal narcotics when he obliterated the seventeen lives on the school bus, he was guilty of murder, not manslaughter.

  Sykes was indicted, tried, and sentenced to life times two. The other fifteen trials were set aside in the interest of justice. Sykes had his life sentences. More trials would serve only to delay the healing that the town so badly needed. Only the mercy of an otherwise liberal judge allowed the sentences to run concurrently.

  Like most serial rapists and killers, Sykes had thought a lot about his crimes over the years. The difference between Sykes and most other cons was that his crimes had gone unnoticed. The killing frenzy and the ease with which he kidnapped and disposed of his victims provided a veritable kaleidoscope of images: arms, legs, stomachs, hair, wild eyes, and pleading lips. He thought of Susan’s own beautiful body and the deliriously erotic games they’d played. Looking back on the early years of his incarceration, he could remember thinking about little else. All he had then were his memories.

  But now they were coming back to life. Susan had become a liability again. Susan, who knew what no other person on earth knew—where the bodies lay.

  Sykes pulled on khaki trousers and heavy shoes and took a Marlboro from a pack on the stainless steel table, tapping it down on the face of his watch. He struck a match and raised it to the cigarette, admiring the way the woman’s breasts swelled on his bicep, just the way they had when he was seventeen years old. He stood and threw the match at the stainless steel sink, hawking up something yellow that he spat into the toilet.

  He blew smoke at the ceiling, the cigarette dangling from his lower lip as he rested his shoe on the sink and laced it, and wondered how it would feel.

  A door opened at the end of the corridor. He could hear footsteps approaching. He dragged fingers through what was left of his dull gray hair, scratched the sore on the back of his neck, and approached the bars.

  It was time.

  Ice pelted the ground as they escorted him across the recreation yard. Though it was still morning, the sky had gone dark and the floodlights glared brightly. He was wearing orange coveralls with his wrists shackled to chains around his waist, which were shackled to chains around his ankles.

  Low, chalky clouds raced over the walls, luminescent in the spots along the tower. Lightning stabbed through the darkness, revealing a lone silhouette at a fourth-floor window. The prison’s psychiatrist. Sykes could make out the soft tapering of her shoulders in the shifting strengths of light. He looked up at her and smiled.

  On the perimeter, a beacon switched from red to green and revolved slowly as heavy steel gates silently rolled back on Teflon bearings. He looked next at the men pacing the catwalks, rifles at the ready, razor wire flashing in the arc of the searchlights. He stepped into a wire chute and walked between his escorts to a small outbuilding at the base of the sally port. The gates rolled closed and the beacons switched back to red.

  The heart of the storm struck all at once, dropping small spirals in the recreation yard, rattling fences, whistling through the brick turrets, bombarding hail, and hammering the steel rooftops of the outbuildings with machinelike precision until the noise was deafening.

  The guards ran with Sykes, slamming the door behind them. Then advanced him toward a scarred metal desk, where he submitted his thumbprint and a signature. The guards led him to a small room with a bench chained to a wall. They removed his shackles and cov
eralls, which they flung in a canvas bucket, and gave him a belt and a denim shirt, a check for eighteen thousand dollars, and a fifty-dollar bill. Then they led Sykes to a door on the far side of the wall, where one of them pushed a button that released a heavy mechanical latch. The guard opened the door and let Sykes out into the storm. A plain white van idled outside the fence with its taillights glowing red and its double rear doors wide open.

  The hail came in waves as thick as the rain and he raised his face to meet it, welcoming the stinging cold on his forehead, his neck, his mouth open and filling with ice as one of the frozen slivers drew blood from his lips.

  He put a foot to the bumper just as another bolt of lightning illuminated his face. His eyes were wild with excitement as he stepped into the darkness, licking the blood from his lips and thinking how sweet it tasted to be free.

  3

  SUNDAY, MAY 1

  WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY

  Lieutenant Kelly Lynch-O’Shaughnessy parked her cruiser in the Cresse Avenue public lot, climbing the ramp to the boardwalk and looking north toward Strayer’s Amusement Pier. The pier extended over the dark ocean to where the first line of waves was breaking. It was a dismal sight this time of year. Wooden scaffolds and frames of amusement rides stood dormant until Memorial Day weekend, when the tourists began to trickle back into town.

  She crossed to the opposite side of the boardwalk and descended the stairs to the beach. A crowd of policemen milled about; pink-faced rookies wearing yellow rain slickers walked a grid search back and forth along the beach.

  It was a gray, unseasonably chilly day. She could feel the sand overtaking the sides of her shoes and reached down to remove them. Her panty hose would not survive, but heels were impossible in the sand.

  She wore a navy plastic poncho—with LIEUTENANT stamped across the back—over her church clothes, a silk blouse and green wool skirt. She’d had to leave the girls with friends seated in a nearby pew.