Ride the Nightmare Read Online Free PDF

the red light at the foot of the hill. He sat, wordless, his hands clenched over the rim of the steering wheel. Then the light changed and he turned the Ford around the corner, heading north Helen closed her eyes as the car picked up speed. Maybe she could sleep, she thought.
    After a while, she opened her eyes again and looked at the highway. The headbeams hurried on ahead, picking out a path of light for the car. She tried to shift Connie a little.
    “She too heavy?” Chris asked. He sounded almost grateful for the excuse to speak to her.
    “It’s all right,” Helen answered.
    He stopped for the light at Santa Monica Canyon and Helen looked around the deserted intersection, at the steep hill angling off the highway, leading to the Palisades, the silent cafes and stores. The light changed and the car moved forward.
    “Helen?”
    “What?”
    “I’d like to tell you about it.”
    He waited as if expecting her to answer. Helen swallowed. “If you want,” she said.
    “I know you think I lied to you because I was afraid of going to prison,” he said. “That isn’t true. It was you I was afraid of. You were so young when we married, so unprepared for anything like that.”
    “That was seven years ago, Chris.”
    “I know, I know,” he said. “It’s just that I never knew how to tell you.”
    The Ford started along the stretch of highway that led toward Sunset Boulevard. “I was living in New Mexico when it happened,”he said. “I told you about it. That part wasn’t a lie. I was working for a bank. I picked up deposits from the big stores and factories in the area. It wasn’t much—”
    He broke off as Connie made a restless noise in her throat. Then, after several moments, he began again.
    “I was living with my mother,” he said. “We didn’t get along. I was seventeen but, to her, I was still a baby. So, more to defy her than for any other reason I started going to the skid row section of the city. I bowled there, played pool, just sat around sometimes. I didn’t belong there and I knew it. I would have preferred going to a concert or reading a book. But music and books I associated with my mother. I didn’t want to have anything to do with them.”
    He clenched his teeth and blew out breath. “That’s how I met Adam and Steve,” he said. “Later on, Cliff. The four of us sort of stuck together.”
    The thought of Chris associating with the dead man gave Helen a restless, uncomfortable sensation. It made her wonder if Chris was really what he’d always seemed to be.
    “We saw a lot of each other,” Chris was saying. “I don’t know if they worked except for Adam. He was an accountant at the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant; a sort of pseudo intellectual I guess you’d call him.”
    For a few moments, there was only the sound of the Ford pulling quickly around the dark curve of highway that ran beside the ocean-fronting restaurants and houses.
    “Why we decided to do what we did I’ll never know,” Chris said. “I can’t explain why four supposedly sane human beings should decide to commit a robbery.”
    Helen closed her eyes and shuddered. There it was. They’d robbed someone and, during the robbery, that someone had been killed. And Chris had been there. Her Chris.
    “We decided to rob one of the bank’s depositors,” Chris went on. “He owned a jewelry store. I’d told them how much money he deposited and—Adam picked him.”
    They drove past the entrance to Topanga Canyon and Helen wondered why he didn’t turn in, deciding that it was because there were too many people living there. There was no safe place for burying things.
    “We were to use Adam’s car,” Chris was saying. “I was supposed to knock on the back door of the jewelry store the way I usuallydid. When the man opened it, they were going in to get the money while I waited in the car.”
    His fingers tightened on the steering wheel and beneath his foot, the Ford accelerated steadily.
    “I was supposed to warn them