Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 40 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

“It’s a possibility,” said Lily.

Now it was Lucas’ turn to shake his head. “You know, when you lay it out like that, it sounds pretty unlikely . . . .”

“The Crows are pretty unlikely,” the security man said. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll freeze the kitchen. Stick a monitor somewhere. If they come in, we’ll snap them up.”

“A trap,” said Lily.

“Right. Well—excuse me, I gotta go talk to the chief. And listen: Thanks.”

On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, Lucas shook his head again.

“It was a hole, but that’s not what the Crows are up to,” he said.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

In the car, Lily looked at her watch. “Why don’t we talk about it over lunch?”

“Sure. Want to go to my place?” Lucas asked.

Lily looked at him curiously. “This is a new attitude,” she said. “What happened?”

“Jennifer . . .”

“ . . . figured us out,” she finished, sitting up straight in her seat. “Oh, shit. Did she throw you out?”

“That’s about it,” Lucas conceded. He cranked the car and pulled away from the curb.

“You don’t think she’d call David, do you?” Lily asked anxiously.

“No. No, I don’t. She’s spent some time in bed with married men—I know some of them—and she’d never have thought of talking to their wives. She wouldn’t break up a marriage.”

“It makes me nervous,” Lily said. “And that must be why you’re so bummed out. You sat in Daniel’s office looking like your dog had died.”

“Yeah. It’s Jen and it’s this fuckin’ case. Larry killed, executed. And I’ve been useless. That feels weird, you know? When something important is happening—drugs, gambling, credit-card scams, burglary rings—I’ve got these contacts. Daniel comes to me and says, ‘Talk to your net. We got thirty-six burglaries on the southeast side last week, all small shit, stereos and TVs.’ So I go out and talk to the net. A good part of the time, I’ll find out what’s happening. I’ll squeeze a gambler and get sent to a fence and squeeze the fence and find a junkie, and squeeze the junkie and get the whole ring. But this thing . . . I got nobody. If they were regular crooks, I could find them. Dopers need dope or need to sell it, so they’re out and about. Burglars and credit-card hustlers need fences. But who do these guys need? An old friend. Maybe a former university professor. Maybe an old sixties radical. Maybe some kind of right-wing lunatic. Maybe Indian, maybe white. Who the fuck knows? I spent my whole goddamn life in this town, and most of the time I lived right around where the Indians live and I never saw them. I know a few, but it’s because they’re in drugs or burglary, or because they’re straight and I go to their stores. Other than that, I just don’t have a net out there. I’ve got a black net. I’ve got a white net. I’ve even got an Irish net. I don’t have an Indian net.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Lily said. “You got the tip on the trouble out at Bear Butte and found the photograph that I picked Hood out of.”

“I got tied up like a fuckin’ pig by Hood and almost got my brains blown out . . . .”

“You figured out how to squeeze the Liss woman and got the names of the Crows out of her. You’re doing all right, Davenport.”

“It’s been luck, and that ain’t going to hack it from here on out,” Lucas said, glancing at her. “So stop trying to cheer me up.”

“I’m not,” she said cheerfully. “We don’t have a lot to be cheerful about. As a matter of fact, unless we get real lucky, we’re completely fucked.”

“Not completely,” Lucas said. He downshifted, let the car wind down to a red light and touched her thigh. “But in an hour, who knows?”

Lily prowled through the house like a potential buyer, checking each of the rooms. Once, Lucas thought, he caught her sniffing the air. He grinned, said nothing and got two beers.

“Pretty good,” she said finally, as she came up the stairs from the basement. “Where’d you get that old safe?”

“I use it as a gun safe,” Lucas said, handing her a beer. “I picked it up cheap when they were tearing out a railroad ticket office here in St. Paul. It took six guys to get it in the house and down the stairs. I was afraid the stairs were going to break under the weight.”

She took a sip of beer and said, “When you invited me for lunch . . .”

“Yeah?”

“ . . . am I supposed to make it?”

“Oh, fuck no,” he said. “You got your choice. Pasta salad or chicken-breast salad with slices of avocado and light ranch dressing.”

“Really?”

“It’s a zoo over on Franklin and down on Lake,” Lily said as she worked down into her salad. “With Clay in town, the feebs are crawling all over the place.”

“Assholes,” Lucas grunted. “They’ve got no contacts, the people hate them, they spend twenty-four hours a day stepping on their dicks . . . .”

“They’re doing that now, in major numbers,” Lily agreed. She looked up from her chicken-breast salad and said, “That was delicious. That pasta looks pretty good too . . . .”

“Want a bite?”

“Maybe just a bite?”

After lunch, they went to the study and Lily pulled out one of Anderson’s notebooks for review. They both drank another beer, and Lucas put his feet up on a hassock and dozed.

“Warm in here,” Lily said after a while.

“Yeah. The furnace kicked in. I looked at the thermometer. It’s thirty-six degrees outside.”

“It felt cold,” she said, “but it’s so pretty, you don’t notice it. With the sun and everything.”

“Yeah.” He yawned and dozed some more, then cracked his eyes open as Lily peeled off her cotton sweater. She had a marvelously soft profile, he thought. He watched her read, nibbling at her lower lip.

“Nothing in the notebooks,” he said. “I’ve been through them.”

“There must be something, somewhere.”

“Mmm.”

“Why did the Crows kill Larry? They must have known that it would be counterproductive, in the political sense. And they didn’t have to kill him—he wasn’t helping us that much.”

“They didn’t know that. He was on TV after the raid on the Crows’ apartment . . . . Maybe they thought . . .”

“Ah. I didn’t think of that,” she said. Then she frowned. “I was on TV the other night. After Larry was cut.”

“Might be a good idea to lie low for a while,” Lucas said. “These guys are fruitcakes.”

“I still can’t figure Larry,” she said. “Or this other guy, Yellow Hand. Why kill Yellow Hand? Revenge? But revenge doesn’t make any sense in this kind of situation, against one of your own people. It just muddies things up. And they never mention those shootings in their press releases . . . .”

“I got no ideas,” Lucas said. After a moment he added, “Well, that’s not quite right. I do have one idea . . . .”

“What’s that?”

“Why don’t we sneak back to the bedroom?”

She sighed, smiled a sad smile and said, “Lucas . . .”

When they talked about it later, Lucas and Lily agreed that there wasn’t anything notable about the time they spent in bed that afternoon. The love was soft and slow, and they both laughed a lot, and between times they talked about their careers and salaries and told cop stories. It was absolutely terrific; the best of their lives.

“I’ve decided what I’m going to do about David,” Lily said later in the day, rolling out to the edge of the bed and putting her feet on the floor.

“What are you going to do?” Lucas asked. He had been putting on his jockey shorts, and he stopped with one foot through a leg hole.

“I’m going to lie to him,” she said.

“Lie to him?”

“Yeah. What we’ve got going, David and I, is pretty good. He’s a good guy. He’s attractive, he’s got a nice sense of humor, he worries about me and the kids. It’s just . . .”

“Keep talking.”

“There’s not the same kind of heat as there is with you. I can look at him sometimes and I get a lump in my throat, I can’t even talk. I just feel so . . . warm toward him. I love him. But I don’t get that kind of driving hot feeling. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah. I know.”

“I was thinking about it the other night. I was thinking, Here’s Davenport. He’s large and he’s rough and he makes himself happy first. He’s not always asking me if I’m okay, have I come. So what is this, Lily? Is this some kind of safe rape fantasy?”

“What’d you decide?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t decide anything, really. Except to lie to David.”

Lucas got fresh underwear from his chest of drawers and said, “Come on. I’ll give you a shower.”

She followed him into the bathroom. In the shower she said, “David wouldn’t do this either. I mean, you just kind of . . . work me over. Your hands are . . . in everything, and I . . . kind of like it.”

Lucas shrugged. “You’re hurting yourself. Stop talking about David, for Christ’s sake.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I better.”

When they got out of the shower, he dried her, starting the rough towel around her head and slowly working down her legs. When he finished, he was sitting on the side of the bathtub; he reached around her and pulled her pelvis against his head. She ruffled his hair.

“God, you smell good,” he said.

She giggled. “We’ve got to stop, Davenport. I can’t handle much more of this.”

They dressed slowly. Lucas finished first and lay on the bed, watching her.

“The hardest part of lying to him will be the first ten or fifteen minutes,” he said suddenly. “If you can get through the first few minutes, you’ll be okay.”

She looked up, a guilty expression on her face. “I hadn’t thought of that. The first . . . encounter.”

“You know when you bust a kid for something, a teenager, and you’re not sure that they did it? And they get that look on their face when you tell them you’re a cop? And then you know? If you’re not careful, you’ll look like that.”

“Ah, Jesus,” she said.

“But if you can get through the first ten minutes, just keep bullshitting along, you’ll stop feeling guilty and it’ll go away.”

“The voice of experience,” she said, with the tiniest stain of bitterness in her voice.

“I’m afraid so,” he said, a little despondently. “I don’t know. I love women. But I look at Sloan. You know, Sloan’s wife calls him Sloan? And they’re always laughing and talking. It makes me jealous.”

Lily dropped onto the foot of the bed. “Let’s not talk about this,” she said. “It’ll put me in an early grave. Like Larry.”

“Poor old Larry,” Lucas said. “I feel for the sonofabitch.”

The next day was sunny. Lucas had on his best blue suit with a black wool dress coat. Lily wore a dark suit with a blue blouse and a tweed overcoat. Just before they left Lily’s hotel room, TV3 had begun live coverage of Larry Hart’s funeral. The coverage opened with a shot of Lawrence Duberville Clay arriving at the funeral. Clay spoke a few clichés into a microphone and went inside.

“He thinks he’s the fuckin’ president,” Lucas said.

“He might be, in six more years,” Lily said.

The Episcopalian church was crowded with welfare workers and clients, cops and Indian friends and family. Daniel spoke a few words, and Hart’s oldest friend, whom he’d called brother, spoke a few more. The casket was closed.

The cortege to the cemetery shut down traffic in central Minneapolis for five minutes. The line of funeral cars ran bumper to bumper through the Loop, escorted by cops on motorcycles.

“It’s better out here,” Lily said as they walked into the cemetery. “Churches make me nervous.”

“This is the first place I ever saw you,” Lucas said. “Bluebird’s buried here.”

“Yup. Weird.”

Gravestones were scattered over twelve acres of slightly shaggy grounds, beneath burr oaks. Lucas supposed it would be a spooky place on moonlit nights, the oaks looming like shadows cast by the Headless Horseman. Anderson, stiff in a black suit, looking more like an undertaker than the undertaker, wandered over to stand beside them.

“This is where Rose E. Love is buried,” he said after a while.

“Oh, yeah? Where’d you find that out?” Lucas said.

“I found it in some notes with the old coroner’s files. There weren’t any relatives handy when she died, so they made a note on the death certificate about the funeral home and cemetery, in case somebody came looking for her.”

“Hmph.”

“Bluebird too,” Lily said.

“Mmm.”

After a while, Anderson wandered away, edging around the accumulation of funeralgoers. Film crews from all the local television stations and several foreign and national news services stood as close as seemed circumspect, as the cops rolled out their most martial ceremony. When it was over, they passed a folded flag to Hart’s mother and fired a military salute.

When the service ended, Anderson strolled up again.

“She’s right along here,” he said.

“Who?”

“Rose E. Love. I had them look up the gravesite in the cemetery office.”

Lucas and Lily, pulled along by Anderson’s interest, followed him a hundred yards to a gravesite under the boughs of an aging oak, a dozen feet from the wrought-iron fence surrounding the cemetery.

“Nice spot,” Anderson said, looking up into the spreading oak tree with its hand-size leaves still clinging to the branches.

“Yeah.” The grave had been kept up spotlessly; on the oblong pink granite stone was inscribed ROSE E. LOVE, in large letters, and below that MOTHER, in smaller script. Lucas looked around. “The grave looks a lot better than the other ones around here. You don’t think maybe Shadow Love stops by and works on it?”

Anderson shook his head. “Naw. The cemeteries don’t allow that. They’d get all kinds of shit going on. Me and my old lady bought our plots, you know, a couple of years back. They had all these care plans you could sign up for. Give them two thousand bucks now and they’ll take care of your grave in perpetuity. It’s called Plan Perpetual. You can put it right in your will.”

“That’s a little steep, isn’t it?” Lily asked. “Two thousand bucks?”

“Well, I mean, it’s forever,” Anderson said. “When the next ice age comes through, they’ll have a guy out here with a heater . . . .”

“Still a little steep.”

“If you can’t afford it all at once, you can pay by the year. You know, like seventy-five, a hundred bucks.”

“Gives me the creeps thinking about it,” Lucas said.

“He doesn’t plan to die,” Lily confided to Anderson.

“I hate to tell you this,” Anderson said as they wandered away from Rose Love’s grave, “but there comes a time in every man’s life . . .”

Lucas thought of a question for Anderson. As he opened his mouth to speak, the cold steel of a gun barrel touched him behind the ear. He jerked to a halt, staggered, closed his eyes, slapped his neck and let out a deep breath.

“Lucas?” asked Lily. She had stopped and was looking up at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said after a moment. “I was just daydreaming.”

“Jesus, I thought you had a heart attack or something.” Anderson was looking at him curiously, but Lucas shook his head and took Lily’s arm. Anderson broke off just before they got to the fence, and headed across the slope toward the cemetery road. Lily and Lucas strolled out of the cemetery through a side exit, away from the remnants of the somber crowd.

The question was lost.

“What do you want to do?” Lily asked.

“I think I might go back out on my regular net,” Lucas said. He had been thinking about his lie of the day before, and decided that talking to his regulars might be a good idea.

“Okay. You can drop me at the hotel,” Lily said. “I’m going to sit around and read Anderson’s notebooks for a while. Maybe go for a run before dinner.”

“I told you. There’s nothing in it—Anderson’s stuff,” Lucas said. “We won’t find them on paper. If the Crows are lying low, we need somebody to talk to us.”

“Yeah. But somewhere, there’s something. A name. Something. Maybe somebody from their prison days . . .”

The day was chilly, but the bright sunlight felt fine on Lily’s face. She walked with her head tilted back as they crossed the street, taking in the rays, and Lucas’ heart thumped as he walked behind her, marveling.

Shadow Love was parked a block away, watching them.

CHAPTER

24

Shadow Love stole a Volvo station wagon from the reserved floor of an all-day parking ramp. He drove it to the cemetery and waited a half-block from the hillside where they’d bury Hart.

The wait was a short one: Hart’s funeral moved like clockwork. The funeral cortege came in from the other side of the graveyard, but Davenport and the New York woman came in from his side. They all gathered on the hillside and prayed, and Shadow Love watched, slipping back to the warm moment when he slashed Hart, feeling the power of the knife . . . . The knife was in his pocket, and he touched it, tingling. No gun had ever affected him the same way, nor had the knife, before the Hart killing.

Blood made the stone holy. . . .

When the funeral ended, Davenport and the New York cop walked away from the crowd with another man, down the hill toward his mother’s grave. When they stopped, Shadow Love’s forehead wrinkled: They were at his mother’s grave. What for? What did they want?

Then they split up. The other man wandered away, and Davenport and the woman continued on until they crossed through the wrought-iron fence onto the sidewalk. The woman tilted her head back, smiling, the sunlight playing across her face. Davenport caught her arm as they got to the car and bumped his hip against hers. Lovers.

He would have trouble staying with the Porsche, Shadow Love thought, if Davenport stayed on city streets. He couldn’t get too close. But Davenport went straight to I– 35W and headed north. Shadow stayed several cars back as Davenport drove into the Loop, made one left and dropped the woman in front of her hotel.

As Shadow Love waited at the curb, Davenport pulled out of the hotel’s circular driveway, crossed two lanes of traffic and headed straight back toward him. Shadow Love turned in his seat and looked out the passenger window until Davenport was past. Following him would be impossible. Davenport would see the U-turn close behind him, and the tomato-red Volvo was not inconspicuous. The woman, on the other hand . . .

Lily.

Shadow Love touched the stone knife, felt it yearning for drink . . . .

Shadow Love had worked intermittently as a cab driver, and he knew the Minneapolis hotels. This was a tough one: it was small, mostly suites, and played to a wealthy clientele. Security would be good.

Shadow Love left the car at the curb, walked to the hotel entrance, and carefully stepped into the lobby and looked around. No sign of the woman. She had already gone up. Three bellhops were leaning on the registration desk, talking to the woman behind it. If he went farther inside, he’d be noticed . . . .

A flower shop caught his eye. It had an exterior entrance, but it also had a doorway that led directly into the hotel lobby. He thought for a moment, then checked his billfold. Forty-eight dollars and change. He went back outside and walked to the flower shop.

“One red rose? How romantic,” the woman said, her eyebrows arching, a skeptical note in her voice. The hotel was expensive. Shadow Love was not the kind of man who would have a lover inside.

“Not my romance,” Shadow grunted, picking up her skepticism. “I just dropped her off in the cab. Her old man give me ten extra bucks for the rose.”

“Ah.” The woman’s face broke into a smile. Everything was right in the world. “For ten dollars you could buy two roses . . . .”

“He said one and keep the change,” Shadow Love said grumpily. He had forty-eight dollars between himself and the street, and this flower shop was selling roses at five dollars a pop. “Her name is Rothenburg. I don’t know how you spell it. Her old man said you could get the room.”

“Sure.” The woman wrapped a single red rose in green tissue paper and said, “Is the card to be signed?”

“Yeah. ‘Love, Lucas.’ ”

“That’s nice.” The woman picked up the phone, rapped in four numbers and said, “This is Helen. You got a Rothenburg? Don’t know the spelling. Yeah . . . Four-oh-eight? Thanks.”

“We’ll send it right up,” the woman said as she gave Shadow Love his change.

Room 408. “Thanks,” he said.

He left the shop and went outside. It was late afternoon, getting cooler. He looked both ways, then walked away from the car toward Loring Park and took a long turn around the pond, thinking. The woman was good with a gun. He couldn’t fuck up. If he waited awhile, then went straight in to the elevators, as though he belonged there, he might get up. Then again, maybe not—but if they stopped him, they wouldn’t do more than throw him out. He dug in a pocket, took out a Slim Jim sausage and chewed on it.

If he got up, what then? If he knocked on her door and she opened it, bang. But what if the chain was on? He had no faith in the idea of shooting through the door. The pistol was a .380, good enough for close work, but it wouldn’t punch through a steel fire-liner. Not for sure. She’d recognize him. And she was a killer. If he missed, she’d be all over him. It’d be hell just getting out of the hotel . . . .

Have to think.

He was still working it out when he got back to the car. A Federal Express truck stopped across the street and the driver hopped out. Shadow Love, his mind far away, automatically tracked him as he went into the lobby of an office building and began emptying the local package box. A moment later, when the driver came out with his load of packages, Shadow Love skipped out of the car and walked into the lobby.

The Federal Express box had an open rack of packaging envelopes and address slips, with ballpoint pens on chains.

Lily Rothenburg, Police Officer, he wrote. Room 408 . . .

He still didn’t know how he’d get in her door. Sometimes you had to pray for luck. When he got back on the sidewalk, it was dark . . . .

The rose was totally unexpected: the last thing she would have expected, but it thrilled her. David sent flowers; Davenport did not. That he should . . .

Lily put it in a water glass and set it on top of the television set, looked at it, adjusted it and sat down with Anderson’s computer printouts. In two minutes, she knew she couldn’t read.

Davenport, God damn it. What’s this rose shit? She took a turn around the room, caught her image in a mirror. That’s the silliest smile I’ve seen on you since you were a teenager.

She couldn’t work. She glanced at a copy of People, put it aside and walked around the room again, stopping to sniff at the rose.

She was in a feeling mood, she decided. A hot bath . . .

Shadow Love went straight through the lobby with the Federal Express package in his hand, slightly in front of his body, so the bellhops could see the colors. He stopped at the elevators, poked 4 and resolutely did not look at the desk and the bellhops. The elevator chimed, the doors opened . . . he was in, and alone.

He gripped the knife, feeling its holy weight, then touched his belly, feeling the gun there. But the knife was the thing.

The doors opened on the fourth floor and he stepped out, still holding the package in front of him. Room 408. He turned right and heard a vacuum cleaner behind him. He stopped. Luck.

He turned back, went around the corner and found a maid with a vacuum cleaner. There was nobody else in the hallway.

“Got a package,” he grunted. “Where’s four-oh-eight?”

“Down there,” the maid said, flipping a thumb down the hall behind her. She was a short woman, slender, early twenties; already worn out.

“Okay,” Shadow said. He slipped a hand under his jacket, looked around once to make sure they were alone, pulled the gun and pointed it at the woman’s head.

“Oh, no . . .” she said, backing away, her hands out toward him.

“Down to the room. And get your keys out . . . .” The woman continued backing away, Shadow matching her pace for pace, the muzzle of the gun never leaving her face. “The keys,” he said.

She groped in her apron pocket and produced a ring with a dozen keys.

“Open four-oh-eight . . . but let me knock first.” He thrust the package at her, his voice rising, an edge of madness to it. “If she answers, tell her you’ve got a package. Let her see it. If you try to warn her, if you do anything to spook her, bitch cunt, I’ll blow your motherfuckin’ brains out . . . .”

The thought that the maid might betray him gripped Shadow Love’s stomach, and the black spot popped into his line of vision, obscuring her face. He forced it down, down, concentrating: Not this one; not yet.

The maid was terrified. She clutched at the package, holding it to her chest.

“Here,” she squeaked.

The black spot was still there, smaller, floating like a mote in God’s eye, but he could read the number on the door: 408. Shadow reached out and knocked, quietly. No answer. The killing rush was coming now, like cocaine, even better . . . . He knocked again. No answer.

“Open it,” he said. He pressed the gun against the woman’s forehead. “If there’s a noise, I’ll fuckin’ kill you, bitch. I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains all over the hall.”

The woman slipped the key into the lock. There was a tiny metallic click and she flinched, and Shadow Love tapped her with the barrel. “No more,” he whispered. “Open it.”

She turned the key. There was another click and the door eased open.

Lily got out of the bathtub, steam rolling off her body; she felt languid and soft from the bath oils. She heard the knock and stopped toweling. It wasn’t a maid’s knock. It was too soft, too . . . furtive. She frowned, took a step toward the bathroom door, looked through the bedroom to the outer sitting room; it was dark. A lamp was on in the bedroom, as were the lights in the bathroom. There was another knock, a pause, then a click. Somebody coming in.

Lily looked around for her purse, with the gun in the concealed holster: outer room. Shit. She reached back, hit the bathroom light switch and started for the lamp.

Shadow Love pushed the maid forward. The door opened and the woman went through. There was little light, apparently coming from a bathroom . . . . No. There’s another room. Fuckin’ rich bitch has a suite . . . . The light suddenly went out, and they were in darkness, Shadow Love and the maid silhouetted against the light from the hallway.

Lily killed the lamp as the door opened. She felt a tiny surge of relief when she saw the small woman and the familiar colors on the package. She reached again for the wall switch, then saw the man behind the woman and what looked like a gun.

“Freeze, motherfucker,” she screamed at the dark figures, dropping automatically into her Weaver stance, her hands empty. But the movement, in the dark, might be convincing . . . .

The scream startled him. Shadow Love sensed the cop woman dropping into a shooter’s stance, and swept the maid’s feet from under her and went down on top of her. He could feel the woman moving sideways in the minimal light in the room, and he pivoted and kicked the outer door shut. The dark was complete.

“Got a woman, here, a maid,” Shadow Love called. He pointed the gun toward where he thought the other door was, although he was disoriented and felt he might be off. But if she fired at him, he’d get her in the muzzle blast. “Come out and talk; I just want to talk about the Indians, about the Crows. I’ve worked with the police.”

Bullshit. Shadow Love. Must be.

“Bullshit. You move, motherfucker, and I’ll spread you around like spaghetti sauce.”

Lily, nude, crawled across the bedroom floor in the dark, her hands sweeping from side to side, looking for a weapon. Anything. Nothing. Nothing. Back toward the bathroom, creeping in silence, waiting for the killing light . . . Into the bathroom. Groping. Up the walls. A towel rack. She tugged on it. It held. She put her full weight on it, bouncing frantically, and suddenly, explosively, it came free. She went flat again, frozen, waiting for the light, but nothing came. She went back to the floor and, with the towel bar in her hand, crawled out the bathroom door toward the front room.

There was a sudden, terrific clatter. Shadow Love started, put his face next to the maid’s and whispered, “Move, bitch, and I’ll slit your fuckin’ throat.” He could feel the woman trembling in her thin maid’s uniform. “And I got the gun; if you go for the door, I’ll shoot you.”

He left her then, and crawled toward the spot where he thought the inner door was, feeling his way across the carpet in the dark.

What was the noise? What was she doing? Why hadn’t she risked a light? She wouldn’t be any worse off . . . .

The problem was, the first one to turn on a light would be most exposed . . . .

“I’m not here to hurt anybody,” he called.

His voice was a shock: he was so close. Two feet away, three. And now she could smell him: his breath. He’d been eating something spicy, sausage maybe, and his warm breath trickled toward her over the carpet. Could he smell the bath oils on her? She thought she might be a yard from the door, and he was coming through. She rolled to one side, a slow, inching, agonizing movement, holding the towel bar between her breasts.

Where was she? Why wasn’t she answering? She could be standing over him, pointing a .45 at his skull, tightening on the trigger. The injustice of his death gripped him, and for a full beat, two beats, he waited for the crashing blow that would kill him. There was nothing. He reached ahead in the dark, feeling the baseboard on the wall ahead, sliding his hand to the right, finding the corner and the doorway. The bathroom . . . that noise she made, that sounded like it came out of a bathroom, the hollow-sharp sound you get from tile walls . . . What was she doing in there? Moving a few inches at a time, he crossed through the doorway, low-crawling toward the bathroom. Nothing from her. Nothing. Maybe she’s not armed . . . .

“Don’t got no gun, bitch. That’s it. Well, I’m putting my gun away, you know? You know why? ‘Cause I’m getting my knife out. Cut open Larry Hart with it, you know? You know what I did then? After I cut him? You know?”

Where is she? Where is the bitch? He strained into the darkness. Got to scare her, got to make her move.

“I sucked the blood, that’s what I did,” Shadow Love called. “All hot. Better’n deer’s blood. Sweeter . . . Bet yours’ll be sweeter yet . . .”

Where the fuck is she?

There was a change in the darkness next to her, a movement through it. Shadow Love, on the floor next to her, not more than two feet away, low-crawling toward the bathroom. She couldn’t see him, but she could sense him there, moving in the dark. Moving as slowly as he was, she pulled her feet under her and quietly stood up, her hand sliding up the woodwork along the edge of the door. She could no longer sense him—standing, she was quite literally too far away—but she figured he had to be through the door.