such a screwup-and which she knew for sure when Mr. Harrison made the
crack about caviar pajamas and showed he had a sense of humor. But by
then she was so into her act that somehow she couldn't stop being an
obnoxious screwup that she wouldn't find a way to retreat and start
over. Now the Harrisons were probably getting drunk, celebrating their
narrow escape, or maybe down on their knees in a church, weeping with
relief and fervently saying the Rosary, thanking the Holy Mother for
interceding to spare them the mistake of adopting that awful girl
sight-unseen. Shitú (Oops. Vulgarity. But not as bad as taking the
Lord's name in vain. Even worth mentioning in the confessional?) In
spite of having no appetite and in spite of Carl Cavanaugh and his crude
humor, she ate all of her dinner, but only because God's policemen, the
nuns, would not let her leave the table until she cleaned her plate. The
fruit in the lime Jell-O was peaches, which made dessert an ordeal. She
couldn't understand how anyone could think that lime and peaches went
together. Okay, so nuns were not very worldly, but she wasn't asking
them to learn which rare wine to serve with roast tenderloin of
platypus, for God's sake. (Sorry, God.) Pineapple and lime Jell-O,
certainly. Pears and lime Jell, okay. Even bananas and lime Jell-O.
But putting peaches in lime Jell-O was, to her way of thinking, like
leaving the raisins out of rice pudding and replacing them with chunks
of watermelon, for God's sake.
(Sorry, God.) She managed to eat the dessert by telling herself that it
could have been worse; the nuns could have served dead mice dipped in
cheni fat-though why nuns, of all people, would want to do that, she had
no idea. Still, imagining something worse than what she had to face was
a trick that worked, a technique of self-persuasion that she had used
many and other games, or to the TV room to watch whatever slop was on
the boob tube, but as usual she returned to her room. She spent most
evenings reading. Not tonight, though. She planned to spend this
evening feeling sorry for herself and contemplating her status as a
world-class screwup (good thing stupidity isn't a sin), so she would
never forget how dumb she had been and would remember never to make such
a jackass of herself again.
Moving along the tile-floored hallways nearly as fast as a kid with two
good legs, she remembered how she had clumped into the attorney's
office, and she began to blush. In her room, which she shared with a
blind girl named Winnie, as she jumped into bed and flopped on her back,
she recalled the calculated clumsiness with which she had levered
herself into the chair in front of Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. Her blush
deepened, and she put both hands over her face.
"Reg," she said softly against the palms of her own hands, "you are the
biggest asshole in the world." (One more item on the list for the next
confession, besides lying and deceiving and taking God's name in vain:
the repeated use of a vulgarity.) "Shit, shit, shit!" (Going to be a
long confession.) 5
When Redlow regained consciousness, his assorted pains were so bad, they
took one hundred percent of his attention. He had a violent headache to
which he could have testified with such feeling in a television
commercial that they would have been forced to open new aspirin
factories to meet the consumer response. One eye was puffed half shut.
His lips were split and swollen; they were numb and felt huge. His neck
hurt, and his stomach was sore, and his testicles throbbed so fiercely
from the knee he had taken in the crotch that the idea of getting up and
walking sent a paroxysm of nausea through him.
Gradually he remembered what had happened to him, that the bastard had
taken him by surprise. Then he realized he was not lying on the motel
parking lot but sitting in a chair, and for the first time he was
afraid.
He was not merely sitting in the chair. He was tied in it. Ropes bound
him at chest and waist, and more ropes wound across his thighs, securing
him to the seat. His arms were fixed to the arms of the chair just
below his elbows and again at the wrists.
Pain had muddied his thought processes. Now fear clarified them.
Simultaneously squinting his good right eye and trying to widen his
swollen left eye, he studied the darkness. For a moment he assumed he
was in a room at the Blue Skies Motel, outside of which he had been
running a surveillance in hope of spotting the kid. Then he recognized
his own living room. He couldn't see much. No lights were on. But
having lived in that house for eighteen years, he could identify the
patterns of ambient night-glow at the windows, the dim shapes of the
furniture, shadows among shadows of differing intensity, and the subtle
but singular smell of home, which was as special and instantly
identifiable to him as the odor of any particular lair to any particular
wolf in the wild.
He did not feel much like a wolf tonight. He felt like a rabbit,
shivering in recognition of its status as prey.
For a few seconds he thought he was alone, and he began to strain at the
ropes. Then a shadow rose from other shadows and approached him.
He could see nothing more of his adversary than a silhouette. Even that
seemed to melt into the silhouettes of inanimate objects, or to change
as if the kid were a polymorphous creature that could assume a variety
of forms. But he knew it was the kid because he sensed that difference,
that alienness he had perceived the first time he had laid eyes on the
bastard on Sunday, just four nights ago, at the Blue Skies.
"Comfortable, Mr. Redlow?"
Over the past three months, as he had searched for the creep, Redlow had
developed a deep curiosity about him, trying to puzzle out what he
wanted, what he needed, how he thought. After showing countless people
the various photographs of the kid, and after spending more than a
little of his own time in contemplation of them, he had been especially
curious about what the voice would be like that went with that
remarkably handsome yet forbidding face. It sounded nothing like he had
imagined it would be, neither cold and steely like the voice of a
machine designed to pass for human nor the guttural and savage snarling
of a beast. Rather, it was soothing, honey-toned, with an appealing
reverberant timbre.
"Mr. Redlow, sir, can you hear me?"
Nothing in the voice indicated that the kid was being snide or mocking.
He was just a boy who had been raised to address his elders with
consideration and respect, a habit he could not cast off even under
circumstances such as these. The detective was gripped by a primitive,
superstitious feeling that he was in the presence of an entity that
could imitate humanity but had nothing whatsoever in common with the
human species.
Speaking through split lips, his words somewhat slurred, Morton Redlow
said, "Who are you, what the hell do you want?"
"You know who I am."
"I haven't a fuckin
g clue. You blindsided me. I haven't seen your
face.
What are you a bat or something? Why don't you turn on a light?"
Still only a black form, the kid moved closer, to within a few feet of
the chair. "You were hired to find me."
"I was hired to run surveillance on a guy named Kirkaby. Leonard
Kirkaby. Wife thinks he's cheating on her. And he is. Brings his
secretary to the Blue Skies every Thursday for some in-and-out."
"Well, sir, that's a little hard for me to believe, you know? The Blue
Skies is for low-life guys and cheap whores, not business executives and
their secretaries."
"Maybe he gets off on the sleaziness of it, treating the girl like a
whore.
Who the hell knows, huh? Anyway, you sure aren't Kirkaby. I know his
voice. He doesn't sound anything like you. Not as young as you,
either.
Besides, he's a piece of puff pastry. He couldn't have handled me the
way you did."
The kid was quiet for a while. Just staring down at Redlow. Then he
began to pace. In the dark. Unhesitating, never bumping into
furniture.
Like a restless cat, except his eyes didn't glow.
Finally he said, "So what're you saying, sir? That this is all just a
big mistake?"
Redlow knew his only chance of staying alive was to convince the kid of
the lie-that a guy named Kirkaby had a letch for his secretary, and a
bitter wife seeking evidence for a divorce. He just didn't know what
tone to take to sell the story. With most people, Redlow had an
unerring sense of which approach would beguile them and make them accept
even the wildest proposition as the truth. But the kid was different;
he didn't think or react like ordinary people.
Redlow decided to play it tough. "Listen, asshole, I wish I did know
who you are or at least what the hell you look like, 'cause once this
was finished, I'd come after you and bash your fuckin' head in."
"What're you talking about?" Redlow asked.
"Burnt out."
The conversation was taking a turn Redlow didn't understand, which made
him uneasy.
"Excuse me, sir, no offense meant, but you're getting too old for this
kind of work."
Don't I know it, Redlow thought. He realized that, aside from one
initial tug, he had not again tested the ropes that bound him. Only a
few years ago, he would have quietly but steadily strained against them,
trying to stretch the knots. Now he was passive.
"You're a muscular man, but you've gone a little soft, you've got a gut
on you, and you're slow. From your driver's license, I see you're
fifty-four, you're getting up there. Why do you still do it, keep
hanging in there?"
"It's all I've got," Redlow said, and he was alert enough to be
surprised by his own answer. He had meant to say, Its all I know.
"Well, yessir, I can see that," the kid said, looming over him in the
darkness. "You've been divorced twice, no kids, and no woman lives with
you right now. Probably hasn't been one living with you for years.
Sorry, but I was snooping around the house while you were out cold, even
though I knew it wasn't really right of me. Sorry. But I just wanted
to get a handle on you, try to understand what you get out of this."
Redlow said nothing because he couldn't understand where all of this was
leading. He was afraid of saying the wrong thing, and setting the kid
off like a bottle rocket. The son of a bitch was insane. You never
knew what might light the fuse on a nutcase like him. The kid had been
through some analysis of his own over the years, and now he seemed to
want to analyze Redlow, for reasons even he probably could not have
explained.
Maybe it was best to just let him rattle on, get it out of his system.
"Is it money, Mr. Redlow?"
"You mean, do I make any?"
"That's what I mean, ' "I do okay."
"You don't drive a great car or wear expensive clothes."
"I'm not into flash," Redlow said.
"No offense, sir, but this house isn't much."
"Maybe not, but there's no mortgage on it."
The kid was right over him, slowly leaning farther in with each
question, as if he could see Redlow in the lightless room and was
intently studying facial tics and twitches as he questioned him.
Weird. Even in the dark, Redlow could sense the kid bending closer,
closer, closer.
"No mortgage on it," the kid said thoughtfully. "Is that your reason
for working, for a living? To be able to say you paid off a mortgage on
a dump like this?"
Redlow wanted to tell him to go fuck himself but suddenly he was not so
sure that playing tough was a good idea, after all.
"Is that what life's all about, sir? Is that all it's about? Is that
why you find it so precious, why you're so eager to hold on to it? Is
that why you life-lovers struggle to go on living just to acquire a
pitiful pile of belongings, so you can go out of the game a winner?
all."
The detective's heart was pounding too hard. It slammed painfully
against his bruised ribs. He hadn't treated his heart well over the
years, too many hamburgers, too many cigarettes, too much beer and
bourbon.
What was the crazy kid trying to talk him to death, scare him to death?
"I'd imagine you have some clients who don't want it on record that they
ever hired you, they pay in cash. Would that be a valid assumption,
sir?"
Redlow cleared his throat and tried not to sound frightened. "Yeah.
Sure. Some of them."
"And part of winning the game would be to keep as much of that money as
you could, avoiding taxes on it, which would mean never putting it in a
bank."
The kid was so close now that the detective could smell his breath.
For some reason he had expected it to be sour, vile. But it smelled
sweet, like chocolate, as if the kid had been eating candy in the dark.
"So I'd imagine you have a nice little stash here in the house
somewhere.
Is that right, sir?"
A warm quiver of hope caused a diminishment of the cold chills that had
been chattering through Redlow for the past few minutes. If it was
about money, he could deal with that. It made sense. He could
understand the kid's motivation, and could see a way to get through the
evening alive.
"Yeah," the detective said. "There's money. Take it. Take it and go.
In the kitchen, there's a waste can with a plastic bag for a liner.
Lift out the bag of trash, there's a brown paper bag full of cash under
it, in the bottom of the can."
Something cold and rough touched the detective's right cheek, and he
flinched from it.
"Pliers," the kid said, and the detective felt the jaws take a grip on
his flesh.
"What're you doing?"
The kid twisted the pliers.
Redlow cried out in pain. "Wait, wait, stop it, shit, please, stop it,
no!"
The kid stopped. He took the pliers away. He said, "I'm sorry, sir,
but
I just want you to understand that if there isn't any cash in the
trash can, I won't be happy. I'll figure if you lied to me about this,
you lied to me about everything."
"It's there," Redlow assured him hastily.
"It's not nice to lie, sir. It's not good. Good people don't lie.
That's what they teach you, isn't it, sir?"
"Go, look, you'll see it's there," Redlow said desperately.
The kid went out of the living room, through the dining room archway.
Soft footsteps echoed through the house from the tile floor of the
kitchen.
A clatter and rustle arose as the garbage bag was pulled out of the
waste can.
Already damp with perspiration, Redlow began to gush sweat as he
listened to the kid return through the pitch-black house. He appeared
in the living room again, partly silhouetted against the pale-gray
rectangle of a window.
"How can you see?" the detective asked, dismayed to hear a faint note of
hysteria in his voice when he was struggling so hard to maintain control
of himself. He was getting old. "What are you wearing night-vision
glasses or something, some military hardware? How in the hell would you
get your hands on anything like that?"
Ignoring him, the kid said, "There isn't much I want or need, just food
and changes of clothes. The only money I get is when I make an addition