Pulling into the parking lot, Dyce took the only available spot and turned off the lights of his Toyota. Because the bar was popular and crowded, he left the motor running; his ignition had been erratic of late and he did not want to risk not getting the spot he needed because he couldn’t move immediately when the opening came.
The red station wagon was parked behind him and to the side, but he could watch it by fuming his rear-view mirror. The wagon was just on the edge of the pool of light shed by the parking lot’s one lamppost. Not fully lighted, but not completely dark, either. Dyce would have preferred it darker, but it would serve.
The door to the bar opened and several people came out, accompanied by a gust of music and loud voices. A couple, arms around each other, moved toward the red wagon. The woman was laughing at something the man said, and he had his arm around her waist as if afraid she might bolt. Dyce slid down on the seat and watched in the mirror as they paused behind the car on the left of the wagon. The man slipped both arms around her and tugged her into him. They stood, pressed together at the waist, leaning back with their trunks so they could look at each other as they talked. She pointed in one direction, he in the other and she laughed again. Deciding which car to take, Dyce thought.
The man whispered something into her ear and she pulled her head back even farther to look at him, startled by his suggestion. He pulled her to him again, and for a moment they leaned against the back of the wagon itself. Behind them Dyce could see the shadows of the man’s landscaping tools, hafts and handles sticking up like a dead, stunted forest.
Finally the couple moved to the car on the right of the station wagon and drove off together, the woman behind the wheel. She was talking as they swung directly past Dyce’s car and for a moment she reminded him of Helen. That inability to do anything in silence. Dyce wondered if the man next to her bothered to listen to her, either. It wasn’t conversation. There was no exchange of views and ideas; it was noise, generated from a fear of what she might hear if she were quiet.
There was an opening next to the wagon now, but it was on the wrong side and in the full glare of the light. Dyce could not take a chance, so he settled in to wait and let himself think of Helen. It was now just past nine o’clock. She would call him around eleven before she went to bed to say goodnight. She had already called him at six to discuss her day. She had inquired about his activities as well, but Dyce didn’t have those kinds of days. Things did not happen to him as they did to her. He met no strangers, he encountered no minidramas in the shopping aisles, no shoplifters tried to run away with steaks under their shirts in his world. Dyce did his work, ate his lunch, was overlooked by his superior. There was a beauty and a comfort in the numbers, of course; an elegance in the predictions formed from raw data, as simple but complex as the patterns of the ocean’s waves- but he had long since given up trying to explain it all to Helen. She did not understand and after a halfhearted attempt, did not even try. Dyce kept it to himself, another private pleasure.
He did not know what to do about Helen. She was smothering him, that much was clear, but how he might stop it was as murky as the shadows in the back of the station wagon. They had had one fight, a silly squabble about nothing at all as far as Dyce could remember. At the time, he had even suspected she started it just to get a rise out of him. Dyce was not accustomed to fighting and did not understand there were rules. At first he took her petulance as some sort of game, but eventually it dawned on him that she was accusing him of not being jealous. Somewhere in her ramblings she had told him about another man who made a pass at her at work, and Dyce had not responded with the fury she hoped for. In truth, he had not even been listening and the incident was lost on him, although it would not have occurred to him to be angry even if he knew the details. What she did during the day was her business, as far as he was concerned, just as what he did when he was alone was entirely his concern.
The argument had grown and swirled about Dyce as he watched in bafflement, wondering how she could wring so many variations of woe out of the same theme without Dyce contributing anything. Finally she had begun to cry, and it was then that Dyce realized how hard it would be to stop seeing her. When she wept, she touched him and Dyce would do whatever he could to ease her pain.
He comforted her as best he could even though he wasn’t sure what ailed her, and to his amazement he heard himself apologizing. When he admitted his guilt in the matter, her spirits improved immensely. She forgave him and kissed him. The crisis was past, although she continued to pout occasionally about his alleged lack of attention.
He knew she would cry if he told her he didn’t want to see her anymore, or even not so often. He was afraid, in fact, that she would do much worse than cry. She had told him more than once that she would kill herself if he ever left her, and Dyce believed she was capable of it. In a way, the notion of being that important to her was rather flattering, although something of a responsibility. Dyce did not want to be the cause of anyone’s death, or even their unhappiness.
Pouring him a third white wine spritzer, the bartender considered what he was going to have to do with Eric Brandauer. Ginny had already complained twice. The first time, while giving him Eric’s order, she had simply said, “What a prick.”
He liked that about Ginny; she was a no-nonsense person. Older women made better waitresses. They didn’t look so hot, maybe, and nobody tipped them big just because they were cute, but they got the orders straight and they knew a prick when they saw one. Ginny had two kids in high school and a husband who drank it up as fast as Ginny could pay for it, so she didn’t have any illusions that waitressing in a place like this was a stepping-stone to somewhere else. This was it.
The second time she said, “Harold,” using his proper name, which was what he preferred, not Harry, which he hated and the younger women insisted on. “Harold, you’re going to have to shut that prick off.”
“Eric?”
“The asshole.” Eric was slouched in his chair, his left leg stretched out so it nearly tripped anyone who passed, his right leg draped over another chair. “The one sitting in two chairs.”
“Eric Brandauer,” said the bartender. “This is only his third drink.”
“His third here,” said Ginny. “He’s been swilling something stronger than white wine spritzers somewhere. Either that or he’s just naturally as pleasant as a molting snake.”
“Eric’s always had a mean streak,” said the bartender, hoping he wouldn’t be called on to do anything. Eric not only had a reputation for being mean, he was awfully quick to use his hands. And his boots. Tending bar was not the same as bouncing, and Harold had no desire to take up a new career at this stage in his life.
“If he gives you any more trouble, let me know.”
“I’m letting you know now, Harold. If he touches me again, or even looks at me like that, I’m through serving him.”
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” said Harold, placing the wine spritzer on Ginny’s serving tray. She added a napkin.
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” she said. “You keep an eye on me.”
The bartender watched as Ginny put the wine on the table in front of Brandauer. He affected a hat, not quite a Stetson, but something semi-Western, that he wore very low over his eyes. Thinks he’s Clint Eastwood, Harold thought. Or no, someone else, some other actor. Who was it he looked like, not quite a star but well known, a character actor, foreign. Harold remembered him from a Redford movie where he had been a CIA killer, and then he had seen him only the other night in an old movie where he played Jesus or John the Baptist with a Swedish accent. The planes of his face were the same, the high cheekbones, the long, slightly horsey look. Funny that the Swedish women all looked good enough to eat, and the men had these thin, long faces with the big jaws. Max Von Sydow, that was it. He looked like a young Max Von Sydow. Or like Max Von Sydow pretending he was Billy the Kid.
Knowing just how far to push it and when to stop, Eric Brandauer let Ginny pass without incident, but his eyes under the brim of the hat looked at her with the kind of malevolent interest that Harold usually saw on television only when the punk was about to do something rash. Harold prayed that Eric would save his rashness for the parking lot where Harold wouldn’t have to know about it until he read the police report in the local paper.
Dyce waited until ten thirty. His favorite classical music station was playing one of the Beethoven symphonies-he wasn’t certain which, he had missed the announcement, but he thought it was the Seventh- and he was nearly as comfortable in the car as he would have been at home. When the driver of the car to the left of the station wagon finally left, Dyce pulled into the spot, carefully leaving just enough room so that he could open the passenger door all the way. He would wait for fifteen more minutes.
At a quarter of eleven, Dyce gave up and drove home. He wanted to be there before Helen called. Explaining his absence at that hour of the night would simply take too much effort. Seeing that he wasn’t jealous, Helen had decided to assume the role herself and she acted as if Dyce were this wild-eyed ladies man who couldn’t be trusted out of her sight for so much as an hour. He didn’t know what he was going to do about her.
As he pulled out of the parking lot, he saw Brandauer come out of the bar. For a moment he considered pulling back in, taking a chance, improvising something. He could take the man and still get home in time for the call-but then the man was in his own car and it was too late.
Dyce drove home to await Helen’s call. There would be other nights, as many as he needed, and things would be all the better for waiting.
“It’s happening again,” said Becker.
“What’s happening again?”
Becker was at the window once more, peering out through the Levolors.
“You need a new view.”
“You could try looking at me for a change,” Gold said.
“You think that’s an improvement?”
“What’s happening again?” But Becker had clearly changed his mind about discussing it, whatever it was.
“I was with this girl, this woman, the other night. We were talking about crawling into lions’ dens… She has thirty-seven freckles on her cheeks and across her nose.”
Gold drew a vertical line down the margin of his notepad. He did not note the number thirty-seven. He was not a numerologist.
“Bearding the lion in his den. Where did that expression come from? Lions don’t have dens. They live on the open savannah. The expression conjures up this picture of the hon in a cave with the bones of all its prey scattered all over. They don’t live that way. Bears don’t have bones in their caves, either. They don’t eat and they don’t excrete all winter long and the rest of the year they live outdoors. Why do we think of the beast hunkered down with the bones of its victims around it, waiting for us?”
“Is that what we think?”
“Carnivores don’t live that way. At least not mammals.”
“Dragons do,” said Gold. “As long as we’re dealing in symbols. Dragons are surrounded by skeletons and treasure.”
“Did you have to go to school for this?” Becker asked.
“Why do you have such contempt for the psychiatric profession?”
“I see you don’t take it personally. Why is that?”
“What happened after you shot Sal?”
“He died.”
Gold began the serpentine line that intersected the vertical one.
“Sorry,” said Becker. “I’ve got to learn to let the easy ones pass
… I had a reaction.”
“That’s normal.”
“I saw a shrink for a while.”
“There’s no record of that in your file.”
“I didn’t use a Bureau man.”
“You went to a private therapist for help? Why is that?”
Becker was silent.
“Why not use a Bureau therapist?… They’re experienced in that kind of trauma… They’re free.”
“Spiders do that,” said Becker. “They keep the corpses around them. They paralyze them, suck than dry, and leave the husks hanging there.”
“What were you afraid the Bureau would find out about you?”
Becker returned to the window. Gold started to fill in the parabolas on his notepad.
“I don’t respect you because you can’t really fix anything. You can drug the violent ones or put diapers on the bed wetters or talk the mild cases into giving up out of boredom, but when they’re really wrong, you can’t make them right, can you?”
“What do you mean by really wrong?”,
“Some people are wired differently. They like to hear people scream or make them bleed or make them die-and you can’t do anything about those people, can you? You can’t change the wiring.”
“What do you think should be done with such people?”
Becker laughed. “Oh, doctor,” he said. “Now really.”
Eric Brandauer felt like killing somebody. The bitch whose lawn he had just finished mowing had paid him with her nose cocked as if he smelled. He wanted to thrust her head into his crotch; he’d show her what smelled.
The damned weed trimmer had given out on him and he’d had to use a hand sickle that he hadn’t needed in years, and he took a gouge out of his knee while working around the bitch’s flower beds. She told him he should have it looked at but didn’t offer to look at it herself, didn’t come up with iodine or bandages or invite him m. He had a good mind to put on his ski mask and come back there after dark to pork the shit out of the bitch and smash things up a little. Just to teach her a lesson. Just for old times’ sake. He wondered if he could even find the ski mask anymore.
Christ, he felt mean. At least the old life had offered some compensations; he’d been able to let off some steam now and then. Profit wasn’t the only motive for burglarizing the bastards. It did the rich fucks good to have someone trash their houses. Let them know how the other half lives in shit most of the time. It taught the men humility to feel their teeth crack. All those perfect teeth, ah those smiles they bought from the braces man. Let them go out and buy some more. They could afford it, and it did Eric a world of good to paste one of them now and then. Sometimes he would wrap his hands before going out on a job, just like a boxer. A good stiff wrapping with elastic, a pair of work gloves to protect the skin, a roll of nickels clenched in the fist-oh, it did their humility a lot of good. Plus it made Eric feel terrific. He was doing a service for them and himself Now that was his definition of a good deed.
Landscaping, on the other hand, not only didn’t offer any compensations but it didn’t pay worth a damn, either. Here it was Wednesday and he was out of money again. He would have to go to the bank again if he wanted to eat or drink tonight. And he sure as hell wanted to drink. The only good thing to be said about landscaping was that it kept him out of jail. At least he no longer had the cops rousting him out of bed every time somebody lost a VCR. In Shereford there just weren’t any junkies to blame, so all the thefts got pinned on him. And Eric hadn’t stuck a needle in his vein in his whole life. He hated needles. Stick one in himself? He’d have to be crazy. He’d smoked some, popped a pill or two, but nothing serious. Nothing to put him in the same league with the hard-core addicts you had to live with in jail. He didn’t belong there. He might not belong in landscaping, either, but he belonged in jail even less. Which was the only good reason he could think of not to grab the first son of a bitch who looked at him cross-eyed and do a number on his head.
On a whim, Eric decided not to go to his regular bank but to drive to Guileford instead. It would be dark when he got there and there was an automatic teller machine at the train station where the light didn’t work. Or could be made not to work. He wasn’t promising himself anything, but if everything worked out just right, if some wimp decided to get some money and it was between trains and no one was around and Eric felt froggish, well, he just might jump. He didn’t have to, that was the beauty of it. He would just see how things worked out and how he felt. And if nobody showed, he could always just draw twenty-five out of his own account and go back to Shereford and hassle the waitress at the Peacock Lounge. “Lounge,” he liked that, the place was a saloon-hassle the middle-aged bitch until the bartender was forced to try to make him stop. Now that he wanted to see. That might be even better than whipping ass at the Guileford station. He didn’t see how he could lose.
Not once in the thirty-five-minute drive to Guileford did Eric look in his rearview mirror. He hadn’t done anything yet; there was no reason to worry about cops who, as far as he knew, hadn’t gotten around to reading minds yet, and so there was no reason to notice the gray Toyota that followed him all the way to the train station.
Eric drove past the automatic teller machine and turned the corner, parking in front of the office supplies company so that his car was not visible from the machine. That way all he had to do was saunter around the corner, get in the wagon and drive off without worrying whether the victim-if there was a victim, he still had not decided-could identify his car.
A woman was walking away from the teller machine as Eric rounded the corner, putting money in her purse. Let her go, too far away. Eric was not about to chase anybody down the street. What he wanted was a nice, plump businessman, somebody with enough meat that he wouldn’t fall at the first blow. Eric liked it when they stood there, not quite believing him, not even having enough sense to cover up so that he could get in three or four good licks before they really understood what was happening. And men would not scream right away, the way women did. Most of them had just enough ego to convince themselves it was some sort of contest-see how many punches you can take before you fall. None of them took very many.
The street was empty when the woman left. A car drove slowly by and Eric waited until it turned the corner before crossing to the machine. He decided to give it a few minutes. It was a whim, after all, not a job. He could take it or leave it.
The machine was mounted on a concrete wall that had been installed just to house it. On the other side of the wall, between the concrete and the depot, was a small recess, out of sight and in the dark. Stepping into the recess, Eric glanced at his watch before pulling his work gloves up snugly on either hand. Ten minutes, that’s all he would wait, ten minutes, fifteen tops. He was already getting thirsty.
The situation was ideal. Dyce pulled his car into the spot just to the left of the station wagon. He leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door to check. It opened and came to a rest against the driver’s door on the wagon. Dyce had removed the fuses for the overhead light and the door buzzer so he could work in silence and darkness. Perfect.
Removing the plastic cap from the syringe needle, Dyce pressed the plunger until a drop of liquid oozed from the tip. Perfect. He kept the syringe in his right hand, resting out of sight on the seat.
The station was empty. There were no trains due for another forty-five minutes. There was a light on in the office supply shop, but not enough to illuminate Dyce clearly to any passerby. Anyone passing in a car would see only the back of his head, if they even bothered to look. Perfect.
Dyce put Schubert’s Trout Quintet on the tape machine and turned the volume down low. He turned slightly to one side so he could see Eric coming around the corner and have at least thirty seconds to go into action. Perfect.
He settled in to wait. Schubert was beautiful. Dyce felt certain he and the composer would have understood one another.
Fifteen minutes stretched to twenty, and Eric finally said fuck it. The place was a goddamned morgue. Two cars had passed and that was it. He didn’t need this shit, and he was thirsty and hungry and had to piss. He started to pee in the recess, then decided to do it on the teller machine, just to let them all know what he thought of them. He peed a long time and actually managed to hit the face of the machine. Then, walking back to his car, he remembered that he had forgotten to withdraw some money for himself. He had to stand in his own puddle, cursing, to get the twenty-five dollars.
When he reached his wagon he was madder than when he cut his knee with the sickle, and now here was some dumb son of a bitch with his car door open so Eric couldn’t get into his truck. The whole street to park on and he had to squeeze next to his wagon.
“I’m sorry,” Dyce said, leaning across the seat to the passenger door. “Sir? Sir? I’m sorry, but I can’t get my car started. Could you help me, please?”
Eric leaned down and looked at the man stretched across the seat and decided against ripping the jerk’s door off and handing it to him. Heaven works in marvelous ways its wonders to perform, he thought.
“Happy to help,” said Eric. He smiled broadly.
“Oh, thank you, that’s most kind. If you could just hold this flap up so I could get to the wire.”
“What flap is that?” Eric tugged his work gloves on tightly. He hadn’t had time to wrap his knuckles, but this would do very nicely.
“Under the dashboard here. You can reach it if you get in the car. It won’t take a minute.”
The moron thought he could hot-wire this kind of car. Wasn’t even looking in the right place.
“I’ll be happy to help you out,” said Eric.
He slid into the passenger seat and hit Dyce in the face. Dyce lifted his right arm, but Eric pinned it against the seat with his left forearm and hit him hard twice more in the face. He grabbed Dyce’s lapels and jerked him forward, then butted him with his forehead. The second time broke Dyce’s nose.
It was not until he was getting out of the car that Eric noticed the syringe. Sliding across the seat, he knocked it to the floor. Eric looked at it curiously.
“What the fuck is this?” he demanded.
Dyce could not speak for the blood in his mouth.
“What the fuck is this! What are you up to? The fuck you doing?”
He shook Dyce, slapped him once, not paying much attention to the man, still studying the syringe. Dyce shook his head in denial, tried to spit, dribbled blood onto Eric’s glove.
“This for me?” Then Eric got really mad.