“If you call it doing okay, living from day to day.”
Don’t we all live that way? she wondered, but she didn’t ask this question.
Instead she made him tell her what he’d been up to, and he obliged, knowing why she wanted to hear it.
She curled up against the pillows and listened to him speak of the rusty porch door he’d replaced, and the new gun he’d added to his collection, and the food he put out for the rabbits every morning. She heard him light a cigarette as he went on talking.
“Went to the cemetery the other day,” he said. “Placed a new wreath on Regina’s grave. Nice day, warm and clear. No rain yet, and it’s still too early for snow, even in the high peaks of the range.”
He spoke more about the weather. Elizabeth noticed that he had said nothing of visiting Justin’s grave. She wondered if he’d laid a wreath there also. She doubted it.
After a long time she said, “I’d better let you get back to sleep.”
“You don’t have to. You know me. I can talk all night.”
“It’s okay, Anson. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Always a pleasure hearing yours. I wish…”
He didn’t finish. She knew everything he meant to say but couldn’t.
“So do I,” she whispered. “But we play the hand we’re dealt. Isn’t that what you used to say?”
“I said it. Don’t know that it means much.”
“It does to me.”
They said their good-byes. She held the receiver to her ear long enough to hear him click off, and the sad silence after.
She cradled the phone, feeling calm again. Things were bad, but she would go on. If she had to sleep in her damn car, she would. She’d faced worse problems and endured.
And as for Cray…
Tomorrow she would watch Cray again. Tonight there was nothing she could do.
At this very moment he might be lurking outside his next victim’s window, preparing an abduction and another kill.
If so, she couldn’t stop him.
She stretched out on the bed, hearing the creak of old mattress springs, and turned off the bedside lamp. The sudden darkness was heavy and hot, and she let herself fall into it, as into a deep hole. When she reached the bottom of the hole, she was asleep.
Her last half-waking thought was of Sharon Andrews.
Who’s next? a voice asked, a voice that might have been Elizabeth’s own.
But she heard no answer.
Cray waited an additional half hour after the motel room’s window went dark, giving Elizabeth Palmer sufficient time to fall asleep.
Then he pulled on black leather gloves and removed his Glock 9mm from the rear storage compartment of the Lexus.
Cray never handled the Glock bare-handed. There were no prints on the gun or on any of the seventeen rounds loaded in the magazine. The gun itself was unregistered and untraceable. It could never be linked to him.
Also in the storage compartment was a canvas satchel — black, of course — with a drawstring clasp. His little black bag. Cray smiled.
Time to make a house call.
Slowly he drove into the motel parking lot and found a vacant space near Elizabeth Palmer’s room. He switched off his lights and engine, then sat for another long moment, allowing his eyes to readjust to the dark.
He had excellent night vision. Though the moon had long since set, he could see every detail around him. He could even read the unilluminated dial of his watch without strain.
The time was 3:30 when Cray got out of the Lexus.
He stood with his satchel in hand, breathing the warm, dusty air. The parking lot was a flat stretch of asphalt amid a flat stretch of desert under a huge sky dizzy with wheeling stars. Cray felt the immensity of the world and his smallness in it. He felt lonely and almost afraid.
It was always this way for him, at these moments. At heart a human being was only a small, scared animal in the night. When death was a safe abstraction, this fundamental dread could be evaded.
There was no evasion now.
Elizabeth was in an unfamiliar apartment, a place she’d never been before. Yet strangely she felt certain it was her place; she lived here, and parts of it were known to her.
The tiny efficiency kitchen with the compact fridge under the stove — it was like the kitchen of her studio apartment in Taos.
The living room opened onto a patio very similar to the one she’d loved in Santa Fe.
The bathroom with the dripping faucet was straight out of Salt Lake City, where she’d spent three cold months.
I guess this is all the places I’ve lived, Elizabeth thought. A composite of my life.
She wandered from room to room, the view through the windows constantly changing, then found an open door that led to a one-car garage, the type that came attached to a modest house.
The garage was part of her life too, but she couldn’t recall quite how. There was no car parked in it, and she explained this to herself by saying aloud, “He’s out.”
But she didn’t know who he was.
Didn’t know — yet part of her did, or almost did, and suddenly she was sure she didn’t want to be in the garage.
And she wasn’t. She was in a park, someplace green and hot, under a tree, just sitting, and this was much better, except there were ants, so many of them, a flood tide of crawling red.
She jumped up and brushed them off her bare legs, and her hands came away red and sticky, glazed with some viscid awfulness that smelled like copper pennies.
She turned away and smelled the ocean breeze as she walked along the seashore, her hands clean again, cool water lapping her bare feet. The sea surged, pulling in sheets of seaweed.
One green clump, bobbing in the foam, caught her attention. She bent to retrieve it, lifting it in both hands, a flat, limp oval. As she raised it to the sun, she saw that it wasn’t seaweed at all.
It was a woman’s face.