Stephanie's face came out of nowhere.
At one moment, he was planning. The next, she was there, her eyes closed, her head turned away, asleep. He was seized with the thought that he could go back, find her standing in the doorway, find that it had all been a nightmare…
He began to choke again, his chest heaving.
And Stephanie's lover thought, as he sat in the car: Bekker? Had he done this? He started the car.
Bekker.
It wasn't quite human, the thing that pulled itself across the kitchen floor. Not quite human-eyes gone, brain damaged, bleeding-but it was alive and it had a purpose: the telephone. There was no attacker, there was no lover, there was no time. There was only pain, the tile and, somewhere, the telephone.
The thing on the floor pulled itself to the wall where the telephone was, reached, reached… and failed. The thing was dying when the paramedics came, when the glass in the window broke and the firemen came through the door.
The thing called Stephanie Bekker heard the words 'Jesus Christ,' and then it was gone forever, leaving a single bloody handprint six inches below the Princess phone.
CHAPTER 2
Del was a tall man, knobby, ungainly. He put his legs up on the booth seat and his jeans rode above his high- topped brown leather shoes, showing the leather laces running between the hooks. The shoes were cracked and caked with mud. Shoes you'd see on a sharecropper, Lucas thought.
Lucas drained the last of his Diet Coke and looked over his shoulder toward the door. Nothing.
'Fucker's late,' Del said. His face flicked yellow, then red, with the Budweiser sign in the window.
'He's coming.' Lucas caught the eye of the bartender, pointed at his Coke can. The barkeep nodded and dug into the cooler. He was a fat man, with a mustard-stained apron wrapped around his ample belly, and he waddled when he brought the Diet Coke.
'Buck,' he grunted. Lucas handed him a dollar bill. The bartender looked at them carefully, thought about asking a question, decided against it and went back behind the bar.
They weren't so much out of place as oddly assorted, Lucas decided. Del was wearing jeans, a prison-gray sweatshirt with the neckband torn out, a jean jacket, a paisley headband made out of a necktie, and the sharecropper's shoes. He hadn't shaved in a week and his eyes looked like North Country peat bogs.
Lucas wore a leather bomber jacket over a cashmere sweater, and khaki slacks and cowboy boots. His dark hair was uncombed and fell forward over a square, hard face, pale with the departing winter. The pallor almost hid the white scar that slashed across his eyebrow and cheek; it became visible only when he clenched his jaw. When he did, it puckered, a groove, whiter on white.
Their booth was next to a window. The window had been covered with a silver film, so the people inside could see out but the people outside couldn't see in. Flower boxes sat under the windows, alternating with radiator cabinets. The boxes were filled with plastic petunias thrust into what looked like Kitty Litter. Del was chewing Dentyne, a new stick every few minutes. When he finished a stick, he lobbed the well-chewed wad into a window box. After an hour, a dozen tiny pink wads of gum were scattered like spring buds among the phony flowers.
'He's coming,' Lucas said again. But he wasn't sure. 'He'll be here.'
Thursday night, an off-and-on hard spring rain, and the bar was bigger than its clientele. Three hookers, two black, one white, huddled together on barstools, drinking beer and sharing a copy of Mirabella. They'd all been wearing shiny vinyl raincoats in lipstick colors and had folded them down on the barstools to sit on them. Hookers were never far from their coats.
A white woman sat at the end of the bar by herself. She had frizzy blond hair, watery green eyes and a long thin mouth that was always about to tremble. Her shoulders were hunched, ready for a beating. Another hooker: she was pounding down the gin with Teutonic efficiency.
The male customers paid no attention to the hookers. Of the men, two shitkickers in camouflage hats, one with a folding-knife sheath on his belt, played shuffleboard bowling. Two more, both looking as if they might be from the neighborhood, talked to the bartender. A fifth man, older, sat by himself in front of a bowl of peanuts, nursing a lifelong rage and a glass of rye. He'd nip from the glass, eat a peanut and mutter his anger down into his overcoat. A half-dozen more men and a single woman sat in a puddle of rickety chairs, burn-scarred tables and cigarette smoke at the back of the bar, watching the NBA playoffs on satellite TV.
'Haven't seen much crack on TV lately,' Lucas said, groping for conversation. Del had been leading up to something all night but hadn't spit it out yet.
'Media used it up,' said Del. 'They be rootin' for a new drug now. Supposed to be ice, coming in from the West Coast.'
Lucas shook his head. 'Fuckin' ice,' he said.
He caught his own reflection in the window glass. Not too bad, he thought. You couldn't see the gray thatch in the black hair, you couldn't see the dark rings under his eyes, the lines beginning to groove his cheeks at the corners of his mouth. Maybe he ought to get a chunk of this glass and use it to shave in.
'If we wait much longer, she's gonna need a cash transfusion,' Del said, eyeing the drunk hooker. Lucas had staked her with a twenty and she was down to a pile of quarters and pennies.
'He'll be here,' Lucas insisted. 'Motherfucker dreams about his rep.'
'Randy ain't bright enough to dream,' Del said.
'Gotta be soon,' Lucas said. 'He won't let her sit there forever.'
The hooker was bait. Del had found her working a bar in South St. Paul two days earlier and had dragged her ass back to Minneapolis on an old possession warrant. Lucas had put the word on the street that she was talking about Randy to beat a cocaine charge. Randy had shredded the face of one of Lucas' snitches. The hooker had seen him do it.
'You still writing poems?' Del asked after a while.
'Kind of gave it up,' Lucas said.
Del shook his head. 'Shouldn't of done that.'
Lucas looked at the plastic flowers in the window box and said sadly, 'I'm getting too old. You gotta be young or naive to write poetry.'
'You're three or four years younger'n I am,' Del said, picking up the thought.
'Neither one of us is a fuckin' walk in the park,' Lucas said. He tried to make it sound funny, but it didn't.
'Got that right,' Del said somberly. The narc had always been gaunt. He liked speed a little too much and sometimes got his nose in the coke. That came with the job: narcs never got out clean. But Del… the bags under his eyes were his most prominent feature, his hair was stiff, dirty. Like a mortally ill cat, he couldn't take care of himself anymore. 'Too many assholes. I'm gettin' as bad as them.'
'How many times we had this conversation?' Lucas asked.
' 'Bout a hundred,' Del said. He opened his mouth to go on, but they were interrupted by a sudden noisy cheer from the back and a male voice shouting, 'You see that nigger fly?' One of the black hookers at the bar looked up, eyes narrowing, but she went back to her magazine without saying anything.
Del lifted a hand to the bartender. 'Couple beers,' he called. 'Couple Leinies?'
The bartender nodded, and Lucas said, 'You don't think Randy's coming?'
'Gettin' late,' Del said. 'And if I drink any more of this Coke, I'll need a bladder transplant.'
The beers came, and Del said, 'You heard about that killing last night? The woman up on the hill? Beat to death in her kitchen?'
Lucas nodded. This was what Del had been leading up to. 'Yeah. Saw it on the news. And I heard some stuff around the office…'
'She was my cousin,' Del said, closing his eyes. He let his head fall back, as though overcome with exhaustion. 'We grew up together, fooling around on the river. Hers were the first bare tits I ever saw, in real life.'
'Your cousin?' Lucas studied the other man. As a matter of self-defense, cops joked about death. The more
