already he hated this city. It was too big. It had too many hiding places. Not that it mattered. Because things were right on track, and soon a very hard and very heavy brick wall was going to drop onto Craig McClendon’s wayward little daughter, Rosie. At the McClendon funeral-a tripleheader with just about everyone in Aubreyville in attendance-Daniels had started coughing and had been unable to stop. People were turning around to look at him, and he hated that kind of staring worse than practically anything. Red-faced, furious with embarrassment (but still unable to stop coughing), Daniels pushed past his sobbing young wife and hurried out of the church with one hand pressed uselessly over his mouth. He stood outside, coughing so hard at first he had to bend over and put his hands on his knees to keep from actually passing out, looking through his watery eyes at several others who had stepped out for cigarettes, three men and two women who weren’t able to go cold turkey even for a lousy half-hour funeral service, and suddenly he decided he was done smoking. Just like that. He knew that the coughing-fit might have been brought on by his usual summer allergies, but that didn’t matter. It was a dumb fucking habit, maybe the dumbest fucking habit on the planet, and he was damned if some County Coroner was going to write Pall Malls on the cause-of-death line of his death certificate. On the day he had come home and found Rosie gone-that night, actually, after he discovered the ATM card was missing and could no longer put off facing what had to be faced-he had gone down to the Store 24 at the bottom of the hill and bought his first pack of cigarettes in eleven years. He had gone back to his old brand like a murderer returning to the scene of his crime. In hoc signo vinces was what it said on each blood-red pack, in this sign shalt you conquer, according to his old man, who had conquered Daniels’s mother in a lot of kitchen brawls but not much else, so far as Norman had ever seen. The initial drag had made him feel dizzy, and by the time he’d finished the first cigarette, smoking it all the way down to a roach, he’d been sure he was going to puke, faint, or have a heart attack. Maybe all three at once. But now here he was, back up to two packs a day and hacking out that same old way-down-in-the-bottom-of-your-lungs cough when he rolled out of bed in the morning. It was like he’d never been away. That was all right, though; he was going through a stressful life experience, as the psychology pukes liked to say, and when people went through stressful life experiences, they often went back to their old habits. Habits-especially bad ones like smoking and drinking-were crutches, people said. So what? If you had a limp, what was wrong with using a crutch? Once he’d taken care of Rosie (made sure that if there was going to be an informal divorce, it would be on his terms, you might say), he would throw all his crutches away. This time for good. Norman turned his head and looked out the window. Not dark yet, but getting there. Close enough to get going, anyway. He didn’t want to be late for his appointment. He mashed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the nighttable beside the telephone, swung his feet off the bed, and began to dress. There was no hurry, that was the nicest thing; he’d had all those accumulated off-days coming, and Captain Hardaway hadn’t been the slightest bit chintzy about giving them to him when he asked. There were two reasons for that, Norman reckoned. First, the newspapers and TV stations had made him the flavor of the month; second, Captain Hardaway didn’t like him, had twice sicced the IA shoofiies on him because of excessive-force allegations, and had undoubtedly been glad to get rid of him for awhile.
“Tonight, bitch,” Norman murmured as he rode down in the elevator, alone except for his reflection in the tired old mirror at the back of the car.
“Tonight, if I get lucky. And I feel lucky.” There was a line of cabs drawn up at the curb, but Daniels bypassed them. Cab-drivers kept records, and sometimes they remembered faces. No, he would ride the bus again. A city bus, this time. He walked briskly toward the bus stop on the corner, wondering if he had been kidding himself about feeling lucky and deciding he had not been. He was close, he knew it. He knew it because he had found his way back into her head. The bus-one that ran the Green Line route-came around the comer and rolled up to where Norman was standing. He got on, paid his four bits, sat in back-he didn’t have to be Rose tonight, what a relief-and looked out the window as the streets rolled by. Bar signs. Restaurant signs. DELI. BEER. PIZZA BY THE SLICE.SEXEE TOPLESS GIRLZ. You don’t belong here, Rose, he thought as the bus went past the window of a restaurant named Pop’s Kitchen-“strictly Kansas City Beef,” said the blood-red neon sign in the window. You don’t belong here, but that’s all right, because I’m here now. I’ve come to take you home. To take you somewhere, anyway. The tangles of neon and the darkening velvet sky made him think of the good old days when life hadn’t seemed so weird and somehow claustrophobic, like the walls of a room that keeps getting smaller, slowly closing in on you. When the neon came on the fun started-that was how it had been, anyway, back then in the relatively uncomplicated years of his twenties. You found a place where the neon was bright and you slipped in. Those days were gone, but most cops-most good cops-remembered how to slip around after dark. How to slip around behind the neon, and how to ride the streetgrease. A cop who couldn’t do those things didn’t last very long. He had been watching the signs march past and judged that he should be approaching Carolina Street now. He got to his feet, walked to the front of the bus, and stood there holding the pole. When the bus pulled up at the corner and the doors flapped open, he walked down the steps and slipped into the darkness without saying a word. He’d bought a city street-map in the hotel newsstand, six dollars and fifty cents, outrageous, but the cost of asking directions could be even higher. People had a way of remembering the people who asked them directions; sometimes they remembered even five years later, amazing but true. So it was better not to ask. In case something happened. Something bad. Probably nothing would, but TCB and CYA were always the best rules to live by. According to his map, Carolina Street connected with Beaudry Place about four blocks west of the bus stop. A nice little walk on a warm evening. Beaudry Place was where the Travelers Aid jewboy lived. Daniels walked slowly, really just sauntering, with his hands in his pockets. His expression was bemused and slightly dopey, giving no clue that all his senses were on yellow alert. He catalogued each passing car, each passing pedestrian, looking especially for anyone who appeared to be looking especially at him. To be seeing him. There was no one, and that was good. When he reached Thumper’s house-and that’s what it was, a house, not an apartment, another break-he walked past it twice, observing the car in the driveway and the light in the lower front window. Living- room window. The drapes were open but the sheers were drawn. Through them he could see a soft colored blur that had to be the television. Thumper was up, Thumper was home, Thumper was watching a little tube and maybe munching a carrot or two before heading down to the bus station, where he would try to help more women too stupid to deserve help. Or too bad. Thumper hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring and had the look of a closet queer to Norman anyway, but better safe than sorry. He drifted up the driveway and peeked into Thumper’s four- or five-year-old Ford, looking for anything that would suggest the man didn’t live alone. He saw nothing that set off any warning bells. Satisfied, he looked up and down the residential street again and saw no one. You don’t have a mask, he thought. You don’t even have a nylon stocking you can pull over your face, Normie, do you? No, he didn’t. You forgot, didn’t you? Well… actually, no. He hadn’t. He had an idea that when the sun came up tomorrow, there was going to be one less urban Jewboy in the world. Because sometimes bad stuff happened even in nice residential neighborhoods like this. Sometimes people broke in-jigs and junkies for the most part, of course-and there went the old ballgame. Tough but true. Shit happens, as the tee-shirts and bumperstickers said. And sometimes, hard as it was to believe, shit happened to the right people instead of the wrong ones. Pravda-reading Jewboys who helped wives get away from husbands, for instance. You couldn’t just put up with stuff like that; it was no way to run a society. If everyone acted like that, there wouldn’t even be a society. It was pretty much rampant behavior, though, because most of the bleeding hearts got away with it. Most of the bleeding hearts hadn’t made the mistake of helping his wife, however… and this man had. Norman knew that as well as he knew his own name. This man had helped her. He mounted the steps, took one more quick look around, and rang the doorbell. He waited, then rang again. Now his ears, already attuned to catch the slightest noise, picked up the sound of approaching feet, not clack- clack-clack but hish-hish-hish, Thumper in his stocking feet, how cozy.
“Coming, coming,” Thumper called. The door opened. Thumper looked out at him, big eyes swimming behind his hornrimmed glasses.
“Can I help you?” he asked. His outer shirt was unbuttoned and untucked, hanging over a strap-style tee-shirt, the same style of tee-shirt Norman himself wore, and suddenly it was too much, suddenly it was the last straw, the one that fractured the old dromedary’s spinal column, and he was insane with rage. That a man like this should wear an undershirt like his! A white man’s undershirt!
“I think you can,” Norman said, and something in his face or his voice-perhaps it was both-must have alarmed Slowik, because his brown eyes widened and he started to draw back, his hand going to the door, probably meaning to slam it in Norman’s face. If so, he was too late. Norman moved fast, seizing the sides of Slowik’s outer shirt and driving him back into the house. Norman raised one foot and kicked the door shut behind him, feeling as graceful as Gene Kelly in an MGM musical.
“Yeah, I think so,” he said again.
“I hope for your sake you can. I’m going to ask you some questions, Thumper, good questions, and you better pray to your bignose Jewboy God that you’re able to come up with some good answers.”
“Get out of here!” Slowik cried.
“Or I’ll call the police!” Norman Daniels had a good chuckle at that, and then he whirled Slowik around, twisting Slowik’s left fist up until it touched his scrawny right shoulderblade. Slowik began to scream. Norman reached between his legs and cupped his testicles. “stop,” he said. “stop it right now or I’ll pop your balls like grapes. You’ll hear them go.” Thumper stopped. He was gasping and letting out an occasional choked whimper, but Norman could live with that. He herded Thumper back into the living room, where he used the remote control he found sitting on an endtable to turn up the television. He frogmarched his new pal into the kitchen and let go of him. “stand against the refrigerator,” he said.
“I want to see your ass and shoulderblades squashed right up against that baby, and if you move so much as an inch away from it, I’ll rip your lips off. Got it?”
“Y-Y-Yes,” Thumper said.
“Who-Who-Who are you?” He still looked like Bambi’s friend Thumper, but now he was starting to sound like Woodsy Fucking Owl.
“Irving R. Levine, NEC News,” Norman said.
“This is how I spend my day off.” He began pulling open the drawers along the counter, keeping an eye on Thumper as he did so. He didn’t think old Thump was going to run, but he might. Once people got beyond a certain level of fright, they became as unpredictable as tornadoes.
“What… I don’t know what-”
“You don’t have to know what,” Norman said.
“That’s the beauty of this, Thump. You don’t have to know a goddam thing except the answers to a few very simple questions. Everything else can be left to me. I’m a professional. Think of me as one of the Good Hands People.” He found what he was looking for in the fifth and last drawer down the line: two oven gloves with flower patterns. How cute. Just what the well-dressed Jewboy would want to wear when taking his wittle kosher cassewoles out of his wittle kosher oven. Norman pulled them on, then went quickly back down the drawerpulls, rubbing out any prints he might have left. Then he marched Thumper back into the living room, where he picked up the remote control and wiped it briskly on the front of his shirt.
“We’re going to have us a little face-to-face here, Thumper,” Norman said as he did this. His throat had thickened; the voice which came out of it sounded barely human, even to its owner. Norman wasn’t very surprised to find he had a raging hardon. He tossed the remote control onto the sofa and turned to Slowik, who was standing there with his shoulders slumped and tears oozing out from beneath his thick hornrimmed glasses. Standing there in that white man’s undershirt. Tm going to talk to you up close. Right up close. Do you believe that? You better, Thump. You just fucking better.”
“Please,” Slowik moaned. He held his shaking hands out to Norman.
“Please don’t hurt me. You’ve got the wrong man-whoever you want it’s not me. I can’t help you.” But in the end, Slowik helped quite a bit. By then they were down cellar, because Norman had begun to bite, and not even the TV turned all the way to top volume would have completely stifled the man’s screams. But, screams or no screams, he helped quite a bit. When the festivities were over, Norman found the garbage bags under the kitchen sink. Into one of these he put the oven gloves and his own shirt, which could not now be worn in public. He would take the bag with him and get rid of it later. Upstairs, in Thumper’s bedroom, he found only one item of clothing that would come even dose to covering his own much broader upper body: a baggy, faded Chicago Bulls sweatshirt. Norman laid this on the bed, then went into Thumper’s bathroom and turned on Thumper’s shower. While he waited for the water to run hot, he looked in Thumper’s medicine cabinet, found a bottle of Advil, and took four. His teeth hurt and his jaws ached. The entire lower half of his face was covered with blood and hair and little tags of skin. He stepped into the shower and grabbed Thump’s bar of Irish Spring, reminding himself to dump that into the bag, too. He actually didn’t know how much good any of these precautions were going to be, because he had no idea how much forensic evidence he might have left downstairs in the basement. He had kind of grayed out there for awhile. As he washed his hair he began to sing:
“Raaamblin” Rose… Raamblin” Rose… where you raaamble… no one knows… wild and windblown… that’s how you’ve grown… who can cling to… a Ramblin” Rose?” He turned off the shower, stepped out, and looked at his own faint, ghostly image in the steamy minor over the sink.
“I can,” he said flatly.
“I can, that’s who.”
Bill Steiner was raising his free hand to knock yet again, mentally cursing his nervousness-he was a man who wasn’t ordinarily nervous about women-when she answered.
“Coming! I’m coming, just a second, be right there.” She didn’t sound pissed, thank God, so maybe he hadn’t rousted her out of the bathroom. What in hell am I doing here, anyway? he asked
