amble, knowing that any watchers would feel less threatened by a guy on the far side of the street. The specific watcher he kept imagining was the darkie tubbo whose picture had been in the paper, a giant economy-sized bag of works with a pair of hi-resolution field glasses in one hand and a melting clump of Mallow Cremes in the other. He slowed down a little more, but not much-red alert, he reminded himself, they’ll be on red alert. It was a big white frame house, not quite Victorian, one of those turn-of-the-century dowagers that’s three full stones of ugly. It looked narrow from the front, but Norman had grown up in a house not so different from this and was willing to bet it went almost all the way back to the street on the far side of the block. And with a whore-whore here and a whore-whore there, Norman thought, being careful not to change his walk from its current slow amble, and being careful to swallow the house not in one long stare but in small sips. Here a whore, there a whore, everywhere a whore-whore. Yes indeed. Everywhere a whore-whore. He felt the familiar rage begin to pulse at his temples now, and with it came a familiar image, the one which stood for all the things he could not express: the bank card. The green bank card she had dared to steal. The image of that card was always close now, and it had come to stand for all the terrors and compulsions of his life-the forces he raged against, the faces (his mother’s, for instance, so white and doughy and somehow sly) that sometimes slipped into his mind while he was lying in bed at night and trying to sleep, the voices that came in his dreams. His father’s, for instance.
“Come on over here, Normie. I’ve got something to tell you, and I want to tell you up close.” Sometimes that meant a blow. Sometimes, if you were lucky and he was drunk, it meant a hand creeping in between your legs. But that didn’t matter now; only the house across the street mattered. He wouldn’t get another look this good at it, and if he wasted these precious seconds thinking about the past, who was the monkey then? He was directly opposite the place. Nice lawn, narrow but deep. Pretty flowerbeds, flushed with spring blooms, flanked the long front porch. There were metal posts dressed in ivy standing in the center of each bed. The ivy had been pruned away from the black plastic cylinders at the tops of the posts, though, and Norman knew why: there were TV cameras inside those dark pods, giving overlapping views up and down the street. If anyone was looking at the monitors inside right now, they would be seeing a little black-and-white man in a baseball hat and sunglasses moving from screen to screen, walking hunched and slightly bent-kneed so that his six-feet-three would look quite a bit shorter to the casual observer. There was another camera mounted over a front door for which there would be no keyhole; keys were too easy to duplicate, tumblers too easy to tickle, if you were handy with a set of picks. No, there would be a keycard slot, a numerical keypad console, or maybe both. And more cameras in the back yard, of course. As he walked past the house, Norman risked one final look into the side yard. Here was a vegetable garden, and two whores in shorts sliding long sticks-tomato-stakes, he supposed-into the ground. One looked like a taco-bender: olive skin and long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Dynamite body, looked about twenty-five. The other was younger, maybe not even out of her teens yet, one of these punky-grungy scumbuckets with her hair dyed two different colors. There was a bandage covering her left ear. She was wearing a sleeveless psychedelic shirt, and Norman could see a tattoo on her left bicep. His eyes weren’t quite good enough to make out what it was, but he had been a cop long enough to know it was probably either the name of a rock group or a badly executed drawing of a marijuana plant. Norman saw himself suddenly rushing across the street, ignoring the cameras; saw himself grabbing Little Miss Hot Snatch with the rock-star hair; saw himself sliding one of his big hands around her thin neck and running it up until it was stopped by the shelf of her jaw.
“Rose Daniels,” he would say to the other one, the taco-bender with the dark hair and the dynamite bod.
“Get her out here right now or I’ll snap this spermbucket’s neck like a chicken-bone.” That would be great, but he was almost positive Rosie was no longer here. His library research told him that almost three thousand women had availed themselves of the services offered by Daughters and Sisters since Leo and Jessica Stevenson had opened the place in 1974, and the average length of stay was four weeks. They moved them out into the community at a pretty good pace, breeders and disease spreaders, pretty mosquitoes. Probably gave them dildos instead of diplomas when they graduated. No, Rose was almost surely gone, working at some menial job her lesbo pals had found her and going home at night to a scurgy room they’d also found her. The bitches across the street would know where she was, though-the Stevenson woman would have her address in her files, and probably the ones over there in the garden had already been up to her little roachtrap for tea and Girl Scout cookies. Those who hadn’t would have been told all about it by those who had, too, because that was the way women were made. You had to kill them to shut them up. The younger of the gardeners, the one with the rock-star hair, startled him horribly by raising her head, seeing him… and waving. For one awful moment he was sure she was laughing at him, that they were all laughing, that they were lined up at the windows inside Castle Lesbo and laughing at him, at Inspector Norman Daniels, who had been able to bust half a dozen coke-barons but couldn’t keep his own wife from stealing his motherfucking ATM card. His hands snapped into fists. Get hold of yourself! the Norman Daniels version of Practical-Sensible screamed inside him. She probably waves at everybody! She probably waves at stray dogs! It’s what twats like her do! Yes. Yes, of course it was. Norman unrolled his hands, raised one of them, and chopped the air in a brief return wave. He even managed a little smile, which reawoke the ache of muscles and tendon-even of bone-at the back of his mouth. Then, as Little Miss Hot Snatch turned back to her gardening, the smile faded and he hurried on with his heart thumping. He tried to return his thoughts to his current problem-how he was going to isolate one of those bitches (the Head Bitch, preferably; that way he wouldn’t have to risk coming up with one who didn’t know what he needed to find out) and get her to talk-but his ability to work rationally at this problem seemed to be gone, at least for the time being. He raised his hands to the sides of his face and massaged the hinges of his jaws. He had hurt himself this way before, but never this badly-what had he done to Thumper? The paper hadn’t said, but this ache in his jaws-and in his teeth, it was in his teeth, too-suggested that it had been plenty. I’m in trouble if they catch me, he told himself. They’ll have photographs of the marks I left on him. They’ll have samples of my saliva and… well… any other fluids I might have left. They have a whole array of exotic tests these days, they test everything, and I don’t even know if I’m a secretor. Yes, true, but they weren’t going to catch him. He was registered at the Whitestone as Alvin Dodd from New Haven, and if he was pressed, he could even produce a driver’s license-a photo driver’s license-that would back that up. If the cops here called the cops back home, they would be told that Norman Daniels was a thousand miles from the midwest, camping in Utah’s Zion National Park and taking a well- deserved vacation. They might even tell the cops here not to be stupid, that Norman Daniels was a bona fide golden boy. Surely they wouldn’t pass on the story of Wendy Yarrow… would they? No, probably they wouldn’t. But sooner or later-The thing was, he no longer cared about later. These days he only cared about sooner. About finding Rose and having a serious discussion with her. About giving her a present. His bank card, in fact. And it would never be recovered from another trash barrel or from some greasy little fag’s wallet, either. He was going to make sure she never lost it or threw it away again. He was going to put it in a safe place. And if he could see only darkness beyond the… the insertion of that final gift… well, maybe that was a blessing. Now that his mind had returned to the bank card it dwelled there, as it almost always did these days, in his sleep as well as when he was awake. It was as if that piece of plastic had become a weird green river (the Merchant’s instead of the Mississippi) and the run of his thoughts was a stream which flowed into it. All thoughts ran downhill now, eventually losing their identity as they merged into the green current of his obsession. The enormous, unanswerable question surfaced again: How could she have dared? How could she have possibly dared to take it? That she should have left, run away from him, that he supposed he could understand, even if he could not condone it, and even if he knew that she would have to die just for fooling him so completely, for hiding the treachery in her stinking woman’s heart so well. But that she should have dared to take his bank card, to take what was his, like the kid who had snuck up the beanstalk and stolen the sleeping giant’s golden hen… Without realizing what he was doing, Norman put the first finger of his left hand into his mouth and began to bite down on it. There was pain-quite a lot of it-but this time he didn’t feel it; he was deep in his own thoughts. There was a thick pad of callus high up on the first fingers of both hands, because this biting in moments of stress was an old, old habit of his, one that went back to childhood. At first the callus held, but as he continued to think about the bank card, as its green began to deepen in his mind until it had become the near-black of a fir-tree seen at dusk (a color quite unlike the card’s actual lime color), it gave way and blood began to flow down his hand and over his lips. He dug his teeth into his finger, relishing the pain, grinding at the flesh, tasting his blood, so salty and so thick, like the taste of Thumper’s blood when he had bitten through the cord at the base of his-
“Mommy? Why’s that man doing that to his hand?”
“Never mind, come on.” That brought him around. He looked sluggishly over his shoulder, like a man waking from a nap which has been short but deep, and saw a young woman and a little boy of perhaps three walking away from him-she was moving the kid along so fast he was almost running, and when the woman took her own look back, Norman saw she was terrified. What, exactly, had he been doing? He looked down at his finger and saw deep, bleeding crescents on either side of it. One of these days he was apt to bite the damned thing right off, bite it off and swallow it. Not that it would be the first time he’d bitten something off. Or swallowed it, either. That was a bad street to go down, though. He took the handkerchief out of his back pocket and wrapped it around his bleeding finger. Then he raised his head and looked around. He was surprised to see it was well on the way to being dark; there were lights on in some of the houses. How far had he come? Where, exactly, was he? He squinted at the street-sign on the corner of the next intersection and read the words Dearborn Avenue. On his right was a little mom-and-pop store with a bike rack in front and a sign reading OVEN-FRESH ROLLS in the window. Norman’s stomach growled. He realized that he was really hungry for the first time since getting off the Continental Express bus and eating cold cereal in the terminal cafeteria, eating it because it was what she would have eaten. A few rolls were suddenly just what he wanted, the only thing in the world he wanted… but not just rolls. He wanted oven-fresh rolls, like the kind his mother used to make. She was a fat slob who never stopped yelling, but she could cook, all right. No doubt about that. And she had been her own best customer. They better be fresh, Norman thought as he mounted the steps. Inside, he could see an old man pottering around behind the counter. They better be fresh, pal, or God help you. He was reaching for the doorhandle when one of the posters in the window caught his eye. It was bright yellow, and although he had no way of knowing that Rosie had placed this particular flier herself, he felt something stir inside him even before he saw the words Daughters and Sisters. He bent forward to read it, eyes suddenly very small and very intent, his heart picking up speed in his chest.
COME OUT AND PLAY WITH US AT BEAUTIFUL ETTINGER’s PIER AS WE CELEBRATE CLEAR SKIES AND WARM DAYS WITH THE 9TH ANNUAL DAUGHTERS AND SISTERS “SWING INTO SUMMER” PICNIC AND CONCERT SATURDAY, JUNE 4th BOOTHS*CRAFTS*GAMES OF CHANCE* GAMES OF SKILL*RAP DJ FOR THE KIDDIES!!!PLUS!!!
THE INDIGO GIRLS, LIVE AND IN CONCERT, 8 P.M.
SINGLE PARENTS, THERE WILL BE CHILD-MINDING!
“COME ONE, COME ALL!”
ALL PROCEEDS BENEFIT DAUGHTERS AND SISTERS, WHO REMIND YOU THAT VIOLENCE AGAINST ONE WOMAN IS A CRIME AGAINST ALL WOMEN
Saturday the fourth. This Saturday. And would she be there, his rambling Rose? Of course she would be, she and all her new lesbo friends. Cunts of a feather flocked together. Norman traced the fifth line up from the bottom of the poster with the finger he had bitten. Bright poppies of blood were already soaking through the handkerchief wrapped around it. Come one, come all. That was what it said, and Norman thought he just might take them up on it.
Thursday morning, almost eleven-thirty. Rosie took a sip of Evian, rolled it around in her mouth, swallowed, and picked up the sides again. “she was coming, all right; this time his ears weren’t just playing tricks on him. Peterson could hear the staccato rap of her high heels moving up the hallway. He could imagine her with her bag already open, rummaging in there for her key, worrying about the devil who might be coming along behind when she should have been worried about the one lying in wait. He checked quickly to make sure he still had his knife, then pulled the nylon stroking down over his head. As her key rattled in the lock, Peterson pulled the knife out and-”
“Cut-cut-cut!” Rhoda cried impatiently through the speakers. Rosie looked up and through the glass wall. She didn’t like the way Curt Hamilton was just sitting there by his DAT deck and looking at her with his earphones resting on his collarbones, but what alarmed her was the fact that Rhoda was smoking one of her slim cigarettes right in the control room, ignoring the NO PUFFIN sign on the wall. Rhoda looked like she was having a terrible morning, but she wasn’t the only one.
“Rhoda? Did I do something wrong?”
“Not if you wear nylon strokings, I guess,” Rhoda said, and tapped ash into a styrofoam cup sitting on the control panel in front of her.
“I’ve had a few guys stroke mine over the years, now that I think about it, but mostly I call them nylon stockings.” For a moment Rosie didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about, then she mentally replayed the last few sentences she’d read and groaned.
“Jeepers, Rhoda, I’m sorry.” Curt slipped his cans back over his ears and pushed a button.
“Kill All My Tomorrows, take seventy-thr-” Rhoda put a hand on his arm and said something which filled Rosie’s stomach with icewater: “don’t bother.” Then she glanced through the window, saw Rosie’s stricken face, and offered her a smile which was wan but game.
“All’s cool, Rosie, I’m just calling lunch half an hour early, that’s all. Come on out.” Rosie got up too fast, bumping her left thigh a good one on the bottom of the table and almost overturning the plastic bottle of Evian water. She hurried out of the booth. Rhoda and Curt were standing just outside, and for a moment Rosie was sure-no, she knew-that they had been talking about her. If you really believe that, Rosie, you probably ought to go see a doctor, Practical-Sensible spoke up sharply. The kind that shows you inkblots and asks about your potty training. Rosie usually had very little use for that voice, but this time she welcomed it.
