station restroom while a self-serve pump filled the Tempo’s tank on slow automatic feed. So he was fit to be seen on the street-as long as he didn’t press his luck-and that was good. As he disconnected the ignition wires he wondered briefly what time it was. No way to tell; he wasn’t wearing a watch, the shitbox Tempo didn’t have a clock, and he was underground. Did it matter? Did it-“Nope,” a familiar voice said softly. “doesn’t matter. The time is out of joint.” He looked down and saw the bullmask staring up at him from its place in the passenger-side footwell: empty eyes, disquieting wrinkled smile, absurd flower-decked horns. All at once he wanted it. It was stupid, he hated the garlands on the horns and hated the stupid happy-to-be-castrated smile even more… but it was good luck, maybe. It didn’t really talk, of course, all of that was just in his mind, but without the mask he certainly never would have gotten away from Ettinger’s Pier. That was for damned sure. Okay, okay, he thought, viva ze bool, and he leaned over to get the mask. Then, with seemingly no pause at all, he was leaning forward and clamping his arms around Blondie’s waist, squeezing her tight-tight-tight so she couldn’t get enough breath to scream. She had just come out of a door marked HOUSEKEEPING, pushing her cart in front of her, and he thought he’d probably been waiting out here for her quite awhile, but that didn’t matter now because they were going right back into HOUSEKEEPING, just Pam and her new friend Norman, viva ze bool. She was kicking at him and some of the blows landed on his shins, but she was wearing sneakers and he hardly felt the hits. He let go of her waist with one hand, pulled the door closed behind him, and shot the bolt across. A quick look around, just to make sure the place was empty except for the two of them. Late Saturday afternoon, middle of the weekend, it should have been… and was. The room long and narrow, with a short row of lockers standing at the far end. There was a wonderful smell-a fragrance of clean, ironed linen that made Norman think of laundry day at their house when he was a kid. There were big stacks of neatly folded sheets on pallets, Dandux laundry baskets full of fluffy bathtowels, pillowcases piled on shelves.Deep stacks of coverlets lined one wall. Norman shoved Pam into these, watching with no interest at all as the skirt of her uniform flipped up high on her thighs. His sex-drive had gone on vacation, perhaps even into permanent retirement, and maybe that was just as well. The plumbing between his legs had gotten him into a lot of trouble over the years. It was a hell of a note, the sort of thing that might lead you to think that God had more in common with Andrew Dice Clay than you maybe wanted to believe. For twelve years you didn’t notice it, and for the next fifty-or even sixty-it dragged you around behind it like some raving baldheaded Tasmanian devil. “don’t scream,” he said. “don’t scream, Pammy. I’ll kill you if you do.” It was an empty threat-for now, at least-but she wouldn’t know that. Pam had drawn in a deep breath; now she let it out in a soundless rush. Norman relaxed slightly.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she said, and boy, was that original, he’d certainly never heard that one before, nope, nope.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said warmly. 7 certainly don’t.” Something was flopping in his back pocket. He felt for it and touched rubber. The mask. He wasn’t exactly surprised.
“All you have to do is tell me what I want to know, Pam. Then you go on your happy way and I go on mine.”
“How do you know my name?” He gave her that evocative interrogation-room shrug, the one that said he knew lots of things, that was his job. She sat in the pile of tumbled dark maroon coverlets just like the one on his bed up on the ninth floor, smoothing her skirt down over her knees. Her eyes were a really extraordinary shade of blue. A tear gathered on the lower lid of the left one, trembled, then slipped down her cheek, leaving a trail of mascara-soot.
“Are you going to rape me?” she asked. She was looking at him with those extraordinary baby blues of hers, great eyes-who needs to pussywhip a man when you’ve got eyes like those, right, Pammy?-but he didn’t see the look in them he wanted to see. That was a look you saw in the interrogation room when a guy you’d been whipsawing with questions all day and half the night was finally getting ready to break: a humble look, a pleading look, a look that said I’ll tell you anything, anything at all, just let off me a little. He didn’t see that look in Pammy’s eyes. Yet.
“Pam-”
“Please don’t rape me, please don’t, but if you do, if you have to, please wear a condom, I’m so scared of AIDS.” He gawped at her, then burst out laughing. It hurt his stomach to laugh, it hurt his diaphragm even worse, and most of all it hurt his face, but for awhile there was just no way he could stop. He told himself he had to stop, that some hotel employee, maybe even the house dick, might happen by and hear laughter coming from in here and wonder what it meant, but not even that helped; in the end, the throe had to pass on its own. Blondie watched him with amazement at first, then smiled tentatively herself. Hopefully. Norman at last managed to get himself under control, although his eyes were streaming with tears by that time.
“I’m not going to rape you, Pam,” he said at last-when he was capable of saying anything without laughing it into insincerity.
“How do you know my name?” she asked again. Her voice was a little stronger this time. He hauled the mask out, stuck his hand inside it, and manipulated it as he had for the asshole accountant in the Camry.
“Pam-Pam-bo-Bam, banana-fanna-fo-Fam, fee-fi-mo-Mam,” he made it sing. He bopped it back and forth, like Shari Lewis with fucking Lamb Chop, only this was a bull, not a lamb, a stupid fucking fagbull withfiowers on its horns. Not a reason in the world why he should like the fucking thing, but the fact was, he sort of did.
“I sort of like you, too,” Ferd the fagbull said, looking up at Norman with its empty eyes. Then it turned back to Pam, and with Norman to move its lips, it said:
“You got a problem with that?”
“N-N-No,” she said, and the look he wanted still wasn’t in her eyes, not yet, but they were making progress; she was terrified of him-of them-that much was for sure. Norman squatted down, hands dangling between his thighs, Ferdinand’s rubber horns now pointing at the floor. He looked at her sincerely.
“Bet you’d like to see me out of this room and out of your life, wouldn’t you, Pammy?” She nodded so vigorously her hair bounced up and down on her shoulders.
“Yeah, I thought so, and that’s fine by me. You tell me one thing and I’ll be gone like a cool breeze. It’s easy, too.” He leaned forward toward her, Ferd’s horns dragging on the floor.
“All I want to know is where Rose is. Rose Daniels. Where does she live?”
“Oh my God.” What color there still was in Pammy’s face-two spots of red high up on her cheekbones-now disappeared, and her eyes widened until it seemed they must tumble from their sockets.
“Oh my God, you’re him. You’re Norman.” That startled and angered him-he was supposed to know her name, that was how it worked, but she wasn’t supposed to know his-and everything else followed upon that. She was up and off the coverlets while he was still reacting to his name in her mouth, and she almost got away completely. He sprang after her, reaching out with his right hand, the one that still had the bullmask on it. Faintly he could hear himself saying that she wasn’t going anywhere, that he wanted to talk to her and intended to do it right up close. He grabbed her around the throat. She gave a strangled cry that wanted to be a scream and lunged forward with surprising, sinewy strength. Still he could have held her, if not for the mask. It slipped on his sweaty hand and she tore away, fell away toward the door, arms out to either side, flailing, and at first Norman didn’t understand what happened next. There was a noise, a meaty sound that was almost a pop like a champagne cork, and then Pam began to flail wildly, her hands beating at the door, her head back at a strange stiff angle, like someone staring intently at the flag during a patriotic ceremony.
“Huh?” Norman said, and Ferd rose up in front of his eyes, askew on his hand. Ferdinand looked drunk.
“Ooops,” said the bull. Norman yanked the mask off his hand and stuffed it in his pocket, now aware of a pattering sound, like rain. He looked down and saw that Pam’s left sneaker was no longer white. Now it was red. Blood was pooling around it; it ran down the door in long drips. Her hands were still fluttering. To Norman they looked like small birds. She looked almost nailed to the door, and as Norman stepped forward, he saw that, in a way, she was. There was a coathook on the back of the damned thing. She’d torn free of his hand, plunged forward, and impaled herself. The coathook was buried in her left eye.
“Oh Pam, shit, you fool,” Norman said. He felt both furious and dismayed. He kept seeing the bull’s stupid grin, kept hearing it say Ooops, like some wiseass character in a Warner Bros cartoon. He yanked Pam off the coathook. There was an unspeakable gristly sound as she came. Her one good eye-bluer than ever, it seemed to Norman-stared at him in wordless horror. Then she opened her mouth and shrieked. Norman never thought about it; his hands acted on their own, grabbing her face by the cheeks, planting his big palms beneath the delicate angles of her jaw, and then twisting. There was a single sharp crack-the sound of someone stamping on a cedar shingle-and she went limp in his arms. She was gone, and whatever she had known about Rose was gone with her.
“Oh you dopey gal,” Norman breathed.
“Put your eye out on the fucking coathook, how stupid is that?” He shook her in his arms. Her head flopped bonelessly from side to side. She now wore a wet red bib on the front of her white uniform. He carried Pam back over to the coverlets and dropped her there. She sprawled with her legs apart.
“Brazen bitch,” Norman said.
“You can’t even quit when you’re dead, can you?” He crossed her legs. One of her arms dropped off her lap and thumped onto the coverlets. He saw a kinky purple bracelet around her wrist-it looked almost like a short length of telephone cord. On it was a key. Norman looked at this, then toward the lockers at the far end of the room. You can’t go there, Normie, his father said. I know what you’re thinking, but you’re nuts if you go anywhere near their place on Durham Avenue. Norman smiled. You’re nuts if you go there. That was sort of funny, when you thought about it. Besides, where else was there to go? What else was there to try? He didn’t have much time. His bridges were burning merrily behind him, all of them.
“The time is out of joint,” Norman Daniels murmured, and stripped the key-bracelet off Pam’s wrist. He went down to the lockers, holding the bracelet between his teeth long enough to stick the bullmask back on his hand. Then he held Ferd up and let him scan the Dymotapes on the lockers.
“This one,” Ferd said, and tapped the locker marked PAM HAVERFORD with his rubber face. The key fit the lock. Inside was a pair of jeans, a tee-shirt, a sports bra, a shower-bag, and Pam’s bag. Norman took the bag over to one of the Dandux baskets and spilled out the contents on the towels. He cruised Ferdinand over the stuff like some bizarre spy satellite.
“There you go, big boy,” Ferd murmured. Norman plucked a thin slice of gray plastic from the rubble of cosmetics, tissues, and papers. It would open the front door of their clubhouse, no doubt about that. He picked it up, started to turn away-“Wait,” ze bool said. It went to Norman’s ear and whispered, flower-decked horns bobbing. Norman listened, then nodded. He stripped the mask off his sweaty hand again, stuffed it back into his pocket, and bent over Pam’s bag-litter. He sifted carefully this time, much as he would have if he had been investigating what was called “an event scene” in the current jargon… only then he would have used the tip of a pen or pencil instead of the tips of his fingers. Fingerprints certainly aren’t a problem here, he thought, and laughed. Not anymore. He pushed her billfold aside and picked up a small red book with TELEPHONE ADDRESS on the front. He looked under D, found an entry for Daughters and Sisters, but it wasn’t what he was looking for. He turned to the front page of the book, where a great many numbers had been written over and around Pam’s doodles-eyes and cartoon bowties, mostly. The numbers all looked like phone numbers, though. He turned to the back page, the other likely spot. More phone numbers, more eyes, more bowties… and in the middle, neatly boxed and marked with asterisks, this:
[image of a spotted bow tie, an eye, an asterisk, the numbers 0471, an asterisks, an eye and a spotted bow tie]
“Oh boy,” he said.
“Hold your cards, folks, but I think we have a Bingo. We do, don’t we, Pammy?” Norman tore the back page out of Pam’s book, stuffed it in his front pocket, and tiptoed back to the door. He listened. No one out there. He let out a breath and touched the corner of the paper he’d just stuck in his pocket. His mind lifted off in another one of those skips as he did so, and for a little while there was nothing at all.
Hale and Gustafson led Rosie and Gert to a corner of the squadroom that was almost like a conversation-pit; the furniture was old but fairly comfortable, and there were no desks for the detectives to sit behind. They dropped instead onto a faded green sofa parked between the soft-drink machine and the table with the Bunn-O-Matic on it. Instead of a grim picture of drug addicts or AIDS victims, there was a travel-agency poster of the Swiss Alps over the coffee-maker. The detectives were calm and sympathetic, the interview was low-key and respectful, but neither their attitude nor the informal surroundings helped Rosie much. She was still angry, more furious than she had ever been in her life, but she was also terrified. It was being in this place. Several times as the Q- and-A went on, she came close to losing control of her emotions, and each time this happened she would look across the room to where Bill was sitting patiently outside the waist-high railing with its sign reading PLOICE BUSINESS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, PLEASE. She knew she should get up, go over to him, and tell him not to wait any longer-to just take himself on home and call her tomorrow. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She needed him to be there the way she’d needed him to be behind her on the Harley when the detectives had been driving them here, needed him as an over-imaginative child needs a nightlight when she wakes up in the middle of the night. The thing was, she kept having crazy ideas. She knew they were crazy, but knowing didn’t help. For awhile they would go away, she would simply answer their questions and not have the crazy ideas, and then she would catch herself thinking that they had Norman down in the basement, that they were hiding him down there, sure they were, because law enforcement was a family, cops were brothers, and cops” wives weren’t allowed to run away and have lives of their own no matter what. Norman was safely tucked away in some tiny sub-basement room where no one could hear you even if you screamed at the top of your lungs, a room with sweaty concrete walls and a single bare bulb hanging down from a cord, and when this meaningless charade was over, they would take her to him. They would take her to Norman. Crazy. But she only fully knew it was crazy when she looked up and saw
