Dragon Tears

collected.

“See you later,” she said.

“Later.”

One of the attendants unfolded an opaque body bag. It had been doubled so tightly upon itself that the layers of plastic separated with a sticky, crackling, unpleasantly organic noise.

Harry was surprised by a wave of nausea.

The dead woman had been facedown with her head turned away from him. He had heard another detective say that she had been shot in the chest and face. He didn’t want to see her when they rolled her over to put her into the bag.

Quelling his nausea with an effort of will, he turned away and headed for the front door.

Connie said, “Harry?”

Reluctantly he looked back.

She said, “Thanks.”

“You, too.”

That was probably the only reference they would ever make to the fact that their survival had depended on being a good team.

He continued toward the front door, dreading the crowd of onlookers.

From behind him came a wet, suction-breaking sound as they lifted the woman out of the congealing blood that half glued her to the floor.

Sometimes he could not remember why he had become a cop. It seemed not a career choice but an act of madness.

He wondered what he might have become if he had never entered police work, but as always his mind blanked on that one. Perhaps there was such a thing as destiny, a power infinitely greater than the force which drove the earth around the sun and kept the planets in alignment, moving men and women through life as if they were only pieces on a game board. Perhaps free will was nothing more than a desperate illusion.

The uniformed officer at the front door stepped aside to let him out. “It’s a zoo,” he said.

Harry wasn’t sure if the cop was referring to life in general or just to the mob of onlookers.

Outside, the day was considerably cooler than when Harry and Connie had gone into the restaurant for lunch. Above the screen of trees, the sky was as gray as cemetery granite.

Beyond police sawhorses and a barrier of taut yellow crime-scene tape, sixty or eighty people jostled one another and craned their necks for a better view of the carnage. Young people with new-wave haircuts stood shoulder to shoulder with senior citizens, businessmen in suits next to beachboys in cutoffs and Hawaiian shirts. A few were eating huge chocolate-chip cookies bought at a nearby bakery, and they were generally festive, as if none of them would ever die.

Harry was uncomfortably aware that the crowd took an interest in him when he stepped out of the restaurant. He avoided meeting anyone’s gaze. He didn’t want to see what emptiness their eyes might reveal.

He turned right and moved past the first of the large windows, which was still intact. Ahead was the broken pane where only a few toothlike shards still bristled from the frame. Glass littered the concrete.

The sidewalk was empty between the police barriers and the front of the building — and then a young man of about twenty slipped under the yellow tape where it bridged the gap between two curbside trees. He crossed the sidewalk as if unaware that Harry was approaching, his eyes and attention fixed intently on something inside the restaurant.

“Please stay behind the barrier,” Harry said.

The man — more accurately a kid in well-worn tennis shoes, jeans, and a Tecate beer T-shirt — stopped at the shattered window, giving no indication that he had heard the warning. He leaned through the frame, fiercely focused on something inside.

Harry glanced into the restaurant and saw the body of the woman being maneuvered into a morgue bag.

“I told you to stay behind the barrier.”

They were close now. The kid was an inch or two shorter than Harry’s six feet, lean, with thick black hair. He stared at the corpse, at the morgue attendants’ glistening latex gloves which grew redder by the moment. He seemed unaware that Harry was at his side, looming over him.

“Did you hear me?”

The kid was unresponsive. His lips were parted slightly in breathless anticipation. His eyes were glazed, as though he’d been hypnotized.

Harry put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

Slowly the kid turned from the slaughter, but he still had a faraway look, staring through Harry. His eyes were the gray of lightly tarnished silver. His pink tongue slowly licked his lower lip, as if he had just taken a bite of something tasty.

Neither the punk’s failure to obey nor the arrogance of his blank stare was what set Harry off. Irrationally, perhaps, it was that tongue, the obscene pink tip leaving a wet trail on lips that were too full. Suddenly Harry wanted to hammer his face, split his lips, break out his teeth, drive him to his knees, shatter his insolence, and teach him something about the value of life and respect for the dead.

He grabbed the kid, and before he quite knew what was happening, he was half shoving and half carrying him away from the window, back across the sidewalk. Maybe he hit the creep, maybe not, he didn’t think so, but he manhandled him as roughly as if he had caught him in the act of mugging or molesting someone, wrenched and jerked him around, bent him double, and forced him under the crime-scene tape.

The punk went down hard on his hands and knees, and the crowd moved back to give him a little room. Gasping for breath, he rolled onto his side and glared up at Harry. His hair had fallen across his face. His T-shirt was torn. Now his eyes were in focus and his attention won.

The onlookers murmured excitedly. The scene in the restaurant was passive entertainment, the killer dead by the time they arrived, but this was real action right in front of their eyes. It was as if a television screen had expanded to allow them to step through the glass, and now they were part of a real cop drama, right in the middle of the thrills and chills; and when he looked at their faces, Harry saw that they were hoping the script was colorful and violent, a story worth recounting to their families and friends over dinner.

Abruptly he was sickened by his own behavior, and he turned from the kid. He walked fast to the end of the building, which extended to the end of the block, and slipped under the yellow tape at a spot where no crowd was gathered.

The department car was parked around the corner, two-thirds of the way along the next tree-lined block. With the onlookers behind him and out of sight, Harry began to tremble. The trembling escalated into violent shivering.

Halfway to the car he stopped and leaned one hand against the rough trunk of a tree. He took slow deep breaths.

A peal of thunder shook the sky above the canopy of trees.

A phantom dancer, made of dead leaves and litter, spun down the center of the street in the embrace of a whirlwind.

He had dealt much too harshly with the kid. He’d been reacting not to what the kid had done but to everything that had happened in the restaurant and the attic. Delayed-stress syndrome.

But more than that: he had needed to strike out at something, someone, God or man, in frustration over the stupidity of it all, the injustice, the pure blind cruelty of fate. Like some grim bird of despair, his mind kept circling back to the two dead people in the restaurant, the wounded, the cop clinging to a thread of life at Hoag Hospital, their tortured husbands and wives and parents, bereaved children, mourning friends, the many links in the terrible chain of grief that was forged by each death.

The kid had just been a convenient target.

Harry knew he ought to go back and apologize, but couldn’t. It was not the kid he dreaded facing as much as that ghoulish crowd.

“The little creep needed a lesson anyway,” he said, justifying his actions to himself.

He had treated the kid more like Connie might have done. Now he even sounded like Connie.