“Wait,” Harry said. “Yes. Yes, I guess I’ll take it.”
On those occasions when one of his cases became newsworthy, Harry never read about himself in the papers. He was a cop, not a celebrity.
He gave the clerk a quarter and took the evening edition.
He still didn’t understand how the paper had gotten folded and tucked under his arm. Blackout? Or something stranger, more directly related to the other inexplicable events of the day?
When Harry opened the front door and, dripping, stepped into the foyer of his condominium, home had never seemed so inviting. It was a neat and ordered haven, into which the chaos of the outside world could not intrude.
He took off his shoes. They were saturated, probably ruined. He should have worn galoshes, but the weather report had not called for rain until after nightfall.
His socks were wet, too, but he left them on. He would mop the foyer tile after he changed into clean, dry clothes.
He stopped in the kitchen to put the bread and mustard on the counter beside the cutting board. Later he would make sandwiches with some cold poached chicken. He was starved.
The kitchen sparkled. He was so pleased that he had taken the time to clean up the breakfast mess before going to work. He would have been depressed to see it now.
From the kitchen he went through the dining room, down the short hall to the master bedroom, carrying the evening newspaper. As he crossed the threshold, he snapped on the lights — and discovered the hobo on his bed.
Alice never fell down any rabbit hole deeper than the one into which Harry dropped at the sight of the vagrant.
The man seemed even bigger than he had been out of doors or from a distance in the Special Projects corridor. Dirtier. More hideous. He did not have the semi-transparency of an apparition; in fact, with his masses of tangled hair and intricately layered varieties of grime and webwork of scars, with his dark clothes so wrinkled and tattered that they recalled the interment wrappings of an ancient Egyptian mummy, he was more real than the room itself, like a painstakingly detailed figure painted by a photorealist and then inserted into a minimalist’s line- drawing of a room.
The tramp’s eyes opened. Like pools of blood.
He sat up and said, “You think you’re so special. But you’re just one more animal, walking meat like all the rest of them.”
Dropping the newspaper, pulling his revolver from his shoulder holster, Harry said, “Don’t move.”
Ignoring the warning, the intruder swung his legs over the side of the bed, got up.
The impression of the vagrant’s head and body remained in the spread, pillows, and mattress. A ghost could walk through snow, leaving no footprints, and hallucinations had no weight.
“Just another diseased animal.” If anything, the vagrant’s voice was deeper and raspier than it had been on the street in Laguna Beach, the guttural voice of a beast that had laboriously learned to talk. “Think you’re a hero, don’t you? Big man. Big hero. Well, you’re nothing, less than a pissant, that’s what you are.
Harry couldn’t believe it was going to happen again, not twice in one day, and for God’s sake not in his own home.
Backing up one step into the doorway, he said, “You don’t lie down on the floor right now, on your face, hands behind your back,
Starting around the bed toward Harry, the vagrant said, “You think you can shoot anyone you like, push anyone around if you want to, and that’s the end of it, but that’s not the end of it with me, shooting
“Stop, right now, I mean it!”
The intruder didn’t stop. His moving shadow was huge on the wall. “Rip your guts out, hold them in your face, make you smell them while you die.”
Harry had the revolver in both hands. A shooter’s stance. He knew what he was doing. He was a good marksman. He could have hit a flitting hummingbird at such close range, let alone this great looming hulk, so there was only one way it could end, the intruder as cold as a side of beef, blood all over the walls, only one plausible scenario — yet he felt in greater danger than ever before in his life, infinitely more vulnerable than he had been among the mannequins in the box-maze attic.
“You people,” the vagrant said, rounding the foot of the bed, “are so much fun to play with.”
One last time, Harry ordered him to stop.
But he kept coming, maybe ten feet away, eight, six.
Harry opened fire, squeezing shots off nice and smooth, not letting the hard recoil of the handgun pull the muzzle off target, once, twice, three times, four, and the explosions were deafening in the small bedroom. He knew every round did damage, three in the torso, the fourth in the base of the throat from only inches more than arm’s length, causing the head to snap around as if doing a comic double take.
The hobo didn’t go down, didn’t stagger backward, only jerked with each hit he took. Inflicted point-blank, the throat wound was ghastly. The bullet must have punched all the way through, leaving an even worse exit wound in the back of the neck, fracturing or severing the spine, but there was no blood, no spray or spout or smallest spurt, as if the man’s heart had stopped beating long ago and all the blood had dried and hardened in his vessels. He kept coming, no more stoppable than an express train, rammed into Harry, knocking the wind out of him, lifting him, carrying him backward through the doorway, slamming him so hard against the far hallway wall that Harry’s teeth snapped together with an audible
Pain spread like a Japanese accordion fan from the small of Harry’s back across both shoulders. For a moment he thought he was going to black out, but terror kept him conscious. Pinned to the wall, feet dangling off the floor, stunned by the plaster-cracking force with which he’d been hammered, he was as helpless as a child in the iron grip of his assailant. But if he could remain conscious, his strength might flood back into him, or maybe he would think of something to save himself, anything, a move, a trick, a distraction.
The hobo leaned against Harry, crushing him. The nightmarish face loomed closer. The livid scars were encircled by enlarged pores the size of match heads, packed with filth. Tufts of wiry black hair bristled from his flared nostrils.
When the man exhaled, it was like a mass grave venting the gases of decomposition, and Harry choked in revulsion.
“Scared, little man?” the vagrant asked, and his ability to speak seemed unaffected by the hole in his throat and the fact that his vocal cords had been pulverized and blown out through the back of his neck. “Scared?”
Harry was scared, yes, he would have been an idiot if he hadn’t been scared. No amount of weapons training or police work prepared you for going face to face with the boogeyman, and he didn’t mind admitting it, was prepared to shout it from a rooftop if that’s what the vagrant wanted, but he couldn’t get his breath to speak.
“Sunrise in eleven hours,” the hobo said. “Ticktock.”
Things were moving in the depths of the tramp’s bushy beard. Crawling. Maybe bugs.
He shook Harry fiercely, rattling him against the wall.
Harry tried to bring his arms up between them, break the big man’s hold. It was like trying to force concrete to yield.
“First everything and everyone you love,” the vagrant snarled.
Then he turned, still holding Harry, and threw him back through the bedroom doorway.
Harry hit the floor hard and rolled into the side of the bed.
Gasping and dazed, Harry looked up and saw the hobo filling the doorway, watching him. The revolver was at the big man’s feet. He kicked it into the room, toward Harry, and it spun to a stop on the carpet, just out of reach.
Harry wondered if he could get to the gun before the bastard came down on him. Wondered if there was any point trying. Four shots, four hits, no blood.
