“He was staring inside, fascinated by the blood, the bodies. There was something eerie about him… he had this faraway look…and licking his lips as if… as if, I don’t know, as if there was something erotic about all that blood, those bodies. He ignored me when I told him to get back behind the barrier, probably didn’t even hear me… like he was in a trance… licking his lips.”
Harry picked up his brandy snifter and finished the last of his cognac in one swallow.
“Did you get his name?” Connie asked.
“No. I screwed up. I handled it badly.”
In memory, he saw himself grabbing the kid, shoving him across the sidewalk, maybe hitting him and maybe not — had he jammed a knee into his crotch? — jerking and wrenching him, bending him double, forcing him under the crime-scene tape.
“I was sick about it later,” he said, “disgusted with myself. Couldn’t believe I’d roughed him up that way. I guess I was. still uptight about what had happened in the attic, almost being blown away by Ordegard, and when I saw that kid getting off on the blood, I reacted like… like…”
“Like me,” Connie said, picking up her burger again.
“Yeah. Like you.”
Although he had lost his appetite, Harry took a bite of his sandwich because he had to keep his energy up for what might lie ahead.
“But I still don’t see how you can be so damn sure this kid is Ticktock,” Connie said.
“I
“Just because he was a little weird—”
“It’s more than that.”
“A hunch?”
“A lot better than a hunch. Call it cop instinct.”
She stared at him for a beat, then nodded. “All right. You remember what he looked like?”
“Vividly, I think. Maybe as young as nineteen, no older than twenty-one or so.”
“Height?”
“An inch shorter than me.”
“Weight?”
“Maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. Thin. No, that’s not right, not thin, not scrawny. Lean but muscular.”
“Complexion?”
“Fair. He’s been indoors a lot. Thick hair, dark brown or black. Good-looking kid, a little like that actor, Tom Cruise, but more hawkish. He had unusual eyes. Gray. Like silver with a little tarnish on it.”
Connie said, “What I’m thinking is, we go over to Nancy Quan’s house. She lives right here in Laguna Beach—”
Nancy was a sketch artist who worked for Special Projects and had a gift for hearing and correctly interpreting the nuances in a witness’s description of a suspect. Her pencil sketches often proved to be astonishingly good portraits of the perps when they were at last cornered and hauled into custody.
“—you describe this kid to her, she draws him, and we take the sketch to the Laguna police, see if they know the little creep.”
Harry said, “What if they don’t?”
“Then we start knocking on doors, showing the sketch.”
“Doors? Where?”
“Houses and apartments within a block of where you ran into him. It’s possible he lives in that immediate area. Even if he doesn’t live there, maybe he hangs out there, has friends in the neighborhood—”
“This kid has no friends.”
“—or relatives. Someone might recognize him.”
“People aren’t going to be real happy, we go knocking on their doors in the middle of the night.”
Connie grimaced. “You want to wait for dawn?”
“Guess not.”
The band was returning for their final set.
Connie chugged the last of her coffee, pushed her chair back, got up, took some folding money from one coat pocket, and threw a couple of bills on the table.
“Let me pay half,” Harry said.
“My treat.”
“No, really, I should pay half.”
She gave him an are-you-nuts look.
“I like to keep accounts in balance with everyone. You know that,” he explained.
“Take a walk on the wild side, Harry. Let the accounts go out of balance. Tell you what — if dawn comes and we wake up in Hell, you can buy breakfast.”
She headed for the door.
When he saw her coming, the host in the Armani suit and hand-painted silk tie scurried into the safety of the kitchen.
Following Connie, Harry glanced at his wristwatch. It was twenty-two minutes past one o’clock in the morning.
Dawn was perhaps five hours away.
8
Padding through the night town. People in their dark places all drowsy around him.
He yawns and thinks about lying under some bushes and sleeping. There’s another world when he sleeps, a nice world where he has a family that lives in a warm place and welcomes him there, feeds him every day, plays with him anytime he wants to play, calls him Prince, takes him with them in a car and lets him put his head out the window in the wind with his ears flapping — feels good, smells coming at him dizzy-fast, yes yes yes — and never kicks him. It’s a good world in sleep, even though he can’t catch the cats there, either.
Then he remembers the young-man-bad-thing, the black place, the people and animal eyes without bodies, and he isn’t sleepy any more.
He’s got to do something about the bad thing, but he doesn’t know what. He senses it is going to hurt the woman, the boy, hurt them bad. It has much anger. Hate. It would set their fur on fire if they had fur. He doesn’t know why. Or when or how or where. But he must do something, save them, be a good dog, good. So…
Do something.
Okay.
So…
Until he can think what to do about the bad thing, he might as well look for some more food. Maybe the smiling fat man left more good scraps for him behind the people food place. Maybe the fat man is still there in the open door, looking this way and that way along the alley, hoping to see Fella again, thinking he would like to take Fella home, give him a warm place, feed him every day, play with him anytime he wants to play, take Fella for rides in cars with his head sticking out in the wind.
Hurrying now. Trying to smell the fat man. Is he out in the open? Waiting?
Sniffing, sniffing, he passes a rust-smelling, grease-smelling, oil-smelling car parked in a big empty space, and then he smells the woman, the boy, even through the closed windows. He stops, looks up. Boy sleeping, can’t be seen. Woman leaning against door, head against window. Awake, but she does not see him.
Maybe the fat man will like the woman, the boy, will have room for all of them in his nice warm people place, and they can play together, all of them, eat when they want, go for rides in cars with their heads sticking out windows, smells coming at them dizzy-fast. Yes yes yes yes yes yes. Why not? In the sleep world, there is a family. Why not in this world, too?
He is excited. This is good. This is really good. He feels the wonderful thing around the corner, wonderful
