Harry squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to be somewhere else. Maybe in the kingdom of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” with its twelve gorgeous young heirs to the throne, subterranean castles of light, trees with leaves of gold, others with leaves of diamonds, enchanted ballrooms filled with beautiful music…. Yeah, that would be all right. It was one of the Grimm Brothers’ gentler tales. Nobody in it got eaten alive or hacked to death by a troll.
“Surrender!”
It was Connie’s voice this time.
Harry opened his eyes and frowned at her. He was afraid she would give away their position. True, he had not been able to pinpoint the perp by listening to him; sounds bounced around the attic in strange ways, which was a protection for them as well as for the madman. Nevertheless, silence was wiser.
The perp shouted again:
“Surrender!” Connie repeated.
Connie grimaced. “That wasn’t Elvis, you peabrain! That was Steve Lawrence. Surrender.”
“Surrender.”
Harry blinked sweat out of his eyes and studied Connie with incomprehension. He had never felt less in control of a situation. Something was going down between her and the lunatic, but Harry didn’t have a clue as to what it was.
“Surrender.”
Suddenly Harry remembered that “Surrender” was the title of a Presley classic.
He thought that might be another Presley song.
Connie slipped into one of the aisles, out of Harry’s sight, as she called out: “It’s Now or Never.”
Moving away into the maze, Connie answered the perp with two Presley titles: “Surrender. I Beg of You.”
After a hesitation, Connie responded: “Tell Me Why.”
A dialogue had been established. In Presley song titles. Like some bizarre television quiz-show contest with no prizes for correct answers but plenty of peril for wrong ones.
In a crouch, Harry eased into a different aisle from the one that Connie had taken. A spider’s web wrapped his face. He pulled it off and crept deeper into the mannequin-guarded shadows.
Connie resorted to a previously used title: “Surrender.”
“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
After a hesitation, the perp admitted:
Harry still couldn’t get a fix on the voice. Sweat was really pouring off him now, wispy remnants of the spider web clung to his hair and tickled his brow, his mouth tasted like the bottom of a pestle in Frankenstein’s laboratory, and he felt as if he’d stepped out of reality into some drug addict’s dark hallucinations.
“Let Yourself Go,” Connie advised.
Harry knew he shouldn’t be so disoriented by the peculiar twists this pursuit kept taking. These were the 1990s, after all, an age of unreason if ever there had been one, when the bizarre was so common as to establish a new definition of normality. Like the holdup men who had recently taken to threatening convenience-store clerks not with guns but with syringes full of AIDS-tainted blood.
Connie called to the perp, “Let Me Be Your Teddy Bear,” which seemed, to Harry, an odd turn in the song- title conversation.
But the perp came right back at her in a voice full of yearning and suspicion: “
Connie needed only a few seconds to find the right follow-up: “Doncha Think It’s Time?”
And talk about bizarre: Richard Ramirez, the serial killer known as the Night Stalker, was visited regularly in prison by a stream of attractive young women who found him appealing, exciting, a romantic figure. Or what about that guy in Wisconsin not long ago, cooking parts of his victims for dinner, keeping rows of severed heads in his refrigerator, and neighbors said, well, yeah, there had been bad smells coming from his apartment for years, and now and then they heard screams and high-powered electric saws, but the screaming never lasted long, and anyway the guy seemed so nice, he seemed to
“Poor Boy,” she said with apparently genuine sympathy.
“Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” Connie said, romancing him as she prowled through the maze, no doubt intending to blow him away the moment she caught sight of him.
The perp didn’t reply.
Harry kept on the move, too, diligently searching each shadowy niche and byway, but feeling useless. He had never imagined that in the last decade of this strange century, he might have to be an expert on rock-‘n’-roll trivia to be an effective cop.
He hated crap like this, but Connie loved it. She embraced the chaos of the times; there was something dark and wild in her.
Harry reached an aisle that was perpendicular to his. It was deserted — except for a couple of naked mannequins that had toppled over long ago, one atop the other. Hunkered down, shoulders hunched protectively, Harry moved on.
“Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” Connie called out again from elsewhere in the maze.
Maybe the perp was hesitating because he thought it was an offer that a guy should make to a gal, not the other way around. Though definitely a ‘90s man, maybe the bastard still had an old-fashioned sense of gender roles.
“Treat Me Nice,” Connie said.
No answer.
“Love Me Tender,” Connie said.
The perp still did not respond, and Harry was alarmed that the conversation had become a monologue. The creep might be close to Connie, letting her talk so he could get a better, final fix on her.
Harry was about to shout a warning when an explosion shook the building. He froze, crossing his arms protectively over his face. But the blast had not occurred in the attic; there had been no flash.
From the floor below came cries of agony and terror, confused voices, shouts of anger.
Evidently other cops had entered the lower room where the ladder gave access to the attic, and the perp had heard them. He’d dropped a grenade through the trapdoor.
The gruesome screams conjured an image in Harry’s mind: some guy trying to keep his intestines from spilling out of his belly.
He knew that he and Connie were in a rare moment of total agreement, experiencing the same dread and fury. For once he didn’t give a damn about the perp’s legal rights, excessive use of force, or the proper way of doing things. He just wanted the bastard dead.
Above the screams, Connie tried to re-establish the dialogue: “Love Me Tender.”
“My Baby Left Me,” Connie said.
The screams were subsiding on the floor below. Either the injured man was dying, or others were moving
