being able to flee the scene.”
“I’ve already told you, I don’t understand it either.”
Marty decided there was at least one good thing about this mess: the way Paige had not doubted him for an instant, even though reason and logic virtually demanded doubt; the way she stood beside him now, fierce and resolute. In all the years they had been together, he had never loved her more than at that moment.
Picking up the notebook and the evidence bag, Lowbock said, “If the blood upstairs proves to be human blood, that raises all sorts of other questions that would require us to finish the investigation whether or not you’d prefer to be rid of us. Actually, whatever the lab results, you’ll be hearing from me again.”
“We’d simply adore seeing you again,” Paige said, the edge gone from her voice, as if suddenly she ceased to see Lowbock as a threat and could not help but view him as a comic figure.
Marty found her attitude infecting him, and he realized that with him, as with her, this sudden dark hilarity was a reaction to the unbearable tension of the past hour. He said, “By all means, drop by again.”
“We’ll make a nice pot of tea,” Paige said.
“And scones.”
“Crumpets.”
“Tea cakes.”
“And by all means, bring the wife,” Paige said. “We’re quite broad-minded. We’d love to meet her even if she is of another species.”
Marty was aware that Paige was perilously close to laughing out loud, because he was close to it himself, and he knew their behavior was childish, but he required all of his self-control not to continue making fun of Lowbock all the way out the front door, driving him backward with jokes the way that Professor Von Helsing might force Count Dracula to retreat by brandishing a crucifix at him.
Strangely, the detective was disconcerted by their frivolity as he had never been by their anger or by their earnest insistence that the intruder had been real. Visible self-doubt took hold of him, and he looked as if he might suggest they sit down and start over again. But self-doubt was a weakness unfamiliar to him, and he could not sustain it forlong.
Uncertainty quickly gave way to his familiar smug expression, and he said, “We’ll be taking the look-alike’s Heckler and Koch, as well as your guns, of course, until you can produce the paperwork that I requested.”
For a terrible moment, Marty was sure that they had found the Beretta in the kitchen cupboard and the Mossberg shotgun under the bed upstairs, as well as the other weapons, and were going to leave him defenseless.
But Lowbock listed the guns and mentioned only three: “The Smith and Wesson, the Korth thirty-eight, and the M16.”
Marty tried not to let his relief show.
Paige distracted Lowbock by saying, “Lieutenant, are you ever going to get the fuck out of here?”
The detective finally could not prevent his face from tightening with anger. “You can certainly hurry me along, Mrs. Stillwater, if you would repeat your request in the presence of two other officers.”
“Always worrying about those lawsuits,” Marty said.
Paige said, “Happy to oblige, Lieutenant. Would you like me to phrase the request in the same language I just used?”
Never before had Marty heard her use the F-word except in the most intimate circumstances—which meant, though masked by her light tone of voice and frivolous manner, her anger was as strong as ever. That was good. After the police left, she would need the anger to get her through the night ahead. Anger would help keep fear at bay.
When he closes his eyes and tries to picture the pain, he can see it as a filigree of fire. A beautifully luminous lacework, white-hot with shadings of red and yellow, stretches from the base of his throbbing neck across his back, encircling his sides, looping and knotting intricately across his chest and abdomen as well.
By visualizing the pain, he has a better sense of whether his condition is improving or deteriorating. Actually, his only concern is how
The pain had been vicious during the minute or two after he’d been shot. He had felt as if a monstrous fetus had come awake within him and was burrowing its way out.
Fortunately, he has a singularly high tolerance for pain. He also draws courage from the knowledge that the agony will swiftly subside to a less crippling level.
By the time he staggers through the rear door of the house and heads for the Honda, the bleeding stops completely, and his hunger pangs become more terrible than the pain of his wounds. His stomach knots, loosens with a spasm, but immediately knots again, violently clenching and unclenching repeatedly, as if it is a grasping fist that can seize the nourishment he so desperately needs.
Driving away from his house through gray torrents at the height of the storm, he becomes so achingly ravenous that he begins to shake with deprivation. They are not mere tremors of need but wracking shudders that clack his teeth together. His twitching hands beat a palsied tattoo upon the steering wheel, and he is barely able to hold it firmly enough to control the vehicle. Fits of dry wheezing convulse him, hot flashes alternate with chills, and the sweat gushing from him is colder than the rain that still soaks his hair and clothes.
His extraordinary metabolism gives him great strength, keeps his energy level high, frees him from the need to sleep every night, allows him to heal with miraculous rapidity, and is in general a cornucopia of physical blessings, but it also makes demands on him. Even on a normal day, he has an appetite formidable enough for two lumberjacks. When he denies himself sleep, when he is injured, or when any other unusual demands are made on his system, mere hunger soon becomes a ravenous craving, and craving escalates almost at once into a dire
Although the interior of the Honda is adrift in empty food containers—wrappers and packages and bags of every description—there is no hidden morsel in the trash. In the final plummet from the San Bernardino Mountains into the lowlands of Orange County, he feverishly consumed every crumb that remained. Now there are only dried smears of chocolate and mustard, thin films of glistening oil, grease, sprinkles of salt, none of it sufficiently fortifying to compensate for the energy needed to rummage for it in the darkness and lick it up.
By the time he locates a fast-food restaurant with a drive-in window, at the center of his gut is an icy void into which he seems to be dissolving, growing hollower and hollower, colder and colder, as if his body is consuming itself to repair itself, catabolizing two cells for every one it creates. He almost bites his own hand in a frantic and despairing attempt to relieve the grueling pangs of starvation. He imagines tearing out chunks of his own flesh with his teeth and greedily swallowing, sucking down his own hot blood, anything to moderate his suffering
The restaurant is a McDonald’s outlet. The tinny speaker of the intercom at the ordering post has been exposed to enough years of summer sun and winter chill that the greeting of the unseen clerk is quavery and static-riddled. Confident that his own strained and shaky voice won’t sound unusual, the killer orders enough food to satisfy the staff of a small office: six cheeseburgers, Big Macs, fries, a couple of fish sandwiches, two chocolate milkshakes—and large Cokes because his racing metabolism, if not fueled, leads as swiftly to dehydration as to starvation.
He is in a long line of cars, and progression toward the pick-up window is aggravatingly slow. He has no choice but to wait, for with his blood-soaked clothes and bullet-torn shirt, he can’t walk into a restaurant or
