Think! What should she do first? She phoned her superior at the Coalition and briefly explained the situation. She would have to-leave immediately. Could she please arrange to notify the office? They'd cover her absence and handle everything. She assured her boss she'd call as soon as she knew something, rang off, and dialed the motel again, telling the manager not to worry if the police contacted them. It didn't necessarily mean anything bad. Her dad had been conducting a private investigation and may have simply become too involved to return, and so forth.
Sharon forced herself to breathe deeply, count to ten, and get hold of her emotions. She suddenly felt as if she were coming apart at the seams. It was absurd. Her dad would show up tomorrow with an explanation and tell her she'd been childish to worry. She was behaving idiotically.
She went in and started doing every dirty dish in the place, realizing, as she wiped plates and utensils, she'd been grinding her teeth together. She unclenched her jaw and went into the bedroom and started throwing things into a bag, including the packages and mail she'd picked up from her father's apartment during the noon hour—a whirlwind of movement, churning inside.
By 10:45 P.M. she was on her way to an all-night service station, pulling into the self-service lane, getting out, unlocking the gas cap, so nervous she could hardly disengage the pump, hands shaking.
Sharon chilled at the mental image of her dad saying “I'm on to one of the big boys,” the phrase immediately filling her with the helplessness she always experienced when he talked about the war criminals. “I smell a rat.'
“Someone around here?” she'd asked.
“Down in the Bootheel,” he'd told her, referring to the southernmost tip of the state.
But her worst moment was yet to come. Maybe an hour later, driving in a semi-trance, it occurred to Sharon that the first thing the police in Bayou City would do would be to check
She played with that one half the way to Bayou City.
33
Sleep came like an old, comfortable pair of pajamas one pulls on and encased him in a blanket of warm and seductive familiarity. There was the period of the body's surcease from labor, regeneration, and as he gave himself easily to it, his thoughts became a mosaic of assimilated memory. If he remembered the beginnings of the dream he would attribute it to a clumsy piece he'd been reading. The image of comfortable pajamas and the acronym for the
Early in the morning he penetrated the inversion layer and a question rattled through the corridors of his sleeping consciousness. Does he see something? Is it shadow or bloodsplatter? He sees it above him.
Dreaming below a wall hanging that appears to depict acquatic Lentibulariaceae, alive with vesicular floats and hungry insect traps, he imagined his own eyeblink and pulse rapidity. The appalling grotesquerie under which he slumbered drooped, festooned, bulged obscenely, swagged in the center as the billowing middle of it loomed drippingly above his face. The chameleon's eye blinked and the bladderwort dripped into his snoring, open mouth. His shoulder burned, ached. Involuntarily, he swallowed.
How could he fail to recognize the unmistakably salty, metallic bloodtaste? Flanking the drippy Utricularia, the wall above his bed was splattered red with arterial fluid, veiny crimson, dark scarlet lifejuice. He knew full well that it was hers ... her blood, gore, and grue. He knew immediately he'd find her acephalous and dead beside him. His alert mind continued to catalog options, and map escape routes.
Sleep-cudgeled senses registered danger, intruder, violence. It shocked him out of his lethargy and he awakened and saw that it was only a wall hanging above him, that the splatter was naught but shadow, that the clutched object was a pillow not a child's torso with partial head, so for a second he thought it was all a dream. In the next eyeblink, in the next heartbeat, he remembered the details of the hag who recognized him and the Jew she sent to confront him. He knew which part was real now, and permitted himself to slide back down into the cradle of deep sleep.
He hoped he could conjure up the little girlchild, Marta, again. Pick up where he left off in a twisted fantasy, but stop it this time before the death scene. Linger with her, a fragment of delicious domination saved in his collection of monstrous artifacts, a small vignette of sadism he reinvented and played with over and over.
Emil Shtolz's self-protective urges and his pleasure-pain linkages made for restive bedfellows, however, and he could not fasten onto the pleasing parts of the dream. As he dropped back into sleep a corner of his sentient mind wondered who would come for him next. He supposed, incorrectly, it would be a policeman of some kind.
34
“Miss Kamen,” the police chief said, taking her hand, “I'm Jimmie Randall.” She shook his hand firmly. He sucked in his stomach slightly, a thing she noticed guys did sometimes when they saw her. She was too tired to be even faintly amused.
“I guess you got my message?” she asked.
“Yeah. I checked at the motel several times and left word. It doesn't look as if he's been back for two, three days. His clothes and things are still there.'
“I know,” she said, starting to lose it.
“Listen,” he said, seeing that she was on the verge of tears, “we've got a quiet alert out for your father, but I want you to know that I am concerned.” He was picking up the phone even as he spoke calmly to her. He dialed.
She bit her lip, nodding, not knowing what to say. She watched him make his phone call.
“Lemme talk to the boss man. Thanks. Hey, bud, how's things? I have Sharon Kamen in my office.... Yeah...” A long pause. “I'm gonna call Bob.... Yeah. We have to bring ‘em all the way in now, I think.... Okay” He rang off and placed another call before he spoke to her again. “Bob Petergill, please. Bob, this is Jimmie Randall.... Fine. There's another development in the Shtolz business. Nobody's had any contact with Mr. Aaron Kamen for about three days it looks like. We got him in Sikeston—” he glanced over at a stack of notes on his desk. “Uh, let's see ... four days ago, or thereabouts. I think he may have, yes.” She didn't like the sound of that. “All right, sir. I'll be here.” He hung up the instrument.
“That's the head of the bureau in Cape,” he said. “We've got a real good relationship with the FBI here, Sharon, and we need to get all the big guns on this, I think. Might still be that your father is off somewhere and we'll find he's perfectly okay, you know?” She nodded again. She noticed he was no hick cop. In a few moments he'd done everything that could be done, passed the ball, put himself on a first name basis with her but not the other way around, and unless she'd misread him, he was now gently dismissing her.
She wasn't quite so easily finessed. She asked some more questions, most of them dumb, but at least she hadn't started sobbing. Mostly she found herself volunteering a lot of information about herself, the way one often does in a prolonged conversation with an experienced law officer. She decided the smart move would be to get a few hours’ sleep and begin anew. How lost could one get in Bayou City?
Apparently, if Alma Purdy and her father were examples, one could get altogether lost. Sharon came away from the city administration building with a couple of facts she hadn't had going in. She had a missing persons sheet on the Purdy woman and was surprised how relatively young the lady was. Her photo made her appear twenty years older. Second, she had the circular her dad had prepared for the rat hunt.
Back at the motel, all of three blocks from the police headquarters, Sharon shed her clothing and filled the tub, easing her tired body into it and loving the instant gratification of the soapy heat. She was an inveterate shower person but at this moment a hot bath and a long soak were in order. Just a couple, three hours shut-eye
