Safe House

“Yes. She had been stalking him for the longest time, but nobody ever stopped her. And even after the murders, the first jury actually hung. . . . They didn’t convict her.”

“Next time they did.”

“I know. But that’s not the point. If she had been a man, if the situation had been reversed, the first jury would have only been out fifteen minutes. And what about that woman judge, right here in the city? She stalked her ex-lover for years, did all kinds of horrible things to him, even got confidential court records on his wife. And what happened to her? Nothing! They didn’t disbar her. Didn’t even suspend her. She got ‘censured,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. Well, I know what it means—the rules are different.”

“But if you think male stalking victims get even a worse break than women, how come you don’t—?”

“It . . . didn’t work out. The mix wasn’t right. It got too . . . complicated, keeping men and women in the safehouses. There were . . . relationships.”

Like you and Vyra, I thought.

“And when some of those didn’t work,” she continued, “it affected—maybe ‘infected’ is a better word—the whole process. We can’t help everyone. Not even all the women. Or children. So we decided to stay narrow, keep a tight focus. One . . . of us was always saying that. Focus. That’s where power comes from.”

The kenpo guy? I thought. T.B., the bouncer at Rollo’s. Want to tell me about that too, you sweet-voiced little liar?

“And there is one difference,” she continued around my thoughts, “between men and women when it comes to stalkers.”

“Which is?”

“The women always think it was their fault, somehow. They always think that. Even when they didn’t contribute to the . . . ugliness in any way, they blame themselves. ‘What was it about me that made him pick me out? What did I do to set him off?’ That’s one of the hardest things to overcome.”

“Women always blame themselves?”

“I think so. In some way. I never met one who didn’t.”

“I’ll bet Lorraine doesn’t,” I said.

Crystal Beth’s eyes snapped, ready to rumble. “Because she’s gay?”

“No. But she hates men, doesn’t she?”

“She does. But if you think she doesn’t blame herself for that too, you don’t know her.”

“So there’s no role for men in your . . . movement?”

“Of course there is,” she snapped. “If you knew some of the things . . . some of them have done for us . . . But they need their own movement, men. For stalkers. They need to band together too.”

“So why did you show me all this?”

“So you’d like me better,” she said, her voice solemn.

“This is how it went down,” the man said, gesturing toward a chest-high stack of yellowing newspapers in the corner of the L-shaped studio apartment. I measured the place by moving around, casually touching things. A good burglar knows his own measurements better than a fashion model: I can stretch out my arms like I’m reaching for something, take a few strides, spread my fingers on a table, sit in a chair . . . and I’ll be able to come back and do your place in the dark.

“What?” I asked him, not caring, but needing him to talk.

“Nineteen eighty. If Carter rescues the hostages from Iran before the election, he wins in a walk, okay? Now, who’s cutting the defense budget? That’s right . . . Jimmy Carter. And who’s gonna give the military everything they could ever want? Sure, Ronnie RayGun. So what happened? The generals got together and crashed that copter in the desert. What’s a few American lives compared to the military’s greater good?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They never tell you the full story. In the newspapers. How come they always say ‘raped and sodomized’? What does that really mean? Did she have to blow him or did she take it up the ass? You see what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“So, you said you had a message for me. From Lydia?”

“It looks bad,” Crystal Beth said. She was standing next to the easy chair, one tiny high- arched bare foot on the padded arm, my right hand on a folded towel she’d laid across her knee. “I think there’s some bone showing,” she muttered, looking through a rectangular magnifying glass she held in one hand.

I tightened my fist. The pain shot through all the way to my shoulder.

“Hold still,” she told me. Her voice was calm, but her forehead was beaded with sweat. She swabbed the knuckles of my hand with alcohol. I felt it burn clean. “I think I can . . .” she muttered, delicately picking at my hand with a pair of stainless-steel tweezers. “Yes!”

She held up a tiny white chip.

“I have to look under it now,” she said softly, going back to my hand with the tweezers. “Just hold on.”

The pain wasn’t bad enough to let me go somewhere else. I concentrated on the rise and fall of her breasts under the white T-shirt. On the roundness of her bare arms. On her smell.

“It’s clean,” she pronounced. “And it’s only flesh, not bone. It must have been a piece of tooth you got stuck in there.”

“That makes sense,” I grunted. Thinking about the freak opening the little closet and showing me his invention. An oblong length of wood, maybe a yard square and two inches thick, with U-shaped metal hooks screwed in at the corners. A length of heavy chain was anchored to the front with a massive eyelet screw. “This is for her punishment,” he told me, eyes foamy behind the reading glasses he was wearing, showing me how the collar would fit over Lydia’s neck, how the chain would go all the way down her back to between her legs and loop underneath, where it would be reattached to the eyelet screw. “I can make it as tight as I want,” he hissed, pointing to a ratcheting knob on the front of the board. “After she spends a couple of hours in this every day, she’ll never disobey again.”

The next thing I remember, he was on the floor, strange sounds coming out of the red-and-white mess that had been his mouth.

“This won’t hurt,” Crystal Beth said, holding a clear plastic spray bottle. She squirted some reddish mist all over the raw wounds across my knuckles.

“What is that stuff?” I asked her.

“Fibrin sealant,” she said. “Biologic glue. It’s made from proteins found in blood. Stops the bleeding real quick. It helps heal too.”

“I never heard of it.”

“It’s not available here. They use it in Europe. The FDA is holding back on approval. It’s made with blood. . . . I guess maybe they’re worried about AIDS.”

The spray was turning to a kind of jelly right before my eyes. Damaged tissue. Merging. Coming together. Healing wounds. Protecting. I looked at my damaged hand. And saw my family.

I didn’t say anything.

“You don’t have to worry about it,” she told me. “This isn’t European stuff. It’s made right here. Lorraine makes it.”

“Where does she get the blood?”

“From me,” Crystal Beth said solemnly. “Now you have some of mine.”

“He’s coming,” Vyra whispered into the phone. “Now.”

I got there first. Dressed like a lawyer hurrying to an afternoon cocktail with his mistress before catching the 6:09 out of Grand Central to Westport. Nobody in the hotel lobby looked at me twice. And if the security people had