Now it lay still. It had given up. It faced its own end with the equanimity born of unrewarded suffering.
The spider began to prowl.
Treat watched the eight legs navigate the mesh of quivering threads. The spider moved lightly, in a calm, unhurried gait.
She was a western black widow, Latrodectus hesperus, and Treat loved her as much as he could love anything. He had raised her from a spiderling after finding her and others of her brood scurrying amid a drift of timber in the mountains near Malibu. He remembered the thrill of the discovery and the care with which he had gathered up a dozen of the small darting shapes, loading them into a plastic sandwich bag and sealing the flaps.
Most of the spiderlings had died before maturity, but this one and a single male one-quarter her size had both survived. The male, of course, had perished after mating, devoured by the female. A papery egg sack now hung on the web. Soon it would open, releasing hundreds of babies.
He had never named the spider. He did not think of her as a pet. She was an avatar of darkness, a creeping symbol of predatory death. He admired her sleek beauty-the glossy black orb of her abdomen, the balletic precision of her gliding legs, and the jaws with their embedded fangs.
The cricket twitched. The spider moved faster, spurred by the shiver of the web.
Treat pressed his face to the terrarium’s side panel. He had pulled down the shades of his bedroom windows to keep glare off the glass. The only light in the room was the glow of a forty-watt bulb in a gooseneck lamp overhanging the terrarium’s screen cover.
The widow reached her prey. Treat knew the procedure she must follow, having witnessed it countless times. She would blanket the cricket in a silken attack wrap, and then her fangs would poison the prey, paralyzing it. Those same fangs would pump out digestive juices, and the cricket would soften, the enzymes doing their work outside the spider’s body. Finally the victim’s gelatinous form would be sucked into the widow’s mouth.
He did not think it was an unpleasant death. Once immobilized by silk and venom, the cricket would know only the slow dissolution of its body in a bath of chemicals. It would simply fade away, its decomposition effected before death.
There were worse ways to die.
Treat knew all about that.
The spinning of the silk began. At some point during the ritual Treat remembered the sandwich in his hand. He had made it himself after coming home for his lunch hour. He had not guessed that it would be the widow’s lunch hour as well.
He took small, distracted bites of the sandwich-tomato slices, feta cheese, and bean sprouts between two slabs of date-raisin bread-feeding along with the widow.
He watched her, rapt, until the cricket was entirely gone. Idly he wondered where the cricket’s music went when it died. Perhaps the same place that women’s screams went.
He finished his sandwich, swallowing a last wedge of bread and bean sprouts, with a soft, precise smack of his lips.
The spider lay on her web, digesting her food, sated. From this angle Treat could clearly see the distinctive mark common to all black widow females-the maroon hourglass on the underside of her belly.
The hourglass, symbol of time. Wasn’t it Ovid who called time the devourer of all things?
They made an unholy trinity. Treat thought-time, the widow, and himself.
3
Life was funny. She could go for weeks, months, believing she had put her past to rest and finally moved on. And then it would all come back in a hot rush, and she would be ten years old again, huddled in the crawl space with a kitchen knife in her hands.
C.J. pushed the memories away. She wasn’t a little girl anymore; she was a woman of twenty-six, doing her job, and at the moment there was a crazy man with a gun to worry about.
The pathway at the rear of the house was narrow and bright under the midday sun. To her left was a chicken-wire fence protecting a vacant lot. To her right, the home’s stucco wall and the large, overflowing Dumpster that abutted it. Above the Dumpster was a casement window, an inch ajar to let in any breeze that stirred on a January afternoon in LA.
No movement in the window. It seemed likely that the back room of the house was unoccupied.
C.J. muted the radio clipped to her Sam Browne utility belt, then lifted herself onto the lid of the trash bin and peered through the window. She saw a cot piled with disarranged sheets, a pair of threadbare oval throw rugs on a concrete floor, a crib, bare walls. and a doorway that glowed with the flickering light of a TV set in the front room.
That was where he was. In the front of the house. If it could be called a house when it was only a wood- frame garage partitioned into a bedroom, living room, lavatory, and kitchenette. The bedroom had a view of a trash bin, and the living room, windowless, had no view at all.
Crouching on the Dumpster by the window, C.J. listened. There was no sound from the television; the volume must have been turned down. Now and then rose the squall of a baby.
She wondered if she could open the window fully without making a noise that would alert Ramon Sanchez, the crazy man with the gun in the other room.
Never know unless you try, she thought gamely, and she gave the casement window a cautious pull, bracing herself for a squeal of hinges.
The window opened silently.
She knew she was limber enough to wriggle through, even when encumbered by her vest and her belt.
Question was, did she want to do this?
Ramon was out of his mind-his wife, Maria, had been very clear on that point, expressing herself vigorously in both English and Spanish. He was drunk and angry and out of work, and when he got that way, no one could reason with him. She’d called 911 from a neighbor’s home, and the RTO had put it out over the air ten minutes ago.
“Any Newton Area unit, possible four-fifteen in progress at Fifty-fifth and Sloan.”
C.J., riding shotgun in an A-car, had listened to the crackle of static over the cheap speaker. She and her partner Walt Brasco had been on duty since 6:15 A.M., chasing the radio for most of that time. Now it was one o’clock, and they’d been thinking about taking a Code 7 for lunch.
But Fifty-fifth and Sloan wasn’t far from where they were cruising. C.J. looked at Brasco, who nodded and said, “Take it.”
“Thirteen-A-forty-three,” C.J. reported into the handheld microphone hooked to the dashboard. “We’ll take the four-fifteen.”
“Roger, forty-three. Monitor your screen, incident three-seven-one-four. Code Two High.”
Brasco flipped the toggle that activated the car’s light bar and accelerated through a yellow traffic signal. Storefronts flashed past, bearing signs in Vietnamese and Korean and Spanish. A blind beggar held up a cardboard sign at a street corner, in front of a brick wall spray-painted with gang placas.
Welcome to Newton Area division. Shootin’ Newton, as it was known among Officer Caitlin Jean Osborn’s colleagues in the LAPD. A few square miles of multiethnic slums bordered by five other high-crime divisions, a semicircle of blasted hopes: Hollenbeck, Central, Southwest, Seventy-seventh Street, and Southeast. The infamous Rampart Division, now synonymous with police corruption, was wedged between Central and Southwest, not quite touching Newton but close enough, perhaps, to spread its infection here. Crime rates might have dropped in both the city and county of LA, but no one could prove it in Newton.
C.J. kept her eye on the squad car’s computer until it displayed the address of the crime scene. She read it to Brasco, He turned left at the next intersection and pulled to a stop alongside a curb littered with fragments of beer bottles.
A crowd of two dozen was waiting in front of a converted garage that served as somebody’s home. Half the spectators were children with nowhere else to be on a school day.
