Then the stranger held something in front of the Texan’s face, jabbing at it insanely with his knife for him to see, then slapping his face with it, again and again.
But the Texan was already drowning, and he found it difficult to care too much about what the man was doing. It was hard to drown in your own blood, even so much of it. He found that drowning wasn’t a progressive event, as he might have imagined. Rather, it was a lurching sort of thing: Choking on the surge of blood, he faded; then he coughed, spewing a geyser of blood, and was instantly back in the brutal clarity of the moment.
He tried to go ahead and die, but he was disappointed to realize that he couldn’t force it. He went through the whole cycle again. Then he smelled the feces, which were undoubtedly his own, and he was surprised to feel a sad, profound embarrassment.
Then, just when he began to die after all, and he knew for certain that he was dying, he saw the man with the contorted features toss to the dog the thing that he had been flourishing and stabbing in his wild rant. The poor cadaverous creature pounced on it in an instant, and with hunched shoulders and great gorging efforts of his outstretched neck, he wolfed it down.
It was only then that the Texan realized that the man had cut out his tongue.
Chapter 3
Austin, Texas
“I’ve got a client coming in about half an hour,” Bern said, leaning over and blowing eraser crumbs off the sketch he was finishing. He was making a last-minute alteration to the composite drawing of a man accused of raping a University of Texas student.
The victim had been brought to him the night before, and in sporadic, sharp observations she had described the face that had now emerged from under his pencil. Early that morning, the detective had called and asked for a variation in detail.
Alice was sitting on her stool, an arm’s reach away, a sketch pad on her lap, watching over his shoulder. When he stopped drawing, she immediately returned to her own creation for the morning, a conga line of Kewpie doll stick figures, each with a single curl of hair standing upright on its head, all marching toward a cliff.
Alice Lau was seventeen.
Paul Bern sipped coffee from his black mug and looked at her. She was oblivious now, absorbed in her drawing. Wearing designer-faded hip-hugging jeans that revealed her navel, and a cutoff T-shirt that exposed her midriff, she was sitting with one leg crossed over the other at the knee, waggling her bare foot in the universal teenager’s fidget. She was spreading a piece of gum with her tongue and lips, as if she were about to blow a bubble, but the bubble never materialized. Her straight black hair was pulled back in a long braid that was draped over the front of one shoulder.
She was the only child of Bern’s closest friends, Dana and Philip Lau. He and Philip had been undergraduates together at Rice, and though their careers had taken them to different parts of the world, over the years they and their wives had regularly managed to spend a few days of vacation together every couple of years. When Philip became a tenured professor of political science at the University of Texas, he and Dana started lobbying Paul and Tess to move to Austin. Eventually, they were persuaded, and it had been a wonderful decision in every way… until just about a year ago.
They were listening to Tom Waits’s CD Alice, an appropriate choice for many reasons, all completely lost on the girl on the stool. She couldn’t understand anything Waits was singing. She couldn’t understand anything Bern was saying, for that matter, but he always talked to her as if she understood everything. And, mysteriously, it seemed that she often did.
He stood and looked down at his drawing, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the mug of coffee. The guy’s eyes were wide-set, his nose was broad and slightly upturned, and his maxilla was distinctly sunken, emphasizing his prominent front teeth. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t a flattering combination, and it stuck very clearly in the victim’s mind. She also remembered that his hair was worn in a mullet, a feature that only added to the stupidity of his appearance.
“This is as far as I’m going to take it,” he said. “Don’t want to push it.”
Alice looked up while he was talking and glanced at the drawing, too.
“It’s no way through the legs so,” she said, “but if there’s a really wrong, then who would fly on it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They only asked for one variation, and I’ve given them three. I don’t want to start putting ideas in her head.”
Alice shrugged and smiled and then went back to the Kewpie dolls.
He looked at his watch. No time to start anything else. Tom Waits was singing about Poor Edward-“On the back of his head/He had another Face/Was it a woman’s face/Or a young girl?”-and Alice’s foot was waggling, but not in time with the music. Bern knew she appreciated music and understood the beat and rhythm of it, if not the words.
Over a period of months, he had experimented with her and had found that she responded to particular musical moods. Sometimes she was upset if he put on Miles Davis, and she wouldn’t settle down until he switched to Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach. Other times, it was the other way around: Not Bach; let’s have Tosca ’s tangos.
But she wasn’t often so definite about it. Usually, anything he liked, she liked. She was pretty simpatico that way. The way Tess had been. Jesus. Alice didn’t often remind him of Tess anymore. Not often. Still, sometimes… But he didn’t let it derail him now like it used to.
He had gotten used to having Alice around. It was a little awkward at first, and he had worried that it was awkward for Alice, too. But it didn’t take him long to get to know the new Alice, and he realized that his concern was unnecessary. For her, the situation was not so complex. Not in the same way it was for him anyway.
When the doorbell rang, Alice looked up at him, waiting for his reaction.
“That’s my client,” he said, starting back across the room.
He passed the drawing tables, easels, and workbenches cluttered with the tools of his craft-cans of paintbrushes, partially used tubes of oil paints, sketchbooks, sticks of charcoal and pastel chalks. There were cabinets of materials and supplies, books on shelves, and a complete skeleton dangling from a chrome stand. He went up the six steps, which were nearly the width of the room itself.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he called back.
Alice said something in response, the tone and cadence of which sounded reasonable, though the syntax of the words made no sense whatsoever.
“Okay,” he said as he opened the door. “Be right back.”
He saw the woman through the heavy grillwork of the iron gate as he approached her across the interior courtyard. She was standing in the lacy morning shade of a mesquite tree, holding a cardboard carton about the size of a small hatbox in her hands.
He quickly took her in: a simple sleeveless summer dress of lemon yellow, straight, just above the knees. She had a berry-brown suntan. Five eight or nine. Early thirties. Dark blunt-cut hair worn just shorter than shoulder length, but long enough for her to pull it back out of her way and fix it with a practical rubber band. At this moment, she had the sides of it tucked behind her ears. She was trim and fit, not in the sense of an athlete, but more like someone who enjoyed the outdoors, maybe hiked a lot.
“Becca Haber,” she said, peeping at him through the grille as he approached. “Sorry I’m late.”
“It’s all right. Everybody gets lost out here,” he said, sliding back the bolt on the gate to let her in. “I’m used to it.”
Bern lived in one of the countless bends of the Colorado River, which had been dammed up more than half a dozen times as it passed through the hills of central Texas. The dams formed a chain of wooded lakes northwest of Austin, with the lower two lakes coming right into the city where Bern had built his semisecluded house.
He and the woman crossed the courtyard under a canopy of wisteria, which spanned the open space, draping across it from the high stone walls of the surrounding house. He had been watering plants earlier, and the odors of dampened soil and stones still filled the warm morning air.
“You got into town last night?” Bern asked. The woman was walking just a step behind him as they entered a barrel-vaulted corridor of brick and stone slurried over with white plaster.
