“I can’t do it anymore,” he told her.
He was empty inside. Couldn’t feel a thing. It was as though all those years of hunting down the freaks had finally extinguished his own fire.
In the distance he could hear a siren. Someone must have seen what went down. Had to have been a citizen, because street people minded their own business, didn’t matter what they saw.
“It ends here,” he said.
He sat down beside the freak’s corpse to wait for the police to arrive.
“For me, it ends here.”
Late the following day, Luann was still in shock.
She’d finally escaped the endless barrage of questions from both the police and the press, only to find that being alone brought no relief. She kept seeing the face of the man who had attacked her. Had it really seemed to
She couldn’t get it out of her mind. The face. The blood. The police dragging Nicky away. And all those things he’d told her last night.
Crazy things.
Words that seemed to well up out of some great pain he was carrying around inside him.
A thump on her balcony had her jumping nervously out of her chair until she realized that it was just the paperboy tossing up today’s newspaper. She didn’t want to look at what
Naturally enough, the story had made the front page. There was a picture of her, looking washed out and stunned. A shot of the corpse being taking away in a body bag. A head and shoulders shot of Nicky
...
She stopped, her pulse doubling its tempo as the headline under Nicky’s picture sank in.
“KILLER FOUND DEAD IN CELLPOLICE BAFFLED.”
“No,” she said.
She pushed the paper away from her until it fell to the floor. But Nicky’s picture continued to look up at her from where the paper lay.
None of what he’d told her could be true. It had just been the pitiful ravings of a very disturbed man.
But she’d known him once—a long time ago—and he’d been as normal as anybody then. Still, people changed ....
She picked up the paper and quickly scanned the story, looking for a reasonable explanation to put to rest the irrational fears that were reawakening her panic. But the police knew nothing. Nobody knew a thing.
“I suppose that at this point, only Nicky Straw knows what really happened,” the police spokesman was quoted as saying.
Nicky and you, a small worried voice said in the back of Luann’s mind.
She shook her head, unwilling to accept it.
She looked to her window. Beyond its smudged panes, the night was gathering. Soon it would be dark. Soon it would be night. Light showed a long way in the dark; a bright light would show further.
“It ... it wasn’t true,” she said, her voice ringing hollowly in the room. “None of it. Tell me it wasn’t true, Nicky.”
But Nicky was dead.
She let the paper fall again and rose to her feet, drifting across the room to the window like a ghost.
She just didn’t seem to feel connected to anything anymore.
It seemed oddly quiet on the street below. Less traffic than usual—both vehicular and pedestrian.
There was a figure standing in front of the bookstore across the street, back to the window display, leaning against the glass. He seemed to be looking up at her window, but it was hard to tell because the brim of his hat cast a shadow on his face.
That man in the park. His face. Shifting. The skin seeming too loose.
It wasn’t real.
She turned from the window and shivered, hugging her arms around herself as she remembered what Nicky had said when he’d left the apartment last night.
She couldn’t accept that. She looked back across the street, but the figure was gone. She listened for a footstep on the narrow, winding stairwell that led up to her balcony. Waited for the movement of a shadow across the window.
Winter Was Hard
I pretty much try to stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it leaves on my face.
It was the coldest December since they’d first started keeping records at the turn of the century, though warmer, Jilly thought, than it must have been in the ice ages of the Pleistocene. The veracity of that extraneous bit of trivia gave her small comfort, for it did nothing to lessen the impact of the night’s bitter weather. The wind shrieked through the tunnellike streets created by the abandoned buildings of the Tombs, carrying with it a deep, arctic chill. It spun the granular snow into dervishing whirligigs that made it almost impossible to see at times and packed drifts up against the sides of the buildings and derelict cars.
Jilly felt like a little kid, bundled up in her boots and parka, with longjohns under her jeans, a woolen cap pushing down her unruly curls and a long scarf wrapped about fifty times around her neck and face, cocooning her so completely that only her eyes peered out through a narrow slit. Turtlelike, she hunched her shoulders, trying to make her neck disappear into her parka, and stuffed her mittened hands deep in its pockets.
It didn’t help. The wind bit through it all as though unhindered, and she just grew colder with each step she took as she plodded on through the deepening drifts. The work crews were already out with their carnival of flashing blue and amber lights, removing the snow on Gracie Street and Williamson, but here in the Tombs it would just lie where it fell until the spring melt. The only signs of humanity were the odd little trails that the derelicts and other inhabitants of the Tombs made as they went about their business, but even those were being swallowed by the storm.
Only fools or those who had no choice were out tonight. Jilly thought she should be counted among the latter, though Geordie had called her the former when she’d left the loft earlier in the evening.
“This is just craziness, Jilly,” he’d said. “Look at the bloody weather.”
