Think of a Number

time.”

As he led her in small, halting steps across the room to the bed and assisted her into a semireclining position against the upright pillows, he kept repeating in a little boy’s voice, “Beddy-bye, beddy-bye, beddy-bye, beddy- bye.”

Pointing the gun at a rough midpoint between Nardo on the floor and Gurney in the chair, he looked unhurriedly around the room, but not at anything in particular. It was hard to tell whether he was seeing what was there or overlaying on it another scene from another time or place. Then he looked at the woman on the bed in the same way and said with a kind of fey Peter Pan conviction, “Everything’s going to be perfect. Everything’s going to be the way it always should have been.” He began humming very softly a few disconnected notes. As he went on, Gurney recognized the tune of a nursery rhyme, “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.” Perhaps it was the uncomfortable reaction he’d always had to the antilogic of nursery rhymes; perhaps it was this one’s dizzying imagery; perhaps it was the colossal inappropriateness of the music to the moment; but whatever it was, hearing that melody in that room made him want to puke.

Then Dermott added words, but not the right words. He sang like a child, “Here we get into the bed again, the bed again, the bed again. Here we get into the bed again, so early in the morning.”

“I have to pee,” the woman said.

Dermott continued singing his weird ditty as though it were a lullaby. Gurney wondered how distracted the man actually was-sufficiently to permit a leaping tackle across the bed? He thought not. Would a more vulnerable moment come later? If Dermott’s chlorine-gas story was an action plan, not just a scary fantasy, how much time did they have left? He guessed not much.

The house above was deadly still. There was no indication that any of the other Wycherly cops had yet discovered their lieutenant’s absence or, if they had, realized its significance. There were no raised voices, no scuttling feet, no hint of any outside activity at all-which meant that saving Nardo’s life and his own would probably depend on what Gurney himself could come up with in the next five or ten minutes to derail the psychopath who was fluffing up the pillows on the bed.

Dermott stopped singing. Then he stepped sideways along the edge of the bed to a point at which he could aim his revolver with equal ease at either Nardo or Gurney. He began moving it back and forth like a baton, rhythmically, aiming it at one and then the other and back again. Gurney got the idea, perhaps from the movement of the man’s lips, that he was waving the gun in time to eeny meeny miney mo, catch a tiger by the toe. The possibility that this silent recitation might in a few seconds be punctuated with a bullet in one of their heads seemed overwhelmingly real-real enough to jar Gurney right then into taking a wild verbal swing.

In the softest, most casual voice he could muster he asked, “Does she ever wear the ruby slippers?”

Dermott’s lips stopped moving, and his facial expression reverted to a deep, dangerous emptiness. His gun lost its rhythm. The direction of its muzzle settled slowly on Gurney like a roulette wheel winding down to a losing number.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been at the wrong end of a gun barrel, but never in all the forty-seven years of his life had he felt closer to death. There was a draining sensation in his skin, as though the blood were retreating to some safer place. Then, bizarrely, he felt calm. It made him think of the accounts he’d read of men overboard in an icy sea, of the hallucinatory tranquillity they felt before losing consciousness. He gazed across the bed at Dermott, into those emotionally asymmetric eyes-one corpselike from a long-ago battlefield, the other alive with hatred. In that second, more purposeful eye, he sensed a rapid calculation under way. Perhaps Gurney’s reference to the pilfered slippers from The Laurels had served its purpose-raising questions that needed resolution. Perhaps Dermott was wondering how much he knew and how such knowledge might affect the consummation of his endgame.

If so, Dermott resolved these matters to his satisfaction with disheartening speed. He grinned, showing for the second time a glimpse of small, pearly teeth.

“Did you get my messages?” he asked playfully.

The peace that had enveloped Gurney was fading. He knew that answering the question the wrong way would create a major problem. So would not answering it. He hoped that Dermott was referring to the only two things resembling “messages” that had been found at The Laurels.

“You mean your little quote from The Shining?”

“That’s one,” said Dermott.

“Obviously, signing in as Mr. and Mrs. Scylla.” Gurney sounded bored.

“That’s two. But the third was the best, don’t you think?”

“I thought the third was stupid,” said Gurney, desperately stalling, racing back through his recollections of the eccentric little inn and its half owner, Bruce Wellstone.

His comment produced a quick flash of anger in Dermott, followed by a kind of caginess. “I wonder if you really know what I’m talking about, Detective.”

Gurney suppressed his urge to protest. He’d discovered that often the best bluff was silence. And it was easier to think when you weren’t talking.

The only peculiar thing he could remember Wellstone saying was something about birds, or bird-watching, and that something about it didn’t make sense at that time of year. What the hell kind of birds were they? And what was it about the number? Something about the number of birds…

Dermott was getting restless. It was time for another wild swing.

“The birds,” said Gurney slyly. At least he hoped he sounded sly and not inane. Something in Dermott’s eyes told him the wild swing may have connected. But how? And what now? What was it about the birds that mattered? What was the message? The wrong time of year for what? Rose-breasted grosbeaks! That’s what they were! But so what? What did rose-breasted grosbeaks have to do with anything?

He decided to push the bluff and see where it led. “Rose-breasted grosbeaks,” he said with an enigmatic wink.

Dermott tried to hide a flicker of surprise under a patronizing smile. Gurney wished to God he knew what it was all about, wished he knew what he was pretending to know. What the hell was the number Wellstone had mentioned? He had no idea what to say next, how to parry a direct question should it come. None came.

“I was right about you,” said Dermott smugly. “From our first phone call, I knew you were smarter than most members of your tribe of baboons.”

He paused, nodding to himself with apparent pleasure.

“That’s good,” he said. “An intelligent ape. You’ll be able to appreciate what you’re about to see. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll follow your advice. After all, this is a very special night-a perfect night for magic slippers.” As he was speaking, he was backing up toward a chest of drawers against the wall on the far side of the room. Without taking his eyes off Gurney, he opened the top drawer of the chest and removed, with conspicuous care, a pair of shoes. The style reminded Gurney of the open-toe, medium-heel dress shoes his mother used to wear to church- except that these shoes were made of ruby-colored glass, glass that glistened like translucent blood in the subdued light.

Dermott nudged the drawer shut with his elbow and returned to the bed with the shoes in one hand and the gun in the other, still leveled at Gurney.

“I appreciate your input, Detective. If you hadn’t mentioned the slippers, I wouldn’t have thought of them. Most men in your position wouldn’t be so helpful.” The unsubtle ridicule in the comment was meant to convey, Gurney assumed, the message that Dermott was so completely in control that he could easily turn to his own advantage anything anyone else might say or do. He leaned over the bed and removed the old woman’s worn corduroy bedroom slippers and replaced them with the glowing red ones. Her feet were small, and the shoes slipped on smoothly.

“Is Dickie Duck coming to bed?” the old woman asked, like a child reciting her favorite part of a fairy tale.

“He’ll kill the snake and cut off its head. / Then Dickie Duck will come to bed,” he replied in a singsong voice.

“Where’s my little Dickie been?”

“Killing the cock to save the hen.”

“Why does Dickie do what Dickie does?”

“For blood that’s as red / as a painted rose. / So every man knows / he reaps what he sows.”