She placed her closed lips against Lindstrom’s. One, two, three…
His hand went to the back of her head. His tongue emerged from his lips, thick and eely; it penetrated her mouth. A muffled squeal. He pressed her face against his. The tongue was of a grotesque length. Its surface had a fine nubby grain. The tip of it did something fancy against the roof of her mouth then circled around nearer the gum-line. The broad fleshy body of it flattened itself against her and wiped back and forth, luxuriating.
He let go of her, and she fell back. She thought she might vomit.
He sighed contentedly. “Wasn’t so bad, was it?”
She gave no response.
“Mmmm. Thank you, Margaret.”
“You said you’d go.”
“And so I will.”
They moved toward the kitchen door. He gestured for her to go first. She did not like the thought of him being behind her, but the door was just a few feet away, the whole incident nearly over-she could already see herself ten seconds ahead, relieved, unhurt-and she felt the lure of that so-near moment. It occurred to her, too, that he had gestured her forward exactly the same way in exactly the same spot when he had come to the house the first time.
She went ahead, arms folded. Her tongue mopped the roof of her mouth to scrub away the taste-memory of him. She was disgusted with her body. The filth of him, his spit, his taste, would be piped down her throat into her guts. She would absorb it. But she had to be strong for only a few more seconds, a few more steps.
There was a flash and a hollow sound.
Nothing. An empty moment.
Then she was aware of being on the floor. The hall floor. On her back. She could see up the stairs.
His hands were under her skirt. He was stripping off her nylon stockings. She heard a groggy voice say, “Don’t rip my stockin’s,” and it was a moment before she quite knew that the voice was her own. He tugged the stockings down over her calves, over her heels. Somehow her shoes had already come off.
She screamed.
He punched her face twice. “Don’t scream.”
He sat down heavily on her stomach. She felt the weight of his body oscillate on her stomach as he wound up the stockings together.
Her head was jostled roughly then dropped back down on the floor, hard. She wanted to reach for the back of her head, but he had pinned her arms with his legs.
She felt the nylon rope pull up against the back of her neck as he made the first simple over-under knot, then the rope zipped down tight, it cut into her neck, cinched it shut, and she could not breathe or stand the rocketing pain of it. She thrashed, panicked, and even as she did so she felt him completing the knot, securing the noose.
His weight lifted off her.
She continued to thrash until she could pry her fingers under the nylon and open a little space to gasp a stingy little breath, but already she felt herself being lifted by her hair and pulled up the stairs and she had to kick with her feet to keep her body moving so the top of her head did not get yanked right off.
“Come on, you.”
The stairs banged against her back and her bare heels and she was actually relieved when they reached the smooth upstairs hallway. She kept her legs crab-walking as best she could as she felt her skirt being lowered by the friction of her back and butt against the floor, she felt her shirt untuck and the floor scrape against the bare skin of her lower back.
“Where’s the bedroom!”
He released her hair and she dropped painfully on her shoulder. Her scalp ached. She wondered if the skin that tightly bagged the skull could be separated from it somehow, lifted away from that ball of bone, and whether the two could ever be rejoined as they were before.
She heard the bedroom door open.
Lindstrom made a sound-“Heh”-whose meaning she could not guess and before she could parse that syllable- there was an explosion and Lindstrom staggered back against the wall before her.
She scanned up from his oxblood-red loafers to his khakis where, above the right knee, a red stain had blossomed.
She turned her head, painfully-the nylons-and saw in the darkness of her bedroom, underlighted from the hallway, Michael with his father’s gun. He was ghastly pale, white as marble, as he always was during a migraine attack. In the dim light, shoeless and crazy-haired and wearing his undershirt, he looked like a ghost of himself. Behind him the drawer where the gun was kept was still open, her lingerie spilling out. (It occurred to her that, in Joe Senior’s twenty-three and a half years on the force, it was the first time the gun had ever been fired outside the practice range.) Michael held the gun in one hand, but the weight of it seemed too much for him. It threatened to topple him forward.
Above her, Lindstrom encircled the stain with the fingers of both hands, as if he meant to choke it. But the blossom of red continued to deepen and evolve as he, and she, watched it.
Michael took two unsteady slide-steps toward the bedroom door.
Lindstrom looked from his wound to Michael to Margaret to the gun. He darted off.
Margaret and Michael heard him stomp down the stairs and out the door and away down the street.
Michael took one more slow-motion step in the direction of Margaret before his head rolled to one side and he seemed to glance upward and his body ribboned down to the floor.
Charging up the stairs with Joe, looking up at him from a few steps below with the foreshortened perspective that angle imposes, it occurred to Ricky what an awesome creature Joe really was, a centaur with massive haunches above oddly dainty ankles. He would hardly have been surprised if one of Joe’s sneakers slipped off to reveal a black hoof. Joe had come here to kill Lindstrom. Ricky had no doubt he meant to do it. He had his service pistol with him. If Lindstrom was lucky, Joe would use the gun. For his part, Ricky still was not sure, halfway up the stairs, whether he would help with the killing or prevent it. If he could prevent it, that is, once Joe got started.
Joe kicked in Lindstrom’s door with a single stomp by the door handle. He stood in the doorway panting.
The apartment was empty. All that remained was an old Westinghouse electric fan, unplugged, and a few loose papers on the floor. Kurt Lindstrom was gone.
He would never be seen in Boston again.
Walking on a warm night made Joe think of dying-not afraid, just aware that there could only be so many nights like this, strolling in shirtsleeves, in any one lifespan. So, when he felt a hand grab his upper arm, he was already in a waning mood, prepared, philosophically at least, for the possibility of some Very Bad Thing. And yet he was misled momentarily by the busyness of his surroundings-Boylston Street at Park Square, where a new Playboy Club was under construction-and by the intimacy of the touch-an insinuating wiggle of four fat fingers in the crevice of his armpit-so that when he turned, he was wearing a bemused smile. He was expecting to see a friend.
Instead he found himself face-to-face with one of Gargano’s apes. Joe knew this man. His name was like a birdcall, Chico Tirico. A typical street-soldier type, a slab-faced guinea wiseguy. Tirico was fitter than most of them, though. He had been a heavyweight boxer and stayed in shape. No incipient double chin, no bowling-ball belly dropping out of his shirt. (Gargano himself had been a fighter, too, once upon a time. It was not an unusual background among mob stalkers. The neighborhood boxing gyms were like stud farms. A Golden Gloves kid could always have a muscle job if he wanted it.)
“Hey, cop,” Tirico said.
Joe slapped the guy’s hand away indignantly. He did not like the way it looked, the suggestion that some mook could place him under arrest. He was still a cop, despite everything.
There were three other goons alongside. Alerted by Joe’s gesture, they drew closer.
“Take it easy,” Tirico cooed.
They drew back again, and Gargano came into view. He looked sallow and drugged. Word was that Gargano had been doing heroin for years now, and his habit was getting out of control. His face seemed out of focus; Joe glanced away from him to the grid of red bricks on a wall to be sure his vision was still sharp-that the blurring was indeed in Gargano’s face and not Joe’s eyes.
Gargano said, “Somebody wants to talk to you.”
