'Aren't you getting tired of whispering?'
She laughed; she couldn't help it. He sounded so crabby when he said it, like a little kid awakened in the middle of the night by a parent. A grouchy little kid. 'Yes, I'm tired of whispering, but if we talk any louder, he'll hear us.'
He took her hand. 'I don't want you to get hurt, Denise. Maybe we should just forget it.'
'I'll be fine.'
'Maybe you should take the gun.'
'No, you're probably right; I'd just end up shooting myself.' She nodded toward the other duplex. 'I'd better hurry while he's still in there.'
'I'll say a prayer for you,' Greg said.
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then she grabbed her coat and knit hat and went outside.
She figured it couldn't be a heck of a lot colder at the North Pole. She had been out there maybe three minutes, and already her whole face was frozen, as if an invisible dentist had just given her an extra-strong shot of Novocain, and her leather gloves weren't doing much for her hands, either. Her fingers felt like frozen fish sticks.
The backyard was absolutely still. It was the kind of night that is so cold, it's breathless. The alley light cast a purple glow and purple shadows over the three-foot drifts of sparkling snow. In some places you could see where dogs had roamed past and peed yellow in the white snow. In other places you saw where snow was capped by ice; the surface glittered.
Her present vantage point was behind an orderly row of garbage cans next to the garage. She was approximately ten yards from the back door. Her first goal had been simple enough: get out the back door without being heard and then find a place to crouch and wait while she got her bearings.
It was time to get to work, and the first thing to do was to find his car. It was very unlikely he'd parked out front. Too easy to spot by anybody passing by, cops especially. No, more likely he parked in the back somewhere.
Keeping her eye on the back door of the duplex, she started easing herself away from the protection of the garbage cans.
Then she was in the alley, her rubber-soled boots making vague farting noises against the hard-packed snow. Farting noises; God, she always had weird thoughts like that. It was just one of many reasons that she considered herself so weird and unworthy. Other human beings-real human beings didn't have thoughts like that. She was sure she was alone in that and so many other things in the world.
It didn't take a genius to find the car. He had parked it several yards down the alley, parallel with a garage. From inside her coat she took the small tablet and pencil she'd copped from Greg and wrote down the licence number. Then she went over and peered inside the car. She had no idea what she was looking for.
She tried the driver's door. It was unlocked. Since she was looking for stuff, it would probably make more sense to open the door and start looking around that way, wouldn't it?
She opened the door and started rooting around inside. She could tell immediately that the owner of the car smoked cigarettes. The damp tobacco smell was almost foetid. She could also tell that the owner of the car was rich. The seats were real leather. They smelled that way, and they felt that way.
She found, among other things, a paperback novel, an unopened pack of cigarettes, a black pocket comb, a map of Milwaukee, some kind of brochure about the trucking industry, an empty 7-Eleven coffee cup with a lipstick smudge at the top, and a candy wrapper, which made her hungry. God, she was hungry all the time. In some ways that scared her. All her aunts and uncles were real porkers. Was she going to turn out that way herself?
She was just about to start on the glove compartment when the man grabbed her. She knew it was a man because no woman (unless she was one of those ripple-bodied steroidal bodybuilders) could ever have this much strength.
He grabbed her, yanking her out of the car, and then he struck her a mighty blow on the back of her neck. She assumed in that instant of totally blinding pain, in that instant of terrible warmth rushing up her spinal column to her neck and then exploding inside her head-she assumed that she was dying.
Then she struck the ground, her cheek smashing against the snow the man's boots had just turned into small ruts.
She thought of her sister in the mental hospital; of her first dog, Peachy-Keen; of the way sunlight and shadow played on the surface of Henderson creek in the summertime. These were weird things to think of, probably; but then, she was a very weird girl indeed.
And that became her last thought: how odd she was, how different from all others.
Then there was nothing. Nothing.
24
Friday
The man was plump. The man was bald. The man was astigmatic. The man wore a black leather jump-suit; the man was about sixty-three years old. The man was an asshole. The man was a client.
'So, when're you going to line me up with that chick back in the art department?' Harold McAlester said.
'Soon as she gets a little older,' Brolan said.
McAlester, a fat, evil child despite his years, winked over at Foster. 'Brolan here doesn't approve of me. Never has.' He looked at Brolan. 'Fuck 'im.'
They were in the main conference room. They had been in the main conference room for nearly two hours. All the time with McAlester. Though he had ostensibly come here to discuss advertising, McAlester really wanted to tell them about all the women he'd screwed on his recent trip to Vale. Or said he'd screwed. Or would like to've screwed. McAlester, who a long time ago had been a famous college running back, was the owner of a dozen gourmet shops that did windfall business in upscale malls. He had a woman whom he badly underpaid actually run all the day-to-day stuff, while he went out and gave pep talks to high schools about capitalism and positive thinking.
Once, there'd been an incident when he'd gotten a little over-smitten with this sixteen-year-old Nordic ball- buster whom he'd tried to lure out into his Mercedes following some kind of pep-club deal. Just because she was a small town Lutheran didn't mean she didn't know what the old bald fucker had in mind. She told the small-town Lutheran principal, who, in turn, told the small-town Lutheran mayor, who, in turn, told the small town I. utheran newspaper editor. This guy, a mean Republican in a county of mean Democrats, started out his editorial by noting nil Harold's contributions to the Humphrey and Mondale Shumpaigns over the years, and then without a fare-thee- well, mentioned the fact that Harold, in addition to giving his positive thinking sermons, also spent an undue amount of time sniffing around the small town Lutheran daughters of all the small-town Lutheran men who read this here particular paper. Harold spent the next fourteen months eating bag after bag of shit and trying to come up with the right gimmick that would turn his image around.
Which was when he'd come to Foster and Brolan and which was when, together, they came up with the idea for The House of Sunshine, the big rambling mansion where terminally ill kids could come and spend up to five days a month in luxury and privilege while they went back and forth to the university hospital to have their tests and whatnot. Now, no reporter wanted to come right out and say this was a despicable, low-down publicity ploy fabricated by one despicable, low-down, Vatican-loving son-of-a-bitch-they couldn't, not without sounding awfully cynical themselves. And so they let it slide, and every night there was old bald McAlester on the six and ten o'clock news (on the tube he always wore conservative three-piece suits and put some kind of jazz on his shaved head to cut down the glare; no kidding), tub-thumping the shit out, The House of Sunshine, sounding for all the world like a guy who was probably related in some way to Mother Theresa. The heat off, McAlester was back to Vale trips and European trips and Vegas trips and Jew York trips (as he was so fond of calling them), and most especially, he was back to trifling with chicks who probably couldn't buy legal beer yet. All Brolan could figure out was that the asshole had everything. All that was left to him was the risk of jailbait. Maybe it was the only way he could get it up.
'She's got this peach coloured skirt that's so tight, you can see the crack in her ass when she first stands
