He felt a sudden stirring in his groin as he remembered Margaret and how it had felt to drain the life out of her.
He knew now, from going through her purse and car, that the blonde's name was Margaret, Margaret Danielson. Margie for short.
The pulsing urge came on him suddenly. He forced himself to undress and lie on the bed and just think about her.
He allowed himself to masturbate until he found release, because it was far too soon for him to do anything else.
Rita opened her eyes. A brilliant white light was shining above her.
Around the periphery of her vision, several people in green caps and face masks stood over her. All she could see were eyes---eyes and a few anxious frowns, no one she recognized, no one she knew.
A man leaned over her. She smelled the sharp, pungent odor of aftershave. He patted her arm gently. 'It's going to be fine, Rita.
Everything's going to be okay.'
Dr. Rosemead meant his reassuring touch and softly uttered words to offer his patient some comfort. They had exactly the opposite effect.
She shrank away from his fingers, her whole body convulsing and struggling against the restraints that bound her to the operating table even though every movement sent sharp stabs of pain through her body.
'Anesthetic! ' Dr. Rosemead ordered sharply. 'For God's sake, give her something!'
Davy sat quietly in the busy waiting room next to the mountain of a man he knew to be Nana Dahd's nephew.
The cut on his head had mostly stopped bleeding, although his hair was still sticky in spots where more blood had oozed out since the last time someone had cleaned it off. One of the nurses had said he would probably need stitches. He wondered if they used a sewing machine or maybe just a needle and thread.
His head ached, and when he tried to move around, he felt dizzy, so he sat still. The man next to him spoke to him briefly in Papago when he first sat down, then he seemed to go away completely. His body was there, but his mind seemed far, far away. It made Davy think of the way his mother was sometimes when she was working, so he contented himself with sitting and watching.
Being in that room was almost like being invisible. The people around him glanced at him and then looked quickly away. They spoke to one another in Papago, and the things they said made him realize they didn't know he understood what they were saying. They called Rita by another name, Hejel Wi'ithag, which means Left Alone. They called him by another name, too-Me'akam Mad, or Killer's Child. He couldn't understand why they called him by such a strange, mean name, or why they seemed not to like him.
Davy was tired, and his head hurt. He wanted Rita, but the nurses said she was in surgery. They said she was badly hurt. And where was his mother? Why wasn't she here? Just thinking about it made fat tears try to leak out the corners of his eyes. He squinted hard to keep that from happening. He sighed and tried to swallow the huge lump in his throat.
For the first time in more than an hour, the huge man next to him stirred and looked down at the little boy. Then, raising his broad, bare arm, he pulled Davy against him.
At first Davy started to resist, but only when he was resting against the enveloping warmth of the man's massive chest did the boy realize how cold he was and how tired.
He stopped struggling and let his eyes close.
Pillowed against Fat Crack Ortiz's massive bulk, Davy Ladd fell fast asleep.
Chapter Five
THE CAR WINDOWS were open, allowing in the cool night air as well as a noisy, windy roar that made conversation impossible. That was fine with Diana. She had no desire to talk to Brandon Walker, whose very presence unleashed the disturbing flood of memories now surging through her awareness. Blind to the nighttime desert flowing by outside the speeding Ford, Diana was totally preoccupied with pieces of the past that jerked like disjointed figures caught in the brilliant flashes of a strobe of recollection. The spinning figures danced in her mind's eye without order or definition.
Diana Lee Cooper was hard at work in the ditto room that Friday morning when the news came. Everyone in the English Department was so stunned that they all abandoned ship without anyone thinking to come tell her, and she was far too busy to notice.
In addition to the regular batch of departmental quizzes and outlines, Dr. Hunsington, the diminutive head of the English Department, had a twenty-five-page syllabus to put out-seventy-five copies of each. Once she finished running off Halitosis Hunsington's syllabus, it had to be collated and stapled.
Well after noon, she finally completed the last of the stapling and emerged into a strangely deserted hallway.
Laden with an armload of slippery paper, she was surprised to find the door to the English Department closed and locked. A hastily hand-penciled note tucked in one corner of the darkened window announced, CLOSED UNTIL MONDAY. H. F. HUNSINGTON.
'Closed?' she demanded of the inexplicably darkened window and empty hallway. 'What do you mean, closed?'
Diana looked around and found herself absolutely alone.
Where had everyone gone? Her first reaction was that maybe her father's dire predictions of nuclear holocaust had come true, and everyone had disappeared into bomb shelters, but she quickly talked herself out of that one. Had nuclear warfare broken out, surely she would have heard sirens or some other kind of audible warning. There had been nothing.
As a dollar-an-hour, fifteen-hour-a-week work-study student, Diana Cooper had no key to the University of Oregon's English Department office. What was she supposed to do with all the dittos she had run off, she wondered, take them home with her? On her bike?
