Becker's blow. When he caught Becker's eye he parted his lips and smiled. His teeth were red with blood and his eyes twinkled with a sense of victory.
Pegeen stood at the guard control room, just outside the first-level cellblock, and, trying not to let the guards know what she was doing, she smelled deeply of the air. At first there was just the odor of cleaning liquid, heavily ammoniated with a scent of lemon, but as her nose grew used to that, Pegeen began to detect the deeper, pervasive smell, the true, identifying smell of the prison. It seemed to hover on the other side of the control room like a column of heat in a furnace, rising from the ground to the fourth-level cellblock, containing itself within its own shimmering,boundaries inside the vessel of the cauldron, betraying its presence only with occasional puffs just as the heat outside a furnace gives only the slightest clue of the fury of the inferno blazing within.
The stench was of sex, old sex. Sex dried and crusted and worn on the body, but with something else, a sort of grace note of emotion, a commingling of old sweat and new perspiration, both of them caused not by exercise nor heat, but by fear. The prison smelled of sex and fright.
The smell was rape.
Pegeen waited by the car for Becker's return After leaving the prison she had called a colleague in Nashville and asked what he knew about John Becker, a former agent, now on indefinite medical extension. The colleague, a fifteen-year veteran, had laughed at her naivete but seemed eager to fill her in on Becker's career as he perceived it. He hit the highlights, most of which seemed to be Bureau legend.
'One ba-aaad dude,' he had concluded gleefully, bleating like a sheep.
'And you say you're with him?'
'I'm with him,' she said.
'What are you doing, holding his hand?'
'Something like that,' Pegeen had said, feeling herself blush.
'Well, when you get it back, check your hand for blood,' he had said, laughing. 'Becker never comes out of a case without blood on his hands.'
Then his tone had become very serious. 'Now, no shit, Pegeen, this is the straight s — tuff, okay?'
'Okay-,
'Be careful, be very careful..
'I'm just the chauffeur.'
'Great. Let's hope it stays that way. What I'm telling you, kiddo, is first of all, forget his record, the man is the best. I mean the best, nobody else comes close. But things have a way of happening around him.
I'm not saying it's his fault-or maybe it is, I don't know. Just keep your eyes open and your wits about you.'
'He seems nice, actually.'
'Did I say he wasn't nice? He's nice.' She heard his chortle of condescension distantly, as if he were trying to hide it, but not too hard. 'Nice. Jesus, Pegeen, you're such a girl.'
'I'm not going to respond to that.'
'Now don't get upset. I don't mean it as an insult…
'Thank you so much. It's not.', 'It's just that 'nice' is what makes you a girl, thinking about people that way, assuming things like that.
Pegeen began to regret having made the call. 'I don't think you're nice,' she said. 'That should be good for something.'
'But I actually am nice.'
'I'll have to refine the definition, then.'
'The point is, you're like a little kid who wants to run up and pet every dog she sees. Well, some of them are pettable, and some of them bite… And some of them aren't even dogs. They can take your arm off at the shoulder; they can rip your throat out when you bend over.'
Pegeen hung up the phone. What had Becker called himself A werewolf. Not the man who had needed to hold her hand before he entered the prison.
That was not a dangerous man, it was a sweet, troubled, sensitive man.
What, she wondered, would he be when he came back out? To her surprise, she felt a thrill of anticipation.
Back in the car, Becker was agitated and distracted answering Pegeen's questions only with grunts. When they returned to the highway he kept his eyes on the road, searching for something.
'There,' he said finally, pointing a finger. 'Pull over there.'
'Where?'
'The motel.'
'Why are we going to a motel?' Pegeen asked, dutifully steering into the motel courtyard.
Becker didn't answer but bolted from the car and into the office. He returned quickly, holding a key, and he strode to a motel room and entered. Pegeen followed reluctantly, puzzled. There had been no mention during training about agents darting into motel rooms in the middle of the day.
The door of the room was ajar, but Pegeen knocked first. What if he was lying naked on the bed? What if he was… She stopped trying to imagine and admitted to herself that she had no idea. She knocked again, spoke his name, then eased the door open.
She saw his shoes and socks where he had discarded them outside of the bathroom. The bathroom door was open and she heard the sound of the shower running.
She said, 'Hello?' feeling foolish. She waited for several minutes, uncertain what he was doing or what she should do in response. Finally she sat on the edge of the bed, waiting. Would he emerge from the shower with fangs and fur like the werewolf of the movies? she wondered. Would he come out wearing a towel? Without a towel? Should she go wait in the car? Steam billowed out from the bathroom door. She decided to just sit tight and see what happened next. Whether or not he was the 'baaaad dude' she had been warned to be careful of, he was a damned sight more interesting and less predictable than any of the agents at the office.
Or than any other man she knew, for that matter. The steam filled the entire motel room. Pegeen threw her feet up on the bed and relaxed into the pillow. The spot on her cheek where he had touched her still burned, but she knew that was just her imagination.
In the speckled shade of a dying fir, Cooper squatted and studied the restaurant across the highway. The tree was a victim of acid rain, and half of its needles had turned brown and sere, mottling the canopy with scrofulous patches like a dog with mange. Cooper eyed the restaurant, his fingers idly toying with the dead needles that littered the ground around him, raking them into little piles while his mind raced, trying to figure out his situation. They had given him another application, even though Cooper said he'd already filled one out in the other town, even though he was wearing the striped uniform jacket of the restaurant chain to prove he'd worked there. Still, they wanted another application, as if they didn't believe him, or were trying to trick him, trying to make him look stupid. Cooper had glanced at the application and then at the manager who handed it to him. His name tag said he was Ted. Cooper thought of saying, here Ted, here's your head, then breaking the little clerk's neck for him and stuffing the application in the hole.
Instead, he had taken the application across the street, where he could be in the shade and think what to do. Last time, of course, he had made that girl fill out the form for him. Cooper had forgotten exactly how he had made her do it, but he remembered that it worked, he had gotten the job. He remembered other things about the girl, too.
He remembered how she had let him drive her car and how she had surprised him while he was driving and then how she had taken him into the woods and surprised him some more. She had liked him, he knew that.
She told him so and she certainly acted like it, or at least as if she liked part of him. She had told him she loved the way he howled.
'Most men don't say nothing, they don't make a sound, not a sound. You just throw your head back and hoot like an Indian on the warpath. That's a nice thing, Coop. Men aren't usually very good at enjoying themselves.
He remembered that he had howled a lot in the woods, maybe exaggerating it a little bit for her sake. She laughed every time he did, but not a mean laugh; she wasn't making fun of him.
He wished he could see her now. He would trick her into filling out the application again and this time, afterward, when they got in her car, maybe he'd surprise her.
There was something about her he had forgotten, he knew that, something important. He lifted a pile of dead
