Scalpers

my husband, he don't want me to take the test to find out for sure.'

From the back of the Mercedes, Van crept out and looked once more up and down the street, paying particular attention to doorways and windows, and the hospital's emergency room, where beneath the sign some nurses and orderlies took a smoke. He slipped quietly from the car to the sidewalk, his dark cloak masking the sheen of the two large knives he held beneath it. They were brand new knives, brought to him by Ian to replace the ones they had discarded at Park's. It was to keep the police from matching that knife to new wounds, or so Ian said. Ian knew a lot of things about the police. He knew how to be cautious. He had managed to keep them safe all these years.

He worked his way through the shadows to within a few feet of Ian and the woman, just passing where she stood and hiding deep in the dark of the alleyway. Ian, moments later, stopped her at the entranceway with more of his questions.

'Why ... why isn't your husband here? Is it too much to ask? If you're carrying his child? that he—'

'He is working, you know....'

Only a block away, the traffic bustled by. Just a block away, the woman might catch the bus and they'd lose their chance at her child. It'd been a spontaneous idea to strike again tonight, spontaneity brought about by exuberance. Van couldn't recall a time when they'd been so full of power, so proud at having done away with Park; Ian kept talking about making a fool of this man Grant, who Van heard of only through Ian. Ian was smarter than the entire police force, leaving the policewoman at Park's room with the body.

Ian had suggested they come to the clinic to get what they and their gods called for next, the ingredient that must work! Now, it appeared, Ian had been right to bring them here ... the payoff was close at hand.

The woman was raising her voice at Ian, now, and trying to pull away from him. But Ian, calm and resolute, said in a shocked voice, “My God, what is that?” He was pointing into the depths of the alley, giving Van his cue to show himself, but Van wasn't sure it was exactly the right moment. She was too far away from him. Ian needed to guide them into the mouth of the alley, closer ... closer.

But he was somehow managing it.

'Do as you're told and your daughter will not be harmed.'

'Oh, please! Please, sir.'

'Just do as you're told.” He had a knife held against the child's throat.

'Ahh,” moaned Van, making them turn to find him in the dark.

Mrs. Jimenez shouted for her daughter to run, and the child twisted free of Ian. Her legs worked like pistons down the alleyway, and suddenly she disappeared ahead of Ian, who gave chase.

Mrs. Jimenez, meanwhile, had gone down as a result of a blow from Ian and, angry as hell with her, Van repeatedly kicked her in the temple and leaped atop her with his long knife. She had fainted and lay helpless now. He'd do what came naturally, straddling her neck, grinning, the large carving knife in his hands. He ran it across her forehead, drawing an outline of the scalp he intended taking, drawing it in blood. Carving, he thought her unconscious when she made a final plea: 'My baby ... !'

'Precisely,' said Van, carving deeper. The scalp came almost willingly. When he looked up, holding the long, black tresses of the Spanish woman, he studied the dark in an attempt to make out where Ian had got off to. Then he saw him coming back, shaking his head, empty-handed. Van cursed his brother's stupidity at having let the child escape. At the very least, he thought, they had a fresh scalp. But when Ian had seen what Van had done, he crumpled to his knees beside him, telling him he was a damned fool. He reiterated it several times before saying, “We've got to take the body with us. Hide it, bury it—maybe in the swamp.'

'Why? Why bother?'

'They'll know we're still at large!'

'It doesn't matter what they know or think they know. He, our great god, will protect us if they come near us.'

Then the noise of approaching men frightened them off and they were forced to leave Mrs. Jimenez where she lay. Deep in the dark shadows was the girl, hiding, fearful, stunned and in shock, and suddenly terrified into running again when something in the dark beside her moved and reached out a skeletal hand to her. She only saw the hand and the eyes, deep in their sockets, staring up at her as if they were lying on the ground.

She ran back toward what she thought was the hospital, but her mind was out of control, and she wandered the wrong way.

Lionel Morton Silbey the Third lay in a dung heap of his own making at the end of the alley where he'd taken up residence since October of the previous year. He hadn't long been a resident of Orlando, or of Florida, but he liked it so far and believed he would make it his permanent home, permanent, at least, until his Maker should call for his infernal, inebriated soul. God forbid it should be as put-upon as his physical self all these years. First it was by the pain of a loss so great that to this day his heart might burst if he allowed an hour's sober thought to it, the loss of Chrissy, the only child of a marriage destroyed by Chrissy's disease, a brave little three-and-half-month-old child which asked only for life, but instead got a cruel, painful affliction Silbey could not any longer pronounce.

Where his woman was, he had no idea. The city he once called home, he had a vague inkling to be St. Louis. As to his parents, he'd washed their memories from his mind with a conscious flow of booze.

But Lionel had fallen on hard times here in Florida. He hadn't enough money to stay drunk, and people here, they didn't treat a man like him as they did in St. Louis. Here, the weather was kind to an alcoholic—but the people weren't. They made him go to the mission if he begged for handouts. Police arrested him every other night. Only the man that gave him the job of cleaning his kitchen, the Chinaman, gave him what he needed. The Chinaman understood Lionel and paid him in booze, which was all he wanted. It was a proper good bargain, as the British would say in that Limey talk of theirs, a bloody good wage for a bloody good job....

Lionel's thoughts were interrupted where he slept at the back of Chung Fat's Chop Suey House behind some cans when he heard a woman's muffled cry. He groggily straightened up, but froze when his bleary eyes focused on some odd commotion going on. He saw through the space between Chung Fat's trash cans what appeared to be a family. There was the tall, strong, straight-backed father, his arms tightly around the neck of the mother, who was far shorter and fatter. Then, down about their knees, was the little kid, playing around some boxes with what appeared to be two toy swords. The sight, dim and dark as it was in the poor light, and within the limited confines of a drunken eye, brought a phantom tear to the old man's eye. The sight made him think of little Chrissy, reason and eternal excuse for his own living death. These dancing figures before his eyes, this family, this was a taunting, hellish thing that God, in his infinite and mysterious wisdom, tortured a weak and lonely man with.

Lionel then saw the little kid, a boy from the look of him (yet there was something not boyish at all in his movements, his clothes looking like a shaggy-dog costume), pounce on the mother. He was kicking her violently as the father raced after a second child, a terrified little girl who gave him the slip, dropping into a recess just down from where Lionel was, trying to work her way back, closer. The violence terrified Lionel, and yet he could not tear his eyes away, wondering if the family were real or imagined, and wondering what, if anything, the boy might do next. He was soon rewarded with a ghastly show as the ugly child sat over the woman's head and began to carve away at her scalp, her scalp!

Lionel heard the woman's last words repeat themselves in his brain, 'My baby.'

The boy's sword was really a large knife! Lionel's thinned blood chilled at the next instant as if coagulating in his veins when, with the father returning, the boy jumped up and down on the woman's carcass, holding her hair up for approval.

Lionel reeled from the shock of what he was witness to. He questioned his senses, yet he had only just begun to drink this night, and had been nearly sober only two hours before. Was this a horror playing out in the real world, or something his fevered brain had prepared just for the third-generation Silbey, who'd had a great-grandfather who'd been a Confederate general?

He feared to glance again, yet he prayed and half-believed that another look at the awful scene would reveal that it had all been a delirious hallucination brought on by all the alcohol of a troubled life.

Taking a deep breath and closing his eyes in an attempt to banish the sight, Lionel looked out to where he'd seen the mutilation of the mother by the father and son. He was confident nothing, no one, would be there when he looked again.

But it was not to be so.

The two males worked over the corpse, trying, it seemed, to pry something further from it, or drag it away