steroids for his body and the synthetic growth hormone as part of his antiaging trip. All balanced, he thought: and for creativity, a taste of acid? He couldn't remember.
He walked out of the next building, pulling his collar up, the brim of his hat down. Peik Hall was three minutes away. He got close, walked behind a building onto Pillsbury, down the street, pulling on his driving gloves. The Jeep was there, right where it should be. He stooped, found the keys, unlocked the door and got inside. This was the risky part. Fifteen minutes' worth. But if he got the car to the airport, the cops might be bluffed into thinking that George had taken off on his own…
The campus cops came back ten minutes later. The Jeep was gone. One of the cops saw something round and flat winking up at her in the headlights, and she said, 'Something over there?'
'Where?'
'Right there. Looks like money.'
She got out, stooped and picked it up. Lug nut. She tossed it in the back of the squad car.
'Nothing,' she said.
Bekker took the Jeep out the same way Druze had driven, down to I-94, but westbound, to I-35W, south on I- 35W and then on the Crosstown Expressway to the airport. He dropped the Cherokee in the long-term parking garage and left the ticket under the visor. Back on the street, he flagged a cab, keeping his hat down against the wind and against identification.
'Where to?' the cabbie grunted. He wasn't interested in talking.
'The Lost River Theater, on Cedar Avenue…'
From the Lost River, it was a twenty-minute walk to the hospital. He went in the way he'd come out, walked up to his office and sat for ten minutes. He remembered to call the answering machine and, using the touch-tone buttons, ordered it to reset. He waited a few more minutes, impatient, then turned off the lights in his office and went back down to his car.
At home, Bekker stripped off his clothes as he walked up the stairs, dropping them wherever they came off. Stephanie would have been outraged; he smiled as he thought about it. He crawled into his closet and took two tabs of phenobarbital, two more of methaqualone, two of methadone, a heavy hit of acid, five hundred mikes. The warmth was incredible. The drugs unwound as they always did-color sequences, clips from life, fantasies, the face of God-then shaded unexpectedly from yellows and reds through pinks into purples; and finally, the fear growing in his throat, Bekker watched the snake uncurl.
The snake was huge, scaleless, more like an eel than a snake, no mouth, just a long cold form unwinding, curling into him.
And George was there.
He didn't say anything, George: he simply watched and grew. His eyes were black, but somehow bright as diamonds. He closed on Bekker, the eyes growing larger, the mouth beginning to open, a forked tongue deep inside…
Bekker had killed three whores in Vietnam. He'd done it carefully, confident that he'd never be exposed; he'd worn an enlisted man's uniform, the Class A greens of a spec-5 killed in a Saigon traffic accident, the uniform dumped at Bekker's doorstep in a black satchel that had been with the dead man in his jeep.
Bekker had strangled the three women. It hadn't been hard. They'd been specialists of a sort, unsurprised when he let them know that he wanted to sit on their chests. More surprised when he pinned their hands. Definitely surprised when he clamped his powerful fingers on their throats, crushing the cartilage with a powerful pinch of his thumb and fore-finger…
The first one had looked straight into his eyes as she'd died, and it was there that Bekker had had his first hint that she'd seen something beyond.
And she was the one who'd come back.
She'd preyed on him, haunted him, followed him with her black eyes. For six weeks he'd doped himself, screaming through the nights, afraid of sleep. He'd seen her in his waking hours, too, in the shiny reflections from his instruments, from mirrors, in panes and fragments of glass…
She'd faded, finally, beaten down with drugs. And Bekker had known instinctively that the physical eyes made the difference.
For the next woman, he'd been prepared. He'd pinned her, choked her and, with a stainless-steel scalpel, cut her eyes as she'd died. And slept like a baby.
The third one had died quickly, too quickly, before he could cut her eyes. He had cut them dead, but he still feared that she would follow him into his dreams: that it was necessary to cut the living eyes.
But it was not. He'd never seen that one again.
He'd cut the eyes on the old man dying of congestive heart failure, and the old woman with the stroke-they'd delivered those two right to him, in the pathology department, and he still had the taped description of the cutting of the old woman's eyes. And he'd cut the eyes of the boy and the girl from Pediatric Oncology, although he'd had to take a good deal more risk with those. The girl he'd gotten to just before they moved her body out of the hospital. For the boy, he'd had to go to the funeral home and wait his chance.
That had been a bad two days, waiting, the boy out there…
But in the end he'd cut them all.
He hadn't been able to cut George.
And George was here now, coming for him.
Deep in his closet, naked, his arms wrapped around his knees, his eyes wide and staring into the beyond, Bekker began to scream.
CHAPTER 15
'You're sure?' Lucas asked Swanson. 'It's Loverboy?'
Swanson scratched his belly and nodded. 'It's gotta be. I went over to Bekker's as soon as I heard. Shook him out of bed. This was about three hours ago, six A.M., and he looked terrible, and I said, 'For the lover, how about Philip George from the law school?' He went like this'-Swanson mimed Bekker's perplexed look-'and he said, quote, If you told me so, I wouldn't be… shocked, I guess. I mean, we knew him. Why? Is it him? Unquote. Then I told him about George. He seemed kind of freaked out.'
'You got the time George disappeared? It's nailed down? Exactly?'
'Yeah. Within five minutes, I'd bet,' Swanson said, nodding. He was unshaven, holding an empty Styrofoam coffee cup, his eyes glassy from fatigue and caffeine. He'd been rousted out of bed at five o'clock, after four hours' sleep. 'There was a guy with him, a student, when George started changing the tire. The student was supposed to get right home to his wife, she's pregnant, due anytime, so he was anxious. Anyway, he's got a clock on the dashboard of his car. He said he looked at it going out of the lot, and remembers it was ten-fourteen. He remembers that close…'
'What about this shrink Shearson's been looking at?'
Swanson shrugged. 'I always thought that was bullshit, but Daniel wanted him covered.'
'Sonofabitch,' Lucas said in a black fury. Del was leaning in the doorway, listening, and Lucas bolted past him, out of his office, took a turn down the hallway, then almost trotted back, his face white. 'The cocksucker was using me as an alibi. You know that? I'm Bekker's fuckin' alibi…'
'If George is dead,' Swanson said. 'That's a pretty big if. And if Bekker had something to do with it…'
Lucas poked Swanson in the gut with his index finger. 'George is dead. And Bekker did it. Believe it.' Lucas turned to Del. 'Remember when you said the San Francisco alibi was a little too convenient?'
'Yeah?'
'Well, how about this? He invites an investigating cop over for a drink, to talk, he tries to fuckin' seduce me, man, precisely when the main witness is being taken off. How's that for a motherfucking coincidence?'
Del shrugged. He didn't say 'I told you so,' but his shoulders did.
Lucas turned back to Swanson, remembering his odd characterization of Bekker. Bekker had looked fine the night before: sleek, even. Beautiful. 'You said he looked terrible? What do you mean?'
'He looked fucked up,' Swanson said. 'He looked like he was a hundred years old. He ain't getting no
