Night Victims

Paula wondered, what about psychotic, skillful, and lethal?

It wasn’t much of a surprise to Paula that a canny news-woman like Nina Count would have the police contacts to learn so quickly about Horn’s pursuit of the Night Spider. And ratings being essential to TV news, Paula wasn’t shocked to hear Nina trying to develop a story line with recognizable and fascinating characters like Horn and the Night Spider. Viewers would soon become addicts of her nightly installments of the part-soap opera and part-mystery playing out among them in their own city. Never mind that to the people directly involved, it was a tragedy.

But this wasn’t the first time television and tabloid news had trivialized terror, torture, and death.

What bothered Paula was how Nina Count talked directly and insultingly, even tauntingly, to the Night Spider, the camera in close on her model-like made-up features. Paula understood the message in those challenging blue eyes, the red lips and pink tongue sensuously wrapping themselves around every degrading remark.

Does Horn know what Nina Count is up to?

Tape of a derailed train somewhere was playing now, helicopter shots of angled and stacked boxcars in a wooded area.

Paula pressed the Off button on the remote, leaned back, and closed her eyes.

Horn and Bickerstaff were men. Would they fully realize what was going on with Nina Count? Where she wanted it to lead?

She wasn’t sure about Bickerstaff, but Horn might have a chance. The more she saw of Horn, the more she understood how he’d gained the respect of some of the most cynical and brutally practical men on the planet.

And women. We’re-I’m-not immune to cynicism. The things we learn about ourselves! The things we don’t want to know. .

Paula finished her beer and placed the empty can on top of a Newseek on the coffee table. Finally tired, she slid sideways to curl on the sofa; her bare feet were pressed together and burrowed beneath a cushion for warmth.

She knew she should get up before she dozed off, but she was so comfortable she decided to stay where she was. Nights like this had become almost routine. Around 3:00 A.M. she’d wake up enough to rise and stumble into her bedroom, crawl gratefully into bed, and sleep till the alarm woke her.

That process was preferable to getting up now, brushing her teeth and undressing, and lying in bed for hours before sleep came. She actually got more rest this way.

Experience had taught her. What she learned from experience helped her to survive, while the knowledge of increasing odds against her gradually sank into her consciousness. Would she learn fast enough to continue staying sane and living through the stress and dangers of her work, what she used to think of as her calling?

It was a race between what she learned and the risks encountered in her job.

And every day, in ways large and small and often unrecognizable, she bet her life on it.

26

Arkansas, 1978

They were leaving. He’d thought they never would, but now they were going.

Twelve-year-old Aaron Mandle could hear them from where he lay almost naked in the dark closet. He’d be out soon, away from the closeness and the smell and the heat and the sticky sweat. And the spiders.

He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be out. Aaron understood what was with him in the closet and it never surprised him. That was what he was afraid of most-surprises. Bad ones. At least he was safe here from what he didn’t know about. From what confused and terrified him.

If only it wasn’t so hot in here!

He tried to blink away the sweat stinging the corners of his eyes, which only made them burn more.

“The small and the crawl shall inherit the earth.” His mother’s voice. “The weak and the small, the things that fly and crawl, the beak and the talon and pincer and claw.”

The words were familiar to Aaron, always in his mind to be heard if he listened, or to come to him unbidden, no matter what he was doing wherever he was. Walking in the woods, studying in school those few days he attended, fishing in the muddy lake for bluegill, lying in bed late at night in his room and listening to the cicadas crying to each other over what seemed like miles beyond his open window. . The beak and the talon and pincer and claw. .

“The weak shall inherit,” came a man’s answering voice, then a woman’s saying the same words, as if reciting from a book.

Aaron had never completely understood about his mother and her friends, the congregation. Religion. God. And his mother used to have something to do with snakes. Before what she called her awakening. Now it was bugs. Spiders. Religion was one of the things that confused Aaron, what it made people think and do.

“Dust,” said the man’s voice.

“Dust unto dust,” said a woman.

“No, I mean there’s a car comin’.”

“You watch out for yourself, Betheen,” said the woman’s voice. “ ‘Specially now.”

“Like I always do,” said Aaron’s mother.

Faintly, away from the heat and the darkness, the screen door slammed. Even muffled like that, it was a sound Aaron knew. The last of the congregation leaving. The people that got loud and talked and sang together like one person, that got so excited on the other side of the closet door they took to screaming things Aaron couldn’t understand. Tongues, his mother called it. The talking in tongues. He wondered if, when he got old enough, he would understand.

Aaron waited, but his mother didn’t come to open the closet door. He heard her moving around out there, but she didn’t come for him.

He ignored the spiders on his leg and right arm, and lay still, listening. The spiders were still as well, as if they knew what he was thinking, what he wanted.

The screen door slammed again.

“Gonna be Master Sergeant Oakland Mandle, address Germany!” said his father’s excited voice.

His father! What was he doing home? He shouldn’t have been here for two more days. When he drove the old station wagon home from what he called “the base” for the weekend.

“What’re you tryin’ to tell me, Oakland?” Aaron’s mother.

“That I got the transfer. Gonna be stationed at the base near Mannheim, Germany. Motor Pool command.” His father sounded proud. “So ain’t you happy?”

It took a while for Aaron’s mother to answer. “I would say not.”

His father’s heavy footfalls on the plank floor. “We talked about this, Betheen. You knew I was gonna ask for a transfer.”

“We talked like we always talk.”

“There’s no reason you won’t like it in Germany.” His father was beginning to get mad. Aaron could always tell. He wished he could stop them both from talking to each other, right now, so they wouldn’t fight.

“I can’t leave here, Oakland.” His mother’s voice was different, too. Higher, like when she talked to her flock. Or like those times when she didn’t love Aaron. “I know now that here’s where I belong. In this country. Here. With my congregation.”

“What’re you tryin’ to tell me, Betheen? That you don’t belong with your husband?”

“That I’m not goin’ to Germany.”

“The fuck you ain’t!”

“And there’ll be no blasphemy in this house.”

“This cracker-barrel piece of shit ain’t gonna be our house much longer. It’s all been arranged by Uncle Sam. Gonna have new quarters in Germany.”