Shiver

by Michael Prescott

  She kicked off her one slipper and stripped out of her robe and pajamas, then hung them from the shower head. Turning to the bathroom mirror, she studied her face. The new hard glint in her eyes, which she’d first detected at the hospital, was still there.

  She filled the sink, then methodically ran a damp washcloth over her legs, arms, breasts, face. The cool water felt like a process of healing. She dried herself, enjoying the towel’s rough texture. Finally she wetted, dried, and combed her hair. Jeffrey had always said she ought to let it fall around her shoulders. She wondered how he liked it this way.

  Returning to the bedroom, she unfolded Jeffrey’s pajamas, a pair of blue cotton trousers and a matching long-sleeved shirt. With difficulty she pulled them. He was right: they were much too large. They hung on her like a clown’s baggy suit. She rolled up the pant legs and sleeves till she felt marginally less ridiculous, then donned the robe and belted it tight. The socks came last; they warmed her feet instantly.

  “Want something to drink?” Jeffrey asked when she returned to the living room.

  “No, thanks. I’ve had enough stimulation for one night.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a drink-drink. I’ve got fruit juice, coffee, probably some hot chocolate somewhere, mineral water, the works.”

  “I’m okay. Really.”

  “All right.” He sat on the edge of a battered armchair, under a grainy close-up of a half-crushed beer can. “So.”

  “So.”

  “I guess it’s time we talked.”

  “I guess.” She thought about taking a seat, didn’t. She stood before him, putting her hands in the pockets of the robe and taking them out, shifting her weight restlessly. “Look, Jeffrey, I know this is going to sound hard to believe ...”

  “It was the Gryphon, wasn’t it?”

  She felt her jaw drop, actually drop. “How did you know?”

  “Oh, Jesus, Wendy. Oh, Jesus.”

  “Come on, tell me. How did you know?”

  His glasses were in his hand. He rubbed his eyes, wincing, shaking his head.

  “Jeffrey. How?”

  With effort he answered her. “After you called, I had nothing to do except wait. So I turned on the radio. The news came on. They were reporting that the Gryphon went after two women in the same apartment building tonight. He killed one; the other one got away. They didn’t give the address, but the neighborhood sounded like yours. Of course I wasn’t sure. When you told me those cops would be watching the house, I thought ... But I couldn’t really believe ... I mean, it sounds so insane ...”

  “It is insane. All of it. So insane I still can’t believe it myself.”

  Jeffrey sat looking down at his glasses, the wire frames glinting in the lamplight. Then he tossed the glasses aside and rose to his feet in one crisp motion. He must have crossed the room to her, but Wendy didn’t see him do that; she knew only that one moment he was standing by the sofa and the next moment he was holding her in his arms, rocking her back and forth, kissing her forehead, her cheek, her mouth.

  “Wendy. Wendy. Wendy ...”

  She swayed with him, hugging him tight, then buried her face in his chest, needing the warmth she found there, needing to be close to his heart. Distantly, past the buzzing haze filling her brain, she heard a quiet, emotionless voice—her own—telling her she’d been wrong about Jeffrey, terribly wrong. He might not have shown it, but he did care for her, cared a great deal, far more than she’d known, perhaps more than she’d wanted to know.

  “Wendy,” he said again, the word whispered like a prayer.

  After a long time they parted. She looked at him through a prism of tears. When he spoke, he made an effort to sound casual, almost businesslike, as if nothing had happened between them; but his voice was hoarse and cracked, giving the show away.

  “Look, you don’t have to tell me the details tonight. Unless you want to talk about it.”

  She’d thought she did, but in that moment she knew she’d been wrong. She couldn’t go over it again, couldn’t relive the experience as she’d relived it in Delgado’s office. She felt worn through, like old cloth.

  “No,” she answered. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not right now. In the morning, maybe. It’ll be easier for me—everything will—in the morning.”

  “Would you like to get some rest or stay up for a while?”

  “Rest, I think.”

  “You take the bed. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

  “I’m sorry to put you out like this.”

  He laughed. Low helpless laughter that had no hilarity in it. After a startled moment she joined him.

  They were still giggling softly as Jeffrey accompanied her down the hall to the bedroom. His arm was around her waist, and her head was resting on his shoulder. For the length of the walk, Wendy hoped the hallway would be endless, the bedroom forever receding, this moment stretching like elastic and never breaking.

  At the doorway they stopped. She lifted her head from his shoulder, and felt his hand glide free of her body. The last of their laughter dribbled out and was gone. Then they were just two people standing there.

  “If you need anything during the night, holler,” Jeffrey said.

  She smiled up at him. “I will. Good night.”

  He kissed her again, then hesitated, his hand brushing her hair. She wondered if he would try anything.

  1 won’t mind if he does, she thought. I won’t try to stop him.

  Now that was a new attitude, wasn’t it? Not in keeping with the old Wendy at all. But the old Wendy, the one who was always a victim, was not the Wendy she’d seen in the hand mirror at the hospital or in the bathroom mirror just minutes ago. She was not the Wendy birthed in bloody trauma tonight.

  His fingers lingered in her hair for another moment, then vanished, leaving only the memory of their touch. He took a step back. She knew he would not try anything, would not take advantage of her when she was tired and confused and perhaps willing to do something she might later regret. As always, he was a gentleman.

  “Good night,” he echoed softly, then turned with involuntary abruptness and walked too quickly toward the living room, where the sofa was.

  Wendy’s heart was beating fast, and her face felt flushed. She stepped into the bedroom, shut the door, and leaned against it, drawing rapid, shallow breaths. Though Jeffrey was gone, she could still see him behind her closed eyelids, gazing down at her with sympathetic concern. “Are you all right, Wendy?” she heard him ask, his calm baritone edged with a hint of an accent ...

  She blinked. It was not Jeffrey she was imagining. It was Delgado.

  Why would she be thinking of him now?

  A tremor danced lightly over her shoulders like a shrug. She dismissed the question.

  Carefully she draped the robe over a chair, then climbed into bed. Lying on her back, her hands folded on her belly, she stared up at the ceiling with its cobwebbed corners. One of those gray fuzzy things that floated perpetually before everybody’s eyes drifted across the white blankness of the ceiling like a cell on a microscope slide.

  After a while she heard the creaking of the sofa and realized Jeffrey had settled down for the night. She wondered if he’d turned off the lights in the living room. Of course he had.

  Oh, God, he shouldn’t have. She ought to tell him—

  Then she remembered Sanchez and Porter, her guardians. She felt better. Nobody would get inside the house or anywhere near it as long as they were posted across the street.

  To prove she was no longer afraid, she switched off the bedside lamp. Darkness pressed down on her. She listened to the faint, regular sound of her own breathing. Images flashed in her mind like heat lightning, silent, vivid, fragmentary. A wisp of curly brown hair behind the armchair. Gloved hands flying past her face as the garrote was tossed over her neck. The crimson thread ringing her neck where the wire had bitten and fed.

  She shivered and rolled onto her side, crushing the pillow to her face.

  Forg
et about it, she ordered herself. Sleep.

  But I’ll have nightmares, another part of her mind protested in a child’s frightened voice.

  No, you won’t, she answered soothingly. You already had a nightmare, Wendy. A bad one. The worst you’ll ever have.

  And it’s over now.

  17

  “Still can’t figure how she did it. Just an itty-bitty little thing.”

  “Must be a scrapper, though.”

  “Damn straight. She stabbed him, she said. Little street fighter. Amazing.”

  “Hope she got him good.”

  “Hell, maybe he’s dead right now. Maybe he only lived long enough to get out of the building, into some alley, and he croaked there like a damn stray dog.”

  “You better believe Delgado checked all the alleys.”

  “Yeah. Well, maybe he’s dead anyway. Dead in his goddamn house. Maybe he offed his pretty self.”

  “Hey, man, we can dream.”

  Rood smiled. Yes, they could dream. Soon they would dream forevermore.

  Officers Sanchez and Porter were so pathetically impressed with Miss Wendy Alden’s survival skills. Mr. Porter, especially. “An itty-bitty little thing,” he’d just called her, and earlier he’d remarked admiringly on her “Kewpie-doll face and bad-ass attitude,” while insisting in a humorous way that “she’s got to have some Zulu blood in her, man, plain got to.” He and his partner had spoken of little else during the past hour, while Rood lay on his belly at the rear of the squad car.

  He’d crawled there unobserved, the knife damped in his teeth, his eyes fixed on his prey, a guerrilla warrior weaving through jungle brush. His progress was slow, every inch a trembling effort to maintain absolute silence; his enemies were the rustling of his coat, the brittle weeds that crackled under him like twigs, and the gusts of wind that threatened to carry such telltale sounds to the open windows of the patrol car. Although the night was cool and dry, not much time passed before jewels of sweat were tracking down Rood’s temples, his cheeks, his neck. Periodically he paused to snug the black stems of his glasses behind his ears.

  Finally he reached the rear bumper, where he could lie unseen, eavesdropping on the two cops’ witless conversation and awaiting his opportunity to strike. As he waited, he removed his blood-spotted leather gloves from the pockets of his coat and slipped them on.

  From his hiding place he could still see Mr. Pellman’s house across the street. Shortly before two A.M. the lights in the front windows snapped off. The two lovers had gone to bed, it appeared. Rood could picture them locked in grunting passion, their bodies striped with sweat.

  He wondered how it felt to make love with a living woman. A woman who would whisper his name as tenderly as he whispered hers. A woman who would say she loved him, gazing on him with adoring eyes. The eyes of the dead held no adoration. They were glass marbles, nothing more.

  For the first time in many years he remembered how much he’d wanted Miss Kathy Lutton, the waitress in Twin Falls. Wanted her not as a victim but as a lover. How good that would have been. Not as great, as noble, as the work he was doing now, of course. But even so ... how nice to have someone he could love. Just once.

  “Hold the fort, will you?” Officer Porter said suddenly. “I’ve got to make some rain in this desert.”

  Rood tensed, pushing away those unfamiliar thoughts. The passenger-side door swung open. The car rocked lightly on its springs as Officer Porter got out. He took a few steps into the brush. Rood heard him unzip his fly.

  Raising himself to a half-crouch. Rood peered cautiously inside the car through the rear window. Officer Sanchez was looking away from his partner, toward the dark, silent house. Rood swiveled his head to study Officer Porter. The man’s broad back was turned, his hands planted on his hips; falling water sizzled on the dry brush.

  Vulnerable. Both of them. As vulnerable as they would ever be.

  Still, two armed men ... two men trained in self-defense ...

  Rood had never killed a man before. Many women, but never a man, any man, let alone a cop.

  For a moment he nearly lost his nerve. He told himself he could sink back into the brush unnoticed and try to come up with another, better plan. Or he could forget Miss Alden entirely. Or ...

  He gritted his teeth. Fear was unworthy of him. An ordinary man would feel fear. Not Franklin Rood. Franklin Rood would do what had to be done.

  So do it, he ordered himself. First one, then the other. Both kills quick and silent. Now.

  Doubled over, staying low. Rood covered the two yards that separated him from Officer Porter. The cop was fumbling with his zipper, his head down, when Rood rose up behind him. Rood was close, inches away; even in the chancy starlight he could see individual kinks of hair curling over the nape of the man’s thick muscular neck.

  His right hand tightened its grip on the knife. The stainless-steel handle was stiff and hard like an erection. Rood felt good. There was no more fear. There had never been fear. Voltage crackled behind his eardrums. Invisible power lines hummed and sparked. Electric currents passed over him and through him. He was pure energy. He could not be defeated, could never be denied.

  Rood seized Officer Porter from behind, cupping his mouth with one hand, while with the other he jammed the knife blade into the cop’s neck and yanked it sideways, ripping open his throat in a spurt of blood.

  Easy. So easy.

  Officer Porter, who had such high praise for Miss Wendy Alden and who hoped the Gryphon lay dead in an alley like a mongrel dog, spasmed and twitched and danced. No doubt he was trying to scream, but with his throat cut no sound came except a series of low choking gasps muffled by Rood’s hand. Blood spattered on the ground, sounding very much like the sprinkle of urine a moment ago.

  Another universe, erased. Another private cosmos, canceled. Another taste of omnipotence.

  The carcass in his arms stopped writhing within seconds, its feeble energies exhausted. Rood lowered the body gently to the ground, then moved immediately toward the open door of the squad car.

  He slid into the passenger seat. Officer Sanchez sat at the wheel, still looking at the house.

  “Guess when you’ve got to go,” the cop said without turning, “you’ve got to go. Right?”

  “Right,” Rood answered.

  Officer Sanchez heard the unfamiliar voice and swung around in his seat, his hand scrabbling at his holster.

  “And you,” Rood said, “have got to go.”

  He thrust the knife into the cop’s left eye. There was a small pop as the eyeball burst. Rood leaned on the knife, driving the blade in deep. He felt a momentary obstruction, then a sudden release as the stainless-steel tip punched through the thin shell of bone at the back of the eye socket, into the brain.

  Officer Sanchez surrendered his grip on the butt of his gun. He stared at Rood with his one remaining eye, his face a silent shock mask. He was still staring when Rood withdrew the knife by slow degrees, twisting the handle to wrench it free. He was staring even when he slumped in his seat, listing forward in comical slow motion till his forehead banged the dashboard with a hollow thump.

  Rood held up the knife. The serrated blade was smeared with blood and pus. He wiped it clean, then let his head fall back against the headrest as he expelled a shaky breath. He was trembling.

  After a few minutes he was calm again. Calm and vastly pleased with himself. He’d carried out his mission with remarkable expertise. There were not ten men in the world who could have accomplished what he’d done. When his story was told by future generations, as it would be, the execution of Officers Porter and Sanchez would occupy a prominent place in the myth. And the two cops themselves would achieve a kind of immortality, a place in history they had not earned, but which Rood, in his magnanimity, would not begrudge them.

  With effort he roused himself. He could hardly afford to slow down now.

  He left the car and retrieved the drawstring bag. He needed the bag, which contained his tools for enterin
g the house, as well as the hacksaw with which he would take his grandest trophy.

  Crossing the street, he approached the house and circled it. Although he would have liked to break in through a window, as he’d done at Miss Osborn’s place, he found he couldn’t; all the windows on the ground floor were protected by the iron security bars he’d noticed earlier. Well, the locks on a house so old and poorly maintained should give him no trouble.

  They didn’t. Within two minutes he’d defeated the rusty latch bolt and dead bolt on the front door. Cautiously he entered the dark living room, then stopped, his attention caught by the low burr of a snore. The noise came from the sofa, where Mr. Jeffrey Pellman lay fast asleep. Alone.

  So Miss Alden wasn’t sleeping with him, after all. For some reason Rood was relieved. He wasn’t sure why. He supposed he wanted the woman all for himself. Yes. That must be it.

  Well, he would have her soon enough.

  18

  Wendy couldn’t sleep. Her body hummed with adrenaline. Though she’d lain in bed for over an hour, pressing her face to the pillow, she’d been unable to nod off. She felt the need to talk, not about what had happened tonight, but about other things. That park she liked so much, the one Sanchez had reminded her of—she wanted to talk about the summer afternoons she’d spent there, and about how much she loved summer, June especially, when the daylight lasted so long that anything seemed possible. She wanted to say things she’d never dared to say, reveal secrets long hidden even from herself. Then cry a little—she was getting good at that—and let herself be held.

  But she didn’t feel right about waking Jeffrey, even though she was sure he wouldn’t mind. She hated to interfere in his life any more than she already had. Or maybe she hated to admit that she needed him, needed anyone.

  Anyway, morning would come soon. It always did.

  She smiled at the thought, appreciating the optimism contained in it, the optimism always so foreign to her in the past.

  At the other end of the house, in the living room, a floorboard creaked.