“Smooth,” the voice murmured in the darkness.
Leigh felt a chill that spread along each vertebra and then penetrated every nerve and descended into the core and froze the blood.
“Smooth and young,” the voice said.
The finger rose and fell, rose and fell.
Leigh tried to reach up and push the hand away but could do nothing, not even speak. The finger threaded through Leigh’s hair, pulling it away from the neck and then letting it fall slowly back into place. The finger paused at the back of Leigh’s neck before following the line of shoulder and arm downward. Leigh’s nerves broke.
It might be fifty miles back to Sunset and it might take all night to hitch or hike back there, but enough of this shit was enough. This guy couldn’t have enough money to make a night with him anything but a nightmare.
The passenger door flew open and, before the driver could tighten his grip on Leigh’s arm, the passenger seat was empty and Leigh was running down the sidewalk toward a brightly lit intersection maybe three streets away. The sound of feet thudding against pavement, stumbling where the pavement was cracked by roots and years, re-capturing the rhythm and thudding on—the sound would mask the subtle whine of the car engine following closely behind that Leigh expected at any moment.
Only at the end of the first block did it seem safe to steal a glance backward.
The guy was still parked in front of the same house. The car was dark. No lights showed. The window was a black mask reflecting the sparse streetlights. The guy was standing on the sidewalk, halfway up to the house. With the streetlight falling on him, he was clearly visible to Leigh. He stood stiffly, almost like he had a killer headache and was afraid to move for fear his head would fall right off. Or like he did not quite know where he was or how he had gotten there but did not like what he was seeing. He raised his head and stared in Leigh’s direction.
“Up yours,” Leigh yelled down the deserted street. The appropriate gesture followed almost immediately.
The man shook his head hard, as if he were just waking.
“Weird,” Leigh said and turned and kept walking as quickly as possible, checking with every other breath to make sure the weirdo wasn’t following, but there was no movement, not a sign that there was any life at all along the street. At the corner a sign identified the street as Greensward and beneath that, in smaller letters, Leigh read the city name: Tamarind Valley.
Shit, Leigh thought, even farther than I thought.
Breathing a deep sigh, Leigh walked the rest of the way to the stop-light. On one corner stood a Mobil station; on another, an all-night store with a brightly lit pay phone booth just outside the glass front doors.
A couple of minutes later, leaning against the booth and panting from the exertion of the three-block sprint, Leigh decided that Kerry was the one most likely be home and in anything like a reasonable condition to drive.
With a shudder and a sigh, Leigh dug into the change pocket of the worn jeans and pulled out a quarter.
Kerry better the hell be home, he thought, glancing over his shoulder to where Greensward disappeared into the darkness.
He just better be.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
For almost a week after a police detective came by the house to question him about Payne Gunnison, about the still unresolved and increasingly frustrating disappearance of Tasco’s repairman, about the death of The Greer, even about the neighborhood on Greensward in general, Nick knew that Payne was home even though he never saw the other man.
On the one hand, the general sense of disarray that had characterized the house while The Greer was alive had returned like the first dying leaves of autumn. The lawns hadn’t been trimmed since that first time. The Bermuda grass had begun fringing the sidewalks again, spreading like moth-eaten lace across the crumbling edges of mildewed concrete. Here and there dandelions and broad-leaved plantains and sickly green, prickly stemmed weeds of varying sorts took up solitary stands amid the lower grass.
From his window, Nick watched a foot-high dandelion just below one of Payne’s living room windows progress from bud to full head of sunny yellow to wispy gray and finally disperse its seed across the lawn. Payne did nothing to stop it.
In addition, most of the shrubbery around the house was rapidly reasserting the jungle-like density that originally hid the place. The vine along the front again screened much of the porch and crawled along the eaves until it shadowed the single window, making it look more and more like a monstrous eye smudged around the edges with badly applied mascara.
On the other hand, there were subtle and not-so-subtle signs around the house that Payne was very much present. Nick never saw an open door or window, never saw a thick white drapery rustle or a hand twist around the hem, but the positions of the lids on the garbage cans lining the alley shifted slightly from day to day. On trash pick-up day, one of the gleaming tin lids was tilted against the can and reflected the sun’s light into Nick’s back window. The next day, all three cans were tightly closed. When Nick surreptitiously examined the cans later that afternoon, a freshly filled white garbage bag lay curled like a reverse shadow at the bottom of one.
Worse, though, was what happened at night. Nick was increasingly concerned about and simultaneously wary of Payne. Payne’s abruptness about the key, coupled with Nick’s deep-felt discomfort about Tasco’s repairman that Payne had taken so lightly, made Nick less than excited about being with Payne. In spite of the initial warmth of their friendship, now the thought of sitting in the front viewing room with the man, in the near darkness watching a film, nearly made Nick break out in a cold sweat.
All in all, the more Nick thought about Payne Gunnison, the less comfortable he felt. It almost was enough to make him wish for The Greer instead.
Almost.
At night, that almost dwindled to a virtual certainty. During each interminable night following his spontaneous vacation in a dust-ridden and cockroach-infested cabin along the Crest Highway to Big Bear, he had split his time between worrying whether that psycho Ric would suddenly pop up and beat the living tar out of him for some reason Nick could never quite define, and watching the silver flickering reflecting from the leaves behind Payne’s place—the same eerie lights as before when the Greet was alive, only more constant and consistent now.
The sounds returned also. They began well past midnight and continued until just before dawn. The screee, screee, screee of rusted hinges set Nick’s teeth on edge and made him irritable and nervous from lack of sleep. Once, during the second night, he had the impulse to get up, dress, and go next door with a can of oil and do a number on the porch glider, whether Payne was sitting in it or not. He got as far as fumbling beneath the kitchen sink for the Three-in-One machine oil that he kept there, when he suddenly pulled his hand back only inches from the can.
He straightened and stood in the middle of the kitchen, wondering what had brought him out there. The next thing he knew, he went back into the bedroom and gathered up his covers and made a surrogate bed on the living room couch. It was lumpy and scratchy, and the screee, screee, screee was only deadened by the intervening walls, not silenced. But the difference proved to be enough to allow him a few scattered snatches of sleep during the night.
By the evening of the fourth day, he was not sure how he would make it through one more night without committing mayhem or murder. As events turned out, he didn’t have to.
* * * * * * *
Less than half an hour before twilight edged into purple darkness, Payne’s front door swung open and Payne stepped out. If Nick had chanced to look up at that instance and seen him, the sight would have helped calm Nick’s nerves.
This was the old Payne. You could see it in his step, in the way his arms swung loosely at his side, in the tan arms and legs set off by a light blue polo shirt and dark blue cargo shorts and white tennis shoes.
Payne looked healthy enough, even if he did not look particularly happy. In fact, he looked as if he had j
ust come to a difficult decision. His forehead was deeply furrowed and his lips were set in a determined line. His feet slapped hard against the sidewalk as he strode up Greensward to the telephone booth by the all-night store at the intersection. He stepped into the booth but did not dial right away. He hesitated for a long time and then finally picked up the receiver. He held the receiver to his ear until he heard a dial tone. He dropped two dimes in the machine and punched a number. Before it rang through, he hung up and retrieved his dimes.
He repeated the process. He was more definitely ill at east now. He was sweating even though the evening was not especially warm. His shirt clung stickily to his back. His breath rasped shallowly through the closed space of the booth and the black plastic telephone receiver felt slippery and pliant against his palm.
This time he let the phone ring through.
“Hello.”
“Cathy?”
“Yes. Payne? Is that you? What happened? You never....”
“We’ve got to meet. Tonight. As soon as possible.”
“I can be over in just a few....”
“No,” he almost yelled through the mouthpiece. “Not here. Somewhere...else. How about the....”
His voice dropped and faded.
“Payne? Payne, are you still there?”
At the sound of her question the angular squareness of his shoulders dissolved into a rounded hump that distorted the outline of his arms and back. Through the thin weave of his polo shirt, it was as if firm muscle had degenerated in a heartbeat into stringy sinews and flabby tissue. He seemed to lose half a dozen inches in height. His hand tightened into a claw that hitched nervously at his leg just below the hem of his shorts.
“Cathy.” He consciously tried to straighten his shoulders. He laid his palm against the scratched glass of the phone booth and pressed against it, struggling to force the fingers straight, to make the knuckles smooth and round instead of knotted. Pain cut through him like a knife blade, sharp and biting. His breath hissed through pinched lips.
“Payne,” Cathy said tensely. “What’s wrong?”
He almost told her, God help him, he almost broke down the barriers and let the words rush out to enflesh the pain and the deep-set fear. For a second his shoulders struggled to recover their strength.
Then they sagged even lower. His hip pained so much that he could barely breathe. He slumped against the wall of the phone booth. He wasn’t sweating any more.
“I don’t want to see you any more, Cathy,” he said clearly and distinctly. There, it was out. Flat and cold and stiff, delivered in a high-pitched monotone she had never heard from him.
“Oh,” she said. Just that one sound was all that she could make, as if the entirety of her shock and surprise and disappointment and anger could be compressed into a single exhalation that passed for a word even though it was less than that...and far more. “Oh.”
“It wouldn’t work between us.”
“Is there someone else?”
“No,” he answered quickly, so quickly that she must have understood him to mean the opposite because she cut him off without waiting for further clarification.
“Fine, then. Just don’t bother to call me again. Ever.”
She hung up. From the sound of it, she had slammed the receiver into its cradle. The persistent buzzz of the tone rumbled through his ear as he held the receiver close to his head, pressing his temple into the earpiece as if to assuage a headache.
For a moment, his eyes misted and he straightened. His lips moved as if he were speaking, but no sounds emerged. When he stepped out of the phone booth into the full blackness of night, he hurt in the same familiar old places—pains like unwelcome spirits that haunted this body in the darkness of each night. The searing pain spiked through his joints until he nearly sobbed.
The walk back down Greensward was a prolonged exercise in physical agony. His hip felt as if the bare bone were scraping against a metal blade. His flesh was afire with sluggish blood that pounded feverishly through constricted veins and joints clotted with calcium deposits. Moving his feet was harder than wading through knee-deep molasses on a frosty winter morning. His shoulder and hand pained as well, and he clenched his fingers into a fist and hunched the hand close to his side as if to protect it.
By the time he passed the house where the Harrisons had once lived—old busybodies deserved everything they got and more shit on them—the sharpness had retreated a little, leaving behind only the biting memory of pain. He was barely limping when he slowly mounted the porch steps. His footsteps rang on the wooden planks.
Less than fifteen minutes later he emerged again. The polo shirt and cargo shorts had disappeared. In their place he wore faded jeans that were frayed at the cuffs and in horizontal slits across both knees, and a T-shirt that sculpted the arcs and curves of his torso. He glanced toward Nick’s place and then hurriedly away when he saw no lights through the window.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Driving.
He hadn’t known what a rush it could be. He had never experienced anything like it before, certainly not back home in Pennsylvania where the only roads were winding two-lane relics from forty years before that were constantly torn up and fracturing and disintegrating beneath winter snows until the safest speed was barely more exciting than a snail’s crawl. A crippled snail, at that. No, back home offered nothing like the freeways here. Nothing like the vast serpents of concrete and steel that arced the city and bisected it and anatomized it, pulling pieces away from the center and keeping them tenuously connected to the living network by stretching the thin arteries of roadway like fragile skin.
Driving.
Tonight he didn’t bother with the air conditioning even though the air was muggy. He kept the windows open and the hot acrid breeze from the freeways blew into his face. He breathed the exhaust fumes like they were a whore’s perfume. His head felt lighter and lighter. He kept the windows down even when he angled off the freeway and headed northward into the tangled maze of boulevards and streets that defined Hollywood by night.
Cruising was easier with the windows already down, he discovered. His hand felt better but the knuckles still twinged when he twisted them. With both front windows open he didn’t have to lean over and struggle with the knob when the hustler sauntered over at the stop light and stuck his head inside and struck up a conversation that concluded with him sidling in next to Payne and slamming the door behind him.
“Nice wheels,” the punk said conversationally. Payne recognized the conventionality of the opening as well. Pawn forward two squares.
The next thing Payne had noticed about the kid was that in spite of his age—certainly not over twenty, maybe only eighteen or so—he was trying to come over as at least a minimal punk, with tight black jeans, a silver chain that dangled from hip to hip, no more than the requisite piercings, and a leather jacket slashed diagonally down the front. But his hair was within reason, and there was no more beard than could legitimately be expected by the end of a long day, and the eyes seemed intelligent, if overly cold and calculating.
What the hell what do you expect anyway true love compassion and sensitivity for a couple of twenties, the eyes seemed to challenge.
Payne didn’t answer the gambit. Already the situation seemed too much like a repetition of what little he remembered about that other night. He didn’t want to think about that night. He didn’t want to think about it at all because thinking made him see staticky flashes and images of things he had never done, people he had never....
Instead he turned to stare at the clock on the bank building a block away. It read not quite 10:00. Still early.
The punk must have caught the movement and interpreted it correctly, because he grinned tightly and said, “Long night ahead, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Not much for talking?” the punk said. He settled back into the seat and stretched his long legs in front of him and st
retched his arms over his head and into the back of the car.
When he relaxed again, one knee rested lightly against Payne’s leg and one hand draped lazily, with studied casualness, over the headrest of Payne’s seat. Payne felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.
“Name’s Alan,” the hustler said quietly. His voice was a surprise; somehow it didn’t fit his appearance. Too quiet. For an instant, Payne almost felt like he wanted to like the kid.
Alan waited for a long while, long enough for Payne to pull away from the curb and into traffic, long enough for the car to successfully maneuver minor traffic jams at two intersections before he seemed to understand that the man at the wheel was not going to answer.
“What’s yours?” he asked finally.
“Huh?”
The car veered sharply as his hands twitched on the wheel.
“Your name, man, what’s your name?” There was an edge of irritation in Alan’s voice.
“Uh, P—Peter.” Payne stumbled over the sounds. He spit them out as if they were bitter poison, aware even as he did so that the hustler no more believed him than he believed the hustler.
Alan. How grand!
But for the night—for the next hour or less, maybe—they would become Alan and Peter.
So be it.
The rest of the trip passed in virtual silence. Every now and then, Alan would speak but Payne rarely answered with more than a monosyllabic “yeah” or “no,” often with only an indecipherable grunt. Alan’s comments grew more acerbic and biting as the car roared through the darkness. Twice Payne felt hot pressure on his leg, and twice he shifted gears even though the engine complained. He stomped on the clutch with his left foot and on the accelerator with his right, just enough to move his leg away from the heat of the hustler’s knee. Twice he shook his head and breathed sharply through his teeth, Not yet. Not now. Not here.
By the time they reached the house on Greensward, Payne was tense and sweating. He could smell his own stench and was revolted by it. His T-shirt felt sodden under the arms and around the neck and waistband. His jeans had become a hothouse, capturing his own heat like a furnace in the warm night air. He wished faintly for the cargo shorts and the feel of cooling air through the sprinkling of hair on his bare legs. The image faded and disappeared and there was only heat and pressure and confinement. His hand curled along the seam, the fingers claw-like and rigid. His knuckles grazed the hustler’s. His fingers retracted into a tight fist.
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