Dancer's Rain

by Doug Sutherland

  Adrienne had originally thought that somehow this place would be different, in spite of herself entertaining some kind of fantasy that they were moving into a time capsule of a small town, a bubble of benevolence in a dark world. That had been naïve. She was conscious of eyes on her everywhere, and those eyes would be on Emily too.

  He’d seen the girl three or four times by now, and each time the temptation had been stronger. He knew who she was, who her mother was. He even thought of diverting his attentions to the mother—she was beautiful too, perhaps even more so than the daughter, but he was good at reading body language and sensitive to the aura it created. She was far bigger game than her daughter and potentially more dangerous for him. He couldn’t imagine being able to lure her anywhere.

  It had taken no effort at all to find out who they were or what they were. His deceptions had woven him deeply into the life of the town, and people didn’t guard their conversations around him the way they had when he was much younger. Now he was part of those conversations, and inevitably when either the mother or daughter happened by on the street the gossip and speculation would follow in their wake.

  The first time he’d seen the mother it had been by pure chance—he was in a lineup at a supermarket when he looked up and saw her standing in the next line over. For a brief moment he’d mistaken her for the daughter—but then he could see the more pronounced lines around her eyes and mouth, lines of experience, of life. Even standing there as he was he became excited, speculating about what some of that experience must have been.

  She just wasn’t aware of him, even though he was only a few feet away. She looked disgusted, disdainful, as if she’d taken the measure of the people here and come to the conclusion that she was better than any of them. It was a feeling he understood. Her eyes traveled right across him without pausing or making contact with his own, and he realized that to her he was a complete nonentity, standing with the rest of these nonentities and holding her up when she had important things to do. It made him angry.

  She was stunning in her own right—the same build as her daughter, the same long legs and narrow hips, the surprisingly full breasts in a woman so slim. Her hair was short, light brown, and he found himself wondering what the nape of her neck looked like beneath the upturned collar of her jacket. Older than his usual target, and he was fixated on the daughter anyway. Even so his breathing had quickened and he could feel warm moisture in the palms of his hands. It was her turn and she moved up in line, turning away to face the clerk at the cash register. The teenaged boy bagging her groceries seemed to have much the same reaction to her that he did.

  He was still in his own lineup when she finished and went by. He tried to but couldn’t resist the impulse to look at her as she went by, to seek out her eyes. It was a lapse on his part and he was fortunate—she looked straight ahead at where she was going and didn’t see him. He supposed that like most beautiful women she’d learned the folly of making eye contact. He wasn’t there, didn’t exist for her.

  For now.

  It was a tempting thought—to penetrate that arrogance, that reserve—but as tempting as it was it was also intimidating.

  What he was planning was intimidating enough.

  He was throwing away his customary rules of engagement. The others had been random targets of opportunity, albeit opportunities he’d created by relentlessly patrolling a very broad area outside the town limits. There was nothing random about his interest in the Simmonds girl. He realized suddenly that unlike any of the others he would know her name before he moved on her. She was a specific target in a particular place, a place where her absence would be noted almost immediately. He was ratcheting up his personal risk, and instead of alarming him it added to his excitement. He knew that at some point he would go for the girl. It was just a question of when.

  14

  Officially this Saturday was a day off, although the only thing Frank had decided to do with it was nothing. The night before had started out quietly enough, but there’d been a couple of the usual Friday night dustups and accidents as the alcohol worked its way through people’s systems. Nothing serious, but enough to keep him late as he rode herd on the paperwork.

  When the phone rang Frank thought of letting it go to voicemail but decided against it. The woman’s voice sounded vaguely official, clipped. It was Adrienne Simmonds.

  “I owe you an apology,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “My daughter’s behavior—no, actually my behavior. The other day.”

  It took Frank a moment to register what she was talking about. She mistook his silence for something else.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you at home like this,” belatedly Frank realized that someone at the office had broken policy and given out his home phone number, “but I’ve been thinking about the way I acted and I decided it was ...unacceptable.”

  Frank still hadn’t caught up.

  “I was just doing my job ...”

  That sounded hackneyed, dismissive. He tried again.

  “Ms. Simmonds, I’m not very good on the phone. Especially without my morning coffee. Why don’t you let me buy one for you too?”

  Afterward Frank was still amazed he’d had the presence of mind to pick up on whatever it was that was behind the phone call.

  Saturday morning coffee didn’t feel like official business, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe that it could be anything else. They’d arranged to meet in a small diner, just on the outskirts of town, Frank wincing a bit even as he’d suggested it. He knew they’d be seen and inevitably become the subject of speculation. The place was small—four or five booths per wall, tables and loose chairs in the middle, and a vintage juke box in one corner. Red and white checked tablecloths and chipped formica on the lunch counter in front of the grill. None of it was a self-conscious attempt at period décor. It had just always been that way. It was crowded and loud, full of working and retired people in their forties and up. There had been an almost comic drop in the general noise level when she’d walked in, pausing just inside the door to look for him. She was wearing designer jeans, tan leather boots that brought her close to six feet, and a belted suede jacket over a thin navy blue turtleneck. She looked spectacularly out of place, and people were unabashedly staring as she finally spotted him and came over to the booth where he was sitting. The murmuring picked up again only after she sat down across from him. If she noticed she didn’t show it, and Frank decided not to comment. It was obvious enough.

  In spite of himself he was mildly disappointed when things started out as if she was simply discharging some kind of obligation.

  “I think I’ve made a big mistake,” she told him. She didn’t strike him as a person to whom such admissions came easily.

  “What kind of mistake?”

  “Coming here.”

  Of course she’d noticed the stares and whispers. Frank felt suddenly defensive.

  “It’s just coffee.”

  She smiled, glancing around her and shaking her head.

  “I mean here. This town.”

  “Ms Simmonds, if you’re talking about the other day, you’re going to run into bad people everywhere.”

  “I know—but I came to this place to get away from people like that, not find more of them. Every time I think about what could have happened to Emily I start shaking.”

  “I don’t really have an answer to that one. It could have been serious, but—”

  Her eyes flashed. Short fuse, Frank thought. Or more stressed out than their phone conversation had indicated.

  “Could have been? You don’t think what happened was serious enough? She was in our driveway, and these two animals stop their car and just ...”

  Her voice trailed off, her hand trembling slightly as she reached for her coffee cup. Frank looked around the small diner. Heads dipped or turned away.

  “Bad things happen everywhere. Even here.”

  She looked at him.

  “But it could
have been a lot worse, couldn’t it?”

  “I suppose it could have been.”

  “What happened to those men? Are they in jail?”

  Frank sighed. He knew they were back to business now, if they’d ever been away from it.

  “No,” he saw her start to flare up again but he was ready for it, kept talking, his voice low, “Ms. Simmonds, this isn’t the place to have this conversation.”

  She looked around, got what he was saying. She made a visible effort to collect herself.

  “You were the one who suggested it.”

  She had him there. His conceit, wishful thinking, whatever it was, was exposed. It was business, after all, or more correctly a public servant explaining to a concerned citizen why the two men had only been charged with creating a disturbance, paid a fine, and were out of the station within hours—not without a stern warning from Frank to stay the hell away from that street and from the two women.

  Frank knew nothing else would stick, and didn’t bother pursuing it further. It would be a waste of the D.A.’s time and his. He could have forestalled the whole thing by simply calling her in the first place and telling her so—which was strange, he thought, considering the number of times he found himself thinking about her. Maybe because he knew she wouldn’t be happy with the news and that would extend to the messenger as well.

  “Look,” he said finally, “I’m sorry about the way all this happened, and I’m sorry you don’t like it here. I can understand why. If you’ve lived in a—a big city all your life this place can be a real shock to the system.”

  “How would you know?”

  So he told her about Pittsburgh. Why he’d gone there in the first place, why he’d eventually come back. As much as he could he left out the thin blue line ‘us against the world’ cop stories.

  “So,” surprisingly, she was smiling at him, “does it get better? Easier?”

  He thought about that.

  “I don’t know. It’s probably different with me because I grew up here ...”

  “And you could hardly wait to get out.”

  “Yeah...so when I came back it was...well, for one thing I knew what to expect—it was like I’d never been away. But after a while...I don’t know, you look up and all of a sudden a lot of time has gone by and you don’t know where the hell it went.”

  “That feeling,” she told him, “isn’t confined to small towns. I’m just worried—it’s one thing for Emily—she’s just here for the rest of the school year and then she’ll probably go away to college somewhere. But for me—I don’t know if I’ll ever fit in.”

  Frank followed her glance around the diner. Then he turned back to her and grinned.

  “Look at it this way, Adrienne. Why the hell would you want to?”

  Afterward Frank realized that from there it had turned into the longest, most personal conversation he’d had with anyone since he’d come back to town. They stayed in the little diner for more than an hour, customers coming and going, many of them covertly watching and trying to listen from behind their coffee cups.

  They were just on the way out, Frank trying to frame a casual invitation of some kind so they could meet again, when he was intercepted by somebody complaining the ‘neighborhood kids’ were making too much noise at night. Adrienne had stood there for a few moments waiting for the middle-aged woman’s tirade to end, but it showed no signs of abating. Finally Adrienne caught his eye and tapped her wristwatch, smiling and indicating she had to go. Frank could only shrug helplessly and smile back, watching her for a moment as she turned and went through the door.

  Just like everybody else.

  15

  It was almost too good to be true. He hadn’t been able to sleep and had gone prowling in the van. He’d been watching her now for a few days, knowing that he couldn’t keep her under actual surveillance—it would draw too much attention and the van was the only generic vehicle he had, with a few sets of fake license plates. So it would have to be hit and miss, play his luck. He had no real expectation of encountering her at this hour but he knew that he’d get an almost electric rush just by being close, by being able to drive by her house, knowing that impossibly perfect body was lying asleep only a matter of a few yards away and that someday he’d have her.

  So he drove by, teasing himself, slowing slightly and searching the windows for a sign of a light. Nothing, not that he’d expected anything different. She’d be asleep, her mother in the next room. He thought of the mother again, of both of them under the same roof, sleeping and vulnerable...he realized suddenly that he hadn’t been paying attention, had slowed almost to a complete stop in front of the house. He cursed under his breath and, careful not to squeal the tires or gun the engine, accelerated slowly away down the street toward the intersection with Fremont, even remembering to slow down and speed up a couple of times so it would look as if he was searching for another address along the street. An amateurish attempt at covering up, and he was breathing very hard, his hands trembling on the hard plastic of the steering wheel. It was stupid, and it was a measure of his fixation that even then he thought of going around the house again and compounding his error, just to be close to her again. He shook his head, cursing himself—he shouldn’t have been near the house at all.

  Far too much risk of the van being recognized, now or later. He knew he could get inside the house—he’d never tried that before, but knew he could—and if he did everything right he could take both of them.

  It would mean a radical change in how he did things—and he knew that improvising something like this would be yet another mistake, a very bad one. He’d always managed to stay away from mistakes—he thought of the body in the water and corrected himself—for the most part he’d stayed away from them by controlling his impulses, or at least putting them on some kind of delay. That was part of the excitement, the buildup. He knew that fixating on this girl was uncharacteristic for him and potentially the biggest mistake of all.

  The whole process was taking longer than he thought, and his own impatience surprised him. He’d done enough research on his own kind to know that almost invariably the intervals between killings decreased. He’d avoided that pitfall, at least up to now. Now that his next victim had a face and a name it had become very personal.

  This was a problem for him, potentially a big one. He was obsessing about her, and that obsession was leading to more and more impatience. That kind of impatience could—unless he did something about it—would lead to him moving too soon.

  He knew what he had to do now. Just because she was the one he wanted didn’t mean she had to be the next one. He’d wait a little longer, satisfy himself another way.

  He turned onto Fremont and headed down the long empty stretch that led to the town’s fast food alley and the ramp leading to the highway. There was a truck stop there—two, in fact, one much bigger than the other, and for a moment he considered going there, saving himself the longer drive. He forced that thought down as a sign of potentially fatal laziness and turned up the ramp, heading for the next truck stop about forty miles down the highway. It was going to be a long night—especially if he was lucky.

  He knew this truck stop well—he knew all of them well, within about a two hundred mile radius. Nothing distinguishing one from another except corporate logos and slight variations in the surrounding countryside. Their parking lots were vast, generic, and at various times in the past few years he’d hunted in every one of them.

  More correctly, he’d just stayed still and waited.

  On many of those occasions he’d come away with nothing. It was just the nature of what he did, and he accepted that he’d be frustrated many more times than he’d be successful. This time, though, it only took a couple of hours, and when he saw the girl he decided she was a worthwhile substitute for the one he really wanted.

  He watched her in the glare of the towering sodium lamps, watched her approach a huge Peterbilt, its engine turning over noisily in the fall air. Underneath it
all he could hear the familiar susurrus of late night traffic only a few hundred yards away. It was late and he was very tired. Long days lately, presenting one face during the day and hunting at night.

  The girl was wearing a short denim jacket and the inevitable jeans, a backpack slung over one shoulder. He watched as she stepped up on the truck’s running board. She was petite and had to stand on her toes to bring her eyes close to the level of the driver’s side window. The jeans went taut across her buttocks and he could see a flash of taut, bare skin at her midriff. She wobbled a little, trying to maintain her balance, and knocked on the truck’s window.

  The truck cab was elongated, one of the fancy ones with a sleeping compartment in the back. She knocked again, nearly lost her balance again, and waited. After a full minute she gave up and half turned to step awkwardly down onto the pavement. She looked up at the truck. Just as she was about to turn away again a broad, bearded face appeared at the window and looked down at her.

  He was slouched in the van, feigning sleep, and wasn’t close enough to hear the exchange. He could see her body language, though, and could fill the rest of it in for himself. As soon as the man’s face appeared in the window there was almost a visible jolt in the girl, as if somewhere a switch had been flipped to animate her.

  She started talking to the driver right away, pitching him for a drive, sex, or both. She was in three-quarter view, most of her face hidden, but every few moments she turned away from the driver, looking out over the parking lot, and he instinctively slouched lower behind the wheel even though it was impossible for her to see him.

  The truck driver looked impassively down at her, all the energy flowing up from her and none coming back. He was big, bulky, and he looked older. She’d probably woken him up from a nap and he didn’t look happy. He said something to her, only a few words, and the window went back up.