Rose Madder

VIII. VIVA ZE BOOL

He had felt as if he were floating above his own head, somehow, but when Dirty Gertie pissed on him, all that changed. Now, instead of feeling like a helium-filled balloon, his head felt like a flat rock which some strong hand had sent skipping across the surface of a lake. He was no longer floating; now he seemed to be leaping. He still couldn’t believe what the fat black bitch had done to him. He knew it, yes, but knowing and believing were sometimes worlds apart, and this was one of those times. It was as if a dark transmutation had occurred, changing him into some new creature, a thing that went skittering helplessly along the surface of perception, allowing him only brief periods of thought and strange, disconnected snatches of experience. He remembered staggering to his feet that last time behind the shithouse, face bleeding from half a dozen cuts and scrapes, his nose stuffed halfway shut, aching all over from repeated confrontations with his own wheelchair, his ribs and guts throbbing from having about three hundred pounds of Dirty Gertie perched on top of him… but he could have lived with any of that-that and more. It was the wetness from her and the smell of her, not just urine but a woman’s urine, that made his mind feel as if it were buckling each time it turned back that way. Thinking of what she had done made him want to scream, and it made the world-which he badly needed to stay in touch with, if he didn’t want to end up behind bars, probably laced into a straitjacket and stuffed full of Thorazine-begin to fuzz out. As he staggered along the fence he thought, Get her, get her, you have to turn around and get her, get her and kill her for what she did, it’s the only way you’ll ever be able to sleep again, it’s the only way you’ll ever be able to think again. Some part of him knew better, though, and instead of getting her, he ran. Probably Dirty Gertie thought it was the sound of approaching people that drove him off, but it wasn’t. He ran because his ribs hurt so badly that he could only draw half-breaths, at least for the time being, and his stomach ached, and his testicles were throbbing with that deep, desperate pain only men know about. Nor was the pain the only reason he ran-it was what the pain meant. He was afraid that if he took after her again, Dirty Gertie might do better than just fight him to a draw. So he fled, lurching along beside the board fence as fast as he could, and Dirty Gertie’s voice chased him like a mocking ghost: She left you a little message… her kidneys by way of my kidneys… a little message, Normie… here it comes… Then one of those skips happened, a short one, the stone of his mind striking the flat surface of reality and flying up and off it again, and when he came back into himself, some little length of time-maybe as short as fifteen seconds, maybe as long as forty-five-had passed. He was running down the midway toward the amusements area, running as thoughtlessly as a cow in a stampede, actually running away from the park exits instead of toward them, running toward the Pier, running toward the lake, where it would be child’s play to first bottle him up and then bring him down. Meanwhile, his mind shrieked in the voice of his father, the world-class crotchgrabber (and, on at least one memorable hunting trip, world-class cockgobbler, as well). It was a woman! Ray Daniels was screaming. How could you let your clock get cleaned by some cunt, Normie? He shoved that voice out of his mind. The old man had shouted enough at him while he was alive; Norman was damned if he was going to listen to that same old bullshit now that the old man was dead. He could take care of Gertie, he could take care of Rose, he could take care of all of them, but he had to get away from here in order to do it… and before every Security cop in the place was looking for the bald guy with the bloody face. Already far too many people were gawking, and why not? He stank of piss and looked as if he’d been clawed by a catamount. He turned into an alley running between the video arcade and the South Seas Adventure ride, no plan in mind, wanting only to get away from the geeks on the midway, and that was when he won the lottery. The side door of the arcade opened and someone Norman assumed was a kid came out. It was impossible to tell for sure. He was short like a kid and dressed like a kid-jeans, Reeboks, Michael McDermott tee-shirt (I LOVE A GIRL CALLED RAIN, it said, whatever the fuck that meant)-but his entire head was covered by a rubber mask. It was Ferdinand the Bull. Ferdinand had a big, sappy smile on his face. His horns were decorated with garlands of flowers. Norman never hesitated, simply reached out and snatched the mask off the kid’s head. He got a pretty good handful of hair, too, but what the fuck.

“Hey!” the kid screamed. With the mask off, he looked about eleven years old. Still, he sounded more outraged than fearful.

“Gimme that back, that’s mine, I won it! What do you think you’re-” Norman reached out again, took the kid’s face in his hand, and shoved him backward, hard. The side of the South Seas Adventure ride was canvas, and the kid went billowing through it with his expensive sneakers flying up in the air.

“Tell anybody, I’ll come back and kill you,” Norman said into the still-billowing canvas. Then he walked rapidly toward the midway, pulling the bullmask down over his head. It stank of rubber and its previous owner’s sweaty hair, but neither smell bothered Norman. The thought that the mask would soon also stink of Gertie’s piss did. Then his mind took another of those skips, and he disappeared into the ozone for awhile. When he came back this time, he was trotting into the parking lot at the end of Press Street with one hand pushing against his ribcage on the right side, where every breath was now agony. The inside of the mask smelled exactly as he had feared it would and he pulled it off, gasping gratefully at cool air which didn’t stink of piss and pussy. He looked down at the mask and shivered-something about that vapid, smiling face creeped him out. A bull with a ring through his nose and garlands of posies on his horns. A bull wearing the smile of a creature that has been robbed of something and is too stupid to even know what it is. His first impulse was to throw the goddam thing away, but he restrained himself. There was the parking-lot attendant to think about, and while he would undoubtedly remember a man driving off in a Ferdinand the Bull mask, he might not immediately associate that man with the man the police were shortly going to be asking about. If it bought him a little more time, the mask was worth holding onto. He got behind the wheel of the Tempo, tossed the mask onto the seat, then bent and crossed the ignition wires. When he bent over that way, the smell of piss coming off his shirt was so tart and clear that it made his eyes water. Rosie says you’re a kidney man, he heard Dirty Gertie, the jiggedy-jig from hell, say inside his head. He was terribly afraid she’d always be inside his head now-it was as if she had somehow raped him, and left him with the fertilized seed of some malformed and freakish child. You’re one of those shy guys who don’t like to leave marks. No, he thought. No, stop it, don’t think about it. She left you a little message from her kidneys, by way of my kidneys… and then it had flooded his face, stinking and as hot as a childhood fever.

“No!” This time he screamed it aloud, and brought his fist down on the padded dashboard.

“No, she can’t! She can’t! SHE CAN’T DO THAT TO MEI” He pistoned his fist forward, slamming it into the rear-view mirror and knocking it off its post. It struck the windshield and rebounded onto the floor. He lashed out at the windshield itself, hurting his hand, his Police Academy ring leaving a nest of cracks that looked like an oversized asterisk. He was getting ready to start hammering on the steering wheel when he finally got hold of himself. He looked up and saw the parking-lot ticket tucked under the sun-visor. He focused on that, working to get himself under control. When he felt he had some, Norman reached into his pocket, took out his cash, and slipped a five from the moneyclip. Then, steeling himself against the smell (except there was really no way you could defend yourself against it), he pulled the Ferdinand mask back down over his head and drove slowly over to the booth. He leaned out of the window and stared at the parking attendant through the eyeholes. He saw the attendant grab for the side of the booth’s door with an unsteady hand as he bent forward to take the offered bill, and Norman realized an utterly splendid thing: the guy was drunk.

“Viva ze bool,” the parking-lot attendant said, and laughed.

“Right,” the bull leaning out of the Ford Tempo said.

“El toro grande.”

“That’ll be two-fifty-”

“Keep the change,” Norman said, and pulled out. He drove half a block and then pulled over, realizing that if he didn’t get the goddam mask off his head right away he was going to make things exponentially worse by puking into it. He scrabbled at it, pulling with the panicky fingers of a man who realizes he has a leech stuck on his face, and then everything was gone for a little while, it was another of those skips, with his mind lifting off from the surface of reality like a guided missile. When he came back to himself this time he was sitting barechested behind the steering wheel at a red light. On the far corner of the street, a bank clock flashed the time: 2:07 p.m. He looked around and saw his shirt lying on the floor, along with the rear-view mirror and the stolen mask. Dirty Ferdie, looking deflated and oddly out of perspective, stared up at him from blank eyes through which Norman could see the passenger-side floormat. The bull’s happy, sappy smile had wrinkled into a somehow knowing grin. But that was all right. At least the goddam thing was off his head. He turned on the radio, not easy with the knob busted off, but perfectly possible, oh yes. It was still tuned to the oldies station, and here was Tommy James and the Shondells singing

“Hanky Panky.” Norman immediately began to sing along. In the next lane, a man who looked like an accountant was sitting behind the wheel of a Camry, looking at Norman with cautious curiosity. At first Norman couldn’t understand what the man was so interested in, and then he remembered that there was blood on his face-most of it crusting now, by the feel. And his shirt was off, of course. He’d have to do something about that, and soon. Meanwhile… He leaned over, picked up the mask, slipped one hand into it, and gripped the rubber lips with the tips of his fingers. Then he held it up in the window, moving the mouth with the song, making Ferdinand sing along with Tommy James and the Shondells. He rolled his wrist back and forth, so Ferdinand also appeared to be sort of bopping to the beat. The man who looked like an accountant faced forward again quickly. Sat still for a moment. Then leaned over and banged down the doorlock on the passenger side. Norman grinned. He tossed the mask back on the floor, wiping the hand that had been inside it on his bare chest. He knew how weird he must look, how nuts, but he was damned if he was going to put that pissy shirt back on again. The motorcycle jacket was lying on the seat beside him, and at least that was dry on the inside. Norman put it on and zipped it up to the chin. The light turned green as he was doing it, and the Camry beside him exploded through the intersection like something fired from a gun. Norman also rolled, but more leisurely, singing along with the radio:

“I saw her walkin on down the line… You know I saw her for the very first time… A pretty little girl, standin all alone… Hey, pretty baby, can I take you home?” It made him think of high school. Life had been good back then. No sweet little Rose around to fuck everything up, cause all this trouble. Not until his senior year, at least. Where are you, Rose? he thought. Why weren’t you at the bitch-picnic? Where the fuck are you? “she’s at her own picnic,” ze bool whispered, and there was something both alien and knowing in that voice-as if it spoke not in speculation but with the simple inarguable knowledge of an oracle. Norman pulled over to the curb, unmindful of the NO PARKING LOADING ZONE sign, and snatched the mask up off the floor again. Slid it over his hand again. Only this time he turned it toward himself. He could see his fingers in the empty eyesockets, but the eyesockets seemed to be looking at him, anyway.

“What do you mean, her own picnic?” he asked hoarsely. His fingers moved, moving the bull’s mouth. He couldn’t feel them, but he could see them. He supposed the voice he heard was his own voice, but it didn’t sound like his voice, and it didn’t seem to be coming from his throat; it seemed to be coming out from between those grinning rubber lips. “she likes the way he kisses her,” Ferdinand said.

“Wouldn’t you know it? She likes the way he uses his hands, too. She wants him to do the hanky panky with her before they have to come back.” The bull seemed to sigh, and its rubber head rocked from side to side on Norman’s wrist in a strangely cosmopolitan gesture of resignation.

“But that’s what all the women like, isn’t it? The hanky panky. The dirty boogie. All night long.”

“Who?” Norman shouted at the mask. Veins stood out at his temples, pulsing.

“Who’s kissing her? Who’s feeling her up? And where are they? You tell me that!” But the mask was silent. If, that was, it had ever spoken at all. What are you going to do, Normie? That voice he knew. Dad’s voice. A pain in the ass, but not scary. That other voice had been scary. Even if it had come out of his own throat, it had been scary.

“Find her,” he whispered.

“I’m going to find her, and then I’m going to teach her how to do the hanky panky. My version of it.” Yes, but how? How are you going to find her? The first thought that came to him was their clubhouse on Durham Avenue. There’d be a record of where Rose was living there, he was sure of it. But it was a bad idea, just the same. The place was a modified fortress. You’d need a keycard of some sort-one that probably looked quite a lot like his stolen bank card-to get in, and maybe a set of numbers to keep the alarm system from going off, as well. And what about the people there? Well, he could shoot the place up, if it came to that; kill some of them and scare the rest off. His service revolver was back at the hotel in the room safe-one of the advantages of traveling by bus-but guns were usually an asshole’s solution. Suppose the address was in a computer? It probably was, everyone used those pups these days. He’d very likely still be fucking around, trying to get one of the women to give him the password and file name, when the police showed up and killed his ass. Then something came to him-another voice. This one drifted up from his memory like a shape glimpsed in cigarette smoke:… sorry to miss the concert, but if I want that car, I can’t pass up the… Whose voice was that, and what couldn’t its owner afford to pass up? After a moment, the answer to the first question came to him. It was Blondie’s voice. Blondie with the big eyes and cute little ass. Blondie, whose real name was Pam something. Pam worked at the Whitestone, Pam might well know his rambling Rose, and Pam couldn’t afford to pass something up. What might that something be? When you really thought about it, when you put on that old deerstalker hat and put that brilliant detective’s mind to work, the answer wasn’t all that difficult, was it? When you wanted that car, the only thing you couldn’t afford to pass up was a few extra hours at work. And since the concert she was passing up was this evening, the chances were good that she was at the hotel right now. Even if she wasn’t, she would be soon. And if she knew, she would tell. The punk-rock bitch hadn’t, but that was only because he hadn’t had time enough to discuss the matter with her. This time, though, he’d have all the time he needed. He would make sure of it.

Lieutenant Hale’s partner, John Gustafson, drove Rosie and Gert Kinshaw to the District 3 police station in Lakeshore. Bill rode behind them on his Harley. Rosie kept turning in her seat to make sure he was still there. Gert noticed but did not comment. Hale introduced Gustafson as “my better half,” but Hale was what Norman called the alpha-dog; Rosie knew that from the moment she saw the two men together. It was in the way Gustafson looked at him, even in the way he watched Hale get into the shotgun seat of the unmarked Caprice. Rosie had seen these things for herself a thousand times before, in her own home. They passed a bank clock-the same one Norman had passed not so long before-and Rosie bent her head to read the time. 4:09 p.m. The day had stretched out like warm taffy. She looked back over her shoulder, terrified that Bill might be gone, sure in some secret part of her mind and heart that he would be. He wasn’t, though. He shot her a grin, lifted one hand, and waved at her briefly. She raised her own hand in return. “seems like a nice guy,” Gert said.

“Yes,” Rosie agreed, but she didn’t want to talk about Bill, not with the two cops in the front seat undoubtedly listening to every word they said.

“You should have stayed at the hospital. Let them take a look at you, make sure he didn’t hurt you with that taser thing.” “shit, it was good for me,” Gert said, grinning. She was wearing a huge blue-and-white-striped hospital bathrobe over her split jumper.

“First time I’ve felt absolutely and completely awake since I lost my virginity at Baptist Youth Camp, back in 1974.” Rosie tried for a matching grin and could manage only a wan smile.

“I guess that’s it for Swing into Summer, huh?” she said. Gert looked puzzled.

“What do you mean?” Rosie looked down at her hands and was not quite surprised to see they were rolled into fists.

“Norman’s what I mean. The skunk at the picnic. One big fucking skunk.” She heard that word, that fucking, come out of her mouth and could hardly believe she’d said it, especially in the back of a police car with a couple of detectives in the front seat. She was even more surprised when her fisted left hand shot out sideways and struck the door panel, just above the window crank. Gustafson jumped a little behind the wheel. Hale looked back, face expressionless, then faced forward again. He might have murmured something to his partner. Rosie didn’t know for sure, didn’t care. Gert took her hand, which was throbbing, and tried to soothe the fist away, working on it like a masseuse working on a cramped muscle.

“It’s all right, Rosie.” She spoke quietly, her voice rumbling like a big truck in neutral.

“No, it’s not!” Rosie cried.

“No, it’s not, don’t you say it is!” Tears were pricking her eyes now, but she didn’t care about that, either. For the first time in her adult life she was weeping with rage rather than with shame or fear.

“Why won’t he go away? Why won’t he leave me alone? He hurts Cynthia, he spoils the picnic… fucking Norman!” She tried to strike the door again, but Gert held her fist prisoner.

“Fucking skunk Norman!” Gert was nodding.

“Yeah. Fuckin” skunk Norman.”

“He’s like a… a birthmark! The more you rub and try to get rid of it, the darker it gets! Fucking Norman! Fucking, stinking, crazy Norman! I hate him! J hate him!” She fell silent, panting for breath. Her face was throbbing, her cheeks wet with tears… and yet she didn’t feel exactly bad. Bill! Where’s Bill? She turned, certain he would be gone this time, but he was there. He waved. She waved back, then faced forward again, feeling a little calmer.

“You be mad, Rosie. You’ve got a goddam right to be mad. But-”

“Oh, I’m mad, all right.”

“-but he didn’t spoil the day, you know.” Rosie blinked.

“What? But how could they just go on? After…”

“How could you just go on, after all the times he beat you?” Rosie only shook her head, not comprehending. “some of it’s endurance,” Gert said. “some, I guess, is plain old stubbornness. But what it is mostly, Rosie, is showing the world your game-face. Showing that we can’t be intimidated. You think this is the first time something like this has happened? Huh-uh. Norman’s the worst, but he’s not the first. And what you do when a skunk shows up at the picnic and sprays around is you wait for the breeze to blow the worst of it away and then you go on. That’s what they’re doing at Ettinger’s Pier now, and not just because we signed a play-or-pay contract with the Indigo Girls, either. We go on because we have to convince ourselves that we can’t be beaten out of our lives… our right to our lives. Oh, some of them will have left-Lana Kline and her patients are history, I imagine-but the rest will rally round. Consuelo and Robin were heading back to Ettinger’s as soon as we left the hospital.”

“Good for you guys,” Lieutenant Hale said from the front seat.

“How could you let him get away?” Rosie asked him accusingly.

“Jesus, do you even know how he did it?”

“Well, strictly speaking, we didn’t let him get away,” Hale said mildly.

“It was Pier Security’s baby; by the time the first metro cops got there, your husband was long gone.”

“We think he stole some kid’s mask,” Gustafson said.

“One of those whole-head jobs. Put it on, then just boogied. He was lucky, I’ll tell you that much.”

“He’s always been lucky,” Rose said bitterly. They were turning into the police station parking lot now, Bill still behind them. To Gert she said, “You can let go of my hand now.” Gert did and Rosie immediately hit the door again. The hurt was worse this time, but some newly aware part of her relished that hurt.

“Why won’t he let me alone?” she asked again, speaking to no one. And yet she was answered by a sweetly husky voice which spoke from deep in her mind. You shall be divorced of him, that voice said. You shall be divorced of him, Rosie Real. She looked down at her arms and saw that they had broken out all over in gooseflesh.

His mind lifted off again, up up and away, as that foxy bitch Marilyn McCoo had once sung, and when he came back he was easing the Tempo into another parking space. He didn’t know where he was for sure, but he thought it was probably the underground parking garage half a block down from the Whitestone, where he’d stowed the Tempo before. He caught sight of the gas gauge as he leaned over to disconnect the ignition wires and saw something interesting: the needle was all the way over to F. He’d stopped for gas at some point during his last blank spot. Why had he done that? Because gas wasn’t really what I wanted, he answered himself. He leaned forward again, meaning to look at himself in the rear-view minor, then remembered it was on the floor. He picked it up and looked at himself closely. His face was bruised, swelling in several places; it was pretty goddam obvious that he’d been in a fight, but the blood was all gone. He had scrubbed it away in some gas-station restroom while a self-serve pump filled the Tempo’s tank on slow automatic feed. So he was fit to be seen on the street-as long as he didn’t press his luck-and that was good. As he disconnected the ignition wires he wondered briefly what time it was. No way to tell; he wasn’t wearing a watch, the shitbox Tempo didn’t have a clock, and he was underground. Did it matter? Did it-“Nope,” a familiar voice said softly. “doesn’t matter. The time is out of joint.” He looked down and saw the bullmask staring up at him from its place in the passenger-side footwell: empty eyes, disquieting wrinkled smile, absurd flower-decked horns. All at once he wanted it. It was stupid, he hated the garlands on the horns and hated the stupid happy-to-be-castrated smile even more… but it was good luck, maybe. It didn’t really talk, of course, all of that was just in his mind, but without the mask he certainly never would have gotten away from Ettinger’s Pier. That was for damned sure. Okay, okay, he thought, viva ze bool, and he leaned over to get the mask. Then, with seemingly no pause at all, he was leaning forward and clamping his arms around Blondie’s waist, squeezing her tight-tight-tight so she couldn’t get enough breath to scream. She had just come out of a door marked HOUSEKEEPING, pushing her cart in front of her, and he thought he’d probably been waiting out here for her quite awhile, but that didn’t matter now because they were going right back into HOUSEKEEPING, just Pam and her new friend Norman, viva ze bool. She was kicking at him and some of the blows landed on his shins, but she was wearing sneakers and he hardly felt the hits. He let go of her waist with one hand, pulled the door closed behind him, and shot the bolt across. A quick look around, just to make sure the place was empty except for the two of them. Late Saturday afternoon, middle of the weekend, it should have been… and was. The room long and narrow, with a short row of lockers standing at the far end. There was a wonderful smell-a fragrance of clean, ironed linen that made Norman think of laundry day at their house when he was a kid. There were big stacks of neatly folded sheets on pallets, Dandux laundry baskets full of fluffy bathtowels, pillowcases piled on shelves.Deep stacks of coverlets lined one wall. Norman shoved Pam into these, watching with no interest at all as the skirt of her uniform flipped up high on her thighs. His sex-drive had gone on vacation, perhaps even into permanent retirement, and maybe that was just as well. The plumbing between his legs had gotten him into a lot of trouble over the years. It was a hell of a note, the sort of thing that might lead you to think that God had more in common with Andrew Dice Clay than you maybe wanted to believe. For twelve years you didn’t notice it, and for the next fifty-or even sixty-it dragged you around behind it like some raving baldheaded Tasmanian devil. “don’t scream,” he said. “don’t scream, Pammy. I’ll kill you if you do.” It was an empty threat-for now, at least-but she wouldn’t know that. Pam had drawn in a deep breath; now she let it out in a soundless rush. Norman relaxed slightly.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she said, and boy, was that original, he’d certainly never heard that one before, nope, nope.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said warmly. 7 certainly don’t.” Something was flopping in his back pocket. He felt for it and touched rubber. The mask. He wasn’t exactly surprised.

“All you have to do is tell me what I want to know, Pam. Then you go on your happy way and I go on mine.”

“How do you know my name?” He gave her that evocative interrogation-room shrug, the one that said he knew lots of things, that was his job. She sat in the pile of tumbled dark maroon coverlets just like the one on his bed up on the ninth floor, smoothing her skirt down over her knees. Her eyes were a really extraordinary shade of blue. A tear gathered on the lower lid of the left one, trembled, then slipped down her cheek, leaving a trail of mascara-soot.

“Are you going to rape me?” she asked. She was looking at him with those extraordinary baby blues of hers, great eyes-who needs to pussywhip a man when you’ve got eyes like those, right, Pammy?-but he didn’t see the look in them he wanted to see. That was a look you saw in the interrogation room when a guy you’d been whipsawing with questions all day and half the night was finally getting ready to break: a humble look, a pleading look, a look that said I’ll tell you anything, anything at all, just let off me a little. He didn’t see that look in Pammy’s eyes. Yet.

“Pam-”

“Please don’t rape me, please don’t, but if you do, if you have to, please wear a condom, I’m so scared of AIDS.” He gawped at her, then burst out laughing. It hurt his stomach to laugh, it hurt his diaphragm even worse, and most of all it hurt his face, but for awhile there was just no way he could stop. He told himself he had to stop, that some hotel employee, maybe even the house dick, might happen by and hear laughter coming from in here and wonder what it meant, but not even that helped; in the end, the throe had to pass on its own. Blondie watched him with amazement at first, then smiled tentatively herself. Hopefully. Norman at last managed to get himself under control, although his eyes were streaming with tears by that time.

“I’m not going to rape you, Pam,” he said at last-when he was capable of saying anything without laughing it into insincerity.

“How do you know my name?” she asked again. Her voice was a little stronger this time. He hauled the mask out, stuck his hand inside it, and manipulated it as he had for the asshole accountant in the Camry.

“Pam-Pam-bo-Bam, banana-fanna-fo-Fam, fee-fi-mo-Mam,” he made it sing. He bopped it back and forth, like Shari Lewis with fucking Lamb Chop, only this was a bull, not a lamb, a stupid fucking fagbull withfiowers on its horns. Not a reason in the world why he should like the fucking thing, but the fact was, he sort of did.

“I sort of like you, too,” Ferd the fagbull said, looking up at Norman with its empty eyes. Then it turned back to Pam, and with Norman to move its lips, it said:

“You got a problem with that?”

“N-N-No,” she said, and the look he wanted still wasn’t in her eyes, not yet, but they were making progress; she was terrified of him-of them-that much was for sure. Norman squatted down, hands dangling between his thighs, Ferdinand’s rubber horns now pointing at the floor. He looked at her sincerely.

“Bet you’d like to see me out of this room and out of your life, wouldn’t you, Pammy?” She nodded so vigorously her hair bounced up and down on her shoulders.

“Yeah, I thought so, and that’s fine by me. You tell me one thing and I’ll be gone like a cool breeze. It’s easy, too.” He leaned forward toward her, Ferd’s horns dragging on the floor.

“All I want to know is where Rose is. Rose Daniels. Where does she live?”

“Oh my God.” What color there still was in Pammy’s face-two spots of red high up on her cheekbones-now disappeared, and her eyes widened until it seemed they must tumble from their sockets.

“Oh my God, you’re him. You’re Norman.” That startled and angered him-he was supposed to know her name, that was how it worked, but she wasn’t supposed to know his-and everything else followed upon that. She was up and off the coverlets while he was still reacting to his name in her mouth, and she almost got away completely. He sprang after her, reaching out with his right hand, the one that still had the bullmask on it. Faintly he could hear himself saying that she wasn’t going anywhere, that he wanted to talk to her and intended to do it right up close. He grabbed her around the throat. She gave a strangled cry that wanted to be a scream and lunged forward with surprising, sinewy strength. Still he could have held her, if not for the mask. It slipped on his sweaty hand and she tore away, fell away toward the door, arms out to either side, flailing, and at first Norman didn’t understand what happened next. There was a noise, a meaty sound that was almost a pop like a champagne cork, and then Pam began to flail wildly, her hands beating at the door, her head back at a strange stiff angle, like someone staring intently at the flag during a patriotic ceremony.

“Huh?” Norman said, and Ferd rose up in front of his eyes, askew on his hand. Ferdinand looked drunk.

“Ooops,” said the bull. Norman yanked the mask off his hand and stuffed it in his pocket, now aware of a pattering sound, like rain. He looked down and saw that Pam’s left sneaker was no longer white. Now it was red. Blood was pooling around it; it ran down the door in long drips. Her hands were still fluttering. To Norman they looked like small birds. She looked almost nailed to the door, and as Norman stepped forward, he saw that, in a way, she was. There was a coathook on the back of the damned thing. She’d torn free of his hand, plunged forward, and impaled herself. The coathook was buried in her left eye.

“Oh Pam, shit, you fool,” Norman said. He felt both furious and dismayed. He kept seeing the bull’s stupid grin, kept hearing it say Ooops, like some wiseass character in a Warner Bros cartoon. He yanked Pam off the coathook. There was an unspeakable gristly sound as she came. Her one good eye-bluer than ever, it seemed to Norman-stared at him in wordless horror. Then she opened her mouth and shrieked. Norman never thought about it; his hands acted on their own, grabbing her face by the cheeks, planting his big palms beneath the delicate angles of her jaw, and then twisting. There was a single sharp crack-the sound of someone stamping on a cedar shingle-and she went limp in his arms. She was gone, and whatever she had known about Rose was gone with her.

“Oh you dopey gal,” Norman breathed.

“Put your eye out on the fucking coathook, how stupid is that?” He shook her in his arms. Her head flopped bonelessly from side to side. She now wore a wet red bib on the front of her white uniform. He carried Pam back over to the coverlets and dropped her there. She sprawled with her legs apart.

“Brazen bitch,” Norman said.

“You can’t even quit when you’re dead, can you?” He crossed her legs. One of her arms dropped off her lap and thumped onto the coverlets. He saw a kinky purple bracelet around her wrist-it looked almost like a short length of telephone cord. On it was a key. Norman looked at this, then toward the lockers at the far end of the room. You can’t go there, Normie, his father said. I know what you’re thinking, but you’re nuts if you go anywhere near their place on Durham Avenue. Norman smiled. You’re nuts if you go there. That was sort of funny, when you thought about it. Besides, where else was there to go? What else was there to try? He didn’t have much time. His bridges were burning merrily behind him, all of them.

“The time is out of joint,” Norman Daniels murmured, and stripped the key-bracelet off Pam’s wrist. He went down to the lockers, holding the bracelet between his teeth long enough to stick the bullmask back on his hand. Then he held Ferd up and let him scan the Dymotapes on the lockers.

“This one,” Ferd said, and tapped the locker marked PAM HAVERFORD with his rubber face. The key fit the lock. Inside was a pair of jeans, a tee-shirt, a sports bra, a shower-bag, and Pam’s bag. Norman took the bag over to one of the Dandux baskets and spilled out the contents on the towels. He cruised Ferdinand over the stuff like some bizarre spy satellite.

“There you go, big boy,” Ferd murmured. Norman plucked a thin slice of gray plastic from the rubble of cosmetics, tissues, and papers. It would open the front door of their clubhouse, no doubt about that. He picked it up, started to turn away-“Wait,” ze bool said. It went to Norman’s ear and whispered, flower-decked horns bobbing. Norman listened, then nodded. He stripped the mask off his sweaty hand again, stuffed it back into his pocket, and bent over Pam’s bag-litter. He sifted carefully this time, much as he would have if he had been investigating what was called “an event scene” in the current jargon… only then he would have used the tip of a pen or pencil instead of the tips of his fingers. Fingerprints certainly aren’t a problem here, he thought, and laughed. Not anymore. He pushed her billfold aside and picked up a small red book with TELEPHONE ADDRESS on the front. He looked under D, found an entry for Daughters and Sisters, but it wasn’t what he was looking for. He turned to the front page of the book, where a great many numbers had been written over and around Pam’s doodles-eyes and cartoon bowties, mostly. The numbers all looked like phone numbers, though. He turned to the back page, the other likely spot. More phone numbers, more eyes, more bowties… and in the middle, neatly boxed and marked with asterisks, this:

[image of a spotted bow tie, an eye, an asterisk, the numbers 0471, an asterisks, an eye and a spotted bow tie]

“Oh boy,” he said.

“Hold your cards, folks, but I think we have a Bingo. We do, don’t we, Pammy?” Norman tore the back page out of Pam’s book, stuffed it in his front pocket, and tiptoed back to the door. He listened. No one out there. He let out a breath and touched the corner of the paper he’d just stuck in his pocket. His mind lifted off in another one of those skips as he did so, and for a little while there was nothing at all.

Hale and Gustafson led Rosie and Gert to a corner of the squadroom that was almost like a conversation-pit; the furniture was old but fairly comfortable, and there were no desks for the detectives to sit behind. They dropped instead onto a faded green sofa parked between the soft-drink machine and the table with the Bunn-O-Matic on it. Instead of a grim picture of drug addicts or AIDS victims, there was a travel-agency poster of the Swiss Alps over the coffee-maker. The detectives were calm and sympathetic, the interview was low-key and respectful, but neither their attitude nor the informal surroundings helped Rosie much. She was still angry, more furious than she had ever been in her life, but she was also terrified. It was being in this place. Several times as the Q-and-A went on, she came close to losing control of her emotions, and each time this happened she would look across the room to where Bill was sitting patiently outside the waist-high railing with its sign reading PLOICE BUSINESS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, PLEASE. She knew she should get up, go over to him, and tell him not to wait any longer-to just take himself on home and call her tomorrow. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She needed him to be there the way she’d needed him to be behind her on the Harley when the detectives had been driving them here, needed him as an over-imaginative child needs a nightlight when she wakes up in the middle of the night. The thing was, she kept having crazy ideas. She knew they were crazy, but knowing didn’t help. For awhile they would go away, she would simply answer their questions and not have the crazy ideas, and then she would catch herself thinking that they had Norman down in the basement, that they were hiding him down there, sure they were, because law enforcement was a family, cops were brothers, and cops” wives weren’t allowed to run away and have lives of their own no matter what. Norman was safely tucked away in some tiny sub-basement room where no one could hear you even if you screamed at the top of your lungs, a room with sweaty concrete walls and a single bare bulb hanging down from a cord, and when this meaningless charade was over, they would take her to him. They would take her to Norman. Crazy. But she only fully knew it was crazy when she looked up and saw Bill on the other side of the low railing, watching her and waiting for her to be done so he could take her home on the back of his iron pony. They went over it and over it, sometimes Gustafson asking the questions, sometimes Hale, and while Rosie had no sense that the two men were playing good-cop/bad-cop, she wished they would finish with their interminable questions and their interminable forms and let them go. Maybe when she got out of here, those paralyzing swoops between rage and terror would abate a little.

“Tell me again how you happened to have Mr Daniels’s picture in your purse, Ms Kinshaw,” Gustafson said. He had a half-completed report in front of him and a Bic in one hand. He was frowning horribly; to Rosie he looked like a kid taking a final he hasn’t studied for.

“I’ve told you that twice already,” Gert said.

“This’ll be the last time,” Hale said quietly. Gert looked at him.

“Scout’s Honor?”

Hale grinned-a very winning grin-and nodded. “scout’s Honor.” So she told them again how she and Anna had tentatively connected Norman Daniels to the murder of Peter Slowik, and how they had gotten Norman’s picture by fax. From there she went to how she had noticed the man in the wheelchair when the ticket-agent shouted at him. Rosie was familiar with the story now, but Gert’s bravery still amazed her. When Gert got to the confrontation with Norman behind the comfort station, relating it in the matter-of-fact tones of a woman reciting a shopping list, Rosie took her big hand and squeezed it hard. When she finished this time, Gert looked at Hale and raised her eyebrows.

“Okay?”

“Yes,” Hale said.

“Very okay. Cynthia Smith owes you her life. If you were a cop, I’d put you in for a citation.” Gert snorted.

“I’d never pass the physical. Too fat.”

“Just the same,” Hale said, not smiling, meeting her eyes.

“Well, I appreciate the compliment, but what I really want to hear from you is that you’re going to catch the guy.”

“We’ll catch him,” Gustafson said. He sounded absolutely sure of himself and Rosie thought, You don’t know my Norman, Officer.

“Are you done with us?” Gert asked.

“With you, yes,” Hale said.

“I have a few more questions for Ms McClendon… can you deal with that? If not, they could wait.” He paused.

“But they really shouldn’t wait. I think we both know that, don’t we?” Rosie closed her eyes briefly, then opened them. She looked toward Bill, who was still sitting outside the railing, and then back at Hale.

“Ask what you have to,” she said.

“Just finish as soon as you can. I want to go home.”

This time when he came back into his own head he was getting out of the Tempo on a quiet street he recognized almost at once as Durham Avenue. He was parked a block and a half down from the Pussy Palace. It wasn’t dark yet, but getting there; the shadows under the trees were thick and velvety, somehow luscious. He looked down at himself and saw that he must have gone to his room before leaving the hotel. His skin smelled of soap and he was wearing different clothes. They were good clothes for this errand, too: chinos, a white roundneck tee-shirt, and a blue work-shirt with the tails hanging out. He looked like the sort of guy who might turn out on a weekend to check a faulty gas connection or…

“Or to check the burglar alarm,” Norman said under his breath, and grinned.

“Pretty brazen, Senor Daniels. Pretty goddam bra-” Panic struck like a thunderclap then, and he slapped at the lefthand rear pocket of the chinos he was now wearing. He felt nothing but the lump of his wallet. He slapped at the righthand rear and let out a harsh sigh of relief as the limp rubber of the mask flopped against his hand. He had forgotten his service revolver, apparently-left it back in the room safe-but he had remembered the mask, and right now the mask seemed a bit more important than the gun. Probably crazy, but there it was. He started up the sidewalk toward 251. If there were only a few cunts there, he’d try to take them all hostage. If there were a lot, he’d hold onto as many as he could-maybe half a dozen-and send the rest scampering for the hills. Then he’d simply start shooting them, one by one, until somebody coughed up Rose’s address. If none of them knew it, he’d shoot them all and start checking files… but he didn’t think it would come to that. What will you do if the cops are there, Normie? his father asked nervously. Cops out front, cops inside, cops protecting the place from you? He didn’t know. And didn’t much care. He passed 245, 247, 249. There was a hedge between that last one and the sidewalk, and as Norman reached the end of it he stopped suddenly, looking at 251 Durham Avenue with narrow, suspicious eyes. He had been prepared to see a lot of activity or a little activity, but he had not been prepared for what he was seeing, which was no activity at all. Daughters and Sisters stood at the end of its narrow, deep lawn with the second- and third-story shades pulled against the heat of the day. It was as silent as a relic. The windows to the left of the porch were unshaded but dark. There were no shapes moving in there. No one on the porch. No cars in the driveway. I can’t just stand here, he thought, and got moving again. He walked past the place, looking into the vegetable garden where he’d seen the two whores before-one of them the whore he’d grabbed at the comfort station. The garden was also empty this evening. And from what he could see of the back yard, that was empty, too. It’s a trap, Normie, his father said. You know that, don’t you? Norman walked as far as a Cape Cod with 257 on the door, then turned and began to saunter casually back down the sidewalk. He knew it looked like a trap, the father-voice was right about that, but somehow it didn’t feel like a trap. Ferdinand the Bull rose up before his eyes like a cheesy rubber ghost-Norman had pulled the mask out of his back pocket and put it on his hand without even realizing it. He knew this was a bad idea; anyone looking out a window would be sure to wonder why the big man with the swollen face was talking to the rubber mask… and making the mask answer back by wiggling its lips. Yet none of that seemed to matter, either. Life had gotten very… well, basic. Norman sort of liked that.

“Nah, it’s not a trap,” Ferdinand said.

“Are you sure?” he asked. He was almost in front of 251 again.

“Yeah,” Ferdinand said, nodding his garlanded horns.

“They just went on with their picnic, that’s all. Right now they’re probably all sitting around toasting marshmallows while some dyke in a granny dress sings

“Blown” in the Wind.” You didn’t amount to any more than a temporary wrinkle in their day.” He stopped in front of the walk leading up to Daughters and Sisters, looking down at the mask, thunderstruck.

“Hey-sorry, guy,” ze bool said apologetically, “but I don’t make the news, you know, I only report it.” Norman was stunned to discover there was something almost as bad as coming home to find out your wife had absconded for parts unknown with your bank card in her purse: there was being ignored. Being ignored by a bunch of women.

“Well, then, teach them not to do that,” Ferd said.

“Teach them a lesson. Go on, Norm. Teach them who you are. Teach them so they’ll never forget it.” “so they’ll never forget it,” Norman muttered, and the mask nodded enthusiastically on his hand. He stuffed it into his back pocket again and pinched Pam’s keycard and the slip of paper he’d taken from her address book out of his left front one as he went up the walk. He climbed the porch steps, glancing up once-casually, he hoped-at the TV camera mounted over the door. He held the keycard against his leg. Eyes might be watching, after all. He would do well to remember that, lucky or not, Ferdinand was only a rubber mask with Norman Daniels’s hand for a brain. The keycard slot was just where he had expected it would be. There was a talkbox beside it, complete with a little sign instructing visitors to press and speak. Norman pressed the button, leaned forward, and said:

“Midland Gas, checking for a leak in the neighborhood, ten-four?” He let go of the button. Waited. Glanced up at the camera. Black-and-white, probably wouldn’t show how swollen his face was… he hoped. He smiled to show he was harmless as his heart pumped away in his chest like a small, vicious engine. No answer. Nothing. He pushed the button again.

“Anybody home, gals?” He gave them time, counting slowly to twenty. His father whispered that it was a trap, exactly the sort of trap he himself would have set in this situation, lure the scumbucket in, make him believe the place was empty, then land on him like a load of bricks. And yes, it was the kind of trap he himself would have set… but there was no one here. He was almost sure of it. The place felt as empty as a discarded beercan. Norman put the keycard into the slot. There was a single loud click. He pulled the card out, turned the doorknob, and stepped into the front hall of Daughters and Sisters. From his left came a low, steady sound: meep-meep-meep-meep. It was a keypad burglar alarm. The words FRONT DOOR were flashing on and off in its message window. Norman looked at the slip of paper he’d brought with him, took a second to pray the number on it was what he thought it was, and punched 0471. For one hearts topping moment the alarm continued to meep, and then it stopped. Norman let out his breath and closed the door. He reset the alarm without even thinking about it, just cop instinct at work. He looked around, noted the stairs going up to the second floor, then walked down the main hall. He poked his head into the first room on the right. It looked like a schoolroom, with chairs set up in a circle and a blackboard at one end. Written on the blackboard were the words DIGNITY, RESPONSIBILITY, and FAITH.

“Words of wisdom, Norm,” Ferdinand said. He was back on Norman’s hand again. He’d gotten there like magic.

“Words of wisdom.”

“If you say so; looks like the same old shit to me.” He looked around, then raised his voice. It seemed almost sacrilegious to shout into this somehow dusty silence, but a man had to do what a man had to do.

“Hello? Anybody here? Midland Gas!”

“Hello?” Ferd shouted from the end of his arm, looking brightly around with his empty eyes. He spoke in the comic-German voice Norman’s father had sometimes used when he was drunk.

“Hello, vas you dere, Cholly?” Shut up, you idiot,” Norman muttered.

“Yessir, Cap'n,” ze bool replied, and fell silent at once. Norman turned slowly around and then went on down the hall. There were other rooms along the way-a parlor, a dining room, what looked like a little library-but they were all empty. The kitchen at the end of the hall was empty, too, and now he had a new problem: where did he go to find what he was looking for? He drew in a breath and closed his eyes, trying to think (and trying to stave off the headache, which was trying to come back). He wanted a cigarette but didn’t dare light one; for all he knew, they might have the smoke detectors turned up enough to shriek at the first whiff of tobacco. He drew in another deep breath, drew it all the way down to the floor of his lungs, and now recognized the smell in here for what it was-not the smell of dust but the smell of women, women who had been long entrenched with their own kind, women who had knitted themselves into a communal shroud of self-righteousness in an effort to block out the real world. It was a smell of blood and douche and sachet and hair spray and roll-on deodorant and perfumes with fuck-me names like My Sin and White Shoulders and Obsession. It was the vegetable smell of what they liked to eat and the fruity smell of the teas they liked to drink; that smell was not dust but something like yeast, a fermentation, and it produced a smell cleaning could never remove: the smell of women without men. All at once that smell was filling his nose, filling his throat, filling his heart, gagging him, making him feel faint, almost suffocating him.

“Get hold of yourself, Cholly,” Ferdinand said sharply.

“All you smell is last night’s spaghetti sauce! I mean, Cheezus-pleezus!” Norman blew out a breath, took in another one, opened his eyes. Spaghetti sauce, yes. A red smell, like blood. But spaghetti sauce was really all it was. “sorry, got a little flaky there for a minute,” he said.

“Yup, but who wouldn’t?” Ferd said, and now his empty eyes seemed to express both sympathy and understanding.

“This is where Circe turns men into pigs, after all.” The mask swivelled on Norman’s wrist, scanning with its blank eyes.

“Yas, dis be de place.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“I don’t know where to go,” Norman said, also looking around.

“I’ve got to hurry, but Christ, the place is so big! There must be twenty rooms, at least.” The bull pointed its horns at a door across the kitchen.

“Try that one.”

“Hell, that’s probably just the pantry.”

“I don’t think so, Norm. I don’t think they’d put a sign that says PRIVATE on the pantry, do you?” It was a point. Norman crossed the room, stuffing the bullmask back into his pocket as he did (and noticing the spaghetti colander which had been left to drip-dry in the rack beside the sink), then rapped on the door. Nothing. He tried the knob. It turned easily. He opened the door, felt inside on the right, and flipped a switch. The overhead fixture illuminated a dinosaur of a desk heaped high with clutter. Balanced atop one pile was a gold plaque which read ANNA STEVENSON and BLESS THIS MESS. On the wall was a framed picture of two women Norman recognized. One was the late great Susan Day. The other was the white-haired bitch from the newspaper photo, the one who looked like Maude. They had their arms around each other and were smiling into each other’s eyes like true lesbos. The side of the room was lined with filing cabinets. Norman walked over to them, dropped to one knee, started to reach for the cabinet labelled D-E, then stopped. She wasn’t using Daniels anymore. He couldn’t remember if that was something Ferdinand had told him or something he’d either found out or intuited for himself, but he knew it was true. She had gone back to her maiden name.

“You’ll be Rose Daniels until the day you die,” he said, and reached for the M cabinet instead. He tugged. Nothing. It was locked. A problem, but not a big one. He’d get something in the kitchen to pry it open with. He turned, meaning to go back out, then stopped, his eye caught by a wicker basket standing on the corner of the desk. There was a card hanging from the basket’s handle. GO THEN, LITTLE LETTER was written on it in Old English script. There was a small stack of what looked like outgoing mail in the basket, and below a billpayers envelope addressed to Lakeland Cable TV, he saw this poking out: [image of the corner of a partially obscured envelope with only the words “endon, renton Street” visible]-endon? McClendon? He snatched the letter up, overturning the basket and dumping most of the outgoing mail on the floor, his eyes wide and greedy. Yes, McClendon, by God-Rosie McClendon! And right below it, firmly and legibly printed, the address he’d gone through hell to get: 897 Trenton Street. There was a long, chrome-plated letter-opener lying half under a stack of leftover Swing into Summer fliers. Norman grabbed it, slit the letter open, and shoved the opener into his back pocket without even thinking about it. He pulled out the mask again at the same time and slid it onto his hand. The single sheet of paper bore an embossed letterhead which read ANNA STEVENSON in big letters and Daughters and Sisters in slightly smaller ones. Norman gave this small ego-signal a quick glance, then began to cruise the mask over the paper, letting Ferdinand read it for him. Anna Stevenson’s handwritten script was large and elegant-arrogant, some might have termed it. Norman’s sweaty fingers shook and tried to clench inside Ferdinand’s head, sending the rubber mask through a series of convulsive winces and leers as it moved.

Dear Rosie, I just wanted to send you a note in your new “digs” (I know how important those first few letters can be!), telling you how glad I am that you came to us at Daughters and Sisters, and how glad I am we could help you. I also want to say how pleased I am with your new job-I have an idea you won’t be living on Trenton Street for long! Every woman who comes to Daughters and Sisters renews the lives of all the others-those there with her during her first period of healing and all those who come after she’s left, for each one leaves a bit of her experience, strength, and hope behind. My hope is to see you here often, Rosie, not just because your recovery is a long way from complete and because you have many feelings (chiefly anger, I should surmise) which you haven’t yet dealt with, but because you have an obligation to pass on what you’ve learned here. I probably don’t need to tell you these things, but -

A click, not much of a sound but loud in the silence. This was followed by another sound: meep-meep-meep-meep. The burglar alarm. Norman had company.

Anna never noticed the green Tempo parked by the curb a block and a half down from Daughters and Sisters. She was deep in a private fantasy, one she had never told anyone, not even her therapist, the necessary fantasy she saved for horrible days like today. In it she was on the cover of Time magazine. It wasn’t a photo but a vibrant oil painting which showed her in a dark blue shift (blue was her best color, and a shift would obscure the depressing way she had been thickening around the middle these last two or three years). She was looking over her left shoulder, giving the artist her good side to work with, and her hair spilled over her right shoulder in a snowdrift. A sexy snowdrift. The caption beneath the picture read simply: AMERICAN WOMAN, She turned into the driveway, reluctantly putting the fantasy away (she had just reached the point where the writer was saying, “Although she has reclaimed the lives of over fifteen hundred battered women, Anna Stevenson remains surprisingly, even touchingly, modest…'). She turned off the engine of her Infiniti and just sat there for a moment, delicately rubbing at the skin beneath her eyes. Peter Slowik, whom she had usually referred to at the time of their divorce as either Peter the Great or Rasputin the Mad Marxist, had been a promiscuous babbler when alive, and his friends had seemed determined to remember him in that same spirit. The talk had gone on and on, each “remembrance bouquet” (she thought that she could cheerfully machine-gun the politically correct buttholes who spent their days thinking such smarmy phrases up) seemingly longer than the last, and by four o’clock, when they’d finally gotten up to eat the food and drink the wine-domestic and dreadful, just what Peter would have picked if he’d been the one doing the shopping-she was sure the shape of the folding chair on which she’d been sitting must have been tattooed into her ass. The idea of leaving early-perhaps slipping out after one finger-sandwich and a token sip of wine-had never crossed her mind, however. People would be watching, evaluating her behavior. She was Anna Stevenson, after all, an important woman in the political structure of this town, and there were certain people she had to speak to after the formal ceremonies were over. People she wanted other people to see her talking to, because that was how the carousel turned. And, just to add to the fun, her pager had gone off three times in a space of forty-five minutes. Weeks went by when it sat mutely in her bag, but this afternoon, during a meeting where there were long periods of silence broken by people who seemed incapable of speaking above a tearful mutter, the gadget had gone crazy. After the third time she got tired of the swivelling heads and turned the Christing thing off. She hoped nobody had gone into labor at the picnic, that nobody’s kid had taken a thrown horseshoe in the head, and most of all she hoped Rosie’s husband hadn’t shown up. She doubted that he had, though; he would know better. In any case, anyone who’d called her pager would have called D amp; S first, and she’d make the answering machine in her study stop number one. She could listen to the messages through the bathroom door while she peed. In most cases, that would be fitting. She got out of the car, locked it (even in a good neigborhood like this you couldn’t be too careful), and went up the porch steps. She used her keycard and silenced the meep-meep-meep of the security system without even thinking of it; sweet shreds of her daydream (only woman of her time to be loved and respected by all factions of the increasingly divergent women’s movement) still swirled in her head.

“Hello, the house!” she called, walking down the hall. Silence replied, which was what she’d expected… and, let’s face it, hoped for. With any luck, she might have two or even three hours of blessed silence before the commencement of that night’s giggling, hissing showers, slamming doors, and cackling sitcoms. She walked into the kitchen, wondering if maybe a long leisurely bath, Calgon and all, wouldn’t smooth off the worst of the day. Then she stopped, frowning across at her study door. It was standing ajar.

“Goddammit,” she muttered.

“God damn it!” If there was one thing she disliked above all others-except maybe for touchy-huggy-feely people-it was having her privacy invaded. She had no lock on her study door because she did not believe she should be reduced to that. This was her place, after all; the girls and women who came here came through her generosity and at her sufferance. She shouldn’t need a lock on that door. Her desire that they should stay out unless invited in ought to have been enough. Mostly it was, but every now and then some woman would decide she really needed some piece of her documentation, that she really needed to use Anna’s photocopier (which warmed up faster than the one downstairs in the rec room), that she really needed a stamp, and so this disrespectful person would come in, she’d track through a place that wasn’t hers, maybe look at things that weren’t hers to look at, junk up the air with the smell of some cheap drugstore perfume… Anna paused with one hand on the study doorknob, looking into the dark room which had been a pantry when she was a little girl. Her nostrils flared slightly and the frown on her face deepened. There was a smell, all right, but it wasn’t quite perfume. It was something that reminded her of the Mad Marxist. It was… All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all. Jesus! Jesus Christ! Her arms crawled with gooseflesh. She was a woman who prided herself on her practicality, but suddenly it was all too easy to imagine Peter Slowik’s ghost waiting for her inside her study, a shade as insubstantial as the stink of that ludicrous cologne he’d worn… Her eyes fixed on a light in the darkness: the answering machine. The little red lamp was stuttering madly, as if everyone in the city had called today. Something had happened. All at once she knew it. It explained the pager, too… and like a dummy she’d turned it off so people would stop staring at her. Something had happened, probably at Ettinger’s Pier. Someone hurt. Or, God forbid-She stepped into the office, feeling for the light-switch beside the door, then stopped, puzzled by what her fingers had found. The switch was already up, which meant the overhead light should be on, but it wasn’t. Anna flipped the switch up and down twice, started to do it a third time, and then a hand dropped on her right shoulder. She screamed at that settling touch, the sound coming out of her throat as full and frantic as any scream ever voiced by a horror-movie heroine, and as another hand clamped on her upper left arm and turned her around on her heels, as she saw the shape silhouetted against the flooding light from the kitchen, she screamed again. The thing which had been standing behind the door and waiting for her wasn’t human. Horns sprouted from the top of its head, horns which appeared to be swollen with strange, tumorous growths. It was-“Viva ze bool,” a hollow voice said, and she realized it was a man, a man wearing a mask, but that didn’t make her feel any better because she had a very good idea of who the man was. She tore out of his grip and backed toward the desk. She could still smell English Leather, but she could smell other things now, as well. Hot rubber. Sweat. And urine. Was it hers? Had she wet herself? She didn’t know. She was numb from the waist down. “don’t touch me,” she said in a trembling voice utterly unlike her usual calm and authoritative tone. She reached behind her and felt for the button that summoned the police. It was there someplace, but buried under drifts of paper. “don’t you dare touch me, I’m warning you.”

“Anna-Anna-bo-Banna, banana-fanna-fo-Fanna,” the creature in the horned mask said in a tone of deep meditation, and then swept the door shut behind it. Now they were in total darkness. “stay away,” she said, moving along the desk, sliding along the desk. If she could get into the bathroom, lock the door-“Fee-fi-mo-Manna…” From her left. And close. She lunged to the right, but not soon enough. Strong arms enfolded her. She tried to scream again, but the arms tightened, and her breath came out in a silent rush. If I were Misery Chastain, I’d-she thought, and then Norman’s teeth were on her throat, he was nuzzling her like a horny kid parked on Lovers” Lane, and then his teeth were in her throat, and something was spraying warm all down the front of her, and she thought no more.

By the time the final questions were asked and the final statement was signed, it was long past dark. Rosie’s head spun, and she felt a little unreal to herself, as she had after those occasional all-day tests they threw at you in high school. Gustafson went off to file his paperwork, bearing it before him as if it were the Holy Grail, and Rosie got to her feet. She began moving toward Bill, who was also getting up. Gert had gone in search of the ladies” room.

“Ms McClendon?” Hale asked from her elbow. Rosie’s weariness was supplanted by a sudden, horrid premonition. It was just the two of them; Bill was too far away to overhear anything Hale might say to her, and when he began to speak, he would do so in a low, confidential voice. He would tell her that she would stop all this foolishness about her husband right now, while there was still time, if she knew what was good for her. That she would keep her mouth shut around cops from here on out, unless one of them either (a) asked her a question, or (b) unzipped his fly. He would remind her that this was a family thing, that-“I am going to bust him,” Hale said mildly.

“I don’t know if I can completely convince you of that no matter what I say, but I need you to hear me say it, anyway. I am going to bust him. It’s a promise.” She looked at him with her mouth open.

“I’m going to do it because he’s a murderer, and crazy, and dangerous. I’m also going to do it because I don’t like the way you look around the squadroom and jump every time a door slams somewhere. Or the way you cringe a little every time I move one of my hands.”

“I don’t…”

“You do. You can’t help it and you do. That’s all right, though, because I understand why you do. If I was a woman and I’d been through what you’ve been through…” He trailed off, looking at her quizzically.

“Has it ever occurred to you how magic-goddam-lucky you are just to be alive?”

“Yes,” Rosie said. Her legs were trembling. Bill was standing at the gate, looking at her, clearly concerned. She forced a smile for him and raised a single finger-one more minute.

“You bet you are,” Hale said. He glanced around the squadroom, and Rosie followed his eyes. At one desk, a cop was writing up a weeping teenager in a high-school letter-jacket. At another, this one by the chickenwired floor-to-ceiling windows, a uniformed cop and a detective with his jacket off so you could see the.38 Police Special clipped to his belt were examining a stack of photos, their heads close together. At a row of VDT screens all the way across the room, Gustafson was discussing his reports with a young bluesuit who looked no older than sixteen to Rosie.

“You know a lot about cops,” Hale said, “but most of what you know is wrong.” She didn’t know how to answer that, but it was okay; he didn’t seem to require an answer.

“You want to know what my biggest motivation for busting him is, Ms McClendon? Numero uno on the old hit parade?” She nodded.

“I’m going to bust him because he’s a cop. A hero cop, for God’s sake. But the next time his puss is on the front page of the old hometown paper, he’s either going be the late Norman Daniels or he’s going to be in legirons and an orange tracksuit.”

“Thank you for saying that,” Rosie said.

“It means a lot.” He led her over to Bill, who opened the gate and put his arms around her. She hugged him tight, her eyes shut. Hale asked, “Ms McClendon?” She opened her eyes, saw Gert come back into the room, and waved. Then she looked at Hale shyly but not fearfully.

“You can call me Rosie, if you want.” He smiled briefly at that.

“Would you like to hear something that’ll maybe make you feel a little better about your first less-than-enthusiastic reaction to this place?”

“I… I guess so.”

“Let me guess,” Bill said.

“You’re having problems with the cops back in Rosie’s hometown.” Hale smiled sourly.

“Indeed we are. They’re being shy about faxing us what they know about Daniels’s blood-medicals, even his prints. We’re already dealing with police lawyers. Cop-shysters!”

“They’re protecting him,” Rosie said.

“I knew they would.” “so far, yes. It’s an instinct, like the one that tells you to drop everything and go after the killer when a cop gets gunned down. They’ll stop trying to throw sand in the gears when they finally get it through their heads that this is real.” “do you really believe that?” Gert asked. He thought this over, then nodded.

“Yes. I do.”

“What about police protection for Rosie until this is over?” Bill asked. Hale nodded again.

“There’s already a black-and-white outside your place on Trenton Street, Rosie.” She looked from Gert to Bill to Hale, dismayed and frightened all over again. The situation kept sandbagging her. She’d start to feel she was getting a handle on it, and then it would whop her flat all over again, from some new direction.

“Why? Why? He doesn’t know where I live, he can’t know where I live! That’s why he came to the picnic, because he thought I’d be there. Cynthia didn’t tell him, did she?” “she says not.” Hale accented the second word, but so lightly Rosie didn’t catch it. Gert and Bill did, and they exchanged a look.

“Well, there! And Gert didn’t tell him, either! Did you, Gert?”

“No, ma’am,” Gert said.

“Well, I like to play safe-leave it at that. I’ve got the guys in front of your building, and backup cars-at least two-in the neighborhood. I don’t want to scare you all over again, but a nut who knows police procedure is a special nut. Best not to take chances.”

“If you think so,” Rosie said in a small voice.

“Ms Kinshaw, I’ll send someone around to take you wherever you want to go-”

“Ettinger’s,” Gert said, and stroked her robe.

“I’m going to make a fashion statement at the concert.” Hale grinned, then put his hand out to Bill.

“Mr Steiner, good to meet you.” Bill shook it. “same here. Thanks for everything.”

“It’s my job.” He glanced from Gert to Rosie.

“Good night, girls.” He looked back at Gert, fast, and his face broke into a grin that knocked fifteen years off his age in an instant.

“Gotcha,” he said, and laughed. After a moment’s thought, Gert laughed with him.

On the steps outside, Bill and Gert and Rosie huddled together a little. The air was damp, and fog was drifting in off the lake. It was still thin, really no more than a nimbus around the streetlights and low-lying smoke over the wet pavement, but Rose guessed that in another hour it would be almost thick enough to cut.

“Want to come back to D and S tonight, Rosie?” Gert asked.

“They’ll be coming in from the concert in another couple of hours; we could have the popcorn all made.” Rosie, who most definitely did not want to go back to D amp; S, turned to Bill.

“If I go home, will you stay with me?” “sure,” he said promptly, and took her hand.

“It’d be a pleasure. And don’t worry about the accommodations-I never saw a couch yet that I couldn’t sleep on.”

“You haven’t seen mine,” she said, knowing that her sofa wasn’t going to be a problem, because Bill wasn’t going to be sleeping there. Her bed was a single, which meant they’d be cramped, but she thought they would still manage quite nicely. Close quarters might even add something.

“Thanks again, Gert,” she said.

“No problem.” Gert gave her a brief, hard hug, then leaned forward and put a healthy smack on Bill’s cheek. A police car came around the corner and stopped, idling.

“Take care of her, guy.”

“I will.” Gert went to her ride, then stopped to point at Bill’s Harley, heeled over on its kickstand in one of the parking spaces stencilled POLICE BUSINESS ONLY.

“And don’t dump that thing in the goddam fog.”

“I’ll take it easy, Ma, I promise.” She drew back one big fist, mock-scowling, and Bill stuck out his chin with half-closed eyes and a longsuffering expression that made Rosie laugh hard. She had never expected to be laughing on the steps of a police station, but a lot of things she’d never expected had happened this year. A lot.

In spite of all that had happened, Rosie enjoyed the ride back to Trenton Street almost as much as the one out to the country that morning. She clung to Bill as they cut across the city on the surface streets, the big Harley-Davidson slicing smoothly through the thickening fog. The last three blocks were like riding through a dream lined with cotton. The Harley’s headlight was a brilliant, cloudy cylinder, boring into the air like the beam of a flashlight cutting across a smoky room. When Bill finally turned onto Trenton Street, the buildings were little more than ghosts and Bryant Park was a vast white blank. The black-and-white Hale had promised was parked in front of 897. The words To Serve and Protect were written on the side. The space in front of the car was empty. Bill swung his motorcycle into it, kicked the gearshift up into neutral with his foot, and killed the engine.

“You’re shivering,” he said as he helped her off. She nodded and found she had to make a conscious effort to keep her teeth from chattering when she spoke.

“It’s more the damp than the cold.” And yet, even then, she supposed she knew it was really neither; knew on some deep level that things were not as they should be.

“Well, let’s get you into something dry and warm.” He stowed their helmets, locked the Harley’s ignition, and dropped the key into his pocket. “sounds like the idea of the century to me.” He took her hand and walked her down the sidewalk to the apartment building steps. As they passed the radio-car, Bill raised his hand to the cop behind the wheel. The cop lifted his own hand out the window in a lazy return salute, and the streetlight gleamed on the ring he wore. His partner appeared to be sleeping. Rosie opened her purse, got out the key she would need to open the front door at this advanced hour, and turned it in the lock. She had only the faintest idea of what she was doing; her good feelings were gone and her earlier terror had crashed back in on her like some huge dead iron object falling through floor after floor of an old building, an object destined to drop all the way to the basement. Her stomach was suddenly freezing, her head was throbbing, and she didn’t know why. She had seen something, something, and she was so focused on her effort to think what it might have been that she did not hear the driver’s door of the police car open and then chunk softly shut. She did not hear the faintly gritting footsteps on the sidewalk behind them, either.

“Rosie?” Bill’s voice, coming out of darkness. They were in the vestibule now, but she could barely see the picture of the old geezer (she thought maybe it was Calvin Coolidge) hanging on the wall to her right, or the scrawny shape of the coat-tree, with its brass feet and its bristle of brass hooks, standing by the stairs. Why was it so damned dark in here?

Because the overhead light-fixture was out, of course; that was simple. She knew a harder question, though: Why had the cop on the passenger side of the black-and-white been sleeping in such an uncomfortable position, with his chin way down on his chest and his cap pulled so low over his eyes that he looked like a thug in a gangster movie from the thirties? Why was he sleeping at all, for that matter, when the subject he was detailed to watch was due at any moment? Hale would be angry if he knew that, she thought distractedly. He’d want to talk to that bluesuit. He’d want to talk to him right up dose.

“Rosie? What’s wrong?” The footsteps behind them were hurrying now. She rolled mental footage backward like a videotape. Saw Bill raising his hand to the bluesuit behind the wheel of the cruiser, saying hi there, good to see you, without even opening his mouth. She saw the cop raise his own hand in return; saw the gleam of the streetlamp on the ring he wore. She hadn’t been close enough to read the words on it, but all at once she knew what they were. She’d seen them printed backward on her own flesh many times, like an FDA stamp on a cut of meat. Service, Loyalty, Community. Footsteps hurried eagerly up the steps behind them. The door slammed violently shut. Someone was panting low and fast in the dark, and Rosie could smell English Leather.

Norman’s mind took another of those big skips while he was standing at the sink in the Daughters and Sisters kitchen with his shirt off, washing fresh blood from his face and chest. The sun had been low on the horizon, glaring orange into his eyes when he raised his head and reached for the towel. He touched it, and then, without a single break that he was aware of, not so much as an eyeblink, he was outside and it was dark. He was wearing the White Sox ballcap again. He was also wearing a London Fog topcoat. God knew where he’d picked it up, but it was very appropriate, since a rapidly thickening fog had settled over the city. He rubbed one hand over the expensive waterproofed fabric of the coat, liking the feel. An elegant item. He tried again to think of how he’d come by it and couldn’t. Had he killed someone else? Might have, friends and neighbors, might have; anything was possible when you were on vacation. He looked up Trenton Street and saw a city police-car-what they called a Charlie-David car back in Norman’s bailiwick-parked hubcap-deep in the mist about three-quarters of the way to the next intersection. He reached into the deep left pocket of the coat-a really nice coat, somebody certainly had good taste-and touched something rubbery and crumpled. He smiled happily, like a man shaking hands with an old friend.

“Ze bool,” he whispered.

“El toro grande.” He reached into the other pocket, not sure what he was going to find, only sure that there was something in there he would want. He stabbed the tip of his middle finger into it, winced, and brought it carefully out. It was the chromed letter-opener from his pal Maude’s desk. How she screamed, he thought, and smiled as he turned the letter-opener over in his hands, letting the light from the streetlamps run off its blade like white liquid. Yes, she had screamed… but then she had stopped. In the end the gals always stopped screaming, and what a relief that was. Meantime, he had a formidable problem to solve. There would be two-count em, two-motor-patrolmen in the car parked up there; they’d be armed with guns while he was armed only with a chrome-plated letter-opener. He had to take them out, and as silently as possible. A pretty problem, and one he didn’t have the slightest idea of how to solve.

“Norm,” a voice whispered. It came from his left pocket. He reached in and pulled out the mask. Its empty eyeholes gazed up at him with blank rapt attention, and the smile once more looked like a knowing sneer. In this light, the garlands of flowers decking the horns might have been clots of blood.

“What?” He spoke in a low, conspiratorial whisper.

“What is it?”

“Have a heart attack,” ze bool whispered, so that was what he did. He plodded slowly up the sidewalk toward where the cruiser was parked, plodding slower and slower as he got closer and closer. He was careful to keep his eyes down and look at the car only with his peripheral vision. They would have seen him by now, even if they were inept-they’d have to, he was the only thing moving out here-and what he wanted them to see was a man looking at his own feet, a man who was working for every step. A man who was either drunk or in trouble. His right hand was now inside his coat, massaging the left side of his chest. He could feel the blade of the letter-opener, which he was holding in that hand, making little digs in his shirt. As he drew close to his objective he staggered-just one moderate-to-heavy stagger-and then stopped. He stood perfectly still with his head down for a slow five-count, not allowing his body to sway so much as a quarter-inch to one side or the other. By now their first assumption-that this was Mr Ginhead making his slow way home after a few hours at the Dew Drop Inn-should be giving way to other possibilities. But he wanted them to come to him. He’d go to them if he absolutely had to, but if he had to do that, they would probably take him down. He took another three steps, not toward the cruiser now but toward the nearest stoop. He grabbed the cold, fog-beaded iron railing which ran up its side and stood there panting, head still down, hoping he looked like a man who was having a heart attack and not one with a lethal instrument hidden inside his coat. Just when he was beginning to think he had made a serious error here, the doors of the police car swung open. He heard this rather than saw it, and then he heard an even happier sound: feet hurrying toward him. Cheezit, Rocky, da cops, he thought, and then risked a small look. He had to risk it, had to know where they were in relation to each other. If they weren’t close together, he would have to stage a collapse… and that held its own ironic danger. In such a case one of them would very likely run back to the cruiser in order to radio for an ambulance. They were a typical Charlie-David team, one vet and one kid still wet behind the ears. To Norman, the rookie looked weirdly familiar, like someone he might have seen on TV. That didn’t matter, though. They were close together, almost shoulder to shoulder, and that did matter. That was very nice. Cozy. “sir?” the one on the left-the older one-asked. “sir, do you have a problem?”

“Hurts like a bastard,” Norman wheezed.

“What hurts?” Still the older one. This was a crucial moment, not quite crunch-time, but almost. The older cop could order his partner to radio for EMT backup at any moment and he would be hung, but he couldn’t strike just yet; they were just a tiny bit too far away. At this moment he felt more like his old self than he had since starting on this expedition: cold and clear and totally here, aware of everything, from the droplets of fog on the iron railing to a dirty-gray pigeon feather lying in the gutter next to a crumpled potato chip bag. He could hear the soft, steady susurrus of the cops” breathing.

“It’s in here,” Norman gasped, rubbing under his coat with his right hand. The blade of the letter-opener poked through his shirt and pricked his skin, but he hardly felt it.

“It’s like having a gallbladder attack, only in my chest.”

“Maybe I better call an ambulance,” the younger cop said, and suddenly Norman knew who the young cop reminded him of: Jerry Mathers, the kid who’d played Beaver on Leave It to Beaver. He’d watched all those shows in reruns on Channel 11, some of them five and six times. The older cop didn’t look a bit like the Beav’s brother Wally, though.

“Hang on a sec,” the older cop said, and then, incredibly, gave away the store.

“Let me take a look. I was a medic in the army.”

“Coat… buttons…” Norman said, keeping an eye on the Beavfrom the corner of his eye.

The older cop took another step forward. He was now standing right in front of Norman. The Beav also took a step forward. The older cop undid the top button of Norman’s newfound London Fog. Then the second one. When he undid the third one, Norman pulled the letter-opener out and plunged it into the man’s throat. Blood burst out in a torrent, gushing down his uniform. In the foggy darkness it looked like steak sauce. The Beav turned out not to be a problem. He stood, paralyzed with horror, as his partner raised his hands and beat weakly at the handle of the thing in his throat. He looked like a man trying to rid himself of some exotic leech.

“Bluh!” he choked.

“Ahk! Bluh!” The Beav turned to Norman. In his shock he seemed totally unaware that Norman had had anything to do with what had just befallen his partner, and this didn’t surprise Norman at all. It was a reaction he had seen before. In his shock and surprise, the cop looked about ten years old, now not just something like the Beav, but a dead ringer. “something happened to Al!” the Beav said. Norman knew something else about this young man who was about to join the city’s Roll of Honor: inside his head he thought he was shouting, he really did, when what was actually coming out was only a little bitty whisper. “something happened to Al!”

“I know,” Norman said, and delivered an uppercut to the kid’s chin, a dangerous punch if your opponent is dangerous, but a sixth-grader could have dealt with the Beav as he was now. The blow connected squarely, knocking the young cop back into the iron railing Norman had been clutching not thirty seconds ago. The Beav wasn’t as out as Norman had hoped, but his eyes had gone cloudy and vague; there was going to be no trouble here. His hat had tumbled off. The hair beneath was short, but not too short to grab. Norman got a handful and yanked the kid’s head sharply down as he brought his knee up. The sound was muffled but terrific; the sound of a man with a mallet whacking a padded bag full of china. The Beav dropped like a lead bar. Norman looked around for his partner, and here was something incredible: the partner was gone. Norman wheeled around, eyes glaring, and spotted him. He was walking up the sidewalk very slowly, with his hands held out in front of him like a zombie in a fright-film. Norman turned a complete circle on his heels, looking for witnesses to this comedy. He didn’t see any. There was a lot of hooting and hollering drifting over from the park, teenagers running around in there, playing grab-ass in the fog, but that was all right. So far his luck had been fantastic. If it held for another forty-five seconds, a minute at most, he’d be home free. He ran after the older cop, who had now stopped to have another go at pulling Anna Stevenson’s letter-opener out of his throat. He had actually managed to get about twenty-five yards.

“Officer!” Norman said in a low peremptory voice, and touched the cop’s elbow. The cop turned jerkily. His eyes were glassy and bulging from their sockets, the eyes of something that belonged mounted on the wall of a hunting lodge, Norman thought. His uniform was drenched scarlet from neck to knees. Norman didn’t have the slightest idea how this man could still be alive, let alone conscious. I guess they must build cops tougher in the midwest, he thought.

“Caw!” the cop said urgently.

“Caw! Fuh! Bah-up!” The voice was bubbly and choked, but still amazingly strong. Norman even knew what the guy was saying. He’d made a bad mistake back there, a rookie’s mistake, but Norman thought this was a man he could have been proud to serve with, just the same. The letter-opener handle sticking out of his throat bobbed up and down when he tried to talk, in a way that reminded Norman of how the bullmask looked when he manipulated the lips from the inside.

“Yes, I’ll call for backup.” Norman spoke with soft, urgent sincerity. He closed one hand on the cop’s wrist.

“But for now, let’s get you back to the car. Come on. This way, Officer!” He would have used the cop’s name, but didn’t know what it was; the name-tag on his uniform shirt was covered with blood. He couldn’t very well call him Officer Al. He gave the cop’s arm another gentle tug, and this time got him moving. Norman led the staggering, bleeding Charlie-David cop with the letter-opener in his throat back to his own black-and-white, expecting someone to come out of the steadily thickening fog at any moment-a man who’d gone to get a sixpack, a woman who’d been to the movies, a couple of kids on their way home from a date (maybe, God save the King, an amusement-park date at Ettinger’s)-and when that happened he’d have to kill them, too. Once you got started killing people it never seemed to stop; the first one spread like ripples on a pond.

But no one came. There were only the disembodied voices floating across from the park. It was a miracle, really, like how Officer Al could still be on his feet even though he was bleeding like a stuck pig and had left a trail of blood behind him so wide and thick it was starting to puddle up in places. The puddles gleamed like engine oil in the fog-faded glow of the streetlamps. Norman paused to pluck the Beav’s fallen hat off the steps, and when they passed the open driver’s-side window of the black-and-white, he leaned through quickly to drop it on the seat and pluck the keys from the ignition. There were a formidable number of them on the ring, so many that they couldn’t lie flat against one another but stuck out like sunrays in a child’s crayon drawing, but Norman had no trouble picking out the one which opened the trunk of the car.

“Come on,” he whispered comfortingly.

“Come on, just a little further, then we can get backup rolling.” He kept expecting the cop to collapse, but he didn’t. He had given up on trying to pull the letter-opener out of his throat, though.

“Watch the curb here, Officer, whoops-a-daisy.” The cop stepped off the curb. When his black uniform shoe came down in the gutter, the wound in his throat gaped open around the blade like the gill of a fish and more blood squirted onto the collar of his shirt. Now I’m a cop-killer, too, Norman thought. He expected the idea to be devastating, but it wasn’t. Perhaps because a deeper, wiser part of him knew that he really hadn’t killed this fine, tough police officer; someone else had. Something. Most likely it had been the bull. The longer Norman thought about it, the more plausible that sounded.

“Hold it, Officer, here we are.” The cop stopped where he was, at the back of the car. Norman used the key he had picked out to open its boot. There was a spare tire in there (bald as a baby’s ass, too, he saw), a jack, two flak vests-kapok, not Kevlar-a pair of boots, a grease-stained copy of Penthouse, a toolkit, a police radio with half its guts spilling out. A pretty full boot, in other words, like the boot of every other police-car he’d ever seen. But like the boot of every other police-car he’d ever seen, there was always room for one more thing. He moved the toolkit to one side and the police radio to the other while the Beav’s partner stood swaying beside him, now completely silent, his eyes seemingly fixed on some distant point, as if he now saw the place where his new journey would begin. Norman tucked the jack behind the spare tire, then looked from the empty space to the person for whom he had created it.

“Okay,” he said.

“Good. But I need to borrow your hat, okay?” The cop said nothing, simply swayed back and forth on his feet, but Norman’s sly bag of a mother had been fond of saying “silence gives consent,” and Norman thought it a good motto, certainly better than his father’s favorite, which had been

“If they’re old enough to pee, they’re old enough for me.” Norman took off the cop’s hat and put it on his own bald head. The baseball cap went into the trunk.

“Bluh,” said the cop, holding one smeared hand out to Norman. His eyes didn’t bother; they seemed to have floated away completely.

“Yes, I know, blood, that goddam bull,” Norman said, and shoved the cop into the trunk. He lay there limply, with one twitching leg still sticking out. Norman bent it at the knee, loaded it in, and slammed the trunk shut. Then he went back to the rookie. The rook was trying to sit up, although his eyes said he was still mostly unconscious. His ears were bleeding. Norman dropped to one knee, settled his hands around the young cop’s throat, and began to squeeze. The cop fell backward. Norman sat on him and kept squeezing. When the Beav had ceased all movement, Norman put his ear against the young man’s chest. He heard three heartbeats from in there, random and disordered, like fish flopping on a riverbank. Norman sighed and slid his hands around the Beav’s throat again, thumbs pressing into his windpipe. Now someone will come, he thought, now someone’ll come for sure, but no one did. Someone called, “Yo, muthafucka!” from the white blank of Bryant Park, and there was shrill laughter, the kind only drunks and the mentally retarded can manage, but that was all. Norman bent his ear against the cop’s chest again. This guy was stage-dressing, and he didn’t want his stage-dressing coming to life at a crucial moment. This time there was nothing ticking but the Beav’s watch. Norman picked him up, carted him around to the passenger side of the Caprice, and loaded him in. He jammed the rookie’s hat down as far as he could-black and swollen, the kid’s face was now the face of a troll-and slammed the door. Now every part of Norman’s body was throbbing, but the worst pain of all had once more settled in his teeth and jaws. Maude, he thought. That’s all about Maude. Suddenly he was very glad he. couldn’t remember what he had done with Maude… or to her. And of course it really hadn’t been him at all; it had been ze bool, el tow grande. But dear God, how everything hurt. It was as if he were being dismantled from the inside out, taken apart a bolt and a screw and a cog at a time. The Beav was sliding slowly to the left, his dead eyes bulging out of his face like croaker marbles.

“No you don’t, whoa, Nellie,” Norman said, and pulled him upright again. He reached in farther and buckled the Beav’s seatbelt and harness. That did the trick. Norman stood back a little and took a critical look. He didn’t think he’d done badly, all in all. The Beav just looked conked out, catching an extra forty or fifty winks. He leaned in the window again, careful not to disturb the Beav’s position, and pawed open the glove compartment. He expected to find a first-aid kit, and he wasn’t disappointed. He popped the lid, took out a dusty old bottle of Anacin, and swallowed five or six. He was leaning against the side of the car, chewing them and wincing at the sharp, vinegary taste, when his mind took another of those skips. When he came back to himself time had passed, but probably not too much; his mouth and throat were still filled with the sour taste of aspirin. He was in the vestibule of her building, snapping the light-switch up and down. Nothing happened when he did it; the little room stayed dark. He’d done something to the lights, then. That was good. He had one of the Charlie-David cops” guns in his other hand. He was holding it by the barrel, and he had an idea he’d used the butt to hammer something. Fuses, maybe? Had he been down cellar? Maybe, but it didn’t matter. The lights here didn’t work, and that was enough. This was a rooming-house-a nice one, but still a rooming-house. It was impossible to mistake the smell of cheap food, the kind that always got cooked on a hotplate. It was a smell that seeped into the walls after awhile, and nothing could get rid of it. Two or three weeks from now the characteristic sound of rooming-houses in summer would be added to that smell: the low, intermingled whine of small fans set in many different windows, trying to cool rooms that would be walk-in ovens in August. She had traded her nice little house for this cramped desperation, but there was no time to puzzle over that mystery now. The question right now was how many roomers lived in this building, and how many of them would be in early on a Saturday night. How many, in other words, might be a problem? None of them will be, said the voice from the pocket of Norman’s new topcoat. It was a comfy voice. None of them will be, because what happens after doesn’t matter, and that simplifies everything. If anyone gets in your way, just kill them. He turned, went out onto the stoop, and pulled the vestibule door shut behind him. He tried it and found it locked. He supposed he’d picked his way in-the lock certainly didn’t look like much of a challenge-but it was mildly disquieting not to know for sure. And the lights. Why had he gone to the trouble of killing them, when she would most likely come in alone? For that matter, how did he know she wasn’t in already? This second was easy-he knew she wasn’t in because the bull had told him she wasn’t, and he believed it. As to the first question, she might not be alone. Gertie might be with her, or… well, ze bool had said something about a boyfriend. Norman found that frankly impossible to believe, but… “she likes the way he kisses her,” Ferd had said. Stupid, she’d never dare… but it never hurt to be safe. He started down the steps, meaning to go back to the cop car, meaning to slide behind the wheel and start waiting for her to show up, and that was when the last flip happened, and it was a flip this time, a flip and not a skip, he went up like a coin flipped from the thumbnail of a referee in a pregame ritual, who to kick, who to receive, and when he came back down he was slamming the vestibule door behind him, lunging into the darkness, and locking his hands around the neck of Rose’s boyfriend. He didn’t know how he knew the man was her boyfriend and not just some plainclothes cop who had been charged with seeing her home safe, but who cared? He did know, and that was enough. His whole head was vibrating with outrage and fury. Had he seen this guy (she likes the way he kisses her)

swapping spit with her before going in, maybe with his hands sliding down from her waist to cup her ass? He couldn’t remember, didn’t want to remember, didn’t need to remember.

“I told you!” the bull said; even in its fury its voice was perfectly lucid.

“I told you, didn’t I? That’s what her friends have taught her! Nice! Very nice!” Tm going to kill you, motherfucker,” he whispered into the unseen face of the man who was Rosie’s boyfriend, and forced him back against the vestibule wall.

“And oh boy, if I can, if God lets me, I’m gonna kill you twice.” He clamped his hands around Bill Steiner’s throat and began to squeeze.

“Norman!” Rosie screamed in the darkness.

“Norman, let him go!” Bill’s hand, which had lightly been touching the back of her arm ever since she had pulled her key out of the door, was suddenly gone. She heard stumbling footfalls-foot-thuds-in the darkness. Then there was a heavier bump as someone drove someone else into the vestibule wall. Tm going to kill you, motherfucker,” came whispering out of the dark.

“And oh boy, if I can, if God lets me-” I’m gonna kill you twice, she finished in her head before he could finish out loud; it was one of Norman’s favorite threats, often yelled at the TV screen when an umpire made a call that went against Norman’s beloved Yankees, or when someone cut him off in traffic. If God lets me, I’m gonna kill you twice. And now she heard a choking, gargly sound, and of course that was Bill. That was Bill in the process of having the life choked out of him by Norman’s large and powerful hands. Instead of the terror Norman had always roused in her, she felt a return of the rage she’d experienced in Male’s car and then at the police station. This time it seemed almost to engulf her.

“Let him alone, Norman!” she screamed.

“Get your fucking hands off him!” “shut up, you whore!” came out of the darkness, but she could hear surprise as well as anger in Norman’s voice. Until now she’d never given him a single command-not in the entire course of their marriage-or spoken to him in such a tone. And something else-there was a band of dull heat above the place where Bill had been touching her. It was the armlet. The gold armlet the woman in the chiton had given her. And in her mind, Rosie heard her snarl Stop your stupid sheep’s whining! at her.

“Quit it, I’m warning you!” she screamed at Norman, and then started toward the place from which the choking sounds and the effortful grunts were coming. She went with her hands held out before her like the hands of a blind woman, her lips drawn back from her teeth. You’re not going to choke him, she thought. You’re not, I won’t let you. You should have gone away, Norman. You should have gone away and left us alone while you still could. Feet, drumming helplessly against the wall just ahead of her, and she could imagine Norman holding Bill up against it, lips drawn back in his biting smile, and suddenly she was a glass woman filled with a pale red liquid, and that liquid was pure and untinctured fury.

“You shit, didn’t you hear me? PUT HIM DOWN, I SAID!” She reached out with her left hand, which now felt as strong as an eagle’s talon. The armlet was burning fiercely-she felt she should almost be able to see it, even through her sweater and the jacket Bill had loaned her, glowing like a dull ember. But there was no pain, only a kind of dangerous exhilaration. She grabbed the shoulder of the man who had beaten her for fourteen years and dragged him backward. It was astoundingly easy. She squeezed his arm through the slippery waterproof fabric of his coat, then whipped her own arm out and slung him off into the darkness. She heard the rapid rattle of his stumbling feet, then a thud, then an explosion of breaking glass. Cal Coolidge, or whoever it was in the picture over there, had taken a dive. She could hear Bill coughing and gagging. She groped for him with splayed fingers, found his shoulders, and settled her hands upon them. He was hunched over, tearing for each breath and immediately coughing it back out. This didn’t surprise her. She knew how strong Norman was. She slipped her right hand down his left arm and grasped him above the elbow. She was afraid to use her left hand, afraid she might hurt him with it. She could feel power humming in it, throbbing through it. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the sensation was how much she liked it.

“Bill,” she whispered.

“Come on. Come with me.” She had to get him upstairs. She didn’t know exactly why, not yet, but she did not doubt at all that when she needed to know, the knowing would come. But he didn’t move. He only leaned on his hands, coughing and making those gagging noises.

“Come on, goddamit!” she whispered in a harsh peremptory voice… and she had come so close to saying you, as in Come on, goddam you! And she knew who she sounded like, oh yes indeed, even in these desperate circumstances, she knew very well. He got moving, though, and for now that was all that mattered. Rosie led him across the vestibule with the confidence of a seeing-eye dog. He was still coughing and half-retching, but he was able to walk.

“Halt!” Norman shouted from his part of the darkness. He sounded both official and desperate.

“Halt, or I’ll shoot!” No you won’t, that would spoil all your fun, she thought, but he did shoot, the dead cop’s.45 slanted up at the ceiling, the sound terrific in the enclosed space of the vestibule, the smell of burnt cordite sharp enough to make the eyes water. There was also a momentary shutterflash of reddish-yellow light, so bright it printed afterimages on her eyes like tattoos, and she supposed that was why he’d done it: to get a look at the landscape, and a look at where she and Bill were in that landscape. At the foot of the stairs, in fact. Bill made a choked vomiting sound and staggered against her, sending her into the wall of the staircase. As she struggled to keep from going to her knees, she heard a rush of footsteps in the dark as Norman came for them.

She lunged up the first two steps, hauling Bill with her. He paddled with his feet, trying to help; perhaps he even did, a little. As Rosie gained the second step, she flung her left hand out behind her and swept the coat-tree across the foot of the stairs like a roadblock. As Norman crashed into it and began cursing, she let go of Bill, who slumped but did not fall. He was still gagging and she sensed him bending over again, trying to get his breath back, trying to get his windpipe to work again.

“Hang in,” she murmured.

“Just hang in there, Bill.” She went up two stairs, then came back down on the other side of him, so she could use her left arm. If she was going to get him to the top of the stairs, she’d need all the power the gold armlet was putting out. She slipped her arm around his waist, and suddenly it was easy. She started to go up with him, breathing hard and canted over to the right, like a woman counterbalancing a heavy weight, but not gasping or buckling in the knees. She had an idea she could have hauled him up a high ladder like this, if that had been required. Every now and then he’d put a foot down and push, trying to help, but mostly his toes just dragged up the risers and across the carpeted stair-levels. Then, as they reached the tenth step-the halfway point, by her count-he started to help a little more. That was good, because there was a splintering sound from behind and below them as the coat-tree snapped beneath Norman’s two hundred and twenty pounds. Now she could hear him coming again, not on his feet-at least it didn’t sound that way-but crawling on his hands and knees.

“You don’t want to play with me, Rose,” he panted. How far behind? She couldn’t tell. And while the coat-tree had slowed him down, Norman wasn’t dragging a man who was hurt and only three-quarters conscious. “stop right where you are. Quit trying to run. I only want to talk to y-” “stay away!” Sixteen… seventeen… eighteen. The light was off up here, too, and with no windows it was as dark as a mineshaft. Then she was staggering forward, the foot that had been searching for the nineteenth step finding only more level going. Apparently there were only eighteen stairs in the flight, not twenty. How marvellous. They had made it to the top ahead of him; at least they had managed to do that much. “stay away from me, Nor-” A thought struck her then, one so terrible that it froze her where she was. She sucked the last syllable of her husband’s name back into herself like someone who has been punched in the stomach. Where were her keys? Had she left them dangling from the lock in the outside door? She let go of Bill so she could feel in the lefthand pocket of the leather jacket he had loaned her, and as she did, Norman’s hand closed softly and persuasively around her calf, like the coil of a snake which squeezes its prey rather than poisoning it with venom. Without thinking, she kicked powerfully backward with her other foot. The sole of her sneaker connected squarely with Norman’s already battered nose, and he gave voice to a sick howl of pain. This changed to a yell of surprise as he grabbed for the bannister, missed it, and toppled backward into the darkened stairwell. Rosie heard a double crash as he somersaulted twice, heels over head. Break your neck! she screamed silently at him as her hand closed on the comforting round shape of the keyring in her jacket pocket-she had stuck it in there after all, thank Christ, thank God, thank all the angels in the Kingdom of Heaven. Break your neck, let it end right here in the dark, break your stinking neck, die and leave me alone! But no. She could already hear him stirring and moving around down there, and then he was cursing her, and then there was the unmistakable marching thud of his knees as he started crawling up the stairs again, calling her all his names-cunt and dyke and whore and bitch-as he came.

“I can walk,” Bill said suddenly. His voice was pinched and small, but she was grateful to hear it just the same.

“I can walk, Rosie, let’s get to your room. The crazy bastard is coming again.” Bill started coughing. Below them-but not much below-Norman laughed.

“That’s right, Sunny Jim, the crazy bastard is coming again. The crazy bastard is going to poke your eyeballs right out of your fucking head and then make you eat them. I wonder how they’ll taste?” “sTAY AWAY, NORMAN!” Rosie shrieked, and began to guide Bill down the pitch-black hall. Her left arm was still wrapped around his midsection; with her right hand she felt the wall, trailing her fingers along it, hunting for her door. Her left hand was a fist against Bill’s side with the only three keys she had so far accumulated in this new life-front door key, mailbox key, and room key-clutched in it. “sTAY AWAY, I’M WARNING YOU!” And from the dark behind her-still on the stairs but now very close to the top of them again-the ultimate absurdity came floating: “don’t you DARE warn me, you BITCH!” The wall notched in to a door that had to be hers. She let go of Bill, picked out the key that opened this one-unlike the one to the front door, her room key had a square head-and then jabbed it at the lock in the dark. She could no longer hear Norman. Was he on the stairs? In the hall? Right behind them, and reaching toward the sounds of Bill’s choked breathing? She found the lock, pressed her right index finger over the vertical slot of the keyway as a. guide, then brought the key to it. It wouldn’t go in. She could feel the tip of it pressing into the slot, but it refused to budge beyond that point. She felt panic starting to rip at her mind with busy little rat-teeth.

“It won’t go in!” she panted at Bill.

“It’s the right key but it won’t go in!”

“Turn it over. You’re probably trying it upside-down.” “say, what’s going on down there?” This was a new voice, farther down the hall and above them. Probably on the third-floor landing. It was followed by the fruitless dick-dick-dick of a light switch.

“And why’re the lights out?” “stay-” Bill shouted, and immediately started coughing again. He made a terrific grinding sound in his throat, trying to clear his voice. “stay where you are! Don’t come down here! Call the p-”

“I am the police, fuckstick,” a soft, strangely muffled voice said from the darkness right beside them. There was a low, thick grunt, a sound that was both eager and satisfied. Bill was jerked away from her just as she finally managed to run her room key into its slot.

“No!” she screamed, flailing in the dark with her left hand. On her upper arm, the circlet was hotter than ever.

“No, leave him alone! LEA VE HIM ALONE!” She grasped smooth leather-Bill’s jacket-and then it slipped away. The horrible choking sounds, the sounds of someone whose throat is being packed tight with fine sand, began again. Norman laughed. This sound was also muffled. Rosie stepped toward it, arms in front of her, hands splayed and questing. She touched the shoulder of Bill’s jacket, reached over it, and touched something gruesome-it felt like dead flesh that was also somehow alive. It was lumpy… rubbery… Rubbery. He’s wearing a mask, Rosie thought. Some kind of mask. Then her left hand was seized and pulled into a humid dampness that she had just time to recognize as his mouth before his teeth clamped down on her fingers and she was bitten all the way to the bone. The pain was terrific, but once again her reaction to it was not fear and the helpless urge to give in, to let Norman have his way as Norman had always had his way, but a rage so great it was like insanity. Instead of trying to pull free of his grinding, baleful teeth, she folded her ringers at the second knuckle, pressing the pads of her fingers against the gumline inside his front teeth. Then she set the heel of her preternaturally strong left hand against his chin and pulled. There was a strange creaking sensation under her hand, the sound a board under a man or woman’s knee might make just before it snapped. She felt Norman jerk, heard him make a hollow interrogative sound which seemed to consist solely of vowels-Aaaoouuuu?-and then his lower face slid forward like a bureau drawer, coming dislocated from the hinges of his jaw. He screamed in agony and Rosie pulled her bleeding hand free, thinking That’s what you get for biting, you bastard, try to do it now. She heard him go reeling backward, tracking him by his screams and the sound of his shirt sliding along the wall. Now he’ll use the gun, she thought as she turned back to Bill. He leaned against the wall, a darker shape in the darkness, coughing desperately again.

“Hey, you guys, come on, a joke’s a joke and enough’s enough.” It was the man from upstairs, sounding petulant and put-out, only now he sounded as if he was downstairs, at the far end of this hallway, and Rosie’s heart filled with foreknowing even as she twisted the key in the lock and shoved her door open. She didn’t sound like herself at all when she screamed, she sounded like the other one.

“Get out of here, you fool! He’ll kill you! Don’t-” The gun went off. She was looking to her left and had a nightmarish glimpse of Norman, sitting on the floor with his legs folded under him. There wasn’t enough time in that flash for her to recognize what he was wearing on his head, but she did, just the same: it was a bullmask with a vapidly grinning face. Blood-hers-ringed the mouth-hole. She could see Norman’s haunted eyes looking out at her, the eyes of a cave-dweller who is about to commence some final, cataclysmic battle. The complaining tenant screamed as Rosie pulled Bill in through the door and slammed it behind them. Her room was filled with shadows, and the fog had muted the glow from the streetlamp which usually cast a bar of light across the floor, but the place seemed bright after the vestibule, staircase, and upstairs hall. The first thing Rosie saw was the armlet, glimmering softly in the dark. It was laying on the nighttable beside the base of the lamp. I did it myself, she thought. Her amazement was so great she felt stupid with it. I did it all myself, just thinking I was wearing it was enough-Of course, another voice replied: Practical-Sensible. Of course it was, because there was never power in the armlet, never, the power was always in her, the power was always in-No, no. She wouldn’t go any further down that road, absolutely not. And at that moment her attention was diverted anyway, because Norman hit the door like a freight-train. The cheap wood splintered under his weight; the door groaned on its hinges. Farther away, the upstairs neighbor, a man Rosie had never met, began to wail. Quick, Rosie, quick! You know what to do, where to go-“Rosie… call… have to call…” Bill got that far, then began coughing again-too hard to finish. She had no time to listen to such foolishness, anyway. Later his ideas might be good, but now all they were apt to do was get them killed. Now her job was to take care of him, shelter him… and that meant getting him to a place where he might be safe. Where they might both be safe. Rose jerked open the closet door, expecting to see that strange other world filling it, the way it had filled her bedroom wall when she had awakened to the sound of thunder. Sunlight would come streaming out, dazzling their dark-adapted eyes… But it was only a closet, small and musty and nothing at all in it-she was wearing the only two items of clothing she had stored in there, a sweater and a pair of sneakers. Oh yes, the picture was there, propped against the wall where she had put it, but it hadn’t grown or changed or opened up or whatever it was it did. It was only a picture broken out of its frame, the sort of mediocre painting a person was apt to find in the back of a curio shop or a flea market or a pawnshop. Nothing more than that. Out in the hall, Norman rammed the door again. The crack was louder this time; a long splinter jumped out of the wood and clattered onto the floor. A few more hits would do it; two or three might be enough. Rooming-house doors were not built to withstand insanity.

“It was more than just some goddam picture!” Rosie cried.

“It was left there for me, and it was more than just some goddam picture! It went into some other world! I know it did, because I’ve got her bracelet!” She turned her head, looked at it, then ran over to the nighttable and snatched it up. It felt heavier than ever. And hot.

“Rosie,” Bill said. She could just make him out, holding his hands against his throat. She thought there was blood on his mouth.

“Rosie we have to call the-” Then he cried out as bright light washed the room… except it wasn’t bright enough to be the hazy summer sunlight she had expected. It was moonlight, flooding out of the open closet and washing across the floor. She walked back to Bill with the armlet in her hand and looked in. Where the closet’s back wall had been she saw the hilltop, saw tall grasses rippling in a soft and intermittent night breeze, saw the livid lines and columns of the temple gleaming in the dark. And above all was the moon, a bright silver coin riding in a purple-black sky. She thought of the mother fox they had seen today, a thousand years ago, looking up at such a moon. The vixen looking up as her cubs slept beside her in the lee of the fallen trunk, looking raptly up at the moon with her black eyes. Bill’s face was bewildered. The light lay on his skin like silver gilt.

“Rosie,” he said in a weak and worried voice. His lips continued to move, but he said no more. She took his arm.

“Come on, Bill. We have to go.”

“What’s happening?” He was pitiful in his hurt and confusion. The expression on his face roused strange and contrasting emotions in her: wild impatience at his slow, oxlike responses, and fierce love-not quite maternal-that felt like a flame in her mind. She would protect him. Yes. Yes. She would protect him unto death, if that was what it took.

“Never mind what’s happening,” she said.

“Only trust me, the way I trusted you to drive the motorcycle. Trust me and come. We have to go right now!” She pulled him forward with her right hand; the armlet dangled from her left like a gold doughnut. He resisted for a moment, and then Norman screamed and hit the door again. With a cry of fear and rage, Rosie renewed her grip on Bill’s arm. She yanked him into the closet and then into the moonlit world which now lay beyond its far wall.

Things started to go seriously wrong when the bitch pushed the coat-tree in front of the stairs. Norman got tangled in it somehow, or at least the London Fog he’d liked so much did. One of the brass coathooks somehow ran right through a buttonhole, neatest trick of the week, and another was in his pocket, like an inept pickpocket groping for a wallet. A third speared one blunt brass finger into his much-abused balls. Roaring, cursing her, he tried to lurch forward and upward. The hideous, clinging coat-tree refused to let go of him, and even dragging it along behind him proved to be an impossibility; one of its claw-feet had somehow hooked the newel post, clutching like a grappling-hook and holding like an anchor. He had to get up there, had to. He didn’t want her locking herself and the cocksucker with her into her little bolthole before he could get there. He had no doubt he could break the door down if he had to, he’d broken down a shitload of them in his years as a cop, some of them pretty tough old babies, but time was becoming a factor here. He didn’t want to shoot her, that would be too quick and far, far too easy for the likes of his rambling Rose, but if the course he was running didn’t smooth out a little, and soon, that might be the only option left to him. What a shame that would be!

“Put me in, coach!” the bull cried from the topcoat pocket.

“I’m tanned, I’m fit, I’m rested, I’m ready!” Yes, that was a goddam good idea. Norman snatched the mask out of his pocket and yanked it over his head, inhaling the smell of piss and rubber. The smells weren’t bad at all, when you got them together like that; in fact, they were sort of nice. Sort of comforting.

“Viva ze bool!” he cried, and wriggled out of the topcoat. He lunged forward again, gun in hand. The damned coat-tree snapped under his weight, but not before trying to drive one of its goddam hooks through his left knee. Norman hardly felt it. He was grinning and snapping his teeth savagely together inside the mask, liking the heavy click they made, a sound like colliding billiard balls.

“You don’t want to play with me, Rose.” He tried for his feet and the kneecap the coat-tree had poked buckled under him. “stop right where you are. Quit trying to run. I only want to talk to you.” She screamed back at him, words, words, words, they didn’t matter. He resumed crawling, going as fast as he could and being as quiet as he could. At last he sensed movement above him. He shot his arm out, seized her left calf, dug in with his nails. How good it felt! Got you! he thought, savagely triumphant. Got you, by God! Got-Her foot came out of the dark with the unexpected suddenness of a buckshot-loaded blackjack, striking his nose and smashing it in a new place. The pain was terrible-it felt as if a swarm of African bees had been set loose in his head. She tore away from him, but Norman was hardly aware of this; already he was toppling backward, groping for the bannister and doing nothing but skidding his fingers briefly along its underside. He went tumbling all the way back down to the coat-tree, holding onto the gun with his finger outside the trigger-guard so he wouldn’t blow a hole in himself… and the way things were going, that seemed all too possible. He lay in a heap for a moment, then shook his head in order to clear it and started back up again. There was no actual skip in his thoughts this time, no complete break in consciousness, but he didn’t have the slightest idea what they might have shouted at him from the top of the stairs or what he might have shouted back. His retraumatized nose was in front of everything, laying down a red screen of pain. He was aware that someone else was trying to horn in on the party, the fabled innocent bystander, and Rosie’s little cocksucker friend was telling him to stay away. The nice thing about that was the way it located the cocksucker friend for him, no problem at all. Norman reached for the cocksucker friend and the cocksucker friend was there. He put his hands around the cocksucker friend’s neck and started choking him again. This time he meant to finish the job, only all at once he felt Rosie’s hand on the side of his face… on the skin of the mask. It was like being caressed after you’d been given a shot of Novocain. Rosie. Rosie touching him. She was here. For the first time since she’d walked out with his goddam bank card in her purse she was right here, and Norman lost all interest in loverboy. He seized her hand, stuffed it through the mouth-hole in the mask, and bit down as hard as he could. It was ecstasy. Only-Only then something happened. Something bad. Something horrible. It felt as if she had ripped his lower jaw right out of its sockets. Pain leaped up the sides of his head in polished steel darts, meeting with a bang at the crown. He screamed and reeled back from her, the bitch, oh the dirty bitch, what had happened to change her from the predictable thing she had been into this monster? The innocent bystander spoke up then, and Norman was pretty sure he shot him. He’d shot someone, anyway; people who screamed like that had either been shot or burned. Then, as he turned the gun toward the place where Rose and the cocksucker friend were, he heard a door slam shut. The bitch had beaten him into her room after all. For the time being, even that was of secondary importance. His jaw had replaced his nose as the center of pain now, just as his nose had replaced his jammed knee and his outraged balls. What had she done to him? The lower half of his face felt not just torn open but extended, somehow; his teeth seemed to be satellites floating somewhere out beyond the end of his nose. Don’t be an idiot, Normie, his father whispered. She’s dislocated your jaw, that’s all. You know what to do about that, so do it! “shut up, you old queer,” Norman tried to say, but with his face pulled out of shape, what emerged was Ut uh, ooo ole heer! He put down the gun, hooked up the sides of the mask with his thumbs (he hadn’t pulled it all the way down when he put it on, which made this part of the job easier), and then gently pressed the heels of his hands against the points of his jaw. It was like touching ball-bearings that had jumped out of their sockets. Steeling himself against the pain, he slid his hands farther down, tilted them up, and shoved sharply. There was pain, all right, but mostly because only one side of his jaw went back into place at first. That left the lower part of his face askew, like a dresser drawer that’s been pushed in crooked. Squinch your face that way for long, Norman, and it’ll freeze that way! his mother spat inside his head-the old venom he remembered so well. Norman shoved up on the right side of his face again. This time he heard a click deep inside his head as the right half of his jaw socked back into place. The whole thing felt weirdly loose, however, as if the tendons had been savagely stretched and might take quite some time to tighten up again. He had the oddest sensation that, if he yawned, his jaw might plummet all the way to his belt-buckle. The mask, Normie, his father whispered. The mask’ll help, if you pull it all the way down.

“That’s right,” the bull said. Its voice was muffled because of the way it was rumpled up on the sides of his face, but Norman had no trouble understanding it. He pulled it down carefully, all the way this time, getting the hem well under his jawline, and it did help; it seemed to hold his face in place like an athletic supporter.

“Yep,” ze bool said. Just think of me as a jawstrap.” Norman breathed deeply as he struggled to his feet, stuffing the cop’s.45 into the waistband of his pants as he did. All’s cool, he thought. Nobody in here but the boys; no gals allowed. It even seemed as if he could see more clearly through the eyeholes of the mask now, as if his vision had been in some way boosted. Undoubtedly just his imagination, but it really did feel that way, and it was a nice feeling to have. A confidence-builder. He pressed himself back against the wall, then sprang forward and hit the door she and her cocksucker friend had gone through. It made his jaw waggle painfully even inside the tight webbing of the mask, but he went again, and just as hard, with no hesitation. The door rattled in its frame and a long sliver of wood popped out of the upper panel. He found himself wishing suddenly that Harley Bissington were here. The two of them could have taken the door in one hit, and he could’ve let Harley have ago at his wife while he, Norman, took care of her friend. Having a go at Rose had been one of the great unexpressed desires of Harley’s life, something Norman did not understand but had read in the man’s eyes every time he came over to the house. He hit the door again. On the sixth hit-or maybe it was lucky seven, he’d lost count-the lock tore free and Norman catapulted into the room. She was in here, both of them were, had to be, but for the moment he saw neither. Sweat ran into his eyes, momentarily blurring his vision. The room looked empty, but it couldn’t be. They hadn’t gone out the window; it was closed and locked. He charged across the room, running through the listless light thrown by the fog-wrapped streetlamp outside, swinging his head from side to side, Ferdinand’s horns goring the air. Where was she? The bitch! Where in Christ’s name could she have gone? He spotted an open door on the far side of the room, and the closed lid of a commode. He chased across to it and stood peering into the bathroom. Empty. Unless-He drew the pistol and fired two shots through the shower curtain, opening a pair of surprised black eyes in the flower-patterned vinyl. Then he rattled it back on its rings. The tub was empty. The bullets had blown a couple of porcelain tiles off the wall; that was the extent of the damage. But maybe that was all right. He hadn’t wanted to shoot her, anyway. No, but where had she gone? Norman charged back into the room, dropped to his knees (wincing at the pain but not really feeling it), and swept the muzzle of the gun back and forth under the bed. Nothing. He pounded his fist on the floor in frustration. He started toward the window in spite of what his eyes had told him, because the window was all that was left… or so he thought until he saw light-bright light, moonlight, it looked like-spilling out of another open door, one he had trampled right past during his first charge into the room. Moonlight? Is that what you think you’re seeing? Are you nuts, Normie? I don’t know if you remember, but it’s foggy outside, son. Foggy. And even if this was the night of the fullest full moon of the century, that’s a closet. A second-floor closet, in fact. Maybe it was, but he had come to believe that his sweat-smelling, greasy-haired, crotchgrabbing, cockgobbling poor excuse for a father didn’t automatically know everything about everything. Norman knew that moonlight spilling out of a second-floor closet didn’t make much sense… but that was what he was seeing. He walked slowly toward the door with the pistol dangling from his hand and stood in the flood of radiance. He looked through the eyeholes of the mask (except now, queerly, it seemed like just one eyehole that both his eyes were looking through) and stared into the closet. There were hooks sticking out of the room’s bare plank sides and empty hangers dangling from the metal bar running down the middle, but the closet’s back wall was gone. Where it should have been was a moonlit hillside overgrown with tall grass. He could see fireflies stitching random lines of light in a dark blur of trees. The clouds sliding across the sky looked like lamps when they passed near or in front of the moon, which wasn’t full but close to it. At the bottom of the hill was a sort of ruin. To Norman it looked like a busted-down old plantation-house, or perhaps an abandoned church. I’ve gone completely crazy, he thought. Either that or she’s knocked me out somehow and this is all some kind of nutty dream. No, he didn’t accept that. Wouldn’t accept that.

“COME BACK HERE, ROSE!” he screamed into the closet… which was, strictly speaking, no longer a closet at all.

“COME BACK, YOU BITCH!” Nothing. Only that improbable vista… and a tiny breath of breeze, fragrant with grass and flowers, to prove it wasn’t an eerily perfect optical illusion. And something else: the sound of crickets.

“You stole my bank card, you bitch,” Norman said in a low voice. He reached up and grabbed one of the coathooks jutting out of the board wall, looking like a straphanging commuter in a subway car. Beyond him was a strange, moonlit world, but any fear he might have felt was buried in outrage.

“You stole it and I want to talk to you about it. Right… up… close.” He stepped into the closet and ducked under the bar, knocking a couple of coathangers to the wood floor. He stood where he was for just a moment longer, looking into the other world he could see stretching before him. Then he went forward. There was a sense of stepping down a bit, the way you sometimes had to do in old houses where the floors of the various rooms were no longer quite matched, but that was all. One step and he was no longer on boards, no longer in anyone’s second-floor room; he was standing on grass and that fragrant breeze was hushing all around him. It slipped into the eyehole (yes, there was only one of them now; he didn’t know how that could be, but after the step he’d just taken it didn’t seem all that strange), refreshing his bruised and sweaty skin. He grasped the sides of the mask, meaning to slip it up for awhile so he could treat his whole face to a taste of that breeze, but the mask wouldn’t budge. It wouldn’t budge at all.