"I'm not brave," she said, understanding that he was referring to her birthmark. "I just don't have any choice."
She touched the back of his neck and smiled to herself. She could not believe her luck. He was such a good man.
"If I ever meet up with your ex-husband, I'll kill the bastard," he said. At the moment, he believed himself.
"No," she said softly. "Don't let him ruin this. Don't let's let anything ruin this. I feel more alive than I ever have in my life."
"I love you," Luv said, startling himself with the pronouncement. The words had burst forth of their own accord, pushed out by the force of this most unexpected emotion. Luv could scarcely believe he was feeling what he was feeling. "I do!" Denise moaned and clasped him to her.
Stunned, amazed, delighted by the joy rising in his chest, he cried again, "I love you."
He got onto his hands and knees above her, leaned his face until it was touching hers. Her lips had been kissed so much they looked like satin, smoothed and extended beyond their limits. Her eyes were green, he realized, a bright hazel green, and her hair was the tint of autumn leaves. It sprouted and curled around her face and across the pillow in a thousand tiny rings. He grinned at her wildly, then laughed high in his throat, the lunacy and sheer delight of it all overwhelming him.
"I'm in love!" he cried. He sat up, towering over her, spreading his arms wide for all the world to see. His laughter built and cascaded out of him. "I'm in love."
She watched him with some alarm as his excitement teetered for a moment on the edge of control. She did not want to stop him in his enthusiasm-she knew that she, too, was in love-but the wildness frightened her. Denise reached her arms up to him and he collapsed down on her, embraced her and rolled back and forth across the bed, his limbs wrapped completely around her.
De Cap'n's in love, he thought in wonder. De Cap'n's in luvvv.
Three minutes after he had returned her to the restaurant lot and was driving toward the parking spot where he stowed the company car, he had forgotten the brief but ecstatic surge of "love." Forgotten that he had felt any emotion at all toward the woman he was just with. He liked to indulge such temporary enthusiasms, the victims enjoyed it, believed it, occasionally required it. It meant-beyond the zeal of the moment-no more to him than the sex, which meant nothing at all once it was past.
What mattered most to Luv about Denise once he had left her was that he could now mark her down in his journal. She was another victim, another triumph to add to his ever-growing list.
Kiwasee had located the house and was happy to see the New York Times, in its blue plastic bag still lying in the driveway where it had been flung by the man in the delivery car earlier that day. A downstairs light was burning at two in the morning, a certain giveaway that no one was at home. He approached through the backyard, listening for a dog, then found a window that was unlocked and entered the house. He moved through the rooms silently, but without trepidation. This was not Bridgeport, where some crazy mother might come at you with a knife or a baseball bat or some kind of automatic pistol that would shoot you as many times as a machine gun. Folks in Clamden was nice and civilized and cowardly and stayed in bed if they heard a noise. They was Kiwasee's kind of people, whether they knew it or not, because he was just as peaceable as they was. Burglary wasn't no crime of violence.
Taking things from people as rich as these wasn't hardly no crime at all. It was a redistribution. Kiwasee never hurt nobody, never threatened nobody, never scared nobody. Hell, he never even saw nobody.
Which was all the more reason he didn't deserve the kind of treatment that ol' Pussy McNeil gave him. He had shamed Kiwasee, made him plead and beg and cry like a child-and scared the shit out of him too. Some insults a man wasn't going to swallow, some shit he wasn't going to take, whether it came from a brother in the projects or a honky cop in the suburbs. Course, he wasn't going to jump into McNeil's face, be a fool about it. There was ways and there was ways.
He was out of the house in five minutes, politely closing the window behind him. There was more stuff he could have taken, but this wasn't a business call. He was there for pleasure, and when he had what he needed, he left.
He was aware of the car only after he had driven past it, just an impression of a car's shape, mostly hidden and ohscured by the trees, a dull glow of metal caught for a fraction of a second in his headlights.
It wasn't a cop car, that's all he knew for certain, but it was all he really needed to know. Some people wanted to park in the woods, hump away in the back seat, that didn't bother him. Wasn't going to be no cop hiding in the woods at two in the morning, pulled up in there with the stickers and the branches to scrape paint off, not in Clamden, you could bet on that. He chose to ignore the car and drove a quarter-mile past it.
There was a spot to pull off the road along in there omewhere-he had noticed it when McNeil drove him past it. Kiwasee missed nothing when it came to his trade. That chief of police probably thought Kiwasee was stupid because he couldn't read a map, but Kiwasee didn't need a map, he had one in his head. Once he saw a place, he knew it inside and out and knew more details about it than the people who lived there. Where you going to park your car? How you going to get away if your car is blocked? If you cut through the woods, where you going to come out'? If somebody else driving, where can they slow down and pick you up so nobody sees? How much open ground you got to cross before you get to the back of the house? If you got to jump, where you going to land? If you got to run through the woods in the middle of the night with somebody screaming for the police, you better have more than just a map in your head, you better have a compass and built-in radar, too. It was a clear-cut for the power lines, twenty feet of open space that the electric people kept clean so they could get their trucks in there to work on the pylons if they needed to. Kiwasee pulled his car into the clear-cut, drove straight ahead with only his parking lights on so nobody saw any strange lights coming up the trees from the middle of the woods, and stopped when the incline began. You start driving up and down hills with nothing but dirt and leaves under your tires, you asking for trouble. You asking to get stuck for sure. He looked for a break in the trees and pulled in, driving straight over several saplings and a bush. The car wasn't his in the first place, he didn't care if it got scratched or not. After tonight's work he would drive it to New Jersey, drop it off in Jersey City or Newark, take a PATH train to New York City, head uptown or to BedStuy where he had a cousin. It was time to get out of Bridgeport. 01' Pussy would be looking for him there for sure if tonight worked. He'd never find him in New York. The whole New York City police force would never find him there.
He didn't even pause after stepping out of the car-he knew where he was, he knew where McNeil's house was, all he had to do was hike over this hill and the next one. He'd plant a little gift in McNeil's garage and give the chief another phone call. Chief would have been there once already, he'd bet on it. Chief would have been there, nosed around, probably didn't know what he was seeing, but he got his interest up, Kiwasee was certain of that. Tell the man he missed it the first time, make him feel foolish, then tell him exactly what to look for and exactly where to look for it. Kiwasee couldn't have told him during the first phone call, of course, because he hadn't planted it yet. Didn't even know what he would plant until tonight's work. But that was okay, make the chief work for it, make him suspicious, let him start noticing things about McNeil on his own. Like whose window ol' Pussy be jumping out of at three in the morning. Chief of police ought to be interested in that, no matter how dumb he is.