What followed ought to be in slow motion, no sound, a music track instead-Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” or perhaps something poignant and classical-the cello-Martin would know. Richard Mott’s legs buckled suddenly and he fell to his knees. He’d never experienced that before, you heard talk about it but you didn’t think it happened.
“That’s good,” the man said, “get down on the floor where you belong.”
“What do you want?” His mouth was so dry he could hardly speak. “Take anything, everything. Take everything in the house.” Richard Mott flipped desperately through a mental inventory of everything in Martin’s house. There was a good stereo, a fantastic wide-screen TV over in the corner behind him. He tried to gesture with a nerveless arm in the direction of the television, spotted Martin’s Rolex on his wrist, tried to bring it to the man’s attention.
“I don’t want anything,” the man said (quite calmly, his calmness was the worst thing).
Richard’s phone rang, breaking the strange, intense intimacy between them. They both stared at it, sitting on the coffee table, a bizarre intrusion from outside. Richard Mott tried to calculate whether or not he could reach for it, flip it open, shout down the line to whoever was phoning him at this hour, “Help me, I’m with a crazy guy,” prove he wasn’t joking, give the address (like someone in a movie, a sudden remembered image of Jodie Foster in Panic Room), but he knew it was no good, before he could even touch the phone, the crazy guy would have brought his baseball bat down on his arm. He couldn’t even bear thinking about the kind of pain the crazy guy could inflict. He started whimpering, he could hear himself, like a dog. Jodie Foster was made of sterner stuff, she wouldn’t whimper.
The phone stopped ringing and the crazy guy pocketed it, laughing, taking up the Robin Hood theme song where the phone had left off. “Bunch of faggots if you ask me,” he said to Richard. “Don’t you think?” Richard felt a warm trickle of urine working its way down his thigh. “I didn’t like what you did today.”
“The show?” Richard said in disbelief. “You’re here because you didn’t like the show?”
“Is that what you call it?”
“I don’t understand. I’ve never met you before. Have I?” He had gone through his life indifferent to whether or not he offended people, it struck him now that maybe he should have taken more care.
“Stay down on your knees and face me.”
“Do you want me to suck your cock?” Richard offered desper-ately, trying to make himself sound eager despite his cotton-mouth, despite the warm stain on his boxers. He wondered what he would do to save himself from being hurt by this man. Proba-bly anything.
“You filthy bastard,” the man said. (Okay, he’d read that one wrong.) “I don’t want you to do anything, Martin. Just shut the fuck up, why don’t you?”
Richard Mott opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t Martin, that Martin was asleep upstairs in his room and he would very happily show him the way so he could hurt Martin instead of himself, but all he managed was to croak, “I’m a comedian,” and the man threw back his head and laughed, his mouth open so wide that Richard Mott could see the fillings in his back teeth. He felt a sob break in his throat.
“Oh you fucking are, there’s no doubt about that,” the guy said, and then quickly, quicker than in Richard Mott’s imagination, he brought the bat down, and Richard Mott’s world exploded into pieces of light-little filaments, like in old-fashioned lightbulbs- and he realized he had told his last joke. He could have sworn he heard applause, and then all the little filaments burned out one by one until there was only darkness, and Richard Mott floated into it.
His last thoughts were about his obituary. Who would write it? Would it be good?
17
Jackson woke in the tailspin of a nightmare. Someone, a shadowy figure he didn’t recognize, had handed him a package. Jackson knew that the package was very precious, and if he dropped it something unspeakably awful would happen. The package was too heavy and awkward, though, it had no fixed center of gravity and seemed to move around in his arms so that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t hold on to it. He woke up with a start of horror at the moment that he knew the package was about to slip out of his arms forever.
He hauled himself up and sat on the edge of what passed for a bed. He felt dog-rough, as if his body had been fed through a giant mangle during the course of the night, and his eyes seemed to have been poached-or possibly fried-while he slept. His ribs ached and his hand was throbbing, it had swollen up nicely, the imprint of a boot clearly visible on it.
The seawater that had sluiced through his body yesterday had diluted his blood, and it was going to require gallons of hot, strong coffee to restore its viscosity, to restore Jackson to some semblance of life. He wondered what kind of toxins and pollutants swam around in the water. And sewage, what about sewage? Best not to think about that.
He remembered the dead woman-not that he was about to forget her-and wondered if she had washed up somewhere overnight.
If he was in France he would be going for a swim in his piscine round about now. But he wasn’t in France, he was in a holding cell at St. Leonard’s Police Station in Edinburgh.
He had never been in a jail cell before. He had put people in them, and taken people out of them, but he had never actually been locked in one himself. Nor had he journeyed from a holding cell to the Sheriff Court in the back of a Black Maria, which was like traveling in something that was a cross between a public convenience and what he imagined a horse box would be like. Nor had he been up before a court on the wrong side of the rails, and he had certainly never before been pronounced “guilty” and fined a hundred pounds for assault and gone from being an up-standing citizen to a convicted felon in the slow blink of the reptilian eye of the sheriff. From moment to moment the novelty just grew. He remembered thinking when Louise Monroe was ques-tioning him that it was interesting to be on the other side. “Inter-esting”-there was that word, he had obviously activated the Chinese curse yesterday.
When he came out of the court, he phoned Julia on her mo-bile to tell her he was a free man again. He’d expected to get her voice mail, he thought he remembered her saying that she had a preview at eleven-but she answered, sounding sleepy as if he’d woken her up. “Oh, gosh, sweetie, are you okay?”This morning there was genuine and touching concern for his welfare in her voice, whereas last night there had been un-Julia-like defeat when he phoned to tell her what had happened.
“Arrested? What a wag you are, Jackson,” she had sighed.
“No, really-arrested and charged,” he said. Wag? What kind of a word was that?
“For brawling?”
“I believe the technical term is ‘assault.’ I’m up before the sher-iff in the morning, I have to stay in jail overnight.”
“For God’s sake, Jackson, do you have to go looking for trou-ble?”
“I didn’t go looking for it, it found me all of its own accord. Are you going to ask me if I’m all right?”
“Are you all right?”
“Well, my hand hurts like hell, and I’m wondering if I’ve got at least one cracked rib.”
“Well, that’s what happens when you go in for tomfoolery.”
Tomfoolery? His predicament seemed to have brought out the (even more) bizarre elements of her vocabulary. He thought she would be sympathetic, but she had more or less put the phone down on him, although he supposed he had woken her up in what was the middle of the night by the time he’d been charged and processed. He thought that perhaps she might have left him a nice message on his phone while it waited for him, with his other belongings, but there was nothing.