“Tee? Who’s Tee? I heard this from my mother.”
“Who’s your mother?”
“Mrs. Tolan. That help?”
“Not much. Should it?”
Cindi was leaning back in her chair, looking slightly amused. Becker decided she was perfectly content to let them butt heads.
Alan said, “She said you wouldn’t remember her. She knew you from school.”
Becker instantly reappraised Alan’s age. The man had to be much younger than he looked.
Cindi laughed, without explanation.
“You’re some kind of a legend among the older generation,” said Alan. “What was it, you blew a lot of people away or something?”
“Cindi tells me you tried a new face today.”
“No, the same one. He didn’t even shave,” said Cindi.
“It’s not as if you were a war hero, though, is it? These were civilians you were killing, right?”
A middle-aged man in a tweed jacket approached the salesman’s table. They shook hands, the man in tweed sat down, and the salesman turned the literature so his companion could read it. Seven o’clock and the man was still working. Selling was not an easy life, Becker thought. Not that that was any excuse for the man’s hobby-whatever it was-but still not an easy life.
“Let it go, Alan,” Cindi said. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“That was then, though, right? You were this kind of super fed and now you’re what? Nothing?”
“Now I’m nothing. You’ve got it.”
“Alan,” said Cindi. “Go away.”
“Listen,” said Alan. He gripped her elbow possessively and she twisted it away.
“Go on.” She did not raise her voice but spoke as if she expected to be obeyed.
To Becker’s relief, Alan went. He had been afraid of a scene developing that would have drawn the salesman’s attention to him. He was also gratified to see that whatever bond Alan had with Cindi, it was loose enough for her to order him off.
“Kind of an asshole, isn’t he?” Becker said as Alan made his way toward the bar. “I thought he was going to take me to the parking lot and bump antlers.”
“He’s just being protective of me,” said Cindi.
“Why? Are you in danger?”
Cindi grinned. “Mom made us promise to take care of each other.”
Becker winced. “Ouch.”
“No harm done. He can be an asshole.”
“He’s your younger brother, I hope.”
“Three years older.”
“See you around.”
She laughed. Becker liked the sound of it. She always seemed genuinely amused when she laughed, and as if she were more than prepared to stay in that mood.
“My mother was a high school teacher,” she said. “Not a classmate. She taught typing.”
“Oh. Mrs. Tolan. One of my favorites.”
“You didn’t have her. I’m thirty-one. You’re forty-two. Does that help?”
“It clears up the arithmetic, anyway,” said Becker. “Terrible thing, arithmetic.”
“It’s only numbers,” she said.
When the man in the tweed jacket rose to exit, Becker left. He wanted to go out the door first so that the salesman would not look back and notice him. Only a professional ever considered the possibility of being tailed from the front.
“Stick around,” said Becker to Cindi. “I have some things to take care of but I’ll be back.”
“Or I could meet you somewhere,” she said.
“Or you could meet me,” he said. “Where?”
There was nothing flirtatious about her manner as she wrote out her address on a napkin. She seemed more amused than anything else, as if she knew a joke that Becker did not. He would have to come see her to learn the punch line.
Becker went to the parking lot, sat in his car, and waited. Before long, the salesman came out, got in his car, and drove straight home to a neighborhood like many others in the Clamden area and the adjoining towns where one-family houses were perched close to the sidewalk and children filled the narrow yards. The only thing remarkable about this particular block was the salesman’s presence there: a single man in a neighborhood where families predominated.
Becker watched for several minutes but saw no lights come on. The house remained in total darkness long after the salesman had stepped inside.
Becker drove to a phone booth and called the salesman’s home phone. When the man answered on the third ring, Becker replaced the phone on the hook and drove back to the house. The car was there, the man was there, but still not a single light had been turned on.
Sitting in the silence of his car, watching the darkened house, Becker tried to empty himself of both thought and feeling. He did not want to impose anything on the situation-there was time enough for that later. Right now he wanted to shut off his rational mind and simply react with the senses of the beast. Was there something in the house to be feared? What lurked beneath the salesman’s respectable public pose?
Becker had done this before: At other times, in other places, he had relied on his instincts when the facts presented an inconclusive picture. He needed to be close enough to sense the subject’s feelings; this kind of work could not be done at a desk. He looked for mannerisms, expressions, gestures, the tic of the nervous man or-Becker’s own bete noire and specialty-the dead calm of the monster who took the shape of an average man but who lived to kill. Sometimes he gained that special empathy without any real effort. It was almost as if his guard’s impulses sought him out. Afterwards, he could not say how it manifested itself beyond a feeling, a tingling on the back of the neck, a stirring in the bowels, a silent but overpowering sense of immediate danger.
In this case, Becker was still not sure. Either he hadn’t gotten close enough or the man was not on the stalk and thus not sending out signals. They went through quiescent phases: Becker knew all about that. Their lusts and needs could be slaked for a time and they themselves forgot the awful reality of the appetite and its consequences. It was the on/off nature of their behavior that made them so very hard to find and identify, because when they were off, they were exactly what they pretended to be-indeed, wanted to be: average, normal, harmless men. A sated Hon was dangerous to no one, and the species that was its prey could stroll in front of it unmolested.
At such times the only evidence of their bloody habits was in the refuse of their lairs. Becker decided with reluctance that he might have to go into the house, and as soon as he realized that, he felt the familiar excitement building, deep and visceral, and he knew that it came not from the salesman but from himself.
He was grateful that Cindi was already at home, waiting for him. He did not trust himself to be alone.
Pulling on her jeans, Cindi heard his car pull into the driveway. She had not expected him so soon and she was still wet from the shower. Her climbing outfit lay on the bed where she had tossed it. Throwing the outfit into the back of the closet, closing the closet door, tugging the comforter up on the bed, Cindi told herself to relax. No time for makeup, no time for perfume or lotion. Jeans and a T-shirt and a harassed shower would have to do; she was fairly certain he wouldn’t mind. He did not seem like the type to need a geisha girl.
She forced herself to slow down, to walk to the door, to ignore the chaos and litter in the living room. This was how she lived, take it or leave it. Her heart was pounding as if she were halfway up the rockface without a next move, but she determined to play this just the way she would play the rock. Feign a virtue though you have it not, as her grandmother used to say. Act composed no matter what your stomach says. It fools almost everyone else and sometimes even yourself.
Now Becker, on the other hand, always was composed. Never mind faking it. Even hanging upside down, his head swinging against granite, the man had been in control. She marveled at his calm. He spoke about emotions, he admitted to fear-they had had a lengthy discussion about it after their first climb together-he claimed that he was as nervous and fearful as anyone, but she didn’t believe him. The very fact that he would admit to it seemed to deny its existence. She knew Alan was afraid half the time; she could smell it on him, but he would have died before owning up to it. But then she knew Alan inside out. Bluffers and showoffs were not hard to know. Becker, she suspected, would take a great deal more knowing.