His own nature had been predatory, and he himself had been a very dangerous man. If you are dangerous and you make enemies, you will often make very dangerous enemies. There were others like himself, powerful predators, who might still wish to do him ill. It was mildly upsetting but he was too far gone to be alarmed at anything.
Still and all, wouldn't that be the last straw? To be mugged out here on the street during his constitutional. Dying of goddamn cancer and get mugged. More than a body could stand. He decided he'd head back to the apartment and about that time a bright silver thing sliced out at him slashing out of nowhere and the phrase "nuncupative will and testament" darted past his consciousness as he tried to curse this thing but the blood from his severed throat stopped this last obloquy of thought in a bright red, surprisingly hot spurt as his heart pumped valiantly pumping his life force out into the darkened street.
The first time together
She had forgotten what it was like to wait for the phone to ring. Just as he'd forgotten what it was like to have to build up your nerve to do something. Two more unlikely people never waited to make a date. Both of them long beyond the dating stage. Marriages. Children. Whole histories and lives that the other one couldn't possibly fit into. Just insanity, she thought. And she wondered, for the third or fourth time, when he was going to call her.
He was so damn excited getting ready to go see them that it started irritating him and for a few moments he almost considered calling the whole thing off. He was rushing around trying to get dressed here like it was for a night on the town with a movie star and he was taking some housewife and her kid to some burger joint or whatever. Get a hold of yourself. He took a final look at himself in the, mirror, said to hell with it, and tried to keep from running to the car.
No matter how much he told himself that it was purely comical, he couldn't dampen the excitement he felt and the warmth that spread through him at the thought of seeing this woman again. Unordinary was the word that kept coming to mind. This was some unordinary woman he was having dinner with tonight. He caught himself humming with the radio and shook his head at the rearview mirror as he sped through all the lawbreakers hurrying home after a hard day at the office.
He seemed to get there a lot faster than he remembered, and his heart was pounding when he pulled up in front of the suburban Lynch home and got out of the car. She and Lee Anne both heard the car door and Lee yelled out,
"Somebody's coming," as her mother went to the door.
She opened the door and smiled as he came up the walkway and said, "Hi."
"Hello." His heart was in his throat. "Hungry?"
"Always." She was completely staggered by the look of him and he was poleaxed right out of his shoes at the sight of her. Neither of them had anything to say and they just stood there dumbly in the doorway as a little face peered around her mother's skirt and said, "Hi."
"Hi, Lee Anne. You hungry?"
"Sure."
"We're ready unless you'd like to come in for a drink first."
"No thanks. I'm set if you guys are." And they headed for the car.
"Where are we gonna go?"
"Anywhere you say, Lee Anne. What sounds good to you?"
"Show Biz."
"What's that?"
"You get pizza. You know. And there's these—uh, mechanical animals, uh—and— "
"Maybe Jack doesn't like pizza. Maybe he'd like to go somewhere else."
"Show Biz sounds good." Lee Anne was obviously pleased at the prospect.
In the car he and Lee Anne had a long conversation, Lee leaning over the seat with her head between them as she answered all of his questions up to a point. He was trying to be conversational but it had been a long time since he'd spent much time in the company of a little child. He was inadvertently doing his cop thing as he rapped with her and for a short while she was polite and tried to respond to the mini-interrogation.
"So. You sound like you've been busy since I saw you last. What do you do besides go to school?"
"Do?"
"You know, where do you go, like, at night after school. Do you have meetings? Do you go to church?"
"Yeah."
"Lee," Edie prodded, "tell Jack what you do on Monday night."
"Monday night I go to piano and Wednesday is GA, and—"
"GA?"
"Girls in Action. You know—church?"
"Um-hmm. Good. And what else?" he asked absentmindedly.
"Thursday is Brownies. That's enough!" Edie sank down into the seat. But Eichord only laughed.
"Yeah. You're right. That's plenty," he said smoothly, calmly, and guiding the conversation as he did so easily, and they were talking about something else.
By the time they'd scarfed up the pizza and some of the atmosphere and Lee Anne was already getting anxious to go visit her friend, the child of Edie's best friend at whose home she'd be baby-sat this evening, Lee and Eichord were really hitting it off. Jack thought she had to be one of the friendliest kids and the brightest youngsters he'd ever met and they were both pretty impressed with the other. Edie thought that's the way it is with eight-year-olds they either love ya' or they don't and this one was thataway about this cop. When they headed for the car, the little girl reached for Jack's hand and so it was only natural that he also took Edie's hand and they walked down the sidewalk that way all holding hands.
The first touch of the fingers and then holding each other's hand was like plugging their fingers into a light socket. They wanted each other but there was no sense of pressure, it was something each of them knew was coming and they knew it was going to be good, and it was just a question of the right moment. One of those times when it's not in question at all, really, even though neither one of them had made any kind of a thing about it.
The electricity between them was a living thing that flowed down through their arms and into each other's bodies and it was so beautiful that Eichord loved the moment and tried to will it to just go on and on with the three of them walking like that toward a rented car, him holding hands with this lady he barely knew and her little girl, all plugged into some inexplicable, surging electric current and inanely he thought about the old gal who told him she had electricity flowing through her and he felt like saying, "Doesn't everybody?" And inside his head he let out a silent whoop of pleasure, stopping it before it could get out around his grin, and he looked over at Edie and she was smiling too as they walked to the car touching.
This rush of energy was setting both of them on fire and it was, probably a good thing the kid was in the backseat, Eichord thought, or I'd be all over this woman like some kid in a goddamn drive-in. That thought was enough to calm him down a little bit and she could see him visibly withdraw just a notch when they got in the car and she sat very still and tried to think about anything. What did she think about normally? For just that moment she felt like someone else had invaded her skin. She wasn't used to any of this and she wasn't sure that she liked it. And that's the way it went for the next fifteen minutes or so until they got Lee tucked away at Sandi and Mike's.
She said she didn't care what they did and she let him pick a movie and he didn't care either and he'd seen a pair of twin cinemas on the way to get the pizza and so he headed back in that general direction, driving automatically as work and The Job intruded on the evening. His thoughts turned to the latest murder, a wealthy and influential head of one of Chicago's oldest corporate law firms. What triggered it was he had picked up one of the papers and tried to find a movie he thought she'd like, and in tiny print some art house was advertising CLASSIC SERIAL MURDERS and he did a double take and went back and read in fine print CLASSIC SERIAL TRAILERS and this is what he remembered as they drove along in silence.