“Christ!” Cain said aloud, and reached over to drag the bourbon bottle and an empty glass from the nightstand. He poured the glass half-full, drank all of it in two convulsive swallows, gagged, felt the liquor churning hot and acrid in his stomach.
Lonely. Lonely!
He swung his feet off the bed and went shakily into the bathroom and knelt in front of the toilet and vomited a half dozen times, painfully. When there was nothing left, he stood up and rinsed his mouth from the sink tap, washed his face and neck in the icy mountain water. Then he returned to the bed and sprawled out prone, breathing thickly.
Angie and the kids, gone, gone.
But not architecture, not San Francisco, not Don Collins and Bert Rhymer-not me.
Lonely.
No!
Lonely, lonely, lonely…
Six
In the living room of his brother’s Eldorado Street house, John Tribucci sat with his wife, Ann, and played that fine old prospective-parents game known as Choosing a Name for the Baby
“I still think,” Ann said, “that if it’s a boy, he should be called John Junior.” She was sitting uncomfortably, hugely, on the sofa, one hand resting on the swell of her abdomen; beneath the high elastic waist of the maternity dress she wore even her breasts seemed swollen to twice their normal size. Long-legged and normally slender, she had high cheekbones and rich-toned olive skin and straight, silky black hair parted in the middle-clear testimony to her part-Amerind heritage, her great-grandmother having been a full-blooded Miwoc. Pregnant or not, she was the most beautiful and the most sensual woman Tribucci had ever known.
He said, “One Johnny around the house is plenty. Besides, I refuse to be prematurely referred to as John Tribucci, Senior.”
Ann laughed. “Well, then, there’s always your father’s name.”
“Mario? No way.”
“Andrew is nice.”
“Then we’ve got Ann and Andy, the Raggedy twins.”
“I also like Joseph.”
“Joey Tribucci sounds like a Prohibition bootlegger.”
She made a face at him. “You come up with the most incredible objections. You’re still holding out for Alexander, right?”
“What’s wrong with Alexander?”
“It just doesn’t sound very masculine to me.”
“Alex is one of the most masculine names I can think of.”
“Mmm. But there have still got to be better ones.”
“I haven’t heard any yet.”
“Well-the last time you seemed to like Stephen.”
“But you weren’t exactly overjoyed with it, as I recall.”
“It kind of grows on you. I like John Junior better, but I guess I’m willing to compromise-for now, anyway.”
“All right, for now it’s Stephen. On to girls’ names, since the unlikely possibility does exist that I’ve fathered a female.”
“You,” Ann said, “can be a damned male chauvinist at times.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“And balls to you, love. Okay, you didn’t like Suzanne or Toni or Francesca, and I don’t like Pamela or Jill or Judith. But I’ve been thinking and I came up with three new ones, all of which are pretty and one of which even you are bound to like. The first is Hannah.”
“Somebody’s German maid,” Tribucci said. Then, when she glared at him: “Just kidding, it’s not bad. What’s the second?”
“Marika.”
“Better, much better. Marika Tribucci. You know, that has a nice ring to it.”
“I think so, too. In fact, it’s my favorite. But the third is also sweet: Charlene.”
Tribucci had been smiling and relaxed in Vince’s old naugahyde easy chair; now the smile vanished, and his eyes turned dark and brooding. He got to his feet and walked across to one of the front windows and stood looking out into the darkness.
Behind him Ann said, “Johnny? What’s the matter?”
He did not answer, did not turn. Charlene, he was thinking. Charlene Hammond. It had been a long while since he had thought of her and of the night on the deserted beach near Santa Cruz. The incident had been in his mind often for the first few months after it happened; but that had been thirteen years ago, when he was serving the last of his four-year Army stint at Fort Ord, and time had dulled it finally and settled it into the dim recesses of his memory. Even so, it had only taken Ann’s innocent suggestion just now to bring it all back in sharp, unwelcome focus.
He had met Charlene Hammond in late July of that year, on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. She’d been blond, vivacious, ripe of body and suggestive in her mannerisms; not particularly bright, but at twenty-two and living on an Army base, you don’t really care about a girl’s intelligence quotient. They’d had a few dates-dances, shows, summer events-and when they’d known each other for three weeks, she let him make love to her in the back seat of her father’s car. He saw her again two evenings later, and that was the night they went to the beach-because the car was awkward and because they were young and there was something exhilarating in the idea of screwing out in the open with the ocean close by and the clear, vast sky overhead. Charlene had chosen the spot, and he’d known she had been there before for the same purpose; she hadn’t been a virgin for a long time.
They parked the car on a bluff and descended to a sheltered place under the cliff’s overhang where they couldn’t be seen from the road above. There they had spread out a blanket and opened cans of beer, made out a little, taking their time, letting the excitement build. Still, neither of them wanted to wait very long, and excitement builds rapidly on a warm, empty night with the sound of the surf murmuring and throbbing in your ears.
They were lying in a tight embrace on the blanket, she naked and he with just his pants and shoes on, when the two motorcycles came roaring down onto the beach.
Startled, they broke apart, and Charlene fumbled for her clothing and made the mistake of standing up to put it on. The moonlight had been bright, and as clearly as he could see the cycles approaching, the two riders could see him and Charlene and Charlene’s nakedness. The bikes swerved toward them. He had an instant premonition of danger; he grabbed her arm, tried to pull her away in a run toward the bluff path. But the cycles swung in hard turns, cut them off, forced them back to the overhang.
He saw, as the bikes pulled up in front of them and stopped, that the two riders were young, in their late twenties or early thirties, dressed in black metal-studded denim and heavy boots, one bearded, the other wearing a gold hoop earring. Charlene was crying, terrified; she had most of her clothing on again, but it was much too late-he knew it had been too late from the moment they’d been seen. He tried to talk to the two cyclists, and it was useless; they were either very drunk or flying on drugs. The bearded one told him to move away from Charlene, and he said no, he wasn’t going to do that, and the one wearing the earring dropped a hand to his boot and came up with a long, thin-bladed knife.
“Move now, boyfriend,” the bearded one said, “or both of you going to get cut. And we don’t want to cut nobody, really.”
Charlene screamed, clinging to him. The bearded one grabbed her wrist, spun her to him and held her. Instinctively he started to move to help her, but the knife jabbed forward, darting, pushing him back against the dirt and rock of the bluff. Charlene’s cries then were near hysterical.
“Soggy seconds for you, man,” the bearded one said to the other. “Watch boyfriend here until I’m done.” And turned to Charlene and slapped her several times and pulled her over to the blanket and threw her down on it; tore her clothes off again, dragged his own trousers down. She kept on shrieking, and he kept on hitting her, trying to force her legs apart to get himself inside her. The one with the knife divided his attention between them and Tribucci, giggling softly.