Before he could be insulted anew, she covered his mouth with her own. He was very still, not wanting to lose this connection with her. Had he been standing on knife points, he would not have moved. He could hear the humming in the phone lines, and feel the vibrations where his legs embraced the pole, throbbing in time to a blinking red light, an electronic heartbeat. His eyes closed to the computer-blue wash of her skin.
It was all too brief. She pulled back, but only a little. As the euphoria ebbed away, he wondered if she fully understood the effect she had on him; he thought she might. He would lose sleep wondering why she had kissed him, toward what ulterior motive. No, actually, he wouldn’t.
He didn’t care why she had done it. And he would cheerfully fly down from the pole and kill a score of squirrels for her if she asked. He knew she would ask something.
“I want you to go back to New York, Charles. Go tonight.” Why couldn’t she want something simple like every last drop of his blood? He had no problem with dying for Mallory. But he could never abandon her. She mustn’t expect that. Going back to New York without her was unthinkable. He was shaking his head.
“Henry can help me with everything. Okay? I don’t need you, Charles.”
“Well, thank you very much.”
“You don’t know this place. You can’t – ”
“Good night.” He began climbing down the pole. The metal spikes were cold under his hand. He fixed his eyes on the pole and strengthened his resolve not to look at her again. If he didn’t see her tensing for the strike, then she had no power over him. Yeah, right – as Mallory would say.
“Where are you going?” Her tone rebuked him for the temerity of going away without being dismissed.
Well, tough – another Malloryism. He had learned a lot of them over the years of abuse at her hands; the abuse mainly consisting of him loving her, and Mallory loving no one. “Charles? Where are – ”
“I’m going to find out who killed Babe Laurie.”
“Charles.” Her voice was faint in the growing distance between them.
He was doing so well. He made his way along the dark road and didn’t look back. As he approached the artist’s cottage, it was dark. Mallory sitting on her telephone pole, tapping at her computer, turned on all the lamps in the house, all at once, to light his way.
After a quiet hour of housebreaking, Mallory returned to the woods with a shovel from her mother’s garden shed. She wondered what the sheriff would make of her recent visit to his empty house, and what she had left behind. The tool case was slung on a shoulder strap and thumping against her side as she moved through the trees, guided by a narrow golden beam. The penlight exposed every root and rock lying in wait for her. When she brushed a fern away from her face, the penlight shone on one hand, and she froze.
Her long red fingernails were torn and broken, and the polish was flaking away. The flesh showed scratches, raw red knuckles and blue bruises. She stared at this damage for a moment, incredulous, as though such things as chipped nails were inconceivable in her universe. And this was true.
From the age of ten, she had been compulsively neat, never suffering any chips in her facade, nor one thing out of place in her environs. Her foster mother, the late Helen Markowitz, had prized a neat, clean house. Young Kathy had worshipped Helen and made this ethic part of her religion, which did not include God, but certainly every type of mop and brush, every solvent and powder known to God and professional cleaning women. Back in her New York condo was a pantry, where each can, each bottle and jar stood at attention in the perfect formation of little soldiers in the service of the obsessively tidy Mallory, who was marred only in the places where it didn’t show.
Until now.
She leaned the shovel against a tree and covered her face with the ruined hands. So tired, deflating now, as if the air had been let out of her lungs and the blood from her veins. If she could just sit down in the cool darkness and not get up again. This day had been years long, painful and difficult, but she had only come undone at the sight of chipped polish and broken fingernails.
No – it was not quite that simple.
Everything had been lost – all the family she had ever known, and she had also lost important memories. She had not been able to remember the name of the dog when he lay dying. And now she was alone again, in a state she had always believed preferable to the company of people who would eventually leave her, every one of them, by death, or on foot, as Charles had left her tonight.
Mallory turned off the penlight and stood in the dark, taking deep breaths and quietly rebuilding herself. Had there been light enough to see by, there would have been no trace of pain or any other emotion when she picked up the shovel and moved on.
She entered the clearing where she had left her dog. After pulling the loose branches away, she knelt down beside his body and pulled the black leather duffel from a rotted-out log.
The penlight was trained on the hollow in the wood, where insects scrambled over one another to escape the sudden brightness. Behind the duffel, she had stored a canvas bag with a cache of electronic equipment. She pulled it out and opened it to stash her leather sling, the tool kit and her minicomputer safely inside the metallic lining.
When everything was well hidden again, she picked up the shovel and began the sad work of digging a shallow grave. Later, she could come back and properly weight the animal’s body down. Now it was only important to her to see him into the ground. It would be harder to do this in the daylight, not for the danger, but for the look of him in age and death. In the dark, it was easier to picture her dog in his prime, when they had loved one another and gone everywhere together. Good dog.
There was only time enough to drive the spade into the earth before the gunshot exploded behind her.
She was hit, and the shovel was falling to the ground. Her gun had cleared the shoulder holster before she spun around to fire one shot into the tree. She had no target in sight. The leaves were a mass of blackness. Aim was guided by the intuition of a new creature in the world, all reflex and instinct, detecting form in utter darkness, just as game animals distilled sound from the hunter’s idea of silence.
Fred Laurie’s body dropped from the tree – dead weight with a large bullet hole in his chest.
She nodded, approving the shot. She had selected the.357 magnum over the police-issue.38 for its improved stopping power – a good choice. This was what went through her mind as she stared down at her kill and appraised the hole in the target that was once a human being.
Mallory the Machine was back.
When she holstered her gun, she felt the wet slick of her own blood on her left shoulder and found the exit wound. She looked down at the rifle lying near the man’s body. It was a.22.
Well, that would certainly mess up a frog. He should have used a different gauge for hunting humans.
Fool
There was no pain from her wound yet, but it would come soon enough. She felt around the back of her shoulder. Exploring fingers found the wet entry wound. So there was no bullet to dig out. On the downside, there were two holes to lose her blood by. Still she could manage. When she was a little girl, Tom Jessop had once told her there were more than a dozen small animals running through these woods carrying bullet wounds from idiot Laurie brothers, and yet living to a ripe old age.
She waited, listening for the first sound of footsteps coming to investigate the shot. She saw nothing, heard nothing, yet she was aware of a body twenty feet in front of her. Mallory bolted away from the dog and the duffel bag and the dead man.