But she was too far behind, and Tanker angled to position himself in front of her, pushing her closer to the park wall, closer, grinning as he loped until she shrieked a name and darted through the open gates.
The first whore stopped when she saw Tanker race for the opening, but a feint and snarl had her off again, her voice shrill and laced with tears. He didn’t care. By the time she got help the shakes would be gone.
He ran. Easily. Up on his toes. Silently. Ducking into the brush as soon as he was through the gates, following the babyfuck whore by the sound of her shoes and the sound of her breathing and the sound of her tremulous prayers for someone to hear her.
At the oval pond he broke out and grabbed her.
She screamed so loudly he winced, and before he could stop her she had raked the side of his face with her nails. Shrieking. Kicking, aiming for his groin. Screeching when he slapped her, and clawing at him again until he grabbed her wrists and pulled her forward, spun around once and dumped her into the water.
She gasped as she struggled back to the surface and stood, water dripping from her eyebrows, from her jaw, backing away as he stepped calmly in to join her.
“No,” she said.
He only grinned and moved in.
Amanda leapt for the apron and fell when her wet soles slipped out from under her. Tanker was on her back before she could regain her balance, and with a sad shake of his head he slammed her face into the concrete.
“Whore,” he said, baring his teeth.
Amanda groaned and coughed blood.
He drove her facedown again, his hands snarled in her wet hair, one knee jammed in the small of her back.
“Whore.”
She groaned again, and fell silent.
“Whore,” he said a third time, and dragged her by the hair into the bushes. Then he tore off her jacket and tossed it aside, rolled her onto her back and stood over her. He was right, as usual — a whore. He could tell by the way the sweater clung to her breasts, the way the tiny gold cross on the fine gold chain around her neck mocked the religion she supposedly believed in; he could tell by the way she bled from the gouges in her forehead and chin.
She was a whore, and Tanker was hungry, and with a grateful look to the unseen moon he dropped beside her, put a hand to her cheek, and licked his lips twice before tearing out her throat.
The stadium held over fourteen hundred people in the concrete stands alone; the wooden bleachers on the opposite side added three hundred more. Don imagined every seat filled now with people in black, weeping for the loss of the butchered Amanda Adler.
Weeping. Wailing. Demanding retribution.
But as he ran, the cool wind stinging his eyes into infrequent tears, there was only the sound of his soles on the cinder track, and in the stands there were only about two hundred students and less than a handful of teachers. He had counted them, or tried to, but each time he made a new circuit someone had moved, or new faces appeared and old ones vanished. Some of the kids just sat there, staring at nothing; others milled about, talking softly, tugging at arms, shrugging at leaving.
It had happened just after third period — an announcement by his father over the P.A. system. Amanda Adler was dead, murdered in the park, and the school would close now in her memory and would remain closed tomorrow so that her friends might pay their respects in their own private ways.
After a respectful pause he added that the Ashford Day park concert tomorrow night would not be canceled as rumored, but would be considered a memorial for the two students who had recently lost their lives so senselessly and violently. Then he asked the teachers to end classes and dismiss their charges as soon as possible.
Brian Pratt had said, “All right! Freedom!” and Tar Boston had punched him in the stomach;
Adam Hedley sat with Harry Falcone in the faculty lounge and groused about the closing, obviously one done not in sincerity but with a clear political eye out for preventing a teacher’s strike from getting much play in the papers. It was, he claimed, a cynical and effective move for which Boyd ought to be given credit; and one that might be countered. When Harry asked for an explanation, Hedley told him about the jacket;
Jeff Lichter cleaned his glasses fifteen times in ten minutes, trying to get rid of the elusive blur on the lenses;
Fleet Robinson was absent;
After shutting down the P.A. system, Norman sat behind his desk, and stared out the window, thinking that Harry was going to be pissed, Joyce was going to be understandably upset at the solemnization of her opening celebration, and the newspapers would probably cut his statement in half and make him look like just another politician — all in all, a hell of a day;
Don immediately put his books into his locker and headed for the track. On the way he met Chris, who flung her arms around him and mumbled something about just talking to Amanda the other day. He was stunned and stroked her back absently while trying not to seem embarrassed as students passed around them, trying not to feel the soft tickle of her hair against his chin. No one seemed to notice. Then she stepped away, smiled, kissed his cheek, and thanked him. It was several minutes before he was able to move on, not bothering to change, needing the fresh air and the quiet, and something else to think about, except that even with the feel of Chris’s thin blouse on his palms he couldn’t think about a thing except Amanda, with the long black hair, hanging on Fleet’s hip and taking his crude macho teasing with remarkable good grace.
He had already known about the killing.
Last night, Sergeant Verona had called just after Joyce had returned from her meeting. Don overheard the Boyd end of the conversation, and was prepared when his father told him what had happened. Then the phone rang again, and continued to ring for hours while reporters and god knew who else asked the principal for his official, his private, his off-the-cuff reactions. Norman handled it well, Don thought, and Joyce was right there, drafting a quick statement at the kitchen table for him to read or expand from after the first twenty minutes.
During a pause Norman had turned to him and asked if he’d known her, if she was a good friend. He had only nodded and had gone unhindered to his room.
He was angry because he wanted to do more than just nod his head. He wanted to say that it didn’t make any difference whether she was a friend or not. She was seventeen and he was seventeen-and-a-half, and now she was dead and in some goddamn morgue lying under a dirty sheet. She was dead, and nobody else was. This wasn’t some poor unknown sucker from another school; this was Amanda, Mandy, Fleet’s beautiful dark-haired lady, and he knew her and she was dead and she was only seventeen and strangers may die even younger, but not Amanda because Don knew her and people he knew just didn’t die. And they sure didn’t die because some maniac was out there, getting away with murder while kids were damned dying on the damned streets and who the hell cared if he knew her or not; she was dead, and she was only seventeen.
That morning he had promised not to say a word until the official announcement had been made. It didn’t matter, since most of them knew it anyway through the macabre reach of the grapevine, and those who didn’t were soon filled in after school closed and a quiet had sifted over the grounds.
But he had kept the promise, and when classes were dismissed, he took off for the track.
Seeing the same faces move about, seeing different ones take different places, seeing some of the kids smiling because of the time off, and some of them grim and staring blindly at the grass that rippled as the wind came up.