He swiveled around to face the plate glass. "She's just sitting there so pale and still – so exposed. Can you see her? Every pimple, every pucker of cellulite? Oh, and that hairy patch on one knee, a spot she missed with her razor this morning. Eight! She seems quiet. But you just know inside her head, she's running round in circles, flapping like a duck and screaming."
Her shoulders slumped as she died a little. They all did that. She was probably wondering if she should risk a nervous laugh. Could she risk not laughing? What if he was serious? He could see all of this flashing through her mind.
"Well, people, so far, this isn't much fun. She's about as animated as a corpse."
Stupid, boring cow.
"Seven. Randy? You think her parents are listening tonight? Of course they are. Six. She would've told all her friends and relatives to tune in for her first big break in show business. Five seconds to go, people. Will our hero on the phone make it in time? Four. Will the little girl lose her job and take the next bus back to the farm?"
She snapped.
Finally.
"Our girl's not dead yet. Her chair is spinning round and round. Her eyes are glazing over as she stares at the ceiling. Looking for flights of angels, babe? Her chair just came to a dead stop. Her head is slowly swiveling. Oh – scary. I swear to God, people, it's like a scene from a horror movie. Her eyes are bulging, going medieval on me. She's raising a fist – extending her middle finger – a suggestion that I commit a physically impossible sexual act on myself. Wait. There's more. She could've let it go at that, a simple elegant gesture that pretty much said it all. But she just mimed a well-known slang word for the anal orifice. I'm guessing that's my new name. Is that right, babe?"
She mouthed the words, Die, you bastard.
He liked that. He liked it a lot. Ah, and now the angry tears. She was shredding all the careful notes written at the start of the day, making confetti of pages lined with her schoolgirl penmanship.
"Uh, Zack?" Randy the timid caller had found his voice. "I got a photograph of a live juror right here in Manhattan. So… what do I win?"
Chapter 3
JOHANNA APOLLO RAISED HER FACE TO THE LOW-RIDING sun as she strolled toward Bleecker Street. The morning air was cold, but early risers got company vans with four good tires. This would be the happy side effect of changing her hours and her route to avoid any more contact with Bunny. His habits were nocturnal and his home was a patch of sidewalk on another block.
Every retail store in Greenwich Village was still locked behind burglar gates, but the bagel shop in Father Demo Square was open for business, and she stopped to buy coffee. She was unable to abide the swill at work, believing that the coffee grounds were strained through Riker's old socks to save money on filters. Exiting the shop with a steamy paper cup in hand, she turned on Bleecker and, halfway down the block, she saw the shoe by the curb – Bunny's shoe. There was no mistaking this mangle of tortured leather for anyone else's. Another pedestrian passed her by, a true New Yorker, ignoring the evidence of violence, the blood in the shape of heel marks and red toe prints from one bare foot – and more blood later on down the sidewalk. The widely paced red tracks along the pavement were those of a loping man. Johanna followed the trail of lost blood, running fast, then faster, full-out, losing her paper cup somewhere along the way. And then – breathless and stunned – she came to a stop before the open gate of a playground.
Dead stop.
Bunny was seated on the small wooden board of a child's swing, and his back was turned to the gate. From any distance, he might pass for a man at rest. Johanna walked toward him, her footsteps slowed by shock as she rounded the swing and saw his stark white face. A loose link in one of the chains had snagged the shoulder of his coat and prevented his body from falling. His throat was slashed open, and blood drenched his breast.
How could he have traveled so far with that gaping wound?
It must have taken great will beyond anything she had imagined him capable of – and focus – and all the strength that he had. Buzzing flies lighted on the gross tear in his skin. Others walked across his closed eyes. His hands were folded in his lap and fingers interlaced.
Bunny, did you pray?
What had drawn him here? She knew that his illness had begun when he was painfully young. A playground might be the last memory of joy, some old association with a time when his mother still loved him. During all of the telephone calls to Bunny's mother, Johanna had listened to the voice of an automaton, a woman sucked dry by the incredible labor of raising a child who had early lost his mind.
His most pitiable wound was the one bare foot blackened with disease and unprotected. In other respects, it was like revisiting Timothy Kidd's murder. There could be no doubt that this homeless man was killed because he had met the messenger, the one who had taken such pains to imprint Timothy Kidd's name on his poor, cracked brain. She brushed the matted hair from Bunny's eyes, and a score of fat black flies took wing. Johanna's skin turned clammy as her breakfast marched back up her throat. She fell to her knees.
This death was a personal message. There could be no other point in slaughtering this poor lunatic. Bunny would have been so useless to a police lineup, unable to differentiate between a suspect and a shopping cart. The killer could not have guessed that she would be the one to find the body, but after all the months of noisy street encounters, it was predictable that the police, with only the description of a hunchback, would come knocking on her door.
Johanna stared at the glint of metal near the dead man's feet. This bloody knife, honed to a razor edge, had not been dropped by Bunny. His arthritic hands were no good at articulating small objects. Only in death would his fingers be pliant enough to press them to the metal. So Bunny's murderer must have come this far with him, walked alongside him on the death march, keeping a discreet distance to avoid the splatter of vagrant blood.
And saying what?
Oh, all the things that would terrify the homeless man as he struggled toward this place. And what had kept him on his feet all the way to the playground? Perhaps he had come looking for a parent he had lost years ago, the one who had called him her honey bunny. Had he believed that this woman would heal his gaping wound and calm his banging heart with motherlove? How disappointed he must have been not to find her here.
Bunny, did you cry?
Johanna looked up at his face and whispered, "I'm sorry." She was sorry that his life had been hell on earth, that he had died in pain and in such frightening company, sorry that she had not protected him. Johanna lost all track of time as she knelt in the dust, stuttering her apologies to a bloodied corpse. And now she heard the march of little feet and larger mother shoes and the giggle of soft voices approaching the playground. The children were coming.
Riker never wanted to remember his dreams, intuiting that scary country as best left alone. This morning he had been tricked by a fake awakening, a dream inside the dream, wherein he had opened his eyes to see the scary boy astride his chest, riding him like a belly-up horse, pressing down on him with the heavy weight of crazy. Then came the sensation of lightness from great blood loss and trauma to the body and the brain.
He woke up dying.
And then came the real awakening. The ringing telephone jangled his raw nerve endings, though the sound had to travel down the hall from his front room. The bedside phone had been broken long ago, deliberately and violently. He opened his eyes, wondering if this was his wake-up call from Miss Byrd. He was prepared to roll over and go back to sleep, for the receptionist only rang twice. He waited out the next ring, then five more. Not Miss Byrd.