“Sometimes.” Ricky smiled.
Harry told him about James Ordegard and the death among the mannequins.
Ricky listened. He spoke hardly at all, but when he did have something to say, it was always the right thing. He knew how to be a friend.
When Harry stopped and stared for a long while at the roses in the rain, apparently finished, Ricky said, “That’s not everything.”
“No,” Harry admitted. He fetched the coffee pot, refreshed their cups, sat down again. “There was this hobo.”
Ricky listened to that part of it as soberly as he had listened to the rest. He did not seem incredulous. No slightest doubt was visible in his eyes or attitude. After he had heard it all, he said, “So what do you make of it?”
“Could’ve been seeing things, hallucinating.”
“Could you? You?”
“But for God’s sake, Ricky, how could it have been real?”
“Is the hobo really weirder than the perp in the restaurant?”’
The kitchen was warm, but Harry was chilled. He folded both hands around the hot coffee cup. “Yeah. He’s weirder. Not by much, maybe, but worse. The thing is… you think maybe I should request psychiatric leave, take a couple of weeks for counseling?”
“Since when did you start believing those brainflushers know what they’re doing?”
“I don’t. But I wouldn’t be happy about some other cop walking around with a loaded gun, hallucinating.”
“You’re no danger to anyone but yourself, Harry. You’re going to worry yourself to death sooner or later. Look, as for this guy with red eyes — everybody has something happen to him sometime in his life that he can’t explain, a brush with the unknown.”
“Not me,” Harry said firmly, shaking his head.
“Even you. Now if this guy starts driving up in a whirlwind every hour on the hour, asking if he could have a date, wants to tongue-kiss you — then maybe you have a problem.”
Armies of rain marched across the bungalow roof.
“I’m a tightly wound customer,” Harry said. “I realize it.”
“Exactly. You’re tight. Not a loose bolt in you, my man.”
He and Ricky watched the rain for a couple of minutes, saying nothing.
Finally Ricky put on a pair of protective goggles and picked up the silver belt buckle. He switched on the hand-held buffer, which was about the size of an electric toothbrush and not loud enough to hinder conversation, and began cleaning tarnish and minute silver shavings out of one of the etched designs.
After a while Harry sighed. “Thanks, Ricky.”
“Sure.”
Harry took his cup and saucer to the sink, rinsed them off, and put them in the dishwasher.
On the radio, Harry Connick, Jr., was singing about love.
Over the sink was another window. The hard rain was beating the hell out of the roses. Bright petals, like confetti, were scattered across the soaked lawn.
When Harry returned to the table, Ricky turned off the buffer and started to get up. Harry said, “It’s okay, I’ll let myself out.”
Ricky nodded. He looked so frail.
“See you soon.”
“Won’t be too long till the season starts,” Ricky said.
“Let’s take in an Angels game opening week.”
“I’d like that,” Ricky said.
They both enjoyed baseball. There was a comforting logic in the structure and progression of every game. It was an antidote for daily life.
On the front porch, Harry slipped into his shoes again and tied the laces, while the lizard that he had frightened upon arrival — or one just like it — watched him from the arm of the nearest chair. Slightly iridescent green and purple scales glimmered dully along each serpentine curve of its body, as if a handful of semiprecious stones had been discarded there on the white wood.
He smiled at the tiny dragon.
He felt back in balance again, calm.
As he came off the last step onto the sidewalk and into the rain, Harry looked toward the car and saw someone sitting in the front passenger seat. A shadowy, hulking figure. Wild hair and a tangled beard. The intruder was facing away from Harry, but then he turned his head. Even through the rain-spotted side window and from a distance of thirty feet, the hobo was instantly recognizable.
Harry swung back toward the house, intending to shout for Ricky Estefan, but changed his mind when he recalled how suddenly the vagrant had vanished before.
He looked at the car, expecting to discover that the apparition had evaporated. But the intruder was still there.
In his bulky black raincoat, the man seemed too large for the sedan, as if he were not in a real car but in one of those scaled-down versions in a bumper-car pavilion at a carnival.
Harry moved quickly along the front walk, slopping through gray puddles. Drawing nearer the street, he saw the well-remembered scars on the maniacal face — and the red eyes.
As he reached the car, Harry said, ” What’re you doing in there?”
Even through the closed window, the hobo’s reply was clearly audible: “Ticktock, ticktock, ticktock….”
“Get out of there,” Harry ordered.
“Ticktock… ticktock….”
An indefinable but unnerving quality of the derelict’s grin made Harry hesitate.
“… ticktock…”
Harry drew his revolver, held it with the muzzle skyward. He put his left hand on the door handle.
“… ticktock…”
Those liquid red eyes daunted Harry. They looked like blood blisters that might burst and stream down the grizzled face. The sight of them, so inhuman, was enervating.
Before his courage could drain away, he jerked open the door.
He was almost knocked over by a blast of cold wind, and staggered backward two steps. It came out of the sedan as if an arctic gale had been stored up in there, stung his eyes and drew forth tears.
The wind passed in a couple of seconds. Beyond the open car door, the front passenger seat was empty.
Harry could see enough of the sedan interior to know for certain that the vagrant was not in there anywhere. Nevertheless, he circled the vehicle, looking through all of the windows.
He stopped at the back of the car, fished his keys out of his pocket, and unlocked the trunk, covering it with his revolver as the lid swung up. Nothing: spare tire, jack, lug wrench, and tool pouch.
Surveying the quiet residential neighborhood, Harry slowly became aware of the rain again, of which he’d been briefly oblivious. A vertical river poured out of the sky. He was soaked to the skin.
He slammed the trunk lid, and then the front passenger door. He went around to the driver’s side and got in behind the steering wheel. His clothes made wet squishing noises as he sat down.
Earlier, on the street in downtown Laguna Beach, the hobo had reeked of body odor and had expelled searingly bad breath. But there was no lingering stink of him in the car.
Harry locked the doors. Then he returned his revolver to the shoulder holster under his sodden sportcoat.
He was shivering.
Driving away from Enrique Estefan’s bungalow, Harry switched on the heater, turned it up high. Water seeped out of his soaked hair and trickled down the nape of his neck. His shoes were swelling and tightening around his feet.
He remembered the softly radiant red eyes staring at him through the car window, the oozing sores in the scarred and filthy face, the crescent of broken yellow teeth — and abruptly he was able to identify the unnerving quality in the hobo’s grin which had halted him as he had first been about to yank open the door. Gibbering lunacy was not what made the strange derelict so threatening. It was not the grin of a madman. It was the grin of a predator, cruising shark, stalking panther, wolf prowling by moonlight, something far more formidable and deadly than a mere deranged vagrant.