He could not do much with his clothes. He wiped them with a dry washcloth to remove the surface grit, but they remained somewhat spotted and heavily wrinkled. His white shirt was gray now, fouled by a vague perspiration odor and the heavier stench of smoke, but he had to put it on again because he had no other clothes into which he could change. In memory, he had never allowed himself to be seen in such a disheveled state.
He attempted to rescue his dignity by securing the top button on his shirt and knotting his tie.
More than the dismaying condition of his clothes, the condition of his body worried him. His abdomen was sore where the hand of the mannequin had rammed into him. A dull ache throbbed in the small of his back and did not fade altogether until it reached halfway up his spine, a reminder of the force with which the hobo had slammed him into the wall. The back of his left arm, all along the triceps, was tender, as well, because he had landed on it when the hobo had thrown him out of the hallway into the bedroom.
While he had been on the move, running for his life, pumped up with adrenaline, he hadn’t been aware of his various pains, but inactivity revealed them. He was concerned that his muscles and joints might begin to stiffen. He was pretty sure, before the night was out, he would need to be quick and agile more than once if he hoped to save his butt.
In the medicine cabinet he found a bottle of Anacin. He shook four into the palm of his right hand, then capped the bottle and put it in a jacket pocket.
When he returned to the kitchen and asked for a glass of water with which to take the pills, Connie handed him a can of Coors.
He declined. “I’ve got to keep a clear head.”
“One beer won’t hurt. Might even help.”
“I don’t drink much.”
“I’m not asking you to mainline vodka with a needle.”
“I’d prefer water.”
“Don’t be a prig, for Christ’s sake.”
He nodded, accepted the beer, popped the tab, and chased the four aspirin with a long cold swallow It tasted wonderful. Maybe it was just what he needed.
Starved, he took a slice of cold pizza from the open box on the counter. He tore off a mouthful and chewed enthusiastically, with none of his usual concern for manners.
He had never been to her place before, and he had noticed how Spartan it was. “What do they call this style of decor — Early Monk?”
“Who cares about decor? I’m just showing my landlord a little courtesy. If I croak in the line of duty, he can hose the place out in an hour and have it rented tomorrow.”
She returned to the card table and stared at the six objects she had lined up on it. A ten-dollar bill worn soft with age. One heat-discolored newspaper with pages slightly burnt along one edge. Four misshapen lead slugs.
Joining her, Harry said, “Well?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts, spirits, demons, that crap.”
“Me neither.”
“I saw this guy He was just a bum.”
“I still can’t believe you gave him ten bucks,” Harry said.
She actually blushed. He had never seen her blush before. The first thing ever to embarrass her in his company was this indication that she possessed some compassion.
She said, “He was… compelling somehow.”
“So he wasn’t ‘just a bum.”’
“Maybe not, if he could get ten bucks out of me.”
“I’ll tell you one thing.” He stuffed the last bite of pizza in his mouth.
“So tell me.”
Around the pizza, Harry said, “I saw him burn up alive in my living room, but I don’t think they’ll find any charred bones in the ashes. And even if he hadn’t spoken out of the car radio, I’d expect to see him again, as big and dirty and weird and unburnt as ever.”
As Harry got a second piece of pizza, Connie said, “Thought you just told me you don’t believe in ghosts either.”
“Don’t.”
“Then what?”
Chewing, he regarded her thoughtfully. “You believe me, then?”
“Part of it happened to me, too, didn’t it?”
“Yeah. I guess enough to make you believe me.”
“Then what?” she repeated.
He wanted to sit down at the table, take a load off his feet, but he figured he was more likely to stiffen up if he settled in a chair. He leaned against the counter by the sink.
“I’ve been thinking…. Every day, working an investigation, out on the street, we meet people who aren’t like us, who think the law is just a sham to gull the ignorant masses into obedience. These people care about nothing but themselves, satisfying their own desires, regardless of the cost to others.”
“Hairballs, scumbags — they’re our business,” she said.
“Criminal types, sociopaths. They have lots of names. Like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they walk among us and pass for civilized, ordinary human beings. But even though there’s a lot of them, they’re still a small minority and anything but ordinary. Their civilization is a veneer, stage makeup concealing the scaly, crawling savage thing we evolved from, the ancient reptile consciousness.”
“So? This isn’t news,” she said impatiently. “We’re the thin line between order and chaos. We look into that abyss every day. Teetering on that edge, testing myself, proving I’m not one of them, won’t fall into that chaos, won’t become, can’t become, like them — that’s what makes this work so exciting. It’s why I’m a cop.”
“Really?” he said, surprised.
That was not at all why he was a cop. Protecting the genuinely civilized, guarding them from the pod people among them, preserving peace and the beauty of order, providing for continuity and progress — that was why he had become a police officer, at least part of the reason, and certainly not to prove to himself that he was not one of the reptilian throwbacks.
While Connie spoke, she turned her eyes from Harry and stared at a nine-by-twelve manila envelope lying on one of the chairs at the table. He wondered what it contained.
“When you don’t know where you come from, when you don’t know if you can love,” she said quietly, almost as if talking to herself, “when all you want is freedom, you have to force yourself to take on responsibility, a lot of it. Freedom without responsibility is pure savagery.” Her voice was not merely quiet. It was haunted. “Maybe you come from savagery, you can’t be sure, but what you do know about yourself is you can hate real well even if you can’t love, and that scares you, means maybe you could slide into that abyss yourself….”
Harry stopped chewing halfway through a mouthful of pizza, riveted by her.
He knew she was revealing herself as she had never done before. He just didn’t fully understand what she was revealing.
As if she had broken out of a trance, her gaze clicked up from the envelope to Harry, and her soft voice hardened. “So, all right, the world is full of these shitheads, scumbags, sociopaths, whatever you want to call them. What’s your point?”
He swallowed the pizza. “So suppose an ordinary cop, going about his business, runs into a sociopath who’s worse than the usual scumbags, infinitely worse.”
She had gone to the refrigerator while he was talking. She took another beer from it. “Worse? In what way?”
“This guy has…”
“What?”
“He has a… gift.”
“What gift? Is this riddle hour? Spit it out, Harry.”
He stepped to the table, stirred one finger through the four lead slugs lying there. They rattled against the Formica surface with a sound that seemed to echo down eternity.