“What?”
Latouche’s pathetic unlined face was sopped with gin, dropping down like a beard of tears and slobber.
Coots dragged his handkerchief out and kneeled to attend Latouche, dabbing away, kinder than a nurse.
“My friend, my friend,” he sympathized in his great scratch, softened.
“It’s true. I killed them. They were just worn out, is all. Still lovely, both, still should have been in the fine bloom of a woman’s middle age, that arousing. .”
“But one would suppose that one often destroys the loved one. I have destroyed. Have been destroyed,” Coots said, trying to aid.
“I don’t mean your. . fictions, your creative writing! I mean destroyed!”
“Yes, but guilt, must. .”
“I don’t know what brought me to shout it out. I don’t know why that pistol is loaded. Something made. . You. It’s you, Coots. You demand terrible buried things, somehow. Calamities. Isn’t that it?”
“That’s not a condition of our friendship.”
Latouche calmed down and smiled. “We are friends, aren’t we? All our strangenesses and our differences. We are, yes?”
“Doubtless, friends. And for that I’ll get a fresh one for you. Take it easy. All is locked, here in the bunker.”
Latouche saw the big secured door and nodded, instantly more solid himself.
This drink Coots did thoroughly, a spring in his step, close again to that sun-browned boy with his string of bullheads, his Prince Albert tin filled with nightcrawlers.
When he came out, Latouche was gone and the door was thrown open. There had been a noise in his writing room, and now only Latouche’s things were left, his tape recorder, gun, and overcoat across the arm of the sofa. The front door was unlocked; it must have been thrown open very rapidly, speed quieting the noise.
Coots shut his eyes and knew. He’d forgotten, forgotten, forgotten, entirely the dog hides on the wall of his writing room: the Rottweiler’s black one, and the German shepherds’ speckled gray. Latouche must have stepped inside, looked, then fled, feeling hunted himself. On the spoor.
Horton’s Honda Express, the little city motorbike, was next to the front entranceway, helmet on the seat. Coots knew he should take this. He’d handled it perfectly many times. It would be required, he was positive.
He labored with the big two-by-twelve board on the stairs that served Horton as a ramp. His own long smart overcoat on, helmeted — Horton’s humor insisted on a dove aviary painted all over the helmet — and buckled in, he cranked the scooter and rushed precariously upward through exhaust clouds to the sidewalk, then out bumping off the curb, an old man from hell. Wouldn’t you know, his pesty neighbor, the junkie dentist Newcomb, antithesis of Latouche, hooked possibly on everything and ever determined to visit, was right in his way, and was knocked down by Coots and the whirling machine. Coots cursed with his last cigarette breath, despising this low absurdity. He thought he saw Latouche three blocks up as the street was otherwise empty. Something was scrambling ahead on all fours, head down, trailed by its suspenders, white shirttails out.
It was Latouche. Coots ran over his jacket in the street. Then there was a boot, an old Wellington boot, straight up, abandoned. Poor man! Coots could hardly breathe — the pity, the terror, the love, and the effort with that board. His adrenaline, if it was there, was wondering where to go. He could hardly get air down. Latouche was faster, or through asthmatic illusion Coots thought he was, and he turned back the accelerator all the way. The doctor was running up into the middle of the city. Soon he’d be lost in neon and street strollers, sloths, pimps, bus-stop criminals, sluts. Coots could see citizens spotting the sidewalks, increasingly, a quarter mile up.
At last his respiration and vision were easier. How fast could a dog run? He looked at the speedometer: thirty mph, and he still wasn’t gaining on him. What kind of dog was Latouche? Something Central American and predacious. Please not a greyhound, pushing forty! The motorbike could hit that speed too, but barely. How, then, could he catch Latouche?
He didn’t know it but he passed Riley Barnes, early out of the gym, coming toward him in the Hudson. Barnes flinched and soon U-turned. Coots’s frail head in the bird helmet was unmistakable. By the time he came even, Coots was narrowing his eyes, an elderly cavalry scout in spectacles. Latouche had run into the crowd. He was gone. There was only reckoning with his speed now and trying to stay up even. If Latouche took a turn, it was hopeless. The motorbike wobbled into higher speed, but the traffic would have him soon. Coots felt pure hate for humankind, especially New Yorkers, too cowardly to stay in their rooms; they must be out with their autos, part of the clot, rubbernecking at each other — like dogs. Dogs! Packs of them sniffing, licking balls, consorting in dumb zeal, not a clue, not an inward reflection. The mayor and the police should be shot, for not shooting them. And then this streetlight. He was in a paroxysm of fury.
“Where in the hell are you going, Mr. Coots?” Riley Barnes was next to him at the junction, yelling to him from the high car. “Stop, please.”
Coots did.
“He went into the grofft. I swear, Barnes, a horrible inadvertency at my place. He saw some ‘imagery’ on my wall in another room. He’s up there, blocks, incredibly fast.”
“Get in the car, quick. He can’t be out here!” Barnes was in tears already.
“The car’s no good. If he turns, you’ve no chance. This Honda’s the thing. Let me go.”
“I’m going too. He’s mine.”
“Fool. Then get on the back if you can.”
“You can handle this?” Great poundage in the rear with Barnes. They sank down.
“I can handle it. Shut up and look.”
They were off, riding as if on a wire, given Barnes’s body. Every yard was risky and grim. The motorbike wanted to waddle off into the gutter or straight out into the oncoming lanes. Coots’s arms were noodles from the effort.
“Don’t move! Just look, damn you!” His voice whipped back around the helmeted cheeks.
He looked too, tried to. Hunter of the hunter, pointer of the pointer. It had been ages since he’d labored physically at anything, but Nature had not slighted him in adrenaline. He was handling the cargo nicely after another half mile. But Nature — in Latouche’s case, God? — had not slighted the doctor either. Age ninety, ninety! His fitness was uncanny. Coots thought he saw a clot of citizens part, shouting, at something on the ground another three blocks up. Maybe they were gaining a little. Latouche could not be given much more by his heart and lungs. His bootless feet must be awful by now. If only some decent man would just stop him. But where was a decent citizen of New York to be found? It would take a tourist, some Johnson from Kansas.
“Help! Help him!” shouted Barnes, sensing the same.
All Latouche did was gather disgusted glares from both sidewalks.
The thing they feared worst occurred. Plainly, just two blocks up now, a corner crowd parted, faces snapped down, then to the left, some of them pointing down a side street. Latouche had turned. If he began weaving the streets, he was doomed unless he fainted. Coots’s grand new friend would be snatched from him by the most horrible chance and he would be forever had by another “black thing” as vile as his wife’s death. This plague of one, this Kansan prince of North America, was nearing his end and Coots did not even feel potent enough to be his nurse.