“Door unlocked?” Jesse said.
“I guess it was. It’s stupid. I knew this had been happening. But I forgot. . . .” She spread her hands. “I’m terrible about locking up. Anyway, I said, ‘What the fuck do you want?’ And he pointed his gun at me and said, ‘Do what I say and I won’t hurt you.’ And I was enraged. . . . I said, ‘Like hell.’ And he said, ‘Take off your clothes,’ and I said, ‘Like hell.’ It’s funny, I wasn’t scared, I was very, very angry. The sonovabitch came in my house. . . . Now I’m scared.”
Molly nodded.
“That’s because now it’s safe to be scared.”
“I guess,” Gloria said.
“So what did he do?” Jesse said.
He said, ‘Undress or I’ll shoot you.’ And I said, ‘Get out of my fucking house.’ And his eyes got really big and he took a step toward me and then stopped, and, like, stared at me, and then he turned around and ran out of the house.”
“Did you see his car?”
“No.”
“Which way he went?”
“No,” Gloria said. “I went right to the phone and called nine-one-one and Officer Friedman was here in like a minute.”
Jesse looked at Steve Friedman, standing in the kitchen door.
“I was two blocks away,” Steve said. “I didn’t see him.”
“Description?”
“Oh, about my husband’s size, I would say. Five-eleven, hundred and eighty-five pounds.
Black jacket and pants, black ski mask, had on those latex gloves like doctors use.”
“The gun?”
“I don’t know anything about guns,” she said. “It looked small to me, kind of silver-colored.”
Jesse nodded.
“Any sign of a camera?”
“I think so,” Gloria said. “I think he had some sort of digital camera in his other hand.”
“Which hand had the gun?” Jesse said.
Gloria closed her eyes for a moment and pantomimed with her hands. She opened her eyes.
“Right hand,” she said. “He had the gun in his right hand.”
Jesse nodded.
“That would mean he’s right-handed,” Gloria said.
“Probably,” Jesse said.
“You wouldn’t carry a gun in your off hand,” Gloria said.
“Probably not,” Jesse said. “If he was anybody you knew, would you have been able to tell?”
“I don’t think so,” Gloria said. “His voice didn’t sound familiar.”
“Did he do anything to disguise his voice?” Jesse said.
“Like whisper or something?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No,” Gloria said. “That would mean he wasn’t someone I might know.”
Jesse grinned at her.
“Ah, come on, Mrs. Fisher,” he said. “Could you let me do a little of the police work?”
“But,” she said, “if we didn’t know each other, he would have no reason to disguise his voice. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“It does,” Jesse said. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”
“Not really,” she said. “He was only here, probably, a couple of minutes.”
“You’re a brave woman,” Jesse said.
“I didn’t know I was going to be,” Gloria said. “But . . .”
She looked at Molly.
“You got kids?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Daughter?”
“I have a daughter and three sons,” Molly said.
“I just have the one daughter,” Gloria said. “I kept thinking of her when I saw him. I knew who he was as soon as I saw him, you know? I’d heard about the other women. And I . . .
kept thinking of my daughter . . . and I couldn’t let her mother be forced to strip naked in her own living room in front of some stranger . . . I couldn’t. I would not.”
She looked at Molly again.
“Could you?” she said.
“I won’t know unless it happens,” Molly said.
Gloria nodded.
“We’ll leave Officer Friedman here,” Jesse said. “Until your husband gets home.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Driving back to the station, Jesse said, “Tough woman.”
“Yes,” Molly said. “I wonder if I’d have done what she did?”
“You were right when she asked you,” Jesse said. “No way to know until you’re in the situation.”
“I hope I’d be like her,” Molly said.
“Be a good woman, and a good cop, Moll,” Jesse said. “Whether you did or not.”
“Thank you,” Molly said.
“That’s what you are,” Jesse said. “And whatever you do in one specific situation doesn’t change what you are.”
“Even what I did with a certain Native American person?”
“Even that,” Jesse said.
36
THE WEATHER was pleasant, so Jesse took his first drink of the night out onto his balcony and sat and reread his new letter from the Night Hawk.
Dear Chief Stone,
By now you must know of my recent humiliation. The woman defied me. And I had to run.
Run away! I don’t know why I didn’t force her to do what I said. I wanted to, God knows. But somehow I seemed frozen by her. I couldn’t approach her. I wanted in the worst way to take her and strip her clothes off. But I didn’t. For reasons I don’t understand I fled, and am now in my home, frightened and enraged. What I wanted to do frightens me. That I couldn’t do it enrages me. And it is the rage that I really fear. I have never felt such rage. To be denied like this and humiliated in the process. It will drive me. I can feel it driving me, and if you do not stop me, I don’t know what it will drive me to. I am becoming ever more dangerous. What started out as a basically harmless adventure is turning into something monomaniacal.
Something—shall I say it? Yes!—something evil. So be warned, and be alert!!!
The Night Hawk
Jesse read it twice more. It seemed to him more a display of bravado than a call for help.
To be denied what? Jesse thought. A photo op? He’s embarrassed because the woman faced him down and he ran. He’s explaining to me and himself that he’s really a dangerous bastard and needs to be stopped. Jesse’s glass was empty. He stood and went back into his living room and made himself another one. He took it back out on the balcony and sat with his feet up on the rail and looked out over the dark harbor. Jesse felt some comfort in the fact that the Night Hawk had run. Maybe he wasn’t so dangerous. Maybe he protested that he was because he really knew he wasn’t. But why to me? He doesn’t need my approval. He needs the approval of the town. Jesse sipped quietly at his drink. And the chief is, for him, the face of the town. It was a clear night, but the moon was a slender crescent, and it shed very little light. Jesse took another sip of his drink. Approval isn’t quite it, Jesse thought. Fear? Respect? Fearful respect? Jesse drank again. Then he nodded to himself. He needs us to think he’s not a pathetic creep. He wants us to think he’s THE NIGHT HAWK! instead of the nasty little voyeur that he knows he is. Jesse finished his second drink and went back to the bar. As he mixed the third, he looked at his poster of Ozzie.
“Used to be simpler, Oz. Used to be whether you could go to your right and make the long throw. Used to be about could you sit on the fastball and adjust for the curve.”
Everything rode on questions like that, but not life or death. Baseball was the most important thing that didn’t matter that he’d ever known. Win or lose, you played again the next day, or the next year, as far ahead as you could see when you were nineteen and had an absolute cannon of an arm.
“Had a big arm, Oz,” Jesse said. “Bigger than yours, to tell you the truth. Didn’t have your hands. Didn’t probably have your bat. Couldn’t do a backflip. But I had a gun.”
He took his drink back to the balcony. Sixteen-ounce glass, lot of ice, lot of soda. The warm evening made the condensation bead up on the glass and run in tiny rivulets down the side.
Now I gotta worry about whether this guy needs respect enough to hurt one of these women.He drank.