Usually, she confessed, she’d wait until she got some other in-house readings before announcing her own reaction to a manuscript. But why wait? She knew everyone was going to love the book, knew Sales would go out of their minds for it, and all she had to do now was figure out just which month to publish. The sooner the better, of course, but not so soon that the book didn’t have all the groundwork laid for it.
And so on.
It was what Roz had told him to expect. Esther had three million reasons to love the book, so how could she not? But her enthusiasm moved him all the same, and he reached for the phone to share it with Susan, then decided it could wait.
Why the hell had she put his hands on her throat? Pressed them there, when he moved to take them away?
Please, she’d urged.
Please what?
He had dinner alone, came back and picked up a collection of O’Hara’s short stories. He skipped through it, reading a couple of old favorites, wishing he could write like that.
On his way back from the bathroom, he checked the rabbit’s dish. Susan had said the cornmeal was disappearing, and he looked for himself and decided she was seeing things. Or, more accurately, not seeing them. He picked up the dish and sniffed it, and it seemed to him that it smelled of tobacco smoke.
Now you’re really being nuts, he told himself. And dumped the dish in the garbage, wiped it out, and added fresh meal from the sack in the refrigerator.
Live a little, he told the rabbit. We’re going to be rich, you can have fresh cornmeal every day for years.
But how’d you get here, anyway?
He looked for his copy of Blake’s poems, found “The Tyger.” There was one line he wanted to check, to make sure he remembered it correctly. Yes, there it was:
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
He put the book back, picked up the rabbit, looked into his little eyes. They were some dark stone, maybe obsidian, and they gave the animal an expression of great alertness, which was all to the good; if you were going to talk to a little turquoise rabbit, you wanted to feel it was paying attention to you.
Why did I pick you up, and why don’t I remember it? And what did I do just before I picked you up, or just after?
And why did she put my hands on her throat?
forty
One purchase the Carpenter had made was a small plastic funnel, and it was proving a handy tool indeed. He had used wide-mouthed fruit juice jars for his first Molotov cocktails, and they’d been easy to fill, though less easy to fit with stoppers. Nor were they readily available by the case in a riverside marina. Thus the beer bottles, and the funnel, which speeded up the task while keeping spillage to a minimum.
The Carpenter filled twelve bottles at a time, stoppered them with the cloth wicks, and carried each full case out of the cabin and onto the open deck, where any fumes would dissipate quickly in the open air. He paused periodically to have a look at the intruder, who had not yet regained consciousness, and who might indeed be dead by now. He’d had a pulse when the Carpenter first checked, but he hadn’t stirred, and it seemed possible that he might have died of a burst blood vessel in the brain, or some other effect of the two blows he’d taken to the head.
His pockets had yielded some treasures, most notably a pair of handcuffs, which encouraged the Carpenter to look further. He’d found a gun, a fully loaded revolver, and maybe this one actually worked. He seemed to recall that pistols had a tendency to jam, as his had evidently done, and he didn’t think that was the case with revolvers. He’d put the pistol back on top of the chest of drawers, held there by the clips, and transferred the intruder’s pistol to his pocket.
Stripping the man, he’d found what he at once recognized as a bulletproof vest. Well, it wouldn’t have kept the Carpenter from putting a bullet into the back of the intruder’s neck, had the gun worked. The Carpenter tried it on and liked the feel of it, the comfort it somehow provided. He’d put his clothes on over it, liking the bulk and weight of it. Then he added the shoulder holster, and transferred the gun from his pocket to the holster. He practiced with it, drawing it, then returning it to the leather holster. He felt as though he were now secretly protected, as if by a guardian angel.
The intruder, in marked contrast, was naked, and entirely vulnerable. He had no body hair, the Carpenter noted, although he had a full head of hair and the beard of a man who’d last shaved in the morning. The Carpenter ran a hand over the smooth skin and wondered at its cause. Some disease? Or had the intruder deliberately removed the hair, perhaps for some religious reason?
Francis Buckram, that was the intruder’s name, according to the cards in his wallet. And he was some sort of policeman, which explained the gun and the handcuffs. It was while he was using those handcuffs to anchor the intruder to the chest of drawers that he remembered where he’d heard that name before, and realized why the man had looked familiar. He’d been the police commissioner once.
And how had he found his way to the Nancy Dee? That was something he might ask the man, if he ever came to. And if it wasn’t necessary to kill him right away.
When the fifth case of bottles had been filled and transferred to the open deck, the Carpenter cast off the lines securing the boat to the pier and maneuvered the Nancy Dee out of the Boat Basin. When he was perhaps twenty yards from the nearest of the moored vessels, he cut the engine and let the boat drift. Then, with a match, he lit the little kerosene lantern.
It was a handy thing, a black sphere eight inches in diameter, flattened on the bottom so it would stay upright, with an adjustable wick at the top. The Carpenter had taken it home from a construction site, where it burned at night to keep trespassers from stumbling into a pit. Now, lit and properly positioned, it greatly simplified the process of lighting the wicks of his firebombs.
He checked his watch. The hour was right, getting on to three in the morning. The Boat Basin was dark and silent. The party had ended in the large houseboat at the southern end of the basin, and the celebrants, like the other houseboaters, were tucked into their bunks. The owners of the other vessels, who lived elsewhere, were either awake or asleep, but in any event they were not here, and thus were of no concern to the Carpenter.
Who picked up a gasoline-filled beer bottle, lit its fuse, and lobbed it high in the air, aimed at a ramshackle houseboat some thirty yards distant.
Before it landed, he had a second bottle in hand.
He was on the verge of consciousness when the first explosion roused him. He opened his eyes, blinked, registered that he was naked, with his right hand cuffed, the other bracelet hooked to the brass pull of the bottommost drawer in a brassbound chest of drawers.
He pulled, but the drawer wouldn’t move, and he saw why. The vertical sides of the chest had extensions that were locked in place to keep the drawers from rolling free in uneven seas. By the time he figured this out there had already been a second explosion, and now there was a third.
And something was burning. He could smell it, and the cabin was unevenly illuminated by the flames.