She climbed out of her crouch and glanced around the office. Nothing much to see.
“Listen, I want to thank you guys. That was the best time I’ve had in years.”
Later, fully dressed and back out on the street, she walked several blocks before she started laughing. She came to a corner and threw the two Mini-DV cassettes in the gutter. She stepped on each of them, grinding them with her heel, then kicked them into the sewer. All the while, she giggled like a lunatic.
Two couples out for Friday night drinks passed her, glanced her way and kept going.
A moment later the tears began to flow and she could not stop weeping.
Smoke Dugan lay awake in absolute darkness, thinking about death.
Across the room, he heard the furtive rustlings as two of his cats wrestled. A glass of port wine from Portugal sat forgotten on the table at his elbow. She hadn’t called yet and that was not like her. Somewhere in his mind, he knew this, but the problem was he knew other things as well. He lay in his basement apartment, watching the visions imprinted on his brain.
The visions were memories.
For more than a year, he had been free of the things. Then last week, something had happened that brought them all rushing back. He had been walking in the Old Port, enjoying the bright fall day. In fact, just moments earlier he had been out on the Maine State Pier watching four harbor seals frolic in the bay. He had read his morning paper out there on a bench, watching also as the Peaks Island Ferry came in and out. Now he was walking back through the sparse crowds. He was thinking he wanted to have a bite to eat, and he was deciding about the many restaurants available to him along the waterfront.
A man was following him.
Damned if it wasn’t so. Smoke had first noticed him on the pier. He was a 40-something tourist in a gray fleece jacket, jeans and LL Bean boots. He wore a Brooklyn Dodgers replica baseball cap and dark sunglasses. Sure, Smoke had seen him there, registered him with his binoculars and his camera and his leather over-the-shoulder tourist duffel. He had registered him like he registered the Hispanic fishermen in their sleeveless t-shirts with their plastic bait-buckets, the floppy-haired teenagers with their skateboards, and the crusty old salts sitting on the benches, commenting and frowning about the state of the world. Smoke registered everything, scanned everything, and as long as everything stayed where it belonged and acted properly, everything was just fine.
But on the crowded sidewalk of Commercial Street, he felt rather than saw the tourist there behind him. That’s when the antennae began to twitch. Was he really there? What was he doing?
Smoke bumped into a young woman passing with her girlfriend.
“Oh my,” he said, turning to her. “Oh young lady, I am so sorry. Are you all right?”
He touched her shoulders and glanced to his left.
The man was there, following along, 20 feet back. He tinkered with something on his camera. Had he taken another photo just a few seconds ago? Smoke’s grip tightened on his cane.
The young woman smiled. She was a pretty girl, blonde. Her friend had a ring through her nose like a bull in a field. “I’m fine, really. It’s my fault. I should have been paying attention.”
“No, I insist. It was definitely my fault.”
“Well, no harm done.” Both ladies laughed.
The man found something fascinating in a storefront window.
The young lovelies moved on. So did Smoke. He walked along, heavy midday traffic flowing to his right. Abruptly, he turned and stepped into the flow. A car screeched to a halt. The driver leaned on the horn as Smoke waved his cane. He hurried across the street, glancing behind him at the driver who still hurled epithets. The tourist watched him go.
Now, Smoke peered into the dark. He reached and took a sip of his wine.
It didn’t prove anything.
Half the street had watched him. After all, he had made a suicidal plunge into heavy traffic. People must have thought he was a senile old man.
Maybe the man really was a tourist. Maybe he wasn’t. But Smoke couldn’t stay here – couldn’t stay anywhere – forever. That’s what he realized now. He had always known it, but this past year had been so good that he allowed himself to forget. The day would come when the man behind him wasn’t a tourist.
Perhaps the time had come to explain himself to Lola. Tell her the whole story. Ask her to run away with him. There was nothing keeping either of them here.
Would she come? Would she even believe him?
She wouldn’t. It was that simple. Lola grew up in bad circumstances, but she was a good girl. She wasn’t tough. She wasn’t cut out for the life Smoke had led. Few people were. Lola was comfortable with the idea that he was a kindly older man who had made a lot of money building toys for retarded children.
Even that. He laughed at the word. “Retarded.” She hated it when he used it.
“Why can’t you say special?” she said. “Or even developmentally disabled?”
He didn’t know why. He just couldn’t. He loved the children, God knew, but he hated the way people danced around what things were, describing them with words that didn’t explain anything. Hearing impaired for deaf. Vision impaired for blind.
Fuck it.
Since the tourist, Smoke had started setting the traps again. And the traps had brought the dead children back to him. He saw the dark ocean water with flames riding on the surface, the bodies floating like dolls, the sharks gathering in the deep. The adults, okay that was bad. But the children… He saw their big vacant eyes most of all, the life gone from them.
“Shit,” he said and rolled over.
He was fully awake now, itching to call her. Every minute she didn’t call was another minute they had gotten her. He would call her, but that didn’t conform to the rules. The rules were she was a big girl, she had grown up in the Chicago housing projects long before she met him, and she could take care of herself. She would call when she got in.
“Some tough girl,” he said. “Can’t even say the word retarded.”
The phone rang, too loud in the close darkness.
“Hello?”
“Smoke?” It was her.
He smiled. He put the sound of sleep in his voice.
“Yeah, babe. Thought you forgot.”
“Did I wake you?” she said.
“Not really. How’d the audition go?”
“It didn’t… it didn’t go well. I don’t think I’m going to get the job. I don’t think they liked me very much.”
“Well, that’s okay. You’ll get ‘em next time.”
“Sure.”
“We having dinner tomorrow night?” he said. “You, me and Pamela?”
“We sure are.”
He thought he heard her voice shake just a little bit.
“Hey,” he said. “Is everything all right?”
“I’m just tired. It’s been a long day. I’m on my way to bed.”
“Well, I love you,” he said.
There was a pause. Sometimes he feared he said it too much, put too much pressure on her. Damn. She was half his age.
“You don’t have to say it,” he said.
“I love you too, silly.”
When they hung up, Smoke picked up his wine glass. Somewhere in the room, the cats still played.
Smoke saw the flames again. He saw the dead eyes of the children.
He pictured two massive hands, grasping in the dark. They were groping for him, trying to find him. Hands that would seize him and crush him.
Searching, searching.
CHAPTER TWO
Denny Cruz had murderer’s eyes.
That’s why the waiter never looked at him. It wasn’t the four-inch scar that came down the side of his face like a jagged stretch of highway – the scar that he left there against all the best advice of well-meaning people.
“Hey Cruz, you got the money, why don’t you get rid of that scar?” someone would say to him.
“Because I want to remember,” he would answer in a voice that rose just barely above a whisper. In Cruz’s experience, you didn’t need to talk loud to get people’s attention.