He gasped in fear, and he almost let go of the purse, almost ran. In a blink, however, she was transformed into a defenseless old woman again. Abruptly she capitulated. Like pop beads, the swollen knuckles of her twisted hands seemed to come apart, and her finger joints went slack. She lost her grip, releasing the purse with a small cry of despair.
Emitting a menacing snarl that served not only to frighten the old woman but also to chase away Billy's own irrational terror, he shoved her backward into a curbside trash container, and he bolted past her with the satchel-size purse under his arm. He glanced back after several steps, half expecting to see that she had fully assumed the form of a great dark bird of prey, flying at him, eyes aflame, teeth bared, talon-hands spread and hooked to tear him to bits. But she was clutching at the trash container to keep her balance, as age-broken and helpless as she had been when he had first seen her.
The only odd thing: She was looking after him with a smile. No mistaking it. A wide, stained-tooth smile. Almost a lunatic grin.
Senile old fool, Billy thought. Has to be senile if she finds anything funny about having her purse snatched.
He could not imagine why he had ever been afraid of her.
He ran, dodging from one alleyway to another, down side streets, across a sun-splashed parking lot, along a shadowy service passage between two tenements, and onto a street far removed from the scene of his latest theft. At a stroll, he returned to his parked car and put the old woman's black purse in the trunk with the others taken elsewhere in the city. At last, a hard day's work behind him, he drove home, looking forward to counting his take, having a few icy beers, and watching some TV.
Once, stopped at a red traffic light, Billy thought he heard something moving in the car trunk. A few hollow thumps. A brief but curious scraping. When he cocked his head and listened closer, however, he heard nothing more, and he decided that the noise had only been the pile of stolen purses shifting under their own weight.
* * *
Billy Neeks lived in a ramshackle four-room bungalow between a vacant lot and a transmission shop, two blocks from the river. The place had belonged to his mother, and it had been clean and in good repair when she had lived there. Two years ago, Billy had convinced her to transfer ownership to him "for tax reasons," then had shipped her off to a nursing home to be tended at the expense of the state. He supposed she was still there; he didn't know for sure because he never visited.
That evening in April, Billy arranged the eight purses side by side in two rows on the kitchen table and stared at them for a while in sweet anticipation of the treasure hunt to come. He popped the tab on a Budweiser. He tore open a bag of Doritos. He pulled up a chair, sat down, and sighed contentedly.
Finally, he opened the purse that he had taken off the woman outside Bartram's and began to calculate his "earnings." She had looked well-to-do, and the contents of her wallet did not disappoint Billy Neeks: four hundred and nine dollars in folding money, plus another three dollars and ten cents in change. She also carried a stack of credit cards, which Billy would be able to fence through Jake Barcelli, the pawnshop owner, who would also give him a few bucks for whatever other worthwhile loot he found in the purses. In the first bag, those miscellaneous fenceable items included a gold-plated Tiffany pen, a matching gold-plated Tiffany compact and lipstick tube, and a fine though not extraordinarily expensive opal ring.
The young mother's purse contained only eleven dollars and forty-two cents. Nothing else of value. Billy had expected as much, but this meager profit did not diminish the thrill he got from going through the contents of the bag. He regarded snatching as a business, yes, and thought of himself as a good businessman, but he also took considerable pleasure simply from examining and touching his victims' possessions. The violation of a woman's personal property was a violation of her too, and when his quick hands explored the young mother's purse, it was almost as if he were exploring her body. Sometimes, Billy took unfenceable items — cheap compacts, inexpensive tubes of lipstick, eyeglasses — and put them on the floor and stomped them, because crushing them beneath his heel was curiously almost like crushing the woman herself. Easy money made his work worthwhile, but he was equally motivated by the tremendous sense of power that he got from the job; it stimulated him, it really did, stimulated and satisfied.
By the time he'd gone slowly through seven of the eight purses, savoring their contents, it was seven-fifteen in the evening, and Billy was euphoric. He breathed fast and occasionally shuddered ecstatically. His oily hair looked oilier than usual, for it was damp with sweat and hung in clumps and tangles. Perspiration glimmered on his face. During his exploration of the purses, he knocked the open Doritos off the kitchen table but didn't notice. He opened a second beer, but he never took a taste of it; now it stood warm and forgotten. His world had shrunk to the dimensions of a woman's purse.
Billy had saved the crazy old woman's bag for last because he had a hunch that it was going to provide the greatest treasure of the day.
The hag's purse was big, almost a satchel, made of supple black leather, with long straps and with a single main compartment that was zippered shut. He pulled it in front of him and stared at it for a while, letting sweet anticipation build.
He remembered how the crone had resisted him, holding fast to the bag until he thought that he might have to flick open his switchblade and cut her. He had cut a few women before, not many but enough to know that he liked cutting them.
That was the problem. Billy was smart enough to realize that, liking knife play so much, he must deny himself the pure pleasure of cutting people, resorting to violence only when absolutely necessary. If he used the knife too often, he would be unable to stop using it, would be compelled to use it — and then he would be lost. Although the police expended no energy in the search for mere purse snatchers, they would be a lot more aggressive and relentless in the pursuit of a slasher.
Still, he had not cut anyone for several months, and by such admirable self-control, he should have earned the right to have some fun. He would have taken enormous pleasure in separating the old woman's withered meat from her bones. Now he wondered why he had not ripped her up the moment that she had given him trouble.
He had virtually forgotten how she'd briefly terrified him, how she'd looked less human than avian, how her bony hands had seemed to metamorphose into wicked talons, and how leer eyes had blazed. Deeply confirmed in his macho self-image, he had no capacity for any memory that had the potential for humiliation.
With a growing certainty that he was about to find a surprising treasure, he put his hands on the purse and lightly squeezed. It was crammed full, straining at the seams, the mother of all purses, and Billy told himself that the forms he felt through the leather were wads of money, banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills.
His heart thumped with excitement.