Alison reached the hallway, but as she did so she unexpectedly stopped. Jerry stared at her, willing her to move, willing her to answer the door, but she didn't. She stayed where she was, in the colorless gloom; and she was swaying, like a woman who has suddenly remembered something dreadful.
"Alison?" he croaked. "Alison?"
She tilted—and then, in a succession of impossibly choreographed movements, like a mad ballet dancer, arms waving, knees collapsing, she began to fall to the floor. As she did so, she pirouetted on one heel, so that she turned back to face him. Her eyes were staring at him in amazement.
For a moment Jerry couldn't understand what had happened to her. But then her head dropped back as if it were attached to her body on nothing but a hinge. Her throat had been cut so deeply that she had almost been beheaded, and blood suddenly jumped up from her carotid artery and sprayed against the ceiling.
A minute later, when the paramedics kicked the front door open, they found Alison lying on her back in a treacle-colored pool of blood, and Jerry crouched down next to her, whimpering and whispering and trying with sticky hands to fit her head back onto her neck.
8
CHAPTER TWO
Decker sat up in bed and peered shortsightedly at his wristwatch. "Holy shit! Two-thirty already. Time I wasn't here."
Maggie grinned at him from underneath a tent of sheets. "Can't you stay for dessert, lover?" She had a thick, husky voice, as if she had been smoking too many Havana cigars.
"Ex-squeeze me? What was that—what we just did? Wasn't that dessert?"
"That? That was only a little something to tickle your palate."
"My palate? You were trying to tickle my palate? I'll tell you something about you, sweet cheeks. You are in serious need of anatomy lessons." Decker swung his legs out of bed and retrieved his glasses from the carpet. "Listen, I have to be back at headquarters about forty minutes ago. What did you do with my shorts?"
"You've lost your appetite, Decker, that's your trouble. You're growing weary of me."
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He leaned across the bed and kissed her smartly on the forehead. He wasn't growing weary of her at all, but, Jesus, she was almost inexhaustible. She was a handsome, ripe, huge-breasted woman with skin the color of burnished eggplants. Her eyes had a devilish glitter and her glossy red lips always looked as if they were about to say something outrageous, and mostly they did. She snatched back the sheets to give him a split-second glimpse of those tiny gold and silver beads she wove into her pubic dreadlocks. Then instantly she bundled herself up again and gave him a dirty laugh.
"Hey," Decker protested, tapping his forehead. "I'm not weary up here but I'm worn out down there. Give me a break, will you?"
"Just showing you what's on the bill of fare, lover. If you don't want it . . . well, that's your choice."
"Listen—I have to go or Cab will assassinate me."
"He'd assassinate you even more if he knew where you were."
Decker switched his cell phone back on. Then he found his shorts under the bed and hopped into them like a one-legged rain dancer. He lifted his scarlet necktie and his crumpled white short-sleeved shirt from the back of the chair and retrieved his black chinos from the other side of the room. Maggie lay back on the pillow watching him dress. "So when am I going to see you again? And don't give me that 'whenever' stuff."
"I don't know. Whenever. You know what my caseload's like."
"Oh, you mean Sandie in dispatch."
"Sandie and me, that was over months ago."
"What about Sheena?"
"Finished. Kaput. I haven't seen Sheena since Labor Day."
10
"Naomi?"
"What is this, the third degree?"
"More like every woman in the Metro Richmond telephone directory, lover man."
Decker went into the bathroom to comb his hair and straighten his necktie. He would have been the first to admit that he didn't exactly look like a love god. But he was lean and rangy, with thick black hair in a rather bombastic pompadour, sage-green eyes, and a kind of etched, half-starved look about him that seemed to appeal to practically every woman he met. He liked his nose, too. Narrow. Pointed. Very Clint Eastwood.
His cell phone played the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth. Maggie mischievously reached across the bed and tried to snatch it off the nightstand, but Decker got there first. "Martin," he said, and touched his finger to his lips to tell Maggie to stop giggling.
"Martin, where the hell have you been?"
"Oh, hi, Cab." To Maggie, "It's Cab, for Christ's sake. Yeah, I'm sorry I'm running late, Cab. I had to swing by Oshen Street and talk to Freddie Wills. Well, he said he had something on that business on St. James Street. But listen, I'll be there in five."
"Forget coming back to headquarters. There's been a stabbing on Davis Street. I want your ass over here now." "Anybody dead?"
"Unless you know of a cure for missing head, yes."
"Jesus. Give me fifteen minutes. I'll pick up Hicks on the way."
"Hicks is already here. Just haul your rear end down here as soon as you can."
Decker sat down on the end of the bed to pull on his loafers. Maggie rose out of the white sheets behind him like
11
a gleaming black Venus rising from the foam and wrapped her arms so tightly around his neck that she almost throttled him.
"Cab's going fishing this weekend," she said, her breath thundering hot in his ear. She smelled like cinnamon and honey and sexual juices and sweat. "Maybe you'd be a dutiful fellow officer and come around for dinner on Saturday evening, keep me company."
"Dinner with dessert?"
"Of course dinner with dessert. Dinner with three desserts."
Decker unwound her arms and stood up. He buckled on his shoulder holster with its absurdly huge nickel-plated Colt Anaconda .45. He lifted the revolver out, opened the chamber, and emptied out all of the shells. Then he kissed the tips of them, one by one, and thumbed them back in again.
"You never told me why you do that," Maggie said. "Hmm? Oh . . . superstition, that's all."
With an operatic chorus of tires, Decker pulled up outside 4140 Davis Street and climbed out of his shiny black Mercury Grand Marquis. This was an elegant, expensive district, with redbrick sidewalks and shady trees and nineteenth-century houses with white-pillared porches. Usually, at this time of day, it was soporific and almost completely deserted, with no sign of life except for sleeping cats and American flags stirring idly in the breeze, but this afternoon there were four squad cars parked diagonally across the street with their lights flashing, an ambulance, a van from the Richmond Coroner's Department, two TV crews, a crowd of uniforms and forensic investigators and reporters and all of those people who turn up at homicide scenes
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shouting on cell phones and looking harassed, even though Decker could never work out what most of them actually did. He even recognized Honey Blackwell from the mayor's office, all 235 pounds of her, in a daffodil-yellow suit and a daffodil-yellow bow in her hair.
"Afternoon, Ms. Blackwell."
"Afternoon, Lieutenant. Tragic business."
"Must be, if it took you away from Ma-Musu's." He was referring to her favorite restaurant, Ma-Musu's West African restaurant on Broad Street.
"You have a sharp tongue on you, Lieutenant. One of these days you're going to cut your own throat with it."
"Not a very tasteful remark to make, Ms. Blackwell, under the circumstances."