You bastard!" he shouted, pushing his way back into the living room. "Show yourself, you son of a bitch, where are you?"
He went back to the kitchen and the master bedroom but there was still nobody there. "I'm coming to get you!" he yelled. "I'm coming to get you and you're going to suffer for this!"
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It was then that he saw himself in the mirror, naked, with his gun in his hand, but not bloodied at all. He looked at himself for a moment, and he was just about to go back to the second bedroom when Maggie reappeared, intact, unharmed, and still wearing his rapidly drying necklace.
"Decker," she said. She went up to him and put her arms around him and held him close. "I don't know what's wrong, Decker, but I think you need some help."
"I'm fine, I'm okay. I'm stressed, that's all."
She shushed him by kissing her fingertips and touching his lips. "This is not the right time for us, lover man. Maybe it never was. This is the time to say that it was fun while it lasted."
He looked into her eyes and they were darkest brown. "Yes," he admitted. "Maybe you're right. It was fun while it lasted."
She sat and watched him as he dressed, and then unloaded his revolver and kissed each of the bullets. "There's some kind of fire burning inside you, Decker Martin," she said. "I hope you find a way to put it out."
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CHAPTER TWENTY‑
THREE
The storm broke just after eleven o'clock. Lightning walked up the James River like the Martian tripods in The War of the Worlds. Thunder bellowed all the way across the city from Mechanicsville to Bon Air, and the rain crashed down in such torrents that the storm drains all along Canal Street and Dock Street were gushing water and the Richmond Fire Department was called to pump out basements and cellars all along the waterfront.
John Mason left Appleby's Restaurant on East Main Street just two minutes shy of midnight, and it was still raining hard. He hadn't brought an umbrella to work that afternoon but he had looked in the lost-property closet and borrowed a ladies' umbrella with splashy red poppies on it and three broken spokes. It didn't do much to keep him dry. The rain was clattering down so fiercely that it bounced off the sidewalk and soaked the bottom of his pants.
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John had celebrated his thirtieth birthday last week and the rest of the staff at Appleby's had arranged for a Strip-AGram. In the photographs, with a half-naked redhead perched on his knee, John looked as if he had just been electrocuted, his thin mousy hair standing up on end and his teeth clenched. The red eyes hadn't helped, either.
John liked girls, but he had always found it difficult to talk to them. Edmundo, who worked in the kitchens with him, had a gorgeous black-haired girlfriend called Rita, and the way Edmundo spoke to Rita always amazed him. Do this, Rita, do that, Rita, bring me this, bring me that, shut up your face, you za-za. And yet Rita adored Edmundo and was always nuzzling him and kissing him. John was sure that if he spoke to a girl like that he would have his face slapped, twice, once in each direction.
All the same, he was fixed to go on a date tomorrow with a girl called Stephanie, to the TheatreVirginia on Grove Avenue to see I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. In actual fact Stephanie was a friend of his sister Paula and the only reason he had been invited was to make a foursome with Paula's boyfriend, Carl. John hated Carl. He was a sixfoot-four-inch loudmouth who sold paneling and who was forever slapping John on the back and calling him "chief." But he liked Stephanie. She was quiet, with large glasses, and lank brown hair, and she enjoyed walking and reading and all the other solitary activities that John did.
He hailed a taxi and it pulled into the curb and drenched him in filthy rainwater up to his knees. The cabbie looked like the late Scatman Crothers, from The Shining. "Hell of a night," he said, as John climbed into the backseat, struggling to fold his broken umbrella.
"Sure is. May Street, please. Corner of Grove."
As the cabbie drove off, John sniffed and realized that there was a strong acidic smell in the back of the taxi. What
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was more, the seat of his pants was soaked. He rubbed his hand on the vinyl seat and then he sniffed his fingers. Somebody had vomited in the taxi and he had sat in it.
"Stop!" he shouted, rapping on the partition.
The cabbie said, "What?"
"I said stop! Somebody's puked on the seat!"
"Somebody's what?"
At last the cabbie pulled into the curbside again. John climbed out and said, "Somebody's puked on the seat. For Pete's sake, look at my pants."
"Shit," the cabbie said. "Just started my shift, too. Why don't folks keep their previously enjoyed food to themselves?"
John had to walk the rest of the way home. The umbrella refused to open and in any case he didn't really care if he got any wetter than he already was. Every time he breathed in he caught the sharp smell of vomit—alcohol and seafood and tomatoes.
Home was a second-story apartment he shared with his widowed mother on May Street, at the back of an ugly, squarish, brown-brick building that had been built in the 1900s as a hostel for disturbed children. John let himself in and trudged up the steep dark stairs. He had to feel his way because the lightbulb on the landing had gone again. The building's super was a shriveled monkey of a man and probably the most argumentative person that John had ever known. He would refuse to change lightbulbs because the sun was going to come up in only a few hours, and they wouldn't be needed anymore.
John opened the door to his mother's apartment. The living room was gloomy and smelled of dead-flower water. The kitchen door was a few inches ajar and as usual John's mother had left the portable television flickering with the sound turned off. He took off his soaking-wet shoes and left them on the welcome mat behind the door. Then he tippy‑
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toed across the carpet to the kitchen. His mother had left a plate of chocolate-chip cookies on the table and a note saying Please take my yellow dress to the cleaners tomorrow.
On the TV screen, Vincent Price was desperately trying to escape the fire in House of Wax. John switched it off and went along the corridor toward the bathroom.
"Johnsy?" his mother called. "You're home late." "I couldn't get a cab."
"You're not wet, are you?"
He opened the door to his mother's bedroom. She was sitting up in bed with a white scarf on her head so that she looked as if she had been having chemotherapy. She was a very thin woman, with an almond-pale face and smudges of grief under her eyes. She always gave the impression that if anybody touched her they would cause her actual physical pain.
"You're drenched," she said. "Get out of those clothes and run yourself a nice hot bath."
Lightning flashed behind the brown floral drapes, and then almost immediately the house was shaken by deafening thunder, as if somebody had tipped a mahogany wardrobe down the stairs.
"Some storm, huh?" John said. "The whole of Dock Street was flooded."
"What did you have to eat tonight? You ate, didn't you?" "Sure, I had fried chicken."
"You and your fried chicken. Your father loved his fried chicken, too."
"Right—I'd better take a bath." His pants were sticking to him and he didn't want to get into one of those long reminiscences about his father. He had only been seven when his father was killed, and he could barely remember him. He knew what he looked like, of course: There were photographs everywhere. But what he had felt like, and smelled
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