like, and what his voice had actually sounded like, he couldn't bring to mind. His father didn't even visit him in dreams.
He always wore his father's Marine Corps ring, but it had never imparted any feeling of what kind of man his father had been.
"Can I bring you anything?" he asked his mother.
She smiled and shook her head. "I've taken my tablets already. You get yourself to bed."
John went to the bathroom and disgustedly pulled down his pants. The rain had washed off most of the half-digested food, but there were still flecks of crab and fragments of tomato on them and he put them in the basin and sluiced them in tepid water. At the same time he turned on the old-fashioned brass faucets to run a bath. He would have preferred a shower, but the washer had worn out and the super hadn't gotten around to fixing it. "You think washers grow on trees?"
While the bath was running, he went into his bedroom. It was a long, narrow room, with a single sawed-oak bed with a dark brown candlewick throw and his pajamas neatly folded on the pillow. All along the wall beside the bed were photographs of classic automobiles—Hudson Hornets and Chevrolet Bel Airs and Packard Hawks—as well as pennants for Richmond's soccer team, the Kickers. John had once stuck up a picture of Pamela Anderson in a wet T-shirt, but his mother had looked at it with such a disappointed expression that he had taken it down.
He looked out of the window. Rainwater was spouting from a broken gutter into the darkened yard below. There was a dazzling flash of lightning and another crash of thunder. It felt as if the storm were right above his head.
He went back into the bathroom and climbed cautiously into the bathtub. Apart from having to walk most of the
201
way home he had worked a double shift today and he felt bone-tired. He lay back and stared at the ceiling. What would his father have thought of him, if he could see him now? A chef in a family diner, instead of a captain in the marines. Pecan pie instead of semper fi.
He soaped his hair and plunged himself under the water to rinse it, his eyes screwed tight shut and his fingers in his ears. As he came up for air, he saw that the bathroom door was wide open.
Odd, he thought. He never left the bathroom door open. His mother wasn't the kind of woman who would sit on the toilet talking to him while he had a bath. In fact she appeared to find sex and nudity not just embarrassing but deeply distasteful. She called it "that sort of thing." John occasionally wondered how he had managed to be conceived at all.
"Mom?" he called out, but there was no answer. She always took two Seconals when she went to bed, so she was probably dead to the world by now.
He stood up in the bath and reached over to the door to close it. But as he did so he was suddenly taken by the feeling that there was somebody standing in the doorway. He couldn't see anybody, but he thought he could hear steady, slightly harsh breathing. It was difficult to be sure, because the bathwater was still slopping from side to side, and thunder was still rumbling over the rooftop, but he could sense a tension in the air, a nearness.
He lowered his left hand to cover himself. "Who's there?" he said, half expecting his mother to appear.
No answer. But the sensation that somebody was standing very close to him was even stronger now. He moved his hand toward the door, waving it from side to side as if he were feeling his way in the dark.
202
There was an immense explosion of thunder, and at the same time something sharp and pointed jabbed him in the right eye, bursting his eyeball. He let out a high-pitched scream and fell backward into the bath with a loud slap of water, knocking his head against the tiles. He grabbed the handrail and tried to sit up, his hand cupping his eye, and he felt a large blob of optic jelly slither between his fingers and slide down his cheek. The pain was unbearable—as if somebody had stuck a red-hot poker into his eye socket.
"God-oh-God-oh-God-oh-God," he babbled, trying to climb out of the bath. "Mom! Mom! Help me! My eye!"
He managed to twist himself around and get himself up on one knee, but then he was roughly pushed back down again, and he actually felt hands gripping him, hands in coarse leather gloves.
"Get off me!" he screamed. "Jesus, get off me!"
But one of the hands gripped his hair and his head was forced under the bathwater. He could hear the watery clonking of his knees against the side of the tub as he struggled to get free, and the crackling of his hair being wrenched out by the roots, but the hand wouldn't let him go. His whole head felt as if it were caving in.
Just when he thought he couldn't hold his breath for a second longer, the hand pulled him up again. He gasped and spluttered and opened his remaining eye, expecting to see who was trying to drown him, but there was still nobody there.
"Let me go, let me go, let me go!" he begged, and there was a moment's pause. He tried again to sit up, but then something sharp stuck into his left eye, too, and everything went black.
"I'm blind!" he screamed. "You've blinded me!"
He thrashed in the bath from side to side, kicking and
203
yammering and letting out whoops of agony. He clawed at the air, trying to find his assailant, trying to climb out, but every time he found the handrail his fingers were pried away from it and he was pushed back into the water.
"What do you want?" he gibbered, and then whooped again because his eyes hurt so much.
There was no answer. He tried one more time to get out of the bath, but when he was forced back yet again, he cowered in the water with his hands over his face and just prayed that this was all a nightmare and that he hadn't been blinded after all and that he would soon wake up and it would be morning.
He thought the water felt hotter than it had before, but that was probably because his injuries had made him more sensitive. Soon, however, he realized that it actually was hotter. Not only that, it was increasing in heat as quickly as the water in a kettle. He sat up and reached blindly for the faucets, but when he found them they were both turned off. The water was heating up spontaneously, and it was already scalding his buttocks and his legs.
"What are you doing to me?" he screeched. "Let me get out, let me get out!"
Again he struggled and kicked, but again he was pushed back into the water. It was so hot now that he felt as if his entire body was burning, and he could hear a deep, thick bubbling noise as it rapidly rose to boiling point.
His agony lasted for less than a minute, but during that minute he discovered hell. He went into total shock, his legs and his arms quivering, his fists gripped tight. He had never thought that pain like this was possible.
The bathwater came to a rolling boil and for the final few seconds of his life he was cooking alive.
204
CHAPTER TWENTY-
FOUR
When Decker walked into his office the next morning, gripping a fifteen-slice pastrami sandwich between his teeth and carrying a cup of espresso and three thick folders under his arm, Sandra and Eunice Plummer were already waiting for him. Sandra was wearing a flowery green dress and a medicine-pink cardigan. Sitting in the corner in a triangle of bright sunlight, she looked simple but saintly. Eunice was wearing a beige pantsuit and a look of irritation.
Decker said, "Mmm, mmm," and jerked his head to indicate that they should follow him over to his desk. He took the sandwich out of his mouth and laid it on top of Erin Malkman's autopsy report on George Drewry. "Good to see you again, Sandra. How can I help?"