She did not dare open her mouth too wide, of course. As it was, the long, deadly canines within pushed into her lower gums slightly, making it appear, to the casual observer, that she was pouting.
"Hi, Alex?" she heard.
She turned her head to the left and saw a tall, thin, ruggedly handsome man dressed in a blue Chevron mechanic's uniform and matching hat. The man was bending over the open hood of a BMW 320i while the man in the driver's seat read a copy of Fortune magazine in the driver's seat.
The woman stopped walking and gave the mechanic her flat come-hither smile. She opened her mouth slightly. "Alex?" she said, her voice the same velvet drizzle it had been at John and Vera Brownleigh's house three nights earlier.
The man dropped a screw into place on the BMW's carburetor. "You don't remember me, do you?"
"Of course I do," the woman answered, still opening her mouth only a little; she knew instinctively the best answers to give her prey.
"I thought so," the man said. "How could you forget old Jimmy Buck, right?" He tightened the screw, fished another one from a spot in front of the radiator, dropped it into place. He was very good at his work, and it showed in the quick, efficient, graceful way he did it.
"I couldn't," the woman breathed.
And something suspicious passed across the man's brow because he'd just realized that this woman was not the woman he'd been with. "Yeah," he said, "good seeing you." He tightened the screw. "Start 'er up," he yelled, and the thirtyish yuppie male in the driver's seat started the BMW, smiled, and craned his well-coiffed head out the window. "What was the problem, Jimmy?"
"Stuck metering valve," Jimmy answered, and closed the hood. He turned to the woman on the sidewalk. He said, having decided at last that she was merely a hooker out of her usual territory, "Go on home, honey. These people don't want nothin' to do with the likes of you."
She said, pretending offense, "Why don't we let them be the judge of that."
The man in the BMW leaned over toward the driver's window and called in his most casual and unassuming voice-as if he merely wanted to do her a favor-"Going anywhere in particular, miss?"
~ * ~
"You believe in possession," Joan Mott Evans said.
Ryerson Biergarten, Creosote running about near his feet, a soft plastic duck tightly clenched in his teeth, said, "We're all possessed by one thing or another. With some of us it's by our work. With others it's by alcohol or drugs. Why can't a very few of us be possessed by things we don't normally see or touch?" It was the paraphrase of a speech he used to give at his night class in parapsychology at New York University. He felt vaguely foolish and embarrassed now because he thought he sounded stiff and formal, which was precisely the opposite tone that he wanted to strike with this woman. Joan picked up on his embarrassment and decided to let him stew in it for a while. So there was silence for a few moments while Ryerson squirmed a bit, then Joan said, "Possession like in The Exorcist, you mean?"
Ryerson was across from her at her small kitchen table. He asked, "Do you believe in demons, Joan?"
"Yes," she answered at once with a firmness that surprised him. "Yes," she said again.
And he, making a guess based on what he was reading from her, asked, "Because of Lila?"
"No," she answered. "You said it yourself, Mr. Biergarten-"
"Rye, please."
"You said it yourself; I have 'the gift,' just like you. So, yes, I know there are demons, not because of Lila, but because I've seen them." She was very uncomfortable, though she tried valiantly to hide it.
Creosote abandoned the soft plastic duck in favor of one of Ryerson's argyle socks-he had a firm, growling bite on it that threatened to tear it from Ryerson's foot. Ryerson bent over, grabbed Creosote by the scruff of the neck with one hand, by the muzzle with the other, and pried the dog's jaws apart. Then he lifted the dog into his lap, looked him squarely in the eye, and said very firmly, pointing a stiff finger at him, "No! Bad dog!"
Joan said, "He doesn't know what you're talking about."
Ryerson looked offended. "Sure he does. I know he does."
Joan shrugged. "Okay, but my experience has been that you've got to show a dog what you're talking about, Rye. Mr. Biergarten," she corrected herself. "As far as he's concerned, all you're telling him is not to sit in your lap."
"Oh, come on. He's not that stupid!"
"Well, he's not human, is he? He's a dog. And dogs are basically dumb."
Ryerson grinned secretively. He could feel that Joan was loosening up. "What sort of demons do you see, Joan?'
Joan said, surprising him again, "No. I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about dogs right now." It was a statement that could easily have sounded petulant, but didn't; it was merely a statement of fact. "We'll slide back into the subject of demons in a few minutes."
Ryerson grinned. "Sure," he said.
She said, "And I've got to tell you that whatever gifts you might have, Rye, a working knowledge of dogs is not high on the list."
~ * ~
The male yuppie, whose name was Alan Pierce, had what he called a "run-to" apartment on Lawrence Street. "You know," he explained, "a place to run to when the world is closing in on me, when the house is closing in on me, when keeping up is closing in on me," all the while smiling his sad, world-weary smile. "My wife has one, too. We have an interesting arrangement, my wife and I." And his world-weary smile altered slightly so it was a worldly-wise smile. "She takes her pleasure where she can, and I take mine where I can, but we reserve our greatest pleasure-giving and taking-for the times when we're together."
The woman with him, who had told him her name was Loni, was seated in one of his two red leather club chairs. She had her legs crossed fetchingly and was pretending to sip at a glass of Perrier he'd given her. She said, "I like that arrangement, Alan."
Alan was standing a few feet away, also with a glass of Perrier in hand. He was dressed in a pair of brown Haggar dress slacks with a knife-edged pleat, a blue striped button-down shirt, and tan RockSports. He had his right elbow cupped in his left palm so he could drink his Perrier without too many possibly clumsy movements, and he was trying very, very hard to make it appear that the sex he literally ached to get on with was of only passing importance to him; consequently, as he drank his Perrier, he looked as if he thought he might be wearing unmatched socks and didn't know how to check gracefully to see if he was or wasn't. He said, pausing in mid-sentence to sip the Perrier, "Pleasure is such a"-sip-"small part of life, isn't it, Loni?"
"No," she said. "It's really all there is to life, Alan."
He didn't know how to respond to that, though he agreed completely with it. He noticed, as possible witty/suggestive remarks passed through his head, that the left side of Loni's white blouse, at her rib cage, seemed to be fluttering slightly, as if a breeze were stirring it. He shifted his Perrier from one hand to the other, so his left elbow, now, was cupped in his right palm. "Life is what we make of it, isn't it, Loni?" he said. "Pleasure is what we make of life." It was a good turn of phrase, he thought.
She laughed despite herself, revealing for a moment the deadly canines. Alan didn't notice. His attention was again on the strange fluttering movements over her rib cage. Suddenly, she seemed to have lost a good bit of her amazing sexuality and was beginning to look bizarre, he thought. Even a little threatening. He said nervously, elbow moving about uncontrollably in his palm, the Perrier sloshing in the glass, "Is that funny?"