Bent over low, bent close to the water, the cold damp soaking through his sleeves, Lieutenant Ramsey held Peter Patterson down. The firelight penetrated the black depths, and he could make out the bookkeeper's face down there. He was sickened by the sight of the eyes staring up at him, sickened at the gaping mouth, wavery underwater, and the staring eyes full of what looked to him like pity. He had to turn away from them. He lifted his own eyes to the fl ames: the burning storefront and the dark buildings looming over it on either side. He saw the silhouetted figures of the looters splashing around in the firelight and caught glimpses of their bright, dead faces. He still had one hand on Peter Patterson's shoulder and the other on the knife. With a sickening thrill, he felt-or thought he felt-Peter Patterson's heartbeat pulsing in the knife handle. The pulse weakened and faded away and was gone.
Ramsey wrestled the knife free and straightened, knee-deep in the water. He let the knife slip out of his hand. It plopped into the flood and sank down, gleaming dully and then more dully until it settled, dim silver, on the bottom beside Patterson's body. Strange. For a moment there, Ramsey had felt relief, really wonderful relief. The very moment of the murder had seemed bright and explosive-a bright moment of freedom from the tension leading up to it-a star-toothed, bright, explosive release from the nausea of the self-hatred and shame he had barely been aware of feeling. But as he released his grip on the body, as he dropped the knife and stood, the nova-like blast of freedom shrank back into itself and the blackness at its edges-the blackness of shame, of self-disgust-came sweeping down on him in a torrent ten-fold and it was horrible. Horrible. Before, sitting in the car, it had seemed to him there was no getting out of this. What with Augie and all the people he knew and all the things they expected of him, Ramsey could see no way then to avoid what had to be done. But now, now that it was over, it all looked different. He saw that he could have gotten out-he could've said no at any time-of course, he could have. It was this-this now-that there was no getting out of. This was done and there was no undoing it. It was like a stain, an acid stain; no washing it away. Ramsey had to force his mind into a kind of deadness so he wouldn't feel the full awareness of it all at once. But it was there nonetheless. The stain, the guilt. The shame, the self-disgust. He had made himself a nightmare with no waking ever.
The clammy water swirled around his legs. The cold of it was beginning to reach into him. The cold made the flames he saw seem strange and unreal, all leaping action and no true heat, like a movie or a memory of fire. Ramsey stood in the flood and shivered and gazed at the burning, drowning city. He felt unbearably alone, unbearably exposed to the eyes of the night, which he knew full well were his mother's eyes and the eyes of his mother's God. A THOUSAND MILES away, a week or so later, as evening came, Shannon was working with wood. We'll call him Shannon anyway. He'd had a couple of other names in his life and he'll have one more before this story is finished, but he was Shannon now and it'll do. He was running a draw knife over a block of white ash. White ash was a hard wood to shape and it rotted fast, but he liked the color of it. This block in particular had caught his eye in the art supply store. He could see a woman in it, a woman's face. She was not young but not old either. She was very gentle and sweet, feminine and yearning. It was only the face but he could picture all of her. He could see her standing in the doorway of a house at the edge of a field of grain. She was looking into the distance, watching for her man, hoping he would come back to her.
When Shannon had finished shaving the block down to the right size, he would go at it with his gouges and draw out the woman's features. He could do that. He could see the shapes in wood and carve them. It was a knack he had. No one had taught it to him. He'd just found out about it in the shop in the Hall, the first time he was sent away, when he was still a juvenile. He'd gotten six months for misdemeanor breaking and entering, pled down from a felony. He'd gone to the Hall shop to kill time, and he'd somehow discovered this talent of his. When his 8320 counselor found out about it, he arranged for Shannon to get training as a carpenter. That was supposed to give him an honest profession and keep him out of trouble. It hadn't kept him out of trouble. He still was what he was. But in his spare time, he carved wood. He liked doing it. It had a good effect on him. It made him calm inside and still. It was the only thing that did. His mind got into the rhythm of his hands and he got wrapped up in what he was doing. He began to think and wonder about things, things that were different and interesting, questions that had no answers. Now, for instance, as his two hands worked the draw knife back over the tough off-white surface of the block, he was wondering: Where had this woman come from, this woman whose face he saw? Was she really in the wood to begin with or had his imagination just put her there? If she wasn't in the wood, how did he see her? How had she gotten into his imagination? She wasn't like anyone he knew or remembered. Maybe he had met her somewhere or passed her on the street and forgotten. Or maybe they had never met but she existed anyway and had somehow come into his imagination by ESP or something so that he saw her face in the wood as you might see someone in a dream who later turned out to be real. That might also explain how he could have real feelings about her. Because he did. When he thought of her standing there, waiting for her man in the doorway of the house, when he pictured her face brightening with a smile as she first spotted him coming up the road through the field, his heart lifted. He felt glad, genuinely glad, as if he were the man coming home to her. He even smiled-smiled back at her-as he worked the draw knife over the wood. It seemed too bizarre to him that he could feel this way about someone who didn't exist at all.
This was the sort of thing he wondered about when his mind fell into the rhythm of his hands carving wood. It was stupid probably, but it made him calm and still inside and nothing else did.
Shannon wasn't sure how old he was, but he was about thirty-one or -two. His driver's license said thirty-two and he knew it was around there somewhere. He was just over six feet tall, lean, broad-chested, and muscular. He had a long, rugged face with lines down the sides and around the eyes that made him look thoughtful and sad. He was wearing jeans now and no shirt. Sawdust clung to the sweat on his chest and arms.
The warmth of day lingered in the Southern California evening. The air smelled of eucalyptus and the sea. Shannon was standing in the little square of yard behind the three-story apartments, where he lived on the top floor. He was using the workbench he'd set out there among the lawn chairs.
He was about to lay the draw knife aside and open his roll of gouges, but he noticed the long light was finally failing. Another ten minutes and it would be too dark to go on. It wasn't worth beginning the next stage of the sculpture.
Shannon sighed and straightened, taking one hand off the knife and pressing the heel of his palm into his back as he stretched. As quick as that-as soon as he stopped carving-he remembered what he had to do tonight.
On the instant, his good feeling and his calm were gone.
Benny Torrance was coming. They were going to do a job. Shannon knew he shouldn't be doing jobs anymore, but somehow he kept doing them anyway. People called and asked him to come in on something, and he knew he should say no, but he never did. He needed the money, for one thing. The carpentry work had been sporadic lately. But it wasn't just that. Even when he was working full-time, he still did break-ins. He needed the buzz, the thrill of them. It was like he was addicted to it. Day-to-day life got on his nerves after a while. When he was carving wood, he was calm, it was all right, but when he wasn't, he needed something else. Day-to-day life made his skin crawl.