She looked away from him, looked down at her knees.
“Pretty knees,” Colin said.
“Knobby.”
“No.”
“Knobby and red.”
“No.”
Sensing that it was what she wanted him to do, he put a hand on her knee, moved it up her thigh a few inches, then down again, stroking softly.
She closed her eyes, trembled slightly.
He felt his own body responding.
“It would be dangerous,” she said.
He couldn’t lie to her. He couldn’t minimize the risk just to secure her co-operation. “Yes,” he said. “It would be very, very dangerous.”
She picked up a handful of sand and let it trickle slowly through her fingers.
He gently stroked her knee, her thigh. He couldn’t believe he was touching her like that. He stared at his bold hand with excitement and amazement, as if it had acquired a will of its own.
“On the other hand,” she said, “we’d have the advantage of planning.”
“And surprise.”
“And the gun,” she said.
“Yes. And the gun.”
“You’re sure you can get the gun?”
“Positive.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it. We’ll trap him. Together.”
Colin’s stomach rolled unpleasantly, powered by a strange mixture of energies: desire and fear in equal measure.
“Colin?”
“What?”
“Do you really think I’m… enough?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty?”
“Yes.”
She looked deep into his eyes, and then she smiled and turned away, stared out to sea.
He thought he saw tears in her eyes.
“You’d better go now,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’ll work better if Roy doesn’t realize you and I know each other. If he happens to see us here, together, he might not fall for the trick later.”
She was right. Besides, he had things to do, preparations to make. He got up and folded his beach towel.
“Call me tonight,” she said.
“I will.”
“And be careful.”
“You too.”
“And Colin?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you’re enough, too. You’re plenty.”
He grinned and tried to think of something to say and couldn’t think of anything and turned and raced off, toward the bicycle lockup in the parking lot.
37
The plan required one piece of expensive equipment, and Colin had to raise a considerable sum of money.
He went home from the beach, went up to his room, and opened the big metal bank that was shaped like a flying saucer. He shook it; a few tightly folded bills and a great many coins spilled onto the bedspread. He tallied the lot and found that he had exactly seventy-one dollars-which was approximately one third of what he needed.
He sat on the bed for a few minutes, staring at the money. He considered his options.
Finally he went to the closet and hauled out several large boxes that were filled with comic books, each in a sealed zip-lock plastic bag, preserved in mint condition. He sorted through them and pulled out some of the most valuable editions.
At one-thirty, he took sixty comic books down to Nostalgia House on Broadway. The store catered to collectors of science fiction, first-edition mysteries, comic books, and tapes of old radio shows.
Mr. Plevich, the proprietor, was a tall, white-haired man with a bushy mustache. He stood with his big belly pressed against the counter while he looked through Colin’s offering.
“S-s-some really n-nice items,” Mr. Plevich said.
“What can you give me for them?”
“I c-c-can’t give you w-what they’re worth,” Mr. Plevich said. “I’ve g-got to leave room for my p-p-profit.”
“I understand,” Colin said.
“Actually, I’d advise against s-s-selling these now. They’re all mint c-condition f-f-first issues.”
“I know.”
“They’re already w-worth a good d-d-deal more than you p-paid for them at the newsstand. If you hold on to them for t-t-t-two years or so, they’ll probably t-triple in value.”
“Yeah. But I need the money now. I need it right away.”
Mr. Plevich winked at him. “You have a g-g-girlfriend?”
“Yeah. And her birthday’s coming up,” Colin lied.
“You’ll b-b-be sorry. A g-g-girlfriend will w-walk away sooner or later, but a g-good comic b-b-b-book c-can be enjoyed over and over again.”
“How much?”
“I was thinking one hundred d-d-dollars.”
“Two hundred.”
“Much t-too much. She d-doesn’t n-n-need such an expensive g-g-g-gift. How about one hundred and t-twenty?”
“No.”
Mr. Plevich looked through the batch of comics two more times, and they finally settled on one hundred and forty dollars, cash.
California Federal Trust stood on the comer, half a block from Nostalgia House. Colin gave one of the tellers the coins that had been in his flying-saucer bank, and she gave him some folding money.
With $211 stuffed in his pockets, he went to Radio Shack on Broadway and bought the best compact tape recorder he could afford. He already owned a cassette recorder, but it was bulky; and besides, the microphone didn’t pick up anything farther away than three or four feet. The one he bought for $189.95, on sale, $30 off the regular price, picked up and clearly recorded voices as far away as thirty feet; at least that’s what the salesman said. Furthermore, it was only nine inches long, five inches wide, and just three inches thick; it could be hidden easily.
A few minutes after he got home and stashed the recorder in his room, his mother stopped by long enough to change clothes for a dinner date. She gave him money to eat at Charlie’s Cafe. When she was gone, he made a cheese sandwich and washed it down with chocolate milk.
After supper he went up to his room and experimented with the new tape recorder for a while. It was a fine machine. In spite of its compact size, it provided a clear and remarkably lifelike reproduction of his voice. It was capable of picking up voices from as much as thirty feet away, as promised, but at its maximum range the fidelity was not adequate for Colin’s purposes. He tested the machine again and again and determined that it could record a conversational tone of voice only up to twenty-five feet. That was good enough.
He went into his mother’s bedroom and looked in the nightstands, then the dresser. The gun was in a dresser drawer. It was a pistol. There were two safety catches, and when you switched them off, a pair of red warning dots shone on the blue-black gun metal. When he had told Roy about the pistol, he had said that it probably wasn’t even loaded. But it was. He put the safeties on again and replaced the weapon; it rested on a pile of his mother’s silky panties.
He called Heather, and they discussed the plan again, searching for potential problems that they had overlooked before. The scheme still appeared to be workable.
“Tomorrow, I’ll talk to Mrs. Borden,” Colin said.
“Do you think it’s really necessary?”
“Yes,” he said. “If I can get her to open up even a little bit and get it on tape, it’ll help support our story.”
“But if Roy knows you’ve been talking to her, he might get suspicious. He might realize something’s up, and we’ll lose the advantage of surprise.”
“They don’t communicate well in that family,” Colin said. “Maybe she won’t even tell Roy she talked to me.”
“And maybe she will.”
“We have to risk it. If she tells us something that helps explain Roy, something that explains his motivation, then we’ll have an easier time getting the police to believe us.”
“Well … okay,” Heather said. “But call me after you’ve talked to her. I want to hear all about it.”