Becky wanted to draw him out of it. “Doctor Ferguson,” she said, “what’s your opinion of all this?”
He smiled a little and shook his head. “I think we’d better get our proof.” He felt his pocket for the rustle of paper. His notes on Beauvoy’s hand signals were there, ready for reference in case his memory slipped.
“He means we’ve run out of time,” Wilson said.
“So what else is new. Any of you guys hungry?”
Everybody was very hungry. They wound up ordering two pizzas from a place down the street Beer and Cokes they had in the refrigerator. Becky was just as glad, she didn’t particularly care to cook for four people. She leaned back on the couch crossing her legs, feeling the weight of the two men beside her. “We got everything?” she asked.
“Two radios and the camera. What else is there to get?”
“Nothing I guess. Anybody been upstairs?”
Their plan was to stake out the roof and man it in relays. One would stay there with the camera while the other three waited below. The reason that they didn’t go up in pairs was that they hoped it would help to keep the chance of being scented to a minimum. The three in the apartment would keep in touch with the one on the roof via the handheld radios they had bought. Dick had purchased them at an electronics store, two CB walkie-talkies. They could have checked out a couple of police-issue models but they didn’t want their traffic overheard on the police band. No sense in attracting attention. By tomorrow morning it wouldn’t matter; they would have the pictures they needed. Becky’s eyes went to the camera, its black bulk resting on the dining room table. It looked more like a flat-ended football than a camera. Only the shielded lens, reposing like a great animal eye deep in its hood, revealed the thing’s function. They had all handled it earlier, getting used to the awkward shape and the overly sensitive controls. You could take pictures almost without realizing you had started the camera, and the focusing mechanism could be very frustrating to work if your depth of field was changing rapidly. How soldiers had ever used it in battle was beyond understanding. And it was terribly delicate, threatening to break at the least jostle or to lose its onboard computer if the batteries weakened too much.
But it worked miraculously well when it worked. “Anybody tried it out yet?” Becky asked. “You’re going to be the first.” She nodded. By mutual agreement she would stand the first watch on the roof, eight to ten-thirty. They had divided the hours of darkness into four two-and-a-half-hour segments and allocated the watches. Becky took the first, Ferguson the second. He had argued that he wanted to take his watch in the alley where he could confront the Wolfen, as he called them, personally. But he had been overruled. The third watch, from one until three-thirty, was to be Dick’s. This was the most likely time for the night’s attempt. Always when they had come before, it had been during this period. Dick had insisted on this watch, saying that he was the best choice, the strongest and the most fit. Becky couldn’t deny it. She and Wilson were exhausted, God knew, and Ferguson was showing signs of cracking. Dick was the strongest, it was right that he go at the most dangerous time.
Still, she did not want him to go. She found herself drawn to him in a strange, dispassionate way that she did not associate with their married love. There was something about his vulnerability that made her want to protect him. Physically there was no real attraction, but there was a quality of spirit that attracted her strongly—he had been willing, after all, to put his whole career on the line to keep his father out of a welfare nursing home. He had always been good and kind to her—but there was something inside him that was growing, a kind of wall that shut her out of his heart, kept her away from his secret thoughts. She wanted to be there but he refused her entry, and maybe not only her but himself as well. He brought tenderness and physical intimacy to the relationship but he did not bring himself. The real Dick Neff was as alien to her now as he had been when they first met. And her spirit, after hungering and trying for his love these many years, had simply given up. She knew now what was missing in their relationship and she had begun to try to do what she could to repair the damage. Mostly, it was going to be up to Dick. She longed for him to open himself to her, to give her more than a thin veneer of himself to go with his urgent sexuality, but she felt that in the end he would fail. Exactly why she felt this way she could not say, but she did feel it. Perhaps it came from the coldness she saw in his eyes, and the lust that filled them when she so desperately wanted to see love. Dick had been scarred in a way that many cops are scarred. He had seen too much of life’s miseries to open himself to any other human being, even his wife. When they were first married Dick would come home hollow-eyed with sorrow, unable to articulate his feelings about the horrors he had seen. He would describe them woodenly, all emotion absent from his voice.
There had been a child suicide, a little girl of twelve who had died in his arms of self-inflicted burns. She had pressed herself against a gas stove, then lurched, in flames, through a window into the street.
There had been a mother, pregnant, beheaded by a gang of teenage junkies. He had been first on the scene, witness to the spontaneous abortion and miscarriage delivery of the seven-month fetus.
There had been many others in his years on the street, most of them connected one way or another with drugs. These experiences plus his time in Narcotics had made of him an obsessive, consumed man with only one goal, to destroy the dealers who destroyed the people.
The obsession had to be compromised in so many ways that his hatred of crime had turned into self-loathing, a mockery of his personal worth. Problems, to a man like Dick, caused a slow closing of his heart, a shutting out of life, until there was nothing left but anger and animal lust and a vague, overshadowing sorrow that he could not voice.
Becky knew these things about her husband, and longed to tell him about them. But it was hopeless, and this hopelessness was now driving her away from him. She was rapidly reaching the point where if she could not help him, she would have to leave him.
And there was Wilson. George Wilson, a grumpy, unappealing creature with an open soul. He might grumble and threaten, but you could open Wilson up and get inside. And he loved her with boyish desperation. When his overtures were accepted he was amazed and gratified. He wanted her in a raw, urgent manner that possessed him right down to his core. She knew that he dreamed about her at night, that he held an image of her in his mind’s eye during his waking hours. And they fit one another in strange and satisfying ways.
Such thoughts were dangerous. How could anyone in her right mind want to trade the young, vital Dick Neff for a busted-up old man like Wilson? Well, she was thinking about it more and more lately.
The doorbell rang, and in a few moments they were eating pizza. “You still sulky, Doc?” Becky asked Ferguson. He was brooding more than he should; she was trying to draw him out.
“I’m not sulky. Just contemplative.”
“Like a soldier before a big battle,” Wilson said. “Like me this afternoon.”
“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been in a battle. But let’s just say that sitting up there on that roof half the night isn’t my idea of my proper role.”
“Your idea is to go down to the alley and get yourself killed.”
“We don’t know their capacities, but I think I have the means to communicate with them. On the roof, you’ll be in danger as soon as they become aware you’re there. You’ll be hidden, they’ll see it as a threat.”