Lissa had been assigned to him, he thought. (Did he think it? Or was it Amy's thought?) He was a natural for Lissa. He was the type that went for her specialized bait.
He was the type. That seemed a key, somehow. A type is compulsive about something.
It had started long before Lissa's effortless seduction of him. He seemed to see an unbroken linkage of cause and effect stretching back to his days living with Amy, in New York.
It began with his need to blindly chase girls. Why had he started cheating on Amy? Was it just her sickness? Or had that been a handy rationale? Some of the time he'd been happy with her – and he'd been frightened by his happiness with Amy.
The car swerved on the newly slick road, threatening to spin, but Lissa kept it on track, and now they'd come to a straight stretch. She used the opportunity to close the convertible roof the rest of the way. Absently, Prentice helped her lock it in place.
There'd been something missing in his life with Amy – something more than the stability sacrificed to her erratic behavior. He'd missed the sense of validation that came from new seductions, new relationships. He remembered something a male character in one of his scripts had said: JACK
Women to me are doorways. They're a way into another would – an alien country where the landscape is made up of each woman's distinctive personality, her tastes, her desires, the way she feels under my hands and the way she feels about my hands… And me, I'm an explorer, is all. I can't be satisfied with exploring only one frontier…
He remembered, too, what Amy's reaction had been, reading that. "An explorer? That's a comfortable euphemism for it."
Euphemism for philanderer. For a guy who needed to have affairs. Who needed that periodic input of reassurance that he got from making a new girl. But there was something else, underlying the urge. A concealed anger against all women.
Riding passively along in the BMW, distantly aware that Lissa was saying something to him, trying to snag his attention once more, he was nearly overwhelmed with a sudden and infinitely tragic yearning for Amy.
And that seemed to pierce a membrane of some kind…
When he turned to see Lissa, all filters were – for one moment – quite gone. He saw Lissa as she really was. Seeing her spiritually and, in some etheric sense, physically.
The sickly, silvery-grey protoplasm of wormstuff had grown out of her mouth and eyes and out from psychic pressure points in the throat and temple – the worm had taken her over and grown to surround her, its great lamprey mouth, ringed and razoreid, turning toward him when she looked his way… its body, thick as a primed firehose, sliding through her body like a maggot through rot. Sliding through her. Squirming. A part of her and independent from her, as she calmly drove the car…
The worm had clusters of polyps for eyes. They could convey no human expression, but he saw clearly its longing and hunger as it looked at him.
Prentice shrieked like an infant stepping on a scorpion.
He flailed, and his hand closed over the steering wheel. He wrenched it toward the brush to one side of the road. Anything to get out of the car.
The BMW squealed and Lissa shouted in furious surprise. A flash of a concrete post pebbled with tiny round stones and then the car shuddered into a stand of Manzanita, the trees' load of rainwater shell-bursting over the windshield. A sickening thump as Lissa struck the windshield at the same moment; some of her blood splashing across its inside. The car jerked back with finality, the engine dying. Prentice was distantly aware that he'd thumped his own forehead on something; that Lissa had been badly hurt. He clawed at the door, scarcely able to see for the blinding pain. Lissa clutched at his elbow, hissing. He didn't want to look at her. He wrenched free of her weak grip and jerked the door open, flung himself from the car. Head pain grinding with every step, he ran into the brush and up into the hills. She was yelling something after him, but it didn't sound as if she was following.
After perhaps a quarter mile, his breath coming in panting stabs, he stopped and looked around. He had to clear his eyes of the lashing rain, before he could quite focus – it was dark out here, though a little light came from up the hill. A house up there. The Ranch? It was too dark and rainy to tell. He was standing on the edge of a gravel road. It forked, a little ways to his left. He stepped onto the road, and walked unsteadily up to the fork. He could taste blood mixed with rainwater, running down from his forehead.
He stood there, blinking stupidly at the fork in the road. Should he go up one of these forks, or go back down the road the other way?
Go up the hill, and then to the right, Amy told him. Quite clearly. Look for a red pick up truck…
Prentice staggered up the right-hand fork, feeling gingerly at the ragged lump on his forehead. He kept on, more or less blindly, thinking about Lissa. Wondering if the thing could pull free of her and come slithering up the road behind him.
The rain slackened to a mist, but he was already soaked to the skin, his clothes rasping and heavy. Up ahead, off the road to the right, was a soft, yellow light. In the oily shine from a small square of window, he could just make out the outline of a one-room shack, and to one side of it, a pickup truck.
Culver City
Garner found the apartment easily enough. But it was locked and dark and no one answered the door. He stood on the dark landing, trying to decide what course to take now. Get something to eat and come back, maybe. He still had a little money. He was getting hungry, and his fractured ribs were aching; his nose and head, too. He needed more codeine, and some food. The codeine would upset his stomach, though. And he probably didn't deserve to eat. For all he knew the bastard motherfucker who had Constance was starving her in some basement.
Once more the sludge-wave of post-cocaine depression rose up around him…
He forgot about it, for a moment, when someone pushed the muzzle of a gun against the back of his head. All he could think of to say was probably the wrong thing, but he said it anyway. "You sure move quietly, man. I didn't hear you comin'."
"I saw you up here trying my door knob, went to my car and got my gun and came back real quiet. It worked out."
Garner could see the guy out of the corner of his eye. Gangly, narrow face, big nose. A glitter of honed intelligence. An expression of triumph. He was the kind of guy who liked guns and had been just waiting for the opportunity to use his… "How many other places here you break into?" the guy asked.
Garner said. "I don't know why I tried the knob. Not even thinking. I'm on codeine, it makes me fuzzy. You're Jeff Teitelbaum?"
He looked startled for a second, then smiled. "So you can read names off mailboxes."
"I guess I look pretty bad, huh? Haven't shaved. Hair all fucked up with bandages. Like a street person. Probably smell like one too. Shit, I feel like one -"
"Bandages…" Something seemed to occur to
Teitelbaum. "Jesus Christ. You're with those lunatics who murdered Kenson!"
"I don't know any Kenson. But I came here partly because of a murder. Detective named Blume. I found Blume's body over in his place… and uh…"
Teitelbaum's jaw had dropped. He took a step back and slowly lowered the gun. Garner turned and looked at it more closely. Holy shit. It was a. 357.
"You really need that thing?" Garner asked. "A gun like that the bullet would probably keep going through my head and right through somebody's window. Must be frustrating to be a gun freak and not get a chance to use it much."
Teitelbaum scowled. "What the fuck you know about Blume?"
"I hired him to find my kid. You lost a child? A boy – Mitch, isn't it? I heard your answering machine message to him…"
"So that's it…"
Garner tried to ignore the gun and spoke fast. "Whoever's been doing the Wetbones killings took my daughter and left her finger with somebody else's bloody bones. Blume thought there was a connection between them and somebody named Denver?"