The parking meters. Jesus Christ.
He walked back and plugged the university’s twenty-four-hour parking meters. He’d have to remember to look for the campus cops. They checked the parking lots once or twice a night. A ticket would be a disaster.
Druze didn’t feel anything when he killed—revulsion, sorrow, empathy. He didn’t fear much, either. But tonight there was an edge of apprehension: it came as he almost walked away from the meters. Suppose he came back, killed George and only then noticed a ticket on his windshield? They’d have him. Or, like Brer Rabbit with the tarbaby, he’d be chasing around the campus, hunting down the cop with the ticket book. He’d have to kill him to get the book. And then . . .
That’d be impossible. That was a nightmare, not a rational possibility. Druze shivered and hunched his shoulders. He hadn’t expected to get this tangled.
A woman student, carrying books, walked by on the other side of the street, looking resolutely away from him. He went out to University Avenue, keeping an eye on the lighted windows in Peik. Bekker had scouted the building, told him which ones to watch . . . . A black kid in a red jacket hurried by, on the other side of the street. Another kid, white, wearing a white helmet and a daypack, zipped past on Rollerblades.
Druze sauntered now, moving into actor mode, one hand in his pocket, on the handle of the antique German knife-sharpening steel. The steel was as heavy as a fireplace poker, but shorter, eighteen inches long, tapering like a sword, with a smooth hickory handle. He’d shoved the point of the steel right through the bottom of his pocket. The handle was big enough for the steel to hang there on its own, cold down his leg, out of sight. He’d practiced drawing it. It came out smoothly and swung like a pipe wrench, with better balance. It would do the job.
Druze moved off University Avenue and walked across a lawn outside Peik. He was doing a lot for Bekker, he thought, and then: But not only for Bekker. This is for me, I’m the one he’d recognize . . . .
At five minutes after ten, three students carrying books came out the front door of Peik Hall. They stopped on the steps for a moment; then one of the men went left, the man and woman right. Another minute passed, and another knot of students came out of the building, talking, and walked away together. A bank of lights went off in the target windows, then another. Druze drifted out toward University Avenue again, then down Pillsbury, toward the parking lot. He walked to the far end of the lot, stepped between two bushes, waited, waited . . . .
Two men walked into the lot, from along the side of the building. He could hear their voices, at first like a faraway typewriter, clacking, then as human speech:
“ . . . Can’t figure out how they won it, given the way the company failed to warn anybody about the gas-tank leaks . . .” The speaker was the shorter of the two men.
“Juries. You have to keep that in mind, always. There’s no absolutely good way to predict what they’ll do, even with the best screening program. In this particular . . . Oh, shit.” The conversation stopped. Druze started back up the sidewalk toward the building. If there were two of them, he’d have to forget it. “Look at the goddamn tire. It’s only three months old . . . .”
“You want me . . .” the other man offered. A student, Druze thought.
“No, no, I can change it in two minutes,” George said, peering down at the tire in disgust. “But it pisses me off, excuse the expression. I should be able to drive over railroad spikes with those tires . . . . Now, there’s a case for you, Mr. Brekke. Sue the goddamn tire company for me . . . .”
“Glad to . . .”
There was more talk and a clatter of tools as the slender student stood and watched the heavyset professor dismount the spare from the Jeep. Druze, feeling something almost like relief, thought the student would stay. But after watching for a couple of minutes, the man looked at his watch and said, “Well, my wife will be wondering . . .”
“Go on. This’ll just take a minute.”
The student was gone, rolling out of the lot, never looking toward Druze’s bush. Druze let him go, heard his car accelerate down University . . . . The professor had his jacket off, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and he grunted and cursed in the night. The flat came off, the spare went on. He seemed to know what he was doing, working without wasted motion. With a series of quick twists, the spare was lugged down.
Druze took a deep breath, got a grip on the sharpening steel with his right hand and stepped into the parking lot, jingling his car keys with his left hand, moving slowly.
The professor popped open the back of the Jeep, leaving the keys in the lock—everything was moving slowly for Druze now, everything was in needle-sharp focus—lifted the flat, holding it carefully clear of his trousers, and heaved it inside the Jeep.
Druze was ten feet away, checking, checking. Nobody around. Nothing coming on Pillsbury, no cars: The professor, a big, beefy blond man, slamming the back of the Jeep, now turning at the sound of Druze’s keys . . . The keys would be a soothing sound, suggesting that Druze was headed for the last car in the lot . . . .
“Flat tire?” Druze asked.
The professor nodded without a flicker of recognition, although Druze was less than a long step away. “Yeah, damn thing was flat as a pancake.”
“Got it under control?” Druze asked, slowing. He looked around a last time: Nothing. The handle of the sharpening steel was cool in his hand.
“Oh yeah, no problem,” George said, pulling on his jacket. His hands were black with grease from the lug nuts.
“Well . . .” Druze drew the steel behind his leg and stepped on, heading for his car, then pivoted and swung the steel one-handed, half overhead, like a whip, or a machete chopping sugarcane. The steel crashed through the side of George’s head, two inches above his right ear. The professor bounced off the Jeep and down. Druze hit him again, but it was unnecessary: the first blow had crushed the side of his head. A sudden stench told Druze that George’s bowels had relaxed. Neither he nor Bekker had thought about the stink the body could make in the car.
No reason to be furtive now: if anyone came in the next thirty seconds, it was over. Druze grabbed George under the arms, dragged him to the station wagon. The building lights, which had seemed remote and inadequate a few moments before, now seemed bright as stadium lights. Druze snatched open the wagon’s back door and threw the body on the black plastic garbage bags that covered the floor behind the front seat. A short-handled spade was on the floor below the bags. When George’s body hit the floor, it landed on the tip of the blade, and the handle popped up, tearing the bags. Druze swore and pushed the handle down, but now the body rolled . . . .
George was heavy, and his legs were still sticking out of the car. Druze struggled, half frantic, trying to bend the legs; then he grappled with the overweight torso, pulling on the sport coat lapels, not seeing the bloody twisted head, trying to lift the torso farther into the car while he pressed the feet in behind. The spade bounded up and down like a teeter-totter, obstructing everything. Druze was sweating heavily by the time he finished.
Never been scared . . . He was scared now. Not badly, but enough to identify the emotion, a feeling that went back to the days of the burning. The hospital baths, where they peeled the dead skin . . . those had scared him. The transplants had scared him. When the doctor had come to check his progress, that had scared him. He hadn’t been scared since he’d left the hospital. But he felt it now, a distant tingle, but definitely there . . . .
When George was fully inside the car, on the floor behind the front seat, Druze covered the body with more black plastic garbage bags and then folded the back seats down over it. The seats didn’t quite cover it, but to anyone looking casually inside, the wagon would appear empty.
He slammed the door, went back to the Jeep, got the keys out of the back door, shoved them between the curb and the front tire, then checked the meter: ten minutes. Druze took more quarters from his pocket, put in two hours’ worth, then went back to the wagon. Nobody around. No
thing but the lights of Minneapolis, over across the river, and the distant sound of an unhappy taxi horn on Hennepin Avenue.
What if the wagon wouldn’t start? What if . . . The wagon turned over, and he rolled it out of the lot, took a right. Met no cars. Turned onto University Avenue, let a breath out. Past the frat houses . . . Checked the gas gauge for the hundredth time. Full. He drove down Oak Street, then left, and then onto I-94, and pointed the car east toward Wisconsin.
The drive was eerie. Quiet. He had the feeling that the car was standing still, with the lights zooming by, like a nightmare. A cop crossed the overhead ramp at Snelling. Druze kept his eyes glued on the rearview mirror, but the cop continued south on Snelling, and out of sight.
He crossed the Fifth Street exit, past Highway 61, and exited at White Bear Avenue. Drove into a Standard station, called the number Bekker had given him, got the answering machine and spoke a single syllable: “Yes.”
Back on I-94, fifty-five miles per hour all the way, ignoring the signs for sixty-five, through the double bridge across the St. Croix River at Hudson, out of Minnesota and up the Wisconsin side. The interstate mileage signs started on the western ends of each state, so he could count the ascending numbers as he moved deeper into Wisconsin, ten miles, twelve. He took the exit specified by Bekker, heading north.
Four-point-two miles, three red reflectors on a sign at the turnoff. He found it, right where Bekker had said, took the turnoff and bumped down a dirt track. Two-tenths of a mile. The track ended at a simple post-and-beam log cabin, a door in the center, a square window on either side of the door. The cabin was dark. In the headlights, he could see a brass padlock hanging from a hasp on the door.
Beyond the cabin, Druze could see moonlight on the lake. Not much of a lake; almost like a large pond, rimmed with cattails. He turned off the car lights, got out and walked down to the water, his feet groping for the path between the cabin and the water. There was a dark form off to his left, and he stepped next to it, trying to figure out what it was. Boards, on a steel frame, tires . . . a rollout dock. Okay.
On the opposite side of the lake, he could see a single lighted window but not the house around it. There was no sound but the wind in the trees. He stood for a moment, listening, watching, then hurried back up to the car.
George was easier to handle this time, because Druze didn’t have to move so quickly or quietly. He got a flashlight from the glove compartment, then grabbed George by the necktie and the crotch, and hauled him out of the wagon. He threw the body over his shoulder like a sack of oatmeal and carried it down past the end of the track, as Bekker had said, past the tire swing hanging from the cottonwood. He flicked the light off and on, as he needed to spot footing; he was walking diagonally away from the cabin across the lake, so the light wouldn’t be visible at the other house.
Blackberry brambles, dead but still armed, plucked at his clothing. Through the brambles, Bekker had said. Just go straight on back, nobody goes out there. Bekker and Stephanie had explored the place three years earlier, when she had been looking for a lake cabin. They’d seen the “For Sale” sign on the way back from another lake, stopped to look, found the cabin vacant, stayed for ten minutes, then moved on. The cabin was primitive: an outhouse, no running water, no insulation. Summer only. Stephanie hadn’t been interested, and nobody in the world knew they had been there.
Druze pushed through the brambles until the ground went soft, then dumped the body. He flicked the light on, looked around. He was on the edge of a bleak, rough-looking tamarack swamp. Bekker was right. It could be years before anyone came back here. Or never . . .
Druze walked back to the car, got the spade and went to work. He labored steadily for an hour, feeling his muscles overheat. Nothing fancy, he thought; just a hole. He dug straight down, a pit three feet in diameter, the soil getting heavier and wetter as he dug deeper. He hit a few roots, flailed at them with the spade, cut through, went deeper, covering himself with muck. At the end he had a waist-deep hole, flooded ankle-deep with muddy water. He climbed out of it, beaten, grabbed the body by the necktie and pantleg, and dumped it headfirst into the hole. There was a splash, and he flicked the light on. George’s head was underwater, his feet sticking up. His socks had fallen down around very white ankles, Druze noticed, and one shoe had a hole in the sole . . . .
He stood for a moment, resting, the clouds whipping overhead like black ships, the moon sliding behind one, then peeking out, then going down again. Cold, he thought. Like Halloween. He shivered, and started to fill the hole.
No one saw, no one heard.
He backed the car out, not turning on the headlights until he was down the track. He was in St. Paul before he realized he’d forgotten to cut George’s eyes.
Fuck his eyes. And fuck Bekker.
Druze was free of the tarbaby.
Two campus cops cruised past George’s Jeep and flashed the meter. More than an hour on the clock.
“Yes.”
The single syllable was in his ear, like stone, so hard. George was dead.
Bekker, standing in the hallway outside the restaurant entrance, dropped the phone in its cradle and danced his little jig, bobbing up and down, hopping from foot to foot, chortling. Caught himself. Looked around, guilty. Nobody. And they were clean. There were details to be tidied away, but they were details. After he got rid of the Jeep, there’d be no way to connect him to anything. Well: there’d be one way. But that was a detail.
He glanced at his watch: not quite midnight. Druze should be in Wisconsin by now. Bekker walked out to his car, drove to the hospital, parked. Took the cigarette case from his pocket, opened it in the gloom, popped one of the special Contac capsules, inhaled. The coke hit him immediately, and he rode with it, head back, eyes closed . . . .
Time to go. Nobody was following, but if someone was, he could handle it. He and his friends. He walked through the hospital lobby and took the stairs. Down, this time. Used his key to get into the tunnel and walked through the maintenance tunnel to the next building. Everybody did it, especially in the winter. But the cops wouldn’t know.
Careful, he told himself, paranoia . . . there were no cops. The dope was in his blood . . . but what was it, exactly? He couldn’t quite remember. There had been some amphetamines, he always did those, and a lick of the PCP; he’d had some aspirin, a lot of aspirin, actually, for an incipient headache, and his regular doses of anabolic steroids for his body and the synthetic growth hormone as part of his antiaging trip. All balanced, he thought: and for creativity, a taste of acid? He couldn’t remember.
He walked out of the next building, pulling his collar up, the brim of his hat down. Peik Hall was three minutes away. He got close, walked behind a building onto Pillsbury, down the street, pulling on his driving gloves. The Jeep was there, right where it should be. He stooped, found the keys, unlocked the door and got inside. This was the risky part. Fifteen minutes’ worth. But if he got the car to the airport, the cops might be bluffed into thinking that George had taken off on his own . . . .
The campus cops came back ten minutes later. The Jeep was gone. One of the cops saw something round and flat winking up at her in the headlights, and she said, “Something over there?”
“Where?”
“Right there. Looks like money.”
She got out, stooped and picked it up. Lug nut. She tossed it in the back of the squad car.
“Nothing,” she said.
Bekker took the Jeep out the same way Druze had driven, down to I-94, but westbound, to I-35W, south on I-35W and then on the Crosstown Expressway to the airport. He dropped the Cherokee in the long-term parking garage and left the ticket under the visor. Back on the street, he flagged a cab, keeping his hat down against the wind and against identification.
“Where to?” the cabbie grunted. He wasn’t interested in talking.
“The Lost River Theater, on Cedar Avenue . . .”
From the Lost River, it was a twenty-minute walk to the hospital. He
went in the way he’d come out, walked up to his office and sat for ten minutes. He remembered to call the answering machine and, using the touch-tone buttons, ordered it to reset. He waited a few more minutes, impatient, then turned off the lights in his office and went back down to his car.
At home, Bekker stripped off his clothes as he walked up the stairs, dropping them wherever they came off. Stephanie would have been outraged; he smiled as he thought about it. He crawled into his closet and took two tabs of phenobarbital, two more of methaqualone, two of methadone, a heavy hit of acid, five hundred mikes. The warmth was incredible. The drugs unwound as they always did—color sequences, clips from life, fantasies, the face of God—then shaded unexpectedly from yellows and reds through pinks into purples; and finally, the fear growing in his throat, Bekker watched the snake uncurl.
The snake was huge, scaleless, more like an eel than a snake, no mouth, just a long cold form unwinding, curling into him.
And George was there.
He didn’t say anything, George: he simply watched and grew. His eyes were black, but somehow bright as diamonds. He closed on Bekker, the eyes growing larger, the mouth beginning to open, a forked tongue deep inside . . . .
Bekker had killed three whores in Vietnam. He’d done it carefully, confident that he’d never be exposed; he’d worn an enlisted man’s uniform, the Class A greens of a spec-5 killed in a Saigon traffic accident, the uniform dumped at Bekker’s doorstep in a black satchel that had been with the dead man in his jeep.
Bekker had strangled the three women. It hadn’t been hard. They’d been specialists of a sort, unsurprised when he let them know that he wanted to sit on their chests. More surprised when he pinned their hands. Definitely surprised when he clamped his powerful fingers on their throats, crushing the cartilage with a powerful pinch of his thumb and fore-finger . . .
The first one had looked straight into his eyes as she’d died, and it was there that Bekker had had his first hint that she’d seen something beyond.