girls and boys. There weren’t women cops back then, you know, not real
cops, just office workers in police stations, radio dispatchers, that
sort of thing. I had no role models. But I knew I’d make it someday. I
was determined. All the time I was growing up, there was never once
when I thought about being anything else but a cop. I never even
considered getting married, being a wife, having kids, being a mother,
because I knew someone would only come along and shoot my husband or
take my kids away from me or take me away from my kids. So what was the
point in it? I would be a cop.
Nothing else. A cop. And that’s what I became. I think I felt guilty
about my father’s murder. I think I believed that there must’ve been
something I could have done that day to save him. And I know I felt
guilty about my mother’s death. I hated myself for not giving the
police a better description of the man who shot my dad, hated myself for
being numb and useless, because if I had been of more help to them,
maybe they’d have gotten the guy before he killed Mama. Being a cop,
stopping other creeps like that junkie, it was a way to atone for my
guilt. Maybe that’s amateur psychology. But not far off the mark. I’m
sure it’s part of what motivates me.”
“But you haven’t any reason at all to feel guilty,” Jack assured her.
“You did all you possibly could’ve done. You were only A!”
“I know. I understand that. But the guilt is there nevertheless. Still
sharp, at times. I guess it’ll always be there, fading year by year,
but never fading away altogether.”
Jack was, at last, beginning to understand Rebecca Chandler-why she was
the way she was. He even saw the reason for the overstocked
refrigerator; after a childhood filled with so much bad news and
unanticipated shocks and instability, keeping a well-supplied larder was
one way to buy at least a small measure of security, a way to feel safe.
Understanding increased his respect and already deep affection for her.
She was a very special woman.
He had a feeling that this night was one of the most important of his
life. The long loneliness after Linda’s passing was finally drawing to
an end. Here, with Rebecca, he was making a new beginning. A good
beginning. Few men were fortunate enough to find two good women and be
given two chances at happiness in their lives. He was very lucky, and
he knew it, and that knowledge made him exuberant. In spite of a day
filled with blood and mutilated bodies and threats of death, he sensed a
golden future out there ahead of them.
Everything was going to work out fine, after all. Nothing could go
wrong. Nothing could go wrong now.
“Kill them, kill them,” Lavelle said.
His voice echoed down into the pit, echoed and echoed, as if it had been
cast into a deep shaft.
The indistinct, pulsing, shifting, amorphous floor of the pit suddenly
became more active. It bubbled surged, churned. Out of that molten,
lavalike substance-which might have been within arm’s reach or, instead,
miles below-something began to take shape.
Something monstrous.
“When your mother was killed, you were only-”
“Seven years old. Turned seven the month before she died.”
“Who raised you after that?”
“I went to live with my grandparents, my mother’s folks.”
“Did that work out?”
“They loved me. So it worked for a while.”
“Only for a while?”
“My grandfather died.”
“Another death?”
“Always another one.”
“How? ”
“Cancer. I’d seen sudden death already. It was time for me to learn
about slow death.”
“How slow?”
“Two years from the time the cancer was diagnosed until he finally
succumbed to it. He wasted away, lost sixty pounds before the end, lost
all his hair from the radium treatments. He looked and acted like an
entirely different person during those last few weeks. It was a ghastly
thing to watch.”
“How old were you when you lost him?”
“Eleven and a half.”
“Then it was just you and your grandmother.”