my father made sense when all the facts were known, why take the
eyes?
Could there possibly be a logical reason for sending this pitiable man
eyeless into the all-consuming fire of the cremator?
Or had someone disfigured the hitchhiker sheerly for the deep, dirty
thrill of it? with the shaved head and the I thought of the hulking
man single pearl earring. His broad blunt face. His huntsman’s eyes,
black and steady. His cold-iron voice with its rusty rasp.
It was possible to imagine such a man taking pleasure from the pain of
another, carving flesh the carefree manner of any country gentleman
lazily whittling a twig.
Indeed, in the strange new world that had come into existence during my
experience in the hospital basement, it was easy to imagine that Sandy
Kirk himself had disfigured the body: Sandy, as good-looking and slick
as any GQ model; Sandy, whose dear father had wept at the burning of
Rebecca Acquilain. Perhaps the eyes had been offered up at the base of
the shrine in the far and thorny corner of the rose garden that Bobby
and I had never been able to find.
In the crematorium, as Sandy and his assistant rolled the gurney toward
the furnace, the telephone rang.
Guiltily, I flinched from the window as though I had triggered an
alarm.
When I leaned close to the glass again, I saw Sandy pull down the wall
phone. The his surgical mask and lift the handset from tone of his
voice indicated confusion, then alarm, then anger, but through the
dual-pane window, I was not able to hear what he was saying.
Sandy slammed down the telephone handset almost hard enough to knock
the box off the wall. Whoever had been on the other end of the line
had gotten a good ear cleaning.
As he stripped out of his latex gloves, Sandy spoke urgently to his
assistant. I thought I heard him speak my name-and not with either
admiration or affection.
an The assistant, Jesse Pinn, was a lean-faced whippet of a in with red
hair and russet eyes and a thin mouth that seemed pinched in
anticipation of the taste of a chased-down rabbit. Pinn started to zip
the body bag shut over the corpse of the hitchhiker.
Sandy’s suit jacket was hung on one of a series of wall pegs to the
right of the door. When he lifted it off the peg, I was astonished to
see that under the coat hung a shoulder holster sagging with the weight
of a handgun.
Seeing Pinn fumbling with the body bag, Sandy spoke sharply to him-and
gestured at the window.
As Pinn hurried directly toward me, I jerked back from the pane. He
closed the half-open slats on the blind.
I doubted that I had been seen.
On the other hand, keeping in mind that I am an optimist on such a deep
level that a subatomic condition with me, I decided that on this one
occasion, I would be wise to listen to a more pessimistic instinct and
not linger. I hurried between the garage wall and the eucalyptus
grove, through the death-scented air, toward the backyard.
The drifted leaves crunched as hard as snail shells underfoot.
Fortunately, I was given cover by the soughing of the breeze through
the branches overhead.
The wind was full of the hollow susurrant sound of the sea over which
it had so long traveled, and it masked my movements.
It would also cloak the footsteps of anyone stalking me.
I was certain that the telephone call had been from one of the
orderlies at the hospital. They had examined the contents of the
suitcase, found my father’s wallet, and deduced that I must have been
in the garage to witness the body swap.
With this information, Sandy had realized that my appearance at his
front door had not been as innocent as it had seemed. He and Jesse
Pinn would come outside to see if I was still lurking on the
property.
I reached the backyard. The manicured lawn looked broader and more
open than I remembered it.
The full moon was no brighter than it had been minutes earlier, but