‘Here comes the big question,’ the cop said. ‘And if you lie, little hero, I’m going to rip your scrote off and feed it to you.’
Daniels squeezed Ramon’s crotch again, and now folds of darkness began to fall across Ramon’s vision. He fought them desperately. If he passed out, the cop was apt to kill him just for spite.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Yes!’ Ramon wept. ‘I unnerstand! I unnerstand!’
‘You were at the bus station and you saw her stick the card in the trash. That much I know.
What I need to know is where she went next.’
Ramon could have wept with relief because, although there was no reason why he should be able to answer this question, it just so happened he could. He had looked after the woman once to make sure she wasn’t looking back at him . . . and then, five minutes later, long after he had slid the green plastic card into his wallet, he had spotted her again. She had been hard to miss, with that red thing over her hair; it was as bright as the side of a freshly painted barn.
‘She was at the ticket-windows!’ Ramon cried out of the darkness that was relentlessly enveloping him. ‘At the windows!’
This effort was rewarded by another ruthless squeeze. Ramon began to feel as if his balls had been torn open, doused with lighter fluid, and then set on fire.
‘I know she was at the windows!’ Daniels half-laughed, half-screamed at him. ‘What else would she be doing at Portside if she wasn’t going someplace on a bus? Doing a sociological study on scumbuckets like you? Which ticket-window, that’s what I want to know — which fucking window and what fucking time?’
And oh thank God, thank Jesus and Mother Mary, he knew the answers to both of those questions, too.
‘Continental Express!’ he cried, now separated from his own voice by what felt like miles. ‘I seen her at the Continental Express window, ten-thirty, quarter of eleven!’
‘Continental? You’re sure?’
Ramon Sanders didn’t answer. He collapsed sideways on the bench, one hand dangling, slim fingers outstretched. His face was dead white except for two small purplish patches high on his cheeks. A young man and a young woman walked by, looked at the man lying on the bench, then looked at Daniels, who had by now removed his hand from Ramon’s crotch.
‘Don’t worry,’ Daniels said, giving the couple a large smile. ‘He’s epileptic.’ He paused and let his smile widen. ‘I’ll take care of him. I’m a cop.’
They walked on a little faster and didn’t look back.
Daniels got an arm around Ramon’s shoulders. The bones in there felt as fragile as bird’s wings. ‘Upsa-daisy, big boy,’ he said, and hauled Ramon up to a sitting position. Ramon’s head lolled like the head of a flower on a broken stalk. He started to slide back down immediately ,making little thick grunts in his throat. Daniels hauled him up again, and this time Ramon balanced.
Daniels sat there beside him, watching the German Shepherd race joyfully after the Frisbee. He envied dogs, he really did. They had no responsibilities, no need to work — not in this country, anyhow — all food was provided for them, plus a place to sleep, and they didn’t even have to worry about heaven or hell when the ride was over. He had once asked Father O’Brian back in Aubreyville about that and Father had told him that pets had no souls— when they died they just winked out like Fourth of July sparklers. It was true that the Shep had probably lost his balls not even six months after he was born, but . . .
‘But in a way that’s a blessing, too,’ Daniels murmured. He patted Ramon’s crotch, where the penis was now deflating even as the testicles began to swell. ‘Right, big boy?’
Ramon muttered deep in his throat. It was the sound of a man having a terrible dream.
Still, Daniels thought, what you got was what you got, and so you might as well be content with it. He might be lucky enough to be a German Shepherd in his next life, with nothing to do but chase Frisbees in the park and stick his head out the back window of the car on his way home to a nice big supper of Purina Dog Chow, but in this one he was a man, with a man’s problems.
At least he was a man, unlike his little buddy.
Continental Express. Ramon had seen her at the Continental Express ticket-window at ten-thirty or quarter to eleven, and she wouldn’t have waited long — she was too scared of him to wait for long, he’d bet his life on that. So he was looking for a bus that had left Portside between, say, eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon. Probably headed for a large city where she felt she could lose herself.
‘But you can’t do that,’ Daniels said. He watched the Shep jump and snatch the Frisbee out of the air with its long white teeth. No, she couldn’t do that. She might think she could, but she was wrong. He would work it on weekends to start with, mostly using the phone. He would have to do it that way; there was a lot going on at the company store, a big bust coming down (his bust, if he was lucky). But that was all right. He’d be ready to turn his full attention to Rose soon enough, and before long she was going to regret what she had done.
Yes. She was going to regret it for the rest of her life, a period of time which might be short but which would be extremely . . . well . . .
‘Extremely intense,’ he said out loud, and yes — that was the right word. Exactly the right word.
He got up and walked briskly back toward the street and the police station on the other side, not wasting a second glance on the semiconscious young man sitting on the bench with his head down and his hands laced limply together in his crotch. In Detective Inspector 2/Gr Norman Daniels’s mind, Ramon had ceased to exist. Daniels was thinking about his wife, and
all the things she had to learn. About all the things they had to talk about. And they would talk about them, just as soon as he tracked her down. All sorts of things — ships and sails and sealing wax, not to mention what should happen to wives who promised to love, honor, and obey, and then took a powder their husbands’ bank cards in their purses. All those things.
They would talk about them up close.
9
She was making another bed, but this time it was all right. It was a different bed, in a different room, in a different city. Best of all, this was a bed she had never slept in and never would.
A month had passed since she had left the house eight hundred miles east of here, and things were a lot better. Currently her worst problem was her back, and even that was getting better; she was sure of it. Right now the ache around her kidneys was strong and unpleasant, true enough, but this was her eighteenth room of the day, and when she’d begun at the Whitestone she had been close to fainting after a dozen rooms and unable to go on after fourteen — she’d had to ask Pam for help. Four weeks could make a hell of a difference in a person’s outlook, Rosie was discovering, especially if it was four weeks without any hard shots to the kidneys or the pit of the stomach.
Still, for now it was enough.
She went to the hall door, poked her head out, and looked in both directions. She saw nothing but a few room-service trays left over from breakfast, Pam’s trolley down by the Lake Michigan Suite at the end of the hall, and her own trolley out here in front of 624.
Rosie lifted a pile of fresh washcloths stacked on the end of the trolley, exposin g a banana.
She took it, walked back across the room to the overstuffed chair by 624’s window, and sat down. She peeled the piece of fruit and began to eat it slowly, looking out at the lake, which glimmered like a mirror on this still, rainy afternoon in May. Her heart and mind were filled with a huge, simple emotion — gratitude. Her life wasn’t perfect, at least not yet, but it was better than she ever would have believed on that day in mid-April when she had stood on the porch of Daughters and Sisters, looking at the intercom box and the keyhole that had been filled with metal. At that moment, she had seen nothing in the future but darkness and misery.