And more cameras in the back yard, of course.
As he walked past the house, Norman risked one final look into the side yard. Here was a vegetable garden, and two whores in shorts sliding long sticks — tomato-stakes, he supposed
— into the ground. One looked like a taco-bender: olive skin and long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Dynamite body, looked about twenty-five. The other was younger, maybe not even out of her teens yet, one of these punky-grungy scumbuckets with her hair dyed two different colors. There was a bandage covering her left ear. She was wearing a sleeveless psychedelic shirt, and Norman could see a tattoo on her left bicep. His eyes weren’t quite good enough to make out what it was, but he had been a cop long enough to know it was probably either the name of a rock group or a badly executed drawing of a marijuana plant.
Norman saw himself suddenly rushing across the street, ignoring the cameras; saw himself grabbing Little Miss Hot Snatch with the rock-star hair; saw himself sliding one of his big hands around her thin neck and running it up until it was stopped by the shelf of her jaw.
‘Rose Daniels,’ he would say to the other one, the taco-bender with the dark hair and the dynamite bod. ‘Get her out here right now or I’ll snap this spermbucket’s neck like a chickenbone.’
That would be great, but he was almost positive Rosie was no longer here. His library research told him that almost three thousand women had availed themselves of the services offered by Daughters and Sisters since Leo and Jessica Stevenson had opened the place in 1974, and the average length of stay was four weeks. They moved them out into the community at a pretty good pace, breeders and disease spreaders, pretty mosquitoes.
Probably gave them dildos instead of diplomas when they graduated.
No, Rose was almost surely gone, working at some menial job her lesbo pals had found her and going home at night to a scurgy room they’d also found her. The bitches across the street would know where she was, though — the Stevenson woman would have her address in her files, and probably the ones over there in the garden had already been up to her little roachtrap for tea and Girl Scout cookies. Those who hadn’t would have been told all about it by those who had, too, because that was the way women were made. You had to kill them to shut them up.
The younger of the gardeners, the one with the rock-star hair, startled him horribly by raising her head, seeing him . . . and waving. For one awful moment he was sure she was laughing at him, that they were all laughing, that they were lined up at the windows inside Castle Lesbo and laughing at him, at Inspector Norman Daniels, who had been able to bust half a dozen coke-barons but couldn’t keep his own wife from stealing his motherfucking ATM card.
His hands snapped into fists.
Get hold of yourself! the Norman Daniels version of Practical-Sensible screamed inside him. She probably waves at everybody! She probably waves at stray dogs! It’s what twats like her do!
Yes. Yes, of course it was. Norman unrolled his hands, raised one of them, and chopped the
air in a brief return wave. He even managed a little smile, which reawoke the ache of muscles and tendon — even of bone — at the back of his mouth. Then, as Little Miss Hot Snatch turned back to her gardening, the smile faded and he hurried on with his heart thumping.
He tried to return his thoughts to his current problem — how he was going to isolate one of those bitches (the Head Bitch, preferably; that way he wouldn’t have to risk coming up with one who didn’t know what he needed to find out) and get her to talk — but his ability to work rationally at this problem seemed to be gone, at least for the time being.
He raised his hands to the sides of his face and massaged the hinges of his jaws. He had hurt himself this way before, but never this badly — what had he done to Thumper? The paper hadn’t said, but this ache in his jaws — and in his teeth, it was in his teeth, too —
suggested that it had been plenty.
I’m in trouble if they catch me, he told himself. They’ll have photographs of the marks I left on him. They’ll have samples of my saliva and . . . well . . . any other fluids I might have left.
They have a whole array of exotic tests these days, they test everything, and I don’t even know if I’m a secretor.
Yes, true, but they weren’t going to catch him. He was registered at the Whitestone as Alvin Dodd from New Haven, and if he was pressed, he could even produce a driver’s license — a photo driver’s license — that would back that up. If the cops here called the cops back home, they would be told that Norman Daniels was a thousand miles from the midwest, camping in Utah’s Zion National Park and taking a well-deserved vacation. They might even tell the cops here not to be stupid, that Norman Daniels was a bona fide golden boy. Surely they wouldn’t pass on the story of Wendy Yarrow . . . would they?
No, probably they wouldn’t. But sooner or later —
The thing was, he no longer cared about later. These days he only cared about sooner.
About finding Rose and having a serious discussion with her. About giving her a present. His bank card, in fact. And it would never be recovered from another trash barrel or from some greasy little fag’s wallet, either. He was going to make sure she never lost it or threw it away again. He was going to put it in a safe place. And if he could see only darkness beyond the . .
. the insertion of that final gift . . . well, maybe that was a blessing.
Now that his mind had returned to the bank card it dwelled there, as it almost always did these days, in his sleep as well as when he was awake. It was as if that piece of plastic had become a weird green river (the Merchant’s instead of the Mississippi) and the run of his thoughts was a stream which flowed into it. All thoughts ran downhill now, eventually losing their identity as they merged into the green current of his obsession. The enormous, unanswerable question surfaced again: How could she have dared? How could she have possibly dared to take it? That she should have left, run away from him, that he supposed he could understand, even if he could not condone it, and even if he knew that she would have to die just for fooling him so completely, for hiding the treachery in her stinking woman’s heart so well. But that she should have dared to take his bank card, to take what was his, like the kid who had snuck up the beanstalk and stolen the sleeping giant’s golden hen . . .
Without realizing what he was doing, Norman put the first finger of his left hand into his mouth and began to bite down on it. There was pain — quite a lot of it — but this time he didn’t feel it; he was deep in his own thoughts. There was a thick pad of callus high up on the first fingers of both hands, because this biting in moments of stress was an old, old habit of his, one that went back to childhood. At first the callus held, but as he continued to think about the bank card, as its green began to deepen in his mind until it had become the near-black of a fir-tree seen at dusk (a color quite unlike the card’s actual lime color), it gave way and blood began to flow down his hand and over his lips. He dug his teeth into his finger, relishing the pain, grinding at the flesh, tasting his blood, so salty and so thick, like the taste of Thumper’s blood when he had bitten through the cord at the base of his —
‘Mommy? Why’s that man doing that to his hand?’
‘Never mind, come on.’
That brought him around. He looked sluggishly over his shoulder, like a man waking from a nap which has been short but deep, and saw a young woman and a little boy of perhaps three walking away from him — she was moving the kid along so fast he was almost running, and when the woman took her own look back, Norman saw she was terrified.
What, exactly, had he been doing?
He looked down at his finger and saw deep, bleeding crescents on either side of it. One of these days he was apt to bite the damned thing right off, bite it off and swallow it. Not that it would be the first time he’d bitten something off. Or swallowed it, either.