There were big stacks of neatly folded sheets on pallets, Dandux laundry baskets full of fluffy bathtowels, pillowcases piled on shelves.Deep stacks of coverlets lined one wall.
Norman shoved Pam into these, watching with no interest at all as the skirt of her uniform flipped up high on her thighs. His sex-drive had gone on vacation, perhaps even into permanent retirement, and maybe that was just as well. The plumbing between his legs had gotten him into a lot of trouble over the years. It was a hell of a note, the sort of thing that might lead you to think that God had more in common with Andrew Dice Clay than you maybe wanted to believe. For twelve years you didn’t notice it, and for the next fifty — or even sixty — it dragged you around behind it like some raving baldheaded Tasmanian devil.
‘Don’t scream,’ he said. ‘Don’t scream, Pammy. I’ll kill you if you do.’ It was an empty threat — for now, at least — but she wouldn’t know that.
Pam had drawn in a deep breath; now she let it out in a soundless rush. Norman relaxed slightly.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she said, and boy, was that original, he’d certainly never heard that one before, nope, nope.
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said warmly. 7 certainly don’t.’ Something was flopping in his back pocket. He felt for it and touched rubber. The mask. He wasn’t exactly surprised. ‘All you have to do is tell me what I want to know, Pam. Then you go on your happy way and I go on mine.’
‘How do you know my name?’
He gave her that evocative interrogation-room shrug, the one that said he knew lots of things, that was his job.
She sat in the pile of tumbled dark maroon coverlets just like the one on his bed up on the ninth floor, smoothing her skirt down over her knees. Her eyes were a really extraordinary shade of blue. A tear gathered on the lower lid of the left one, trembled, then slipped down her cheek, leaving a trail of mascara-soot.
‘Are you going to rape me?’ she asked. She was looking at him with those extraordinary baby blues of hers, great eyes — who needs to pussywhip a man when you’ve got eyes like those, right, Pammy? — but he didn’t see the look in them he wanted to see. That was a look you saw in the interrogation room when a guy you’d been whipsawing with questions all day and half the night was finally getting ready to break: a humble look, a pleading look, a look that said I’ll tell you anything, anything at all, just let off me a little. He didn’t see that look in Pammy’s eyes.
Yet.
‘Pam — ‘
‘Please don’t rape me, please don’t, but if you do, if you have to, please wear a condom, I’m so scared of AIDS.’
He gawped at her, then burst out laughing. It hurt his stomach to laugh, it hurt his diaphragm even worse, and most of all it hurt his face, but for awhile there was just no way he could stop. He told himself he had to stop, that some hotel employee, maybe even the house dick, might happen by and hear laughter coming from in here and wonder what it meant, but not even that helped; in the end, the throe had to pass on its own.
Blondie watched him with amazement at first, then smiled tentatively herself. Hopefully.
Norman at last managed to get himself under control, although his eyes were streaming with tears by that time. ‘I’m not going to rape you, Pam,’ he said at last — when he was capable of saying anything without laughing it into insincerity.
‘How do you know my name?’ she asked again. Her voice was a little stronger this time.
He hauled the mask out, stuck his hand inside it, and manipulated it as he had for the asshole accountant in the Camry. ‘Pam-Pam-bo-Bam, banana-fanna-fo-Fam, fee-fi-mo-Mam,’ he made it sing. He bopped it back and forth, like Shari Lewis with fucking Lamb Chop, only this was a bull, not a lamb, a stupid fucking fagbull withfiowers on its horns. Not a reason in the world why he should like the fucking thing, but the fact was, he sort of did.
‘I sort of like you, too,’ Ferd the fagbull said, looking up at Norman with its empty eyes.
Then it turned back to Pam, and with Norman to move its lips, it said: ‘You got a problem with that?’
‘N-N-No,’ she said, and the look he wanted still wasn’t in her eyes, not yet, but they were making progress; she was terrified of him — of them — that much was for sure.
Norman squatted down, hands dangling between his thighs, Ferdinand’s rubber horns now pointing at the floor. He looked at her sincerely. ‘Bet you’d like to see me out of this room and out of your life, wouldn’t you, Pammy?’
She nodded so vigorously her hair bounced up and down on her shoulders.
‘Yeah, I thought so, and that’s fine by me. You tell me one thing and I’ll be gone like a cool breeze. It’s easy, too.’ He leaned forward toward her, Ferd’s horns dragging on the floor. ‘All I want to know is where Rose is. Rose Daniels. Where does she live?’
‘Oh my God.’ What color there still was in Pammy’s face — two spots of red high up on her cheekbones — now disappeared, and her eyes widened until it seemed they must tumble from their sockets. ‘Oh my God, you’re him. You’re Norman.’
That startled and angered him — he was supposed to know her name, that was how it worked, but she wasn’t supposed to know his — and everything else followed upon that. She
was up and off the coverlets while he was still reacting to his name in her mouth, and she almost got away completely. He sprang after her, reaching out with his right hand, the one that still had the bullmask on it. Faintly he could hear himself saying that she wasn’t going anywhere, that he wanted to talk to her and intended to do it right up close.
He grabbed her around the throat. She gave a strangled cry that wanted to be a scream and lunged forward with surprising, sinewy strength. Still he could have held her, if not for the mask. It slipped on his sweaty hand and she tore away, fell away toward the door, arms out to either side, flailing, and at first Norman didn’t understand what happened next.
There was a noise, a meaty sound that was almost a pop like a champagne cork, and then Pam began to flail wildly, her hands beating at the door, her head back at a strange stiff angle, like someone staring intently at the flag during a patriotic ceremony.
‘Huh?’ Norman said, and Ferd rose up in front of his eyes, askew on his hand. Ferdinand looked drunk.
‘Ooops,’ said the bull.
Norman yanked the mask off his hand and stuffed it in his pocket, now aware of a pattering sound, like rain. He looked down and saw that Pam’s left sneaker was no longer white. Now it was red. Blood was pooling around it; it ran down the door in long drips. Her hands were still fluttering. To Norman they looked like small birds.
She looked almost nailed to the door, and as Norman stepped forward, he saw that, in a way, she was. There was a coathook on the back of the damned thing. She’d torn free of his hand, plunged forward, and impaled herself. The coathook was buried in her left eye.
‘Oh Pam, shit, you fool,’ Norman said. He felt both furious and dismayed. He kept seeing the bull’s stupid grin, kept hearing it say Ooops, like some wiseass character in a Warner Bros cartoon.
He yanked Pam off the coathook. There was an unspeakable gristly sound as she came.
Her one good eye — bluer than ever, it seemed to Norman — stared at him in wordless horror.
Then she opened her mouth and shrieked.
Norman never thought about it; his hands acted on their own, grabbing her face by the cheeks, planting his big palms beneath the delicate angles of her jaw, and then twisting.
There was a single sharp crack — the sound of someone stamping on a cedar shingle — and she went limp in his arms. She was gone, and whatever she had known about Rose was gone with her.
‘Oh you dopey gal,’ Norman breathed. ‘Put your eye out on the fucking coathook, how stupid is that?’
He shook her in his arms. Her head flopped bonelessly from side to side. She now wore a wet red bib on the front of her white uniform. He carried Pam back over to the coverlets and dropped her there. She sprawled with her legs apart.