“Prayboy,” she said. “Ugly little prayboy.” Her voice had changed into something that was neither male nor female. Black shapes had begun to move vaguely beneath the skin of her cheeks and forehead, like the beating membranous wings of small insects. “Here’s what I should have done the first time I saw your toad’s face.”
Audrey’s hands-strong and tanned, chipped here and there with scabs from her work settled around David Carver’s throat. His eyelids fluttered when those hands shut off his windpipe and stopped his breath, but just once.
Just once.
“Why’d you stop?” Steve asked.
He stood in the center of the improbable onstage living room, beside the elegant old wetbar from the Circle Ranch. His strongest wish at that moment was for a fresh shirt.
All day he had been baking (to call the Ryder van s air conditioning substandard was actually to be chari table), but now he was freezing. The water Cynthia was dabbing onto the punctures in his shoulders ran down his back in chill streams. At least he’d been able to talk her out of using Billingsley’s whiskey to clean his wounds like a dancehall girl fixing up a cowpoke in an old movie
“I thought I saw something.” Cynthia spoke in a low voice.
“Waddit a puddy-tat?”
“Very funny.” She raised her voice to a shout. “David? Dayyyy-vid!”
They were alone onstage. Steve had wanted to help Marinville and Carver look for the kid, but Cynthia had insisted on washing out what she called “the holes in your hide” first. The two men had disappeared
into the lobby. Marinville had a new spring in his step, and the way he carried his gun made Steve think of another kind of old movie-the kind where the grizzled but heroic white hunter slogs through a thousand jungle perils and finally succeeds in plucking an emerald as big as a doorknob from the forehead of an idol watching over a lost city.
“What? What did you see?”
“I don’t really know. It was weird. Up on the balcony. For a minute I thought it was you’ll laugh-a floating body.”
Suddenly something in him changed. It wasn’t like a light going on; it was more as if one had been turned out. He forgot about the stinging of the wounds in his shoulders, but all at once his back was colder than ever. Almost cold enough to start him shivering. For the second time that day he remembered being a teenager in Lubbock, and how the whole world seemed to go still and deadly before the benders arrived from the plains, dragging their some-times deadly skirts of hail and wind. “I’m not laughing,” he said.
“Let’s go on up there.”
“It was probably just a shadow.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Steve? You okay?”
“No. I feel like I did when we came into town.”
She looked at him, alarmed. “Okay. But we don’t have a gun- “Fuck that.” He grabbed her arm. His eyes were wide, his mouth pinched. “Now. Christ, something is really wrong. Can’t you feel it?”
“I … might feel something. Should I get Mary? She’s back with Billingsley-”
“No time. Come or stay here. Suit yourself.”
He shrugged up the sides of the coverall, jumped off the stage, stumbled, grabbed a seat in the front row to steady himself, then ran up the center aisle. When he got to its head, Cynthia was right behind him, once again not even out of breath. The chick could motor, you had to give her that.
The boss was just coming out of the box office, Ralph Carver behind him. “We’ve been looking out at the street,” Johnny said. “The storm is definitely … Steve? What’s wrong?”
Without answering, Steve looked around, spotted the stairs, and pelted up them. Part of him was still amazed at the speed with which this feeling of urgency had grabbed hold.
Most of him was just scared.
“David! David, answer if you hear me!”
Nothing. A grim, trash-lined hallway leading past what were probably the old balcony and a snackbar alcove Narrow stairs going farther up at the far end. No one here Yet he had a clear sense that there had been, and only a short time ago.
“David!” he shouted.
“Steve? Mr. Ames?” It was Carver. He sounded almost as scared as Steve felt. “What’s wrong? Has something happened to my son?”
“I don’t know.”
Cynthia ducked under Steve’s arm and hurried down the hallway to the balcony entrance.
Steve went after her A frayed length of rope was hanging down from the top of the arch, still swaying a
little.
“Look!” Cynthia pointed. At first Steve thought the thing lying out there was a corpse, then registered the hair for what it was-some kind of synthetic. A doll. One with a noose around its neck.
“Is that what you saw?” he asked her.
“Yes. Someone could have ripped it down and then maybe drop-kicked it.” The face she turned up to his was drawn and tense. In a voice almost too low to hear, she whispered, “God, Steve, I don’t like this.”
Steve took a step back, glanced left (the boss and David’s father looked at him anxiously, clutching their weapons against their chests), then looked right. There his heart whispered. . . or perhaps it was his nose, picking up some lingering residue of Opium, that whispered. Up there. Must be the projection-booth.
He ran for it, Cynthia once more on his heels. He went up the narrow flight of stairs and was groping for the knob in the dimness when she grabbed the back of his pants to hold him where he was.
“The kid had a pistol. If she’s in there with him, she could have it now. Be careful, Steve.”
“David!” Carver bawled. “David, are you okay?”
Steve thought of telling Cynthia there was no time to be careful, that that time had passed when they lost track of David in the first place . . . but there was no time to talk, either.
He turned the knob and shoved the door hard with his shoulder, expecting to encounter either a lock or some other resistance, but there was none. The door flew open; he flew into the room after it.
Across from him, against the wall with the projection- slots cut into it, were David and Audrey. David’s eyes were half-open, but only their bulging whites showed. His face was a horrid corpse-color, still greenish from the soap but mostly gray. There were growing lavender patches beneath his eyes and high
up on his cheekbones. His hands drummed spastically on the thighs of his jeans. He was making a soft choking sound. Audrey’s right hand was clamped around his throat, her thumb buried deep in the soft flesh beneath his jaw on the right, the fingers digging in on the left. Her formerly pretty face was contorted in an expression of hate and rage beyond anything Steve had ever seen in his life-it seemed to have actually darkened her skin, somehow. In her left hand she held the .45 revolver David had used to shoot the coyote. She fired it three times, and then it clicked empty.
The two-step drop into the projection-booth almost certainly saved Steve at least one more hole in his already perforated hide and might have saved his life. He fell forward like a man who has misjudged the number of stairs in a flight, and all three bullets went over his head. One thudded into the doorjamb to Cynthia’s right and showered splinters into her exotic hair.
Audrey voiced a ululating scream of frustration. She threw the empty gun at Steve, who simultaneously ducked and raised one hand to bat it away. Then she turned back to the slumping boy and began to throttle him with both hands again, shaking him viciously back and forth like a doll. David’s hands abruptly quit thrumming and simply lay on the legs of his jeans, as limp as dead starfish.
“Scared,” Billingsley croaked. It was, so far as Mary could tell, the last word he ever managed to say His eyes looked up at her, both frantic and somehow con- fused. He tried to say something else and produced only a weak gargling noise.
“Don’t be scared, Tom. I’m right here.”
“Ah. Ah.” His eyes shifted from side to side, then came back to her face and seemed to freeze there. He took a deep breath, let it out, took a shallower one, let it out and didn’t take another.
“Tom?”
Nothing but a gust of wind and a hard rattle of sand from outside.
“Tom!”
She shook him. His head rolled limply from side to side, but his eyes remained fixed on hers in a way
that gave her a chill; it was the way the eyes in some painted portraits seemed to stay on you no matter where you were in the room. Somewhere-in this building but sounding very far away, just the same-she could hear Marinville s roadie yelling for David. The hippie-girl was yelling, too Mary supposed she should join them, help them search for David and Audrey if they were really lost, but she was reluctant to leave Tom until she was positive he was dead She was pretty sure he was, yes, but it surely wasn’t like it was on TV, when you knew- “Help?” The voice, questioning and almost too weak to be heard over the slackening wind, still made Mary jump and cup a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry.