lost, adrift, I feel sorry for him. Okay?”
He stared at her, chewing on his pale lower lip for a moment then
finally said, “We work good together because we complement each other.
You’re strong where I’m weak, and I’m strong where you’re weak. In many
ways we’re not at all alike but we belong together because we fit like
pieces of a puzzle.
“What’s your point?”
“One way we’re different but complementary is our motivation. This line
of work suits me because I get a kick out of helping people whore in
trouble through no fault of their own. I like to see good triumph.
Sounds like a comic-book hero, but it’s the way I feel. You, on the
other hand, are primarily motivated by a desire to stomp the bad guys.
Yeah, sure, I like to see the bad guys all crumpled and whimpering, too,
but it is not as important to me as it is to you. And, of course,
you’re happy to help innocent people, but with you that’s second to the
stomping and crushing. Probably because you’re still working out your
rage over the murder of your mother.”
“Bobby, if I want psychoanalysis, I’ll get it in a room when the primary
piece of furniture is a couch-not a toilet.”
Her mother had been taken hostage in a bank holdup when Julie was
twelve. The two perpetrators had been high on amphetamines and low on
common sense and compassion. Before it was all over, five of the six
hostages were dead, and Julie’s mother was not the lucky one.
Turning to the mirror, Bobby looked at her reflection, as if he was
uncomfortable meeting her eyes directly.
“My point is-suddenly you’re acting like me, and that’s no good, that
destroys our balance, disrupts the harmony of this relationship, and
it’s the harmony that has always kept us alive, successful and alive.
You want to take this case because you’re fascinated, it excites your
imagination, and because you’d like to help Frank, he’s so pitiful.
Where’s your usual outrage? I’ll tell you where it is. You don’t have
any because, at this moment anyway, there’s no one to elicit it, no bad
guy. Okay, there’s the guy he says chased him that night, but we don’t
even know if he’s real or just a figment of Frank’s fantasy. Without an
obvious bad guy to focus your anger, I should have to drag you into this
every step of the way, and that’s what I was doing, but now you’re doing
the dragging, and that worries me. It doesn’t feel right.”
She let him ramble on, with their gazes locked in the mirror, and when
at last he finished, she said, “No, that’s not your point.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, everything you just said is smoke. What’s really bothering
you, Robert?”
His reflection tried to stare down her reflection.
She smiled.
“Come on. Tell me. We never keep secrets.”
Bobby-in-the-mirror looked like some bad imitation of the real Bobby
Dakota. The real Bobby, her Bobby, was full of fun and life and energy.
Bobby-in-the-mirror was gray-faced, almost grim; his vitality had been
sapped by worry.
“Robert?” she prodded.
“You remember last Thursday when we woke?” he said. “The Santa Anas
were blowing. We made love.”
“I remember.”
“And right after we’d made love… I had the strange, terrible feeling
that I was going to lose you, that something out there in the wind
was… coming to get you.”
“You told me about it later that night, at Ozzie’s, when we were talking
about jukeboxes. But the windstorm ended, and nothing got me. Here I
am.”
“That same night, Thursday night, I had a nightmare, the most vivid damn
dream you can imagine.” He told her about the little house on the
beach, the jukebox standing in the san the thunderous inner voice-THE
BAD THING IS COMING, THE BAD THING, BAD THING!-and about the corrosive
sea that had swallowed both of them, dissolving the flesh and dragging
their bones into lightless depths.
“It rock me. You can’t conceive of how real it seemed. Sounds crazy
but… that dream was almost more real than real life. I woke up,