Laughing Man (30 page)

"Now!"

"Do you mean before or after I make a meal of you? And oh, oh, what a tasty meal that's going to be, Officer, because I see that you are very certainly well worth eating—"

She lowered her gun a little.

"Don't do what I know you want to do!" he told her.

"Shit!" she whispered.

"Because I can assure you that the consequences will not be what you intend. When one stops caring about existence, because it will soon stop being something to care about, one is . . . freed up to ignore its foolish rules. One can be a magician without the top hat and rabbit. One can breathe and not breathe. One can murder and dissolve."

"I don't know what you're saying. I have no idea at all what you're saying," the trooper said through clenched teeth.

Williamson shook his head slowly, as if, strangely, with malice, and grinned.

"Fuck you!" said the trooper, and pulled the trigger.

Williamson looked down at his leg. He saw the huge, jagged hole her bullet had made in his pants, just above the knee, and the blood seeping from the hole (it stained his jeans the color of sunset), a few small shards of bone sticking out left and right from the hole. He looked blankly at the state trooper.

"You were saying, asshole?" she said, and tried to forget, for the moment, that the bullet which had apparently shattered his leg had not sent him reeling to the ground.

"I was saying, wasn't I?" he said.

V
etris had brought the dead cat into the garage and set it on a towel on top of a two-drawer file cabinet near his work bench. It was while he was cutting a piece of half-inch pine that he realized there was something not quite right about the dead cat who seemed to be staring at him with its eyes half closed, though he couldn't imagine what that not-quite-right thing could be. He stepped over to the body of the cat, which was still stiff, so the cat looked, in profile, as if it might be running, and gave the cat a once-over. He shrugged. No, other than the fact that the animal was dead, there was nothing that was not-quite-right about it.

He turned back to his workbench, began sawing again. "Shit," he muttered, and looked over at the cat once more. What in the hell was bugging him? It was almost as if this cat wasn't really Villain. But there was no mistake—long black fur, golden eyes, sixteen pounds of deadly predator. Dead itself, now, which was a consummate pity.

Vetris began sawing again. An hour and a half later, he'd fashioned what looked pretty much like a miniature casket, had installed the dead cat in it—the towel wrapped around its body—and had buried the miniature casket in a sunny spot in the backyard. He had even said a few words: "Villain, you were unique. You made life hell, sometimes, but it was always interesting. I'll miss you, killer." Then he glanced about to make sure none of his neighbors, who weren't close by anyway, had seen him, and went back into the house.

The phone rang moments later. It was Myrna Guffy. "Vetris," she said, "you've got to come down here ASAP. These guys from the State Police Investigator's office need to talk with you some more."

"Shit," Vetris said.

And Myrna Guffy said, "No, it's not what you think."

S
he knew that she had seen what she had seen, but because it was not possible to have seen it, she believed that she had seen something else, something she had forgotten. Or, which was more likely, she decided, she had been the victim of a mental trick or lapse, or a waking dream, or a hallucination. She believed that all of these possibilities were . . . possible, but believed that none of them were probable. She believed, on balance—if there really was a
balance
to be found in all of this—that she had actually seen what she had actually seen. But she believed, too, that what she had actually seen could not actually have happened.

Although there was the bullet hole in the car door to deal with and think about. And the blood on the ground in front of the car door. And the suspect, Williamson, doubled over in the backseat of the car and moaning in pain from the bullet wound in his lower thigh. And the blood pooling around him on the seat.

And her partner lying prone on the ground. He was silent, now. She reached down, felt his jugular, got a weak pulse, threw the driver's door of the patrol car open, and grabbed the mike, gave her location, glanced quickly back at Williamson—No
human being can do what he did. Only smoke or water
or
air could do what he did!—and
found herself thinking that reality was not all that she had been brought up to believe it was. That, in reality, apparently solid objects were not really solid. That people were capable of strange and awful things other than murder, or rape, or incest. They were capable, some of them—this man, for instance—of magic that
wasn't
magic because it was
real.
They were capable—this man, for instance—of disobeying laws that were not his or anyone's province to disobey, because they were laws that God and God's universe had lain down, so they were not laws at all; they were reality, they were fact, they were immutable. But they weren't. This man—Williamson—had proved it, and
that
fact started a hard knot of fear deep in her belly. Because, she asked herself, what else was this man capable of? What other kinds of magic that weren't magic at all was he capable of? And what would he do with it? What would he do with
her
?

G
rigoli said, "Her name was Tabitha Reed. She was a suspect in some bizarre murders in New York."

Christmas said, "The Chocolate Murders. They were called the Chocolate Murders."

"Why?" Vetris said.

"Because the killer stuffed chocolate in the mouths of his victims."

"And," Christmas began, "your girlfriend, Tabitha Reed—"

"My girlfriend?" Vetris interrupted.

"Yeah, the one you hit."

"I didn't hit her. She hit me. I told you that. She ran into the car."

"Whatever. It's not important. We don't think you had anything to do with it. We don't think it was premeditated."

"We don't?" Grigoli said. "Jerry, we have to have a little discussion."

"Shit. Forget it," Jerry said. "She was involved in these killings, the Chocolate Murders, now she's missing.
Dead
is more likely. And everybody thinks it's damned strange."

"And you're telling me this because?" Vetris said.

"Because we share information with the local constabulary, Detective. That would be you and your captain."

Grigoli said, "And we really want to know if you were involved with her somehow. You'd tell us, right?"

Vetris sighed.

"Listen," Christmas said, "there's two NYPD detectives on their way here and they want to talk to you. Can you stick around? Just tell us if you can't. We'll put them up in a motel and you can talk with them tomorrow."

Grigoli said, "You never heard about the Chocolate Murders, Detective? It was in all the papers."

"I don't read the papers. They're not delivered where I live and it's too far to drive every morning to pick one up.

"Shit, read the paper at work. You don't have a TV either?"

Vetris shook his head. "As a matter of fact, I don't."

Christmas said, "Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but as a homicide detective, I'd think you'd be interested in what's going on."

"I am. Here. In South Oleander. And I'm not strictly a homicide detective. . . ."

"You have a cat, right?" Christmas said.

Grigoli said, "Jesus, what's that got to do with the price of tomatoes?"

"Just making conversation while we're waiting for those people from NYPD."

"W
e both saw him," Erthmun said. "We both saw him. He was a man. He wasn't a boy. He wasn't this boy! For God's sake, he was a naked man!"

"I'm going back and call this in," Patricia said. "You stay with the body." She leaned over, checked the boy's pulse, straightened. "He's dead, yes," she said, in answer to a question Erthmun hadn't asked.

"You checked already," Erthmun said.

"I had to recheck. You've got to be sure." She sighed. "I'll be back. You stay here." She turned and started across the field of summer grass, toward the car.

Erthmun called after her, "He was a
man
,
Patricia. We both saw him."

She called, "Stay with the body, Jack. Just stay with the body."

And he did.

T
he female state trooper was having trouble. She found herself glancing—too often, she thought—at the suspect in the backseat of the patrol car. She knew why she was doing it, of course. Because she couldn't trust her senses. She couldn't trust the earth, the universe, even God Himself, after witnessing what she'd witnessed in the past fifteen minutes. She might as well have watched the sun rise in the west, she thought. That would have had the same impact on her. It would have meant that the universe had changed, or that she had simply never understood it as completely as she thought she did, or that she had never understood it at all. Which made this place, this small piece of the universe, a very, very dangerous place to be. By all that was holy, it made any place a very, very dangerous place to be.

She glanced at Williamson and told him, "You don't make even a move back there, okay? You make a move, you do any goddamned thing, and I'll kill you. I swear I will."

Williamson grinned at her.

"And don't
smile
at
me like that. You
smile
at
me like that and I'll kill you! You breathe too hard and I'll kill you! You think about doing anything to me, and I'll kill you."

"Is that a promise, Officer?" Williamson said, still grinning.

She was having trouble. Reality could not be a thing she did not recognize. Reality could not be something she couldn't cope with, or control. Reality could not be this man! She felt herself reach for her .45, felt herself grip it, hesitate, pull it from its holster, felt herself lean back from the cage that separated her from Williamson, felt herself hold the .45 out straight, heard herself whisper, "Yes, that's a promise," felt herself pull the trigger, heard the report as the gun fired, saw Williamson's head all but shatter, saw his blood splatter in a wide V on the back window, and on the passenger window, on Williamson's shoulders, on the back of the seat, heard herself whisper, "Oh, Good Lord, oh, Good Lord, what have I done?"

S
omething deep inside Patricia had whispered to her that she couldn't trust Erthmun, that she wouldn't find him waiting with the boy's body when she returned. But it was a whisper she had decided to ignore, because she badly needed to trust Erthmun, though there was little evidence that she could. But she had never expected to find what she found—Erthmun standing at the spot where she had left him, and the boy who had been lying dead nowhere in sight.

Jack glanced confusedly at her and said, "He got up and ran away, Patricia."

She looked open-mouthed at the spot where the boy's body had lain. She could see a very rough outline of the body in the tall grass, and a narrow area leading from it where the grass seemed to have been shoved aside. As she looked, several blades of grass snapped up straight again.

Erthmun repeated, "He got up and ran away."

Patricia nodded. "Yes, I see that."

"I watched him," Erthmun said. "Patricia, he wasn't dead. I watched him run away."

"I believe you, Jack. Come on." She started for the area where the boy had apparently run off. "We'll find him."

"Yes," Erthmun said, "perhaps we will."

M
yrna Guffy stuck her head into the interrogation room and said, "Those detectives from NYPD are going to be a while. They ran into some trouble."

"You mean we can have dinner?" Grigoli said.

"Sure," Myrna Guffy said.

"How about we send out for pizza?" Christmas suggested.

"I'm lactose-intolerant," Vetris said.

"Really?" said Christmas. "So's my wife. Can't even have milk in her coffee. Makes her throw up. Are you like that?"

Vetris shook his head. "No, I'm not." He paused, then went on. "Listen, you guys get whatever you want. I'm going to go home, okay?"

Christmas shrugged. "Sure. We'll call you when we need you." He grinned. "Just don't leave town."

"Well, I have to leave town in order to get home," Vetris said, and grinned back.

I
t was past nightfall and several dozen searchers had failed to locate any sign of the boy that Erthmun had shot. Erthmun had been asked by the head of the search team—a state police homicide investigator named Stevens—to wait by his car while the search was conducted because, Stevens had said, Erthmun was a principal in the case.

Patricia was asked to wait by the car, too, in order to keep an eye on Erthmun.