Rose Madder (43 page)

—but he
had
to stop.

Norman knelt abruptly to the left of the swinging door with his back to the women. He dropped his head and pretended to tie his shoe.

“—sorry to miss the concert, but if I want that car, I can't pass up the—”

Out the door they went, but what Norman had heard convinced him: it
was
the picnic the woman was talking about, the picnic and the concert that was going to round off the day, some group called the Indian Girls, probably lezzies. So there was a chance that this woman knew Rosie. Not a
good
chance—lots of people who weren't tight with Daughters and Sisters would be at Ettinger's Pier tomorrow—but a chance, just the same. And Norman was a man who believed emphatically in the fickle finger of fate. The hell of it was, he did not yet know which of the three had been talking.

Let it be Blondie,
he prayed as he got quickly to his feet and went out through the swinging door.
Let it be Blondie with the big eyes and the cute ass. Let it be her, what do you say?

It was dangerous to follow, of course—you could never tell when one of them might glance idly around and win the super bonus round of Place the Face—but at this point he could do nothing else. He sauntered along behind them, his head casually turned to one side, as if the junkola in the shop windows he was passing was of vital interest to him.

“How are you making out on pillowcases today?” the tub of guts walking on the inside asked the other two.

“For once, they're all there,” the older woman walking on the outside said. “How about you, Pam?”

“I haven't counted yet, it's too depressing,” Blondie replied, and they all laughed—those high, giggly sounds that always made Norman feel as if his fillings were cracking in his mouth. He stopped at once, looking in a window at a bunch of sporting goods, letting the maids pull ahead. It was her, all right—no question about it. Blondie was the one who
had said the magic words
Ettinger's Pier.
Maybe it changed everything, maybe it changed nothing. Right now he was too excited to figure it out. It was certainly an amazing stroke of luck, though—the kind of miraculous, coincidental break you always hoped for when you were working a longshot case, the break that happened more often than anyone would ever believe.

For now he would file this in the back of his mind and proceed with Plan A. He wouldn't even ask about Blondie back at the hotel, at least not yet. He knew her name was Pam, and that was plenty to start with.

Norman walked to the bus stop, waited fifteen minutes for the airport shuttle, and then hopped on board. It was a long ride; the terminal was on the edge of the city. When he finally disembarked in front of Terminal A, he slipped on his dark glasses, crossed the street, and made his way to the longterm parking area. The first car he tried jumping had been there so long the battery was dead. The second one, a nondescript Ford Tempo, started all right. He told the man in the collection booth that he'd been in Dallas for three weeks and had lost his ticket. He was always losing them, he said. He lost laundry tickets, too, and he was always having to show his driver's license at Photomat when he stopped in to pick up his snapshots. The man in the collection booth nodded and nodded, the way you do at a boring story you've already heard about ten thousand times. When Norman humbly offered him an extra ten dollars in lieu of the ticket, the man in the collection booth perked up a little. The money disappeared.

Norman Daniels drove out of longterm parking at almost exactly the same moment that Robbie Lefferts was offering his fugitive wife what he termed “a more solid business arrangement.”

Two miles down the road, Norman parked behind a beat-to-shit Le Sabre and swapped license plates. Another two miles on, he stopped at a Robo-Wash. He had a bet with himself that the Temp would turn out to be dark blue, but he lost. It was green. He didn't think it mattered—the man in the collection booth had only taken his eyes off his little black-and-white TV when the tenspot had appeared under his nose—but it was best to play safe. It increased the comfort level.

Norman turned on the radio and found an oldies station.
Shirley Ellis was on, and he sang along as Shirley instructed, “If the first two letters are ever the same/Drop them both and say the name/Like Barry-Barry, drop the B, oh-Arry/That's the only rule that is contrary.” Norman realized he knew every word of that stupid old song. What kind of world was it where you couldn't remember the fucking quadratic equation or the various forms of the French verb
avoir
two years after you got out of high school, but when you were getting on for forty years old you could still remember
Nick-Nick-bo-bick, banana-fanna-fo-fick, fee-fi-mo-mick, Nick?
What kind of world was that?

One that's slipping behind me now,
Norman thought serenely, and yes, that seemed to be the truth. It was like in those science fiction movies where the spacemen saw Earth dwindling in the viewscreens, first a ball, then a coin, then a tiny glowing dot, then all gone. That was what the inside of his head was like now—a spacecraft headed out on a five-year mission to explore new worlds and go where no man had gone before. The Starship
Norman,
approaching warp-speed.

Shirley Ellis finished up and something by the Beatles came on. Norman twisted the radio's volume knob off so hard he broke it. He didn't want to listen to any of that hippy-dippy “Hey Jude” crap today.

He was still a couple of miles from where the real city began when he saw a place called The Base Camp.
ARMY SURPLUS LIKE YOU NEVER FIND
! the sign out front read, and for some reason that made him burst out laughing. He thought it was in some ways the single most peculiar motto he'd seen in his whole life; it seemed to mean
something,
but it was impossible to say just what. Anyway, the sign didn't matter. The store probably had one of the things he was looking for, and that did.

There was a big banner reading
ALWAYS BE SAFE, NEVER BE SORRY
over the middle aisle. Norman inspected three different kinds of “stun-gas,” pepper-gas pellets, a rack of Ninja throwing-stars (the perfect weapon for home defense if you should happen to be attacked by a blind quadriplegic), gas guns that fired rubber bullets, slingshots, brass knuckles both plain and studded, blackjacks and bolas, whips and whistles.

Halfway down this aisle was a glass case containing what Norman considered to be the only really useful item in The
Base Camp. For sixty-three-fifty he purchased a taser which produced a large (although probably not the 90,000 volts promised on the label) wallop of juice between its two steel poles when the triggers were pushed. Norman considered this weapon every bit as dangerous as a small-caliber pistol, and the best part was that one did not have to sign one's name anywhere in order to purchase one.

“You wah niy-vole baddery widdat?” the clerk asked. He was a bullet-headed young man with a harelip. He wore a teeshirt which said
BETTER TO HAVE A GUN AND NOT NEED ONE THAN NEED ONE AND NOT HAVE ONE
. To Norman he looked like the sort of fellow whose parents might have been blood relatives. “Dass waddit runs on—a niy-vole.”

Norman realized what the young man with the harelip was trying to say and nodded. “Give me two,” he said. “Let's live a little.”

The young man laughed as if this was the funniest line he'd ever heard, even funnier than
Army Surplus Like You Never Find!,
and then he bent down, got two nine-volt batteries from under the counter, and slapped them down beside Norman's Omega taser.

“Dull-feetcha!” the young man cried, and laughed some more. Norman figured this one out, too, after a moment, and laughed right along with Young Mister Harelip and later he thought that was the exact moment when he hit warp-speed and all the stars turned into lines. All ahead, Mr. Sulu—this time we're going
way
past the Klingon Empire.

He drove the stolen Tempo back into the city and in a part of town where the smiling models on the cigarette billboards started being black rather than white, he found a barber shop by the charming name of Cut Me Some Slack. He went in and found a young black man with a cool moustache sitting in a old-fashioned barber chair. There were Walkman earphones on his head and a copy of
Jet
in his lap.

“Whatchoo want?” the black barber asked. He spoke perhaps more brusquely than he would have to a black man, but not discourteously, either. You weren't discourteous to a man like this without a damned good reason, especially when you were alone in your shop. He was six-two at least, with broad shoulders and big, thick legs. Also, he smelled like a cop.

Above the mirror were photographs of Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and Jalen Rose. Jordan was wearing a Birmingham Barons baseball uniform. Above his picture was a
slip of paper with
THE ONCE & FUTURE
BULL
typed on it. Norman pointed. “Do me like that,” he said.

The black barber looked at Norman carefully, first making sure he wasn't drunk or stoned, then trying to make sure he wasn't joking. The second was harder than the first. “Whatchoo saying, brother? Are you saying you want a cleanhead?”

“That's exactly what I'm saying.” Norman ran a hand through his hair, which was a thick black just starting to show flecks of gray at the temples. It was neither exceptionally short nor exceptionally long. He had worn it at this same length for almost twenty years. He looked at himself in the mirror, trying to imagine what he was going to look like, as bald as Michael Jordan, only white. He couldn't do it. With luck, Rose and her new friends wouldn't be able to, either.

“You sure?”

Suddenly Norman felt almost sick with the desire to knock this man down and drop both knees onto his chest and lean over and bite his entire upper lip, cool moustache and all, right off his face. He supposed he knew why, too. He looked like that memorable little cocksucker, Ramon Sanders. The one who had tried to cash in on the ATM card his lying bitch of a wife had stolen.

Oh, barber,
Norman thought.
Oh barber, you're so close to being nothing but taillights. Ask one more question, say one more wrong word in my face, and that's all you'll be. And I can't say anything to you; I couldn't warn you even if I wanted to, because right now my own voice is all the firing-pin I'd need. So here we are, and here we go.

The barber gave him another long, careful look. Norman stood where he was and let him do it. Now he felt composed. What happened would be what happened. It was all in this jiggedy-jig's hands.

“All right, I guess you are,” the barber said at last. His voice was mild and disarming. Norman relaxed his right hand, which had been shoved deep into his pocket and gripping the handle of the taser. The barber put his magazine on the counter beside his bottles of tonic and cologne (there was a little brass sign there that said
SAMUEL LOWE),
then got up and shook out a plastic apron. “You wanna be like Mike, let's do it.”

Twenty minutes later, Norman was staring at himself
thoughtfully in the mirror. Samuel Lowe stood beside his chair, watching him look. Lowe seemed apprehensive, but he also seemed interested. He looked like a man seeing something familiar from an entirely new perspective. Two new customers had come in. They were also looking at Norman look at himself, and they wore identical expressions of appraisal.

“The man be handsome,” one of the newcomers said. He spoke in a tone of faint surprise, and mostly to himself.

Norman couldn't get entirely straight in his mind the fact that the man in the mirror was still him. He winked and the mirror-man winked, he smiled and the mirror-man smiled, he turned and the mirror-man turned, but it didn't help. Before, he'd had the brow of a cop; now he had the brow of a mathematics professor, a brow that went into the stratosphere. He couldn't get over the smooth, somehow sensuous curves of his bald skull. And its whiteness. He hadn't thought he had anything like a tan, but compared to his pallid skull, the rest of his skin was as brown as a lifeguard's. His head looked strangely fragile, and too weirdly perfect to belong to the likes of him. To belong to any human being, especially a male. It looked like a piece of Delft china.

“You ain't got a bad head 'tall, man,” Lowe said. He spoke tentatively, but Norman had no sense he was trying to flatter him, and that was good, because Norman was in no mood to have someone blow smoke up his ass. “Look good. Look
younger.
Don't he, Dale?”

“Ain't bad,” the other newcomer agreed. “Nossir, not half.”

“How much did you say?” Norman asked Samuel Lowe. He tried to turn away from the mirror and was distressed and a little frightened to find that his eyes tried to follow the top of his head, to see how it looked in the back. That sense of disassociation was stronger within him than ever. He
wasn't
the man in the mirror, the man with the scholar's bald head rising above heavy black eyebrows; how could he be? This was some stranger, that was all, some fantastic Lex Luthor up to no good in Metropolis, and the things he did from here on out didn't matter. From here on out, nothing mattered. Except catching Rose, of course. And talking to her.

Up close.

Lowe was giving him that cautious look again, breaking it
off to dart glances at the other two patrons, and Norman suddenly realized he was checking to see if they'd help him, if the big white man—the big
bald
white man—suddenly went berserk.