Nightlife_ A Novel Part 37

"Who are you now?"

"Lie down again, this time on your stomach."

"You don't really want to do this."

"You really don't want to make me angry. You know that I wouldn't mind pulling the trigger."

Catherine lay down again and rolled onto her stomach. "You don't get anything for doing this. That's what I meant. I've been trying to help you come in safely for a long time. Breaking in here doesn't help your cause, and it's dangerous."

"Hands behind your back. Cross your wrists."

She watched Catherine do as she had ordered, then leaned over and pulled up the blankets, keeping Catherine's arms and hands on the outside. Catherine said, "You came here to talk to me, didn't you? Well, I'm happy to listen, and I'll try to do what I can for you."

There was silence. Catherine was beginning to feel heaviness coming on her. There had been a few seconds of hot panic, when she had heard the whisper in the dark, and then seen the shape that proved it had not been just a nightmare. But now the heat and the urgency were gone, and the cold fear had begun. Fear was bleeding her muscles of strength and making her nerves slow to transfer signals. Fear made her arms and legs weak and heavy. She concentrated on controlling her voice. She knew she had to keep talking. "What can I call you?"

"Nothing." The voice came from behind her now, beyond the foot of the bed. That was a very bad sign. Dennis Poole had been shot in the back of the head. The banker in Los Angeles had been shot in the back of the head. Gregory McDonald had been blindfolded in bed and shot in the head.

Catherine tried again. It was easy to kill someone who was lying facedown and silent. She had to keep talking to stay alive. "If you were just planning to kill me, you wouldn't have needed to wake me up. You took a risk, so you must have wanted my help. That was a wise decision. Coming in to the bureau with me voluntarily to answer questions is the best thing you could do."

"Answer questions?" The voice was bitter, angry. "Are you still pretending that you just want me to answer a few questions?"

Catherine knew she had fallen into a way of speaking that could get her killed. She had to be extremely careful now not to offend her, and not to appear to be lying. She had to keep the same tone, not retreat. "I'm a police officer. What I say and do have to reflect what the law says. You haven't been charged with anything. You're still wanted for questioning-here and in Arizona and California-so that's what I have to call it."

"And when I'm done, I'll be able to walk out, right?"

Catherine spoke as carefully as possible. "I think that you almost certainly won't. You're a suspect, and so you'll probably be detained. You can wait to answer questions until a lawyer is with you."

"I'm not here for questions."

"Why are you here, then?"

"I'm here for you. I'm what you asked for."

"I asked you to come in to save yourself."

There was a small, voiceless laugh, like a quiet cough that Catherine heard coming from the foot of the bed. She waited for the shot, the pain. But instead, it was only the voice. "If I came in to the office with you tonight, the way you asked, you're saying you wouldn't get any benefit out of it?"

"Of course I would."

"What kind of benefit?"

"Some people I respect would be proud of me."

"Who?"

"Other cops. One in particular. He's retired, but he'd hear about it."

"That's it?"

"Whenever a person in trouble can be persuaded to come in peacefully, it makes everybody safer. And no cop had to do anything that gives him nightmares."

"G.o.d, you're such a liar," said Judith. "You'd be a hero. They'd promote you, and they'd show the mayor on television pinning a medal on you. That would be my life. You could pin my life on the front of your coat. Each time you wore it you could remember me."

"That's what I've been trying to prevent-you losing your life."

"Shut up, and don't move until I tell you." Catherine heard her step in the direction of the closet. There were sounds of hangers sc.r.a.ping on the pole, then other sounds like the sliding and swishing of fabric. There were more sounds of hangers moving on the pole, a couple of dresser drawers opening and closing. Finally, after a very long time, she said, "Very good, Catherine. You didn't move. Now listen carefully. Roll over to the center of the bed onto your back. Do not sit up."

Catherine had been listening carefully to the sounds, but she had not been able to devise a way to take advantage of any possible lapse in Tanya's attention. Lying on her belly under the heavy blankets with her hands crossed behind her had prevented her from making any kind of quick move, and any move might be the wrong one. Now, as she rolled onto her back, she freed her arms, swept the blanket off her, and looked for Tanya. She was still standing at the foot of the bed, where Catherine could not hope to reach her before the gun went off. Tanya had learned a lot in a very short time.

Catherine saw the throw, and winced in advance, but what landed on her was an old white sweatshirt with the University of California seal on the front.

"Put it on."

Catherine held it up with both hands, used the seal of the university to find the front, slipped it over her head and arms, and tugged it down in back. She knew she had to start talking again to keep herself human in Tanya's mind. "Why do you want me to wear this?"

"For fun."

That made Catherine feel the heavy, pa.s.sive kind of fear again. Maybe Tanya had turned that corner too. Sociopaths talked that way. Things struck them as funny. Another bundle flew through the air. This one landed on Catherine's stomach, and she flinched. She touched it and felt denim. It was a pair of blue jeans. As she slipped them on, still lying on her back, she decided that Tanya had made a mistake. Clothes made her feel stronger, less vulnerable and helpless.

"All right. Sit up."

Catherine sat up. The light came on, and she saw Tanya. She felt her breathing stop for a second, as though her chest wouldn't expand to take in the air. Tanya was standing at the foot of the bed, holding her gun. She had taken off whatever she had been wearing, and now she was in one of Catherine's suits.

Tanya smiled. She opened the coat. Catherine's badge was pinned on the belt, where Catherine wore it sometimes. "I'm Catherine," she said. "Maybe Cathy. I think I'll be Cathy."

Catherine knew that she should have antic.i.p.ated this. All this time, Tanya had been lost, trying to invent a person to be. Each time she had tried it she had succeeded for a time, been discovered, been chased. Of course this was what would happen. At last she had decided to stop being the runner. Now she wanted to be the pursuer, the one with the power and authority. "Don't," said Catherine. "Don't do this."

"You don't think I make a good Cathy?"

"It's not a name you can take, because it will get you caught, and maybe killed. People would know that something had happened to me."

"Then what? They would search for me? They're searching now."

"You've got to start thinking clearly about how to end this."

"I have." She was Cathy now. There was nothing that she needed to decide. "All right, Catherine. Listen carefully. You and I are going out. We're going to walk together about a block to the west, and get into my car. There will be no talking along the way, and no noises. If I think you've made a noise that might wake people up, I'll wake them the rest of the way by killing you."

"Where are we going?"

"I told you. My car."

"After that."

"We're going to go for a ride. Or I'd like to. Obviously, if at any point you cause me trouble, I won't be able to bring you any farther. You'll stop there."

"Why are you doing this? Do you think I'm the only one who's been looking for you? I'm one little cop in one town. Police forces everywhere are searching for you right now."

Cathy raised her gun and aimed it at Catherine Hobbes's head. Her expression was cold impatience. Catherine waited for the shot. From this distance Cathy could hardly miss her forehead.

Catherine wanted to close her eyes, but she knew instinctively that closing her eyes would be a bad idea, a signal of resignation and readiness. She forced herself to keep her eyes unblinking and focused on the eyes of-she had to accept the new reality-not Tanya, but Cathy. She tried to keep the fear and anger out of her eyes, and show only calm. The two women stayed that way for several seconds, an age, while Cathy decided.

Cathy lowered the gun a few inches. "You're right," she said. "I did come to talk. I need to make a decision about how I want this to end. It will take time to make a decision and time to come to an agreement, and we can't do it in this apartment. Being here is too dangerous for me. We're going to my car now. Remember what I said. No talk, no noise." She gestured toward the door. "Stand up. Put on those slippers and walk to the door."

Catherine looked at the closet. "My sneakers are right there. Do you mind if I wear those?"

"Yes. Do what I said. Quiet."

Catherine stepped into the slippers and began to walk, the slippers flapping at each step. Cathy was lying. She wanted Catherine to wear the slippers so she couldn't run or fight. Cathy had no interest in talking. She had become so much more sophisticated at killing that she now knew how to make the victim help her. She had learned that anyone she held at gunpoint would help her fool him. The victim might detect the false tone, but he would choose to believe it because it bought a few more minutes of hope, a few minutes when he could still be a person who was going to live and not a person who was about to die. It occurred to her that Cathy might be trying the lie for the first time. Everything a killer like Cathy did was a kind of experiment. She was learning now, preparing for the next person.

Catherine walked to the apartment door and stopped in front of it. From this moment on, she had to force herself to stay calm, to see every spot of the world around her with immediacy and accuracy-with her eyes and not her mind-and try to construct an advantage. Accepting this woman as "Cathy" had been a first attempt to acknowledge the fluidity of events. Each second from now on, she would need to do it again.

Things were not as they had been, and not as they should be. They were what they had become. Catherine stood still and let Cathy open the apartment door. Catherine was thinking like a police officer again, and not like a scared young woman who had been dragged from her bed. She wanted to make sure that if she died tonight, there would be fingerprints here to tell the forensic team who had killed her.

She watched Cathy's left hand clasp the doork.n.o.b and open it. Then Catherine stepped out into the hallway. As Cathy pulled the door shut, Catherine watched surrept.i.tiously. Cathy had taken a tissue with her from the box in the bedroom, and now she wiped the doork.n.o.b clean.

Catherine walked toward the elevator, but Cathy touched her arm and shook her head. They walked to the stairwell. Once again, Cathy used her left hand to open the door, and kept her right hand on the gun. Catherine had to step into the stairwell, then stand in silence while Cathy closed the door with her left hand and wiped off the k.n.o.b. There was no reason to wipe off the fingerprints unless Catherine was going to die.

The two women walked down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor, and Catherine stopped. She considered the possibility that this was the place to make her stand. It was a lighted, closed vertical s.p.a.ce with only cinder-block walls and a set of steel steps, so no bullet would go through a wall and kill a sleeping neighbor. She took too long to think about it, and the moment pa.s.sed. Cathy had the door open, and she was waiting with the gun aimed.

For a second Catherine felt anger at herself, but that pa.s.sed too: the opportunity had to feel right before she took it. An intuition was not magical; it was a conclusion that came from a hundred small calculations made at once-distance between her body and Cathy's, momentum and balance, eye motion and focus. If the conditions had been right, she had not detected it. The moment had not yet come. Catherine stepped out into the lobby.

She walked to the front door and waited. Cathy pushed on the crash bar and guided her out. They walked down the steps to the sidewalk. "Keep going," Cathy whispered. "Cross the street."

Catherine's eyes swept the route ahead, still trying to find a feature she could turn into an advantage. Could she use something ahead as a weapon? A distraction? Was there a dark place where she might be able to slip away and outrun Cathy? On this side of the street she saw only a broad sidewalk, a few young trees too thin to hide behind, a few parked cars. She longed for the comfort of a plan. When she realized that her desire was for the comfort, she abandoned it. She had to keep this difficult, not comforting. She had to keep searching, identifying, and evaluating, second by second. The moment would come, and she simply had to recognize it and act instantly.

She slowed her walk and turned her head slightly to get a view of Cathy, then immediately turned her head forward again to keep from alarming her. She felt a panicky shortness of breath. The sight she had glimpsed was unsettling. Cathy was not only wearing one of Catherine's new suits, with the coat unb.u.t.toned, so that Catherine could catch a glint of her own badge at the belt; she was also carrying Catherine's purse, and her hair had been redone to resemble Catherine's style.

Cathy was walking along, planning to kill Catherine and take her name, identification, weapon, look-her place. The sight of it in the light of a streetlamp made it seem worse than just dying. This was a total obliteration, not like being killed but like being devoured.

She looked ahead to see if she could spot which of the cars parked at the curb would be the one, and her breath caught in her throat. It was a new, teal blue Acura. It was exactly the same as Catherine's car, the one that had been burned in the fire.

Catherine knew now that Cathy had stepped off solid ground, and then kicked reality to pieces behind her. There was nothing holding her to the world anymore except some perverse interest in playing in the s.p.a.ces between things-moving, fooling people, hiding, changing herself.

Catherine could see where this was going, as though simple foresight were clairvoyance. Cathy had made herself look enough like Catherine so she could flash the driver's license or the police ID and get most people to think it was a match. She had probably become good enough at manipulating strangers to convince them that she was a police officer: people who met a cop weren't suspicious of the cop's ident.i.ty; they were defensive about their own, anxious to get the cop's approval.

What was coming was handcuffs. The handcuffs were in the purse, and Cathy had been using the purse to shield her gun from sight. She must have seen or felt the leather case with the handcuffs. She couldn't hope to drive Catherine anywhere without them.

The handcuffs introduced a time limit. Cathy would walk her up to the car, and only then take out the cuffs. She would restrain Catherine's wrists behind her, and put her in the seat. Catherine had to make a move before that happened, before they even got near the car. Cathy was smart enough to know that rather than being restrained and put in a car, Catherine would take the chance of dying in a fight.

Catherine stared ahead to detect an advantage, but it wasn't there. It was still the broad, flat sidewalk, a few widely s.p.a.ced saplings, a few parked cars. There were no garbage cans, no pieces of loose metal or wood, nothing she could s.n.a.t.c.h up and swing. The teal blue Acura was only forty feet away.

Catherine pivoted and swung hard. Her fist grazed Cathy's chin, slid off, hit her neck and collarbone. Cathy staggered back, and the gun fired. There was a ricochet sound as the bullet chipped the pavement at their feet and flew off into the night.

The gun came up fast. Catherine had no time to strike it away, so she charged under it and plowed into Cathy's midsection. Cathy's left hand tangled in Catherine's hair, tugging at it to pull her off, but Catherine kept pushing, digging in hard with her feet, and Cathy fell backward. Her back slammed into the door of a parked car, and the gun fired again. She couldn't get the barrel of it around to aim it, so she pounded it down on Catherine's head.

The pain exploded into a red flash in front of Catherine's eyes, and she could feel it growing, blossoming. She punched at Cathy's belly, and her hand hit something hard. She knew the feel-a gun. Cathy had taped a gun to her waist under her clothes. Catherine hit at Cathy's face with her left hand and used her right to s.n.a.t.c.h the gun out of the tape, bring it upward, and pull the trigger.

Catherine Hobbes stepped off the airplane at Los Angeles International, hurried along the concourse carrying her overnight bag, and joined the gaggle of people stepping one by one onto the crowded escalator. She could hardly wait for it to take her down to the baggage area, where Joe Pitt would be waiting for her.

There was a tall man on the step ahead of her, so she had to look over his shoulder to see down through the gla.s.s wall below the escalator into the waiting area. She smiled when she spotted Pitt standing a distance away beneath the television sets that displayed flight arrival times. She could see him in profile, talking to someone. Catherine craned her neck to see the other person.

Beside him was a young blond woman clutching the extended handle of a small suitcase. She was clearly charmed with Joe Pitt. She reached up to touch her hair twice, her eyes widened as she looked at him, and she leaned forward to laugh at something he said. She gracefully reached into her purse, took out what seemed to be a business card, and held it out to Pitt. He took it.

Catherine's stomach felt hollow, and her mouth was dry. She sensed that she was watching her time with him ending, just as she had watched the end of her marriage-Catherine was once again on the outside, looking into a room, seeing what she was not supposed to see. She knew that Joe had probably not even intended anything like this. He had come to the airport to pick her up, and while he was waiting, he had found himself in a conversation. He was simply being Joe Pitt. One of the reasons he was fun to be with was that he liked women. He had a cheerful, mildly cynical view of things that made them laugh. She was sure he had not searched for that young woman. He had simply found her-probably looked at her appreciatively, or said something friendly-and she had liked him.

There would always be women like that, and they would always like Joe Pitt. If Catherine was with him, moments like this would always be part of her life. They would happen over and over, and she would always catch herself wondering. She had known enough to understand this from the beginning, and she had decided she could live with the feeling. But this was more than a feeling. How could she have picked another man who would not be faithful to her? Somewhere there was a man who would be satisfied with just Catherine Hobbes, but Joe Pitt wasn't the one.

Catherine looked over her shoulder, up the escalator. Maybe she could slip between the other pa.s.sengers, make her way back up to the concourse, and exchange her return ticket for the next flight to Portland. She could call him on his cell phone. She would say, "Joe? You know, I've decided not to fly down to Los Angeles after all. Something's come up and I can't get away." What was she thinking? A woman-an armed woman, at that-scrambling the wrong way up the escalator would be a breach of security, and they'd probably close down the whole terminal while they arrested her.

Already it was too late to do anything. She reached the foot of the escalator, looked down, and stepped off. She could not even pause, or she would cause other pa.s.sengers to pile up behind her. She looked up and spotted him again, now standing alone. She walked directly toward him, and watched him recognize her. He grinned happily and bounded forward as though he was going to hug her.

She veered to stay an arm's length from him, walking beside him toward the door to the street, and said, "Hi, Joe. Sorry if I'm late. I hope you didn't get too lonely waiting for me."

"No," he said. "I happened to run into a woman I knew from the days in the D.A.'s office. She's a crime reporter for the L.A. Times, Times, the one who covered Tanya's killings here." He reached into his pocket, produced the business card that Catherine had seen him take a moment ago, and held it out to her. "She asked me to give you her card. She wants to interview you about the case." the one who covered Tanya's killings here." He reached into his pocket, produced the business card that Catherine had seen him take a moment ago, and held it out to her. "She asked me to give you her card. She wants to interview you about the case."

Catherine glanced down at it, then stopped and faced him. She said, "Aren't you going to kiss me or anything?"

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

THOMAS P PERRY graduated from Cornell University with honors in English in 1969 and received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester in 1974. He has been a university administrator and teacher, a writer-producer of prime-time network television series, and a writer of fiction. He is the author of thirteen previous critically acclaimed novels, including the Edgar Award winner graduated from Cornell University with honors in English in 1969 and received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester in 1974. He has been a university administrator and teacher, a writer-producer of prime-time network television series, and a writer of fiction. He is the author of thirteen previous critically acclaimed novels, including the Edgar Award winner The Butcher's Boy The Butcher's Boy and its sequel, and its sequel, Sleeping Dogs, Sleeping Dogs, the five-volume Jane Whitefield series, and the national bestsellers the five-volume Jane Whitefield series, and the national bestsellers Death Benefits Death Benefits and and Pursuit. Pursuit.

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The Butcher's Boy

Metzger's Dog

Big Fish

Island