Touchy and Feely

by Graham Masterton

  Steve said, ‘Here?’

  ‘That’s right. Somewhere in that supermarket.’

  The trooper looked at Steve and raised one eyebrow. Steve said, ‘I’m just going to take a look. I may need some backup, OK?’

  ‘You’re going to look here?’

  ‘That’s right. I’ll give you a squawk if I need you.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  They drove into the parking lot. Sissy hadn’t felt like this since she took a ride on the centrifuge at the Danbury Fair, when she was fifteen years old. She could hardly breathe, and she felt as if she were pinned in her seat.

  ‘Are you OK, Ms Sawyer?’ Steve asked her.

  Sissy nodded. ‘They’re here, I’m sure of it. Somewhere in this parking lot. Left, go left at the end here.’

  Feely said, ‘What time is it?’

  Robert switched on his flashlight and checked his watch. ‘Twelve noon, in a couple of minutes.’

  ‘I just wanted to tell you how gratified I am that you picked me up. I mean, everything we’ve done together.’

  Robert turned himself over, with a grunt. ‘Well . . . I can’t say it hasn’t been instructive.’

  ‘Are you going to go on shooting people?’

  ‘I don’t know, Feely. Sometimes things change, even when you’re not expecting them to, and all of a sudden the things you used to believe in don’t matter any more.’

  ‘Robert?’

  There was a very long silence. Robert switched the flashlight on again, and then off, and then—when Feely still hadn’t said anything—he switched it back on.

  ‘What is it, Feely?’

  ‘I don’t know how to say this without you misunderstanding me.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you say it anyhow? There isn’t much room for misunderstanding, is there, not in here?’

  ‘What I wanted to say was, I love you, man.’

  Robert stared at him, puckering his mouth up and moving it around the way people do when they’re seriously thinking about something. Then he said, ‘I love you too, Feely. You zurramato.’

  Sissy whipped up her right hand.

  ‘Stop!’ she said.

  Steve abruptly stopped, and the SUV that was following too close behind almost rear-ended them.

  Sissy squeezed her eyes tight shut.

  ‘What is it?’ said Doreen, impatiently.

  ‘They’re very close. I felt something—I felt—’

  She slowly turned her head and looked at Steve in bewilderment. ‘Good God,’ she told him. ‘I felt love.’

  They drove at a snail’s pace along Row 20G. Sissy kept her window wide open, even though the snow was blowing in her face.

  ‘They’re very close now. They’re very, very close.’

  Their headlights illuminated a dirty, dark-bronze Chevrolet Caprice Classic, late eighties model. Sissy touched the back of Steve’s hand, and nodded at it.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I can feel love through a cinderblock wall, Detective.’

  ‘OK, then. Let’s take a look.’

  Steve drove past the Chevrolet and parked the Tahoe fifty yards further down. He said to Sissy, ‘Stay right here, please, Ms Sawyer. Doreen and me will go check this out.’

  Steve and Doreen took out their flashlights and unholstered their guns and walked back to the Chevrolet. Sissy could see their flashlight beams criss-crossing as they looked inside.

  ‘Someone’s looking in the car,’ Feely whispered.

  ‘Sssh,’ said Robert, in the darkness. But Feely felt him picking up the rifle, and then he heard him operate the bolt. Very slowly, very carefully, Robert chambered another round.

  Steve stepped back from the Chevrolet. ‘Connecticut license plate. Let’s run it through traffic and see what we come up with.’

  It was then that Doreen touched his sleeve, and pointed to the rear of the car, next to the offside tail-light. There were two circular holes drilled in it, one above the another, and vapor was blowing out of them. Doreen blew vapor from her own mouth, and pointed back at the car so that Steve would get the point. Breath. They’re hiding in the trunk.

  Steve pulled back the slide of his automatic and stepped right up to the side of the car. Then he slammed his hand on top of the trunk and shouted, ‘State police! Come on out of there with your hands where we can see them!’

  Immediately, there was a sharp crack, and Doreen was flung up into the air and over the hood of a Malibu parked opposite. Steve fired into the side of the Chevrolet’s trunk, four rapid shots, and then he ducked down and crab-scuttled over to Doreen. She was lying on her side with her cheek in the snow, and there was blood running out of her mouth.

  ‘Stomach,’ she whispered.

  Steve unhooked his r/t and said, ‘Officer down! Big Bear parking lot, Row G! I need an ambulance and I need backup! Now!’

  He kept his gun pointed at the Chevrolet, while at the same time cradling Doreen’s head with his hand. ‘You’re going to be all right, OK? Just stay awake, and keep talking.’

  Doreen nodded. ‘You don’t get rid of me that easy.’ Then she coughed, and more blood poured out onto the snow. ‘Tell that psychic . . . tell her she’s really psychic.’

  ‘Robert?’ said Feely. The trunk was filled with the stench of cordite and gasoline, and his eyes were watering. ‘Robert, can you hear me?’

  He shook Robert’s shoulder but Robert was heavy and floppy and unresponsive. ‘Robert! Come on, man, I don’t know what to do!’

  He shook him and he shook him but still Robert didn’t answer. Feely lay there, coughing, lit only by the pencil-shafts of light that came from the bullet-holes, and the holes that Robert had drilled for his sniper rifle.

  What would Captain Lingo do? Captain Lingo could talk his way out of anything. Captain Lingo would climb out of the car with his hands up and say, ‘You’ve saved my life, officers, and I thank you. I was being forcibly abducted by this homicidal maniac and only your instantaneous responses spared me from a grisly demise.’

  He had used the phrase ‘grisly demise’ in his comic strip, but he had never had the chance to say it in real life.

  ‘Grisly demise,’ he whispered. Then he pushed against the rear seats with his feet.

  At that instant, the Chevrolet’s gas tank blew up. The two-ton car was thrown up into the air, blazing, and a huge orange fireball rolled up into the snow. It dropped down again, with a thunderous crash, and it lay there burning while police officers and shoppers gathered around and watched it.

  Steve, shielding his face with his upraised hand, said, ‘Holy shit.’

  Steve stayed with Doreen until the paramedics arrived. Then he walked back to the Tahoe where Sissy was sitting, her hands clasped together as if she were praying.

  ‘How is she?’ Sissy asked him.

  ‘Pretty badly hurt, but the paramedics think she’s going to survive.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Detective. I really am.’

  ‘No, no. If it was anybody’s fault, it was mine. They had a weapon rigged up in the back of the car, so that they could shoot without opening the trunk. I should have been more careful.’

  He took off his hat and wiped the snow away from his eyebrows with the back of his hand. ‘I’ll organize someone to take you home. Maybe I can call on you tomorrow, so that I can work out what we’re going to say about this.’

  ‘I’d rather you said nothing at all—at least as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Steve. He looked at her for a while with the orange light from the burning Chevrolet dancing on the side of his face. Then he said, ‘You felt love?’

  Sissy nodded. ‘People can hide hatred, you know, quite easily; and they can hide contempt. But it doesn’t matter how hard they try, they can never hide love.’

  The Snow Stops

  The next morning, the snow stopped. Sissy went into the yard and stood listening to the silence. Mr Boots came out, too, and stood unusually close to her, his tongue hanging o
ut, panting.

  ‘What are we going to do, Mr Boots?’ she asked him.

  She was still standing there when she heard a vehicle outside, and then Steve appeared, wearing sunglasses with yellow lenses.

  ‘How are you doing, Ms Sawyer?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine, Detective, thank you. How’s your partner?’

  ‘She’s in pretty bad shape, I’m afraid. But she had surgery last night, and they’re confident that she’s going to pull through.’

  ‘I never caught her name, poor woman.’

  ‘Doreen. Doreen Rycerska. She always had a sharp tongue on her, but she’s a good detective.’

  ‘I’ll send her some flowers. Would you like a cup of tea? I have some cherry cake, too. I didn’t bake it myself. I can’t bake cakes to save my life.’

  They went inside, while Mr Boots stayed in the yard to roll around in the snow.

  Steve saw the DeVane cards on Sissy’s coffee table and picked them up. ‘That was some reading you gave me.’

  Sissy was setting out the tea-tray. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They’re unnervingly accurate, those cards. Sometimes I wonder if I ought to throw them away.’

  ‘What you said about my son—’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘All I was going to say was, it was true. He was arrested for sexual assault, and when I talked to him about it, he said that he wanted to be found guilty, to get his revenge on me. Well—as you can imagine—that hurt.’

  Sissy poured boiling water into the teapot and stirred it. Then she brought in the tray and set it down on the coffee table, next to the cards.

  Steve said, ‘Late last night, the girl he was supposed to have assaulted withdrew her complaint. Apparently she was terrified of what her parents were going to say, finding Alan creeping out of their house with no pants on.’

  ‘Kids,’ said Sissy.

  ‘Yes,’ said Steve. ‘They let you down, they lie to you, they look you in the face and tell you that they hate you, but what can you do?’

  The clock struck eleven, hesitant as usual, as if it didn’t like to upset anybody by telling them that time was going by. Sissy said, ‘Have you found out who they were, those two killers? I saw it on the news but they didn’t say.’

  ‘The older one came from New Milford. His name was Robert Touche and he was recently divorced. The other was a Cuban boy named Fidelio Valdes. He came from New York City. We’ve been talking to the girl they stayed with, in Canaan, but she doesn’t know too much about them.

  ‘How the two of them got together, and why they went around shooting people, we don’t have any idea.’

  ‘The cards warned me they were coming,’ said Sissy. ‘Two storms, both at once.’

  ‘Maybe we ought to give you your own fortune-telling department, up at headquarters.’

  Sissy passed him a slice of cherry cake. ‘They warned me about a man in a chest, too. That’s about as close as they could have come to a man in the trunk of a car. They told me about footprints, leading to a lake. That was the two of them, I suppose, making their way to the Mad River Reservoir. They told me about a bird, caught in a trap, but I still can’t work out what that meant.’

  Steve stayed for over an hour. He enjoyed talking to Sissy because she was so uncompromising, but he found her reassuring, too, as if she knew that he wasn’t infallible, but forgave him for it. He was tempted to ask her for another card reading, but in the end he didn’t have the nerve. Besides, her last reading had given him more than enough to think about.

  Sissy stood by the side of the house watching him leave, and waved. As she turned back toward the house, she thought she glimpsed Gerry, going into the back door.

  It made her feel heavy-hearted, leaving him alone here for Christmas, but she would write him a Christmas card, telling him how much she loved him, and that she would soon be coming back.