Then the dream changed, and Hannah at eleven became Randall at eleven. Her son was standing in her current doorway, watching her sleep, watching her dream in the big four-poster bed where long ago her parents had made love. Her son stood there for a moment staring at her, then he turned away from her sleeping form and padded through the dark house to his bedroom. The dream followed him like a camera watching from above. Watching Randall lie down in his own narrow bed and cover himself with sheets and blankets, lying face-up, peering into the blackness.
And this was no longer her regular dream, not the recurrent pleasure of visiting with her parents, witnessing again their secret dynamic, her mother’s enthralling power. This was her son lying in his bed, where suddenly there was a dark angel standing above him, a faceless vampire with a wide cape spreading out like giant wings, a stranger hovering over her son, lowering himself closer and closer to his frail sleeping form.
Hannah knew it was a nightmare. Knew it as she swam upward to the surface of her sleep, kicking and clawing, and took a sharp gasp as she broke through into the air. Knew it was false, an image concocted by the phantom inside her, that creative maestro who spun together the day’s anxieties with the powerful currents from her past. She knew all this, but that knowledge did not keep her heart from knocking out of rhythm or keep her from pushing herself up from her bed and hurrying through the living room and down the dark narrow corridor to Randall’s room and throwing open his door.
He was at his computer. A blue halo surrounding him.
“Randall,” she said.
His hands froze on the keys.
He turned his head and looked back at her.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“What’re you doing?”
“Talking to Stevie.”
“At two in the morning, Randall?”
“Stevie doesn’t sleep much either.”
She came forward and stood at his shoulder.
Randall moved his mouse and clicked and the white panel that held a few dozen lines of typing disappeared.
“Why did you do that, Randall?”
“Do what?”
“You know what I mean. Why did you delete that screen?”
“We were talking about computers, that’s all. Stevie’s twelve. He’s a lot better at programming than I am. He’s a prodigy.”
“Are you hiding something from me, Randall?”
“No.”
His voice was shrill, uncertain. For of course he was hiding something. Just as every child concealed from their parents the secret kingdoms they inhabited, the universe they were convinced that only they fully understood.
She squatted beside his chair. In the metal birdcage Spunky dug deeper into the layer of shredded newspaper.
“Randall,” she said. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s bothering you. Can you do that?”
He shook his head.
“Nothing’s bothering me.”
“That’s not what Dr. English thinks. She believes you’re worried about something. Something very specific.”
He stared ahead into the undersea screen-saver image. Big hammerhead sharks and dazzling schools of iridescent clownfish cruised by a forest of sea fans and elk horn coral. A stream of bubbles trickled up from the bottom of the screen.
“I want to talk about what’s frightening you, Randall.”
He got up from his chair and stepped around her, careful not to brush against her body, and he went to his bed and lay down. He was wearing his red-and-yellow-striped pajamas. There was a glass of water on the table beside his bed. Faintly glowing stars decorated his ceiling.
She stood up and went over to his bed and sat down on the edge.
Randall crossed his arms against his chest and stared up at the greenish stars. There were a couple of moons up there too. Saturn with its rings.
“It’s starting again, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“The code in your book, the thing about house painters. It’s beginning again. You went to see the FBI guy, you’re going to start digging around, being a detective.”
“Randall, I’m not going to lie to you. Yes, I’m going to dig around a little, try to see what this is all about.”
He shook his head, clamped his mouth.
“Wouldn’t you feel better if the killers were caught?”
“No!”
“Yes, you would, Randall. Because then you wouldn’t have to worry anymore. It would all be over. Don’t you want that?’
“It won’t be over. It won’t ever be over. You won’t let it.”
She reached out to comb a wisp of hair from his eyes but he wrenched away from her touch.
She sat still on the bed, hands in her lap.
“Sometimes, Randall, the only way for a wound to heal is to open it up, clean it out, disinfect it. And that hurts, I know it does. It seems like torture to touch a place so sore you can barely stand it. But that’s the only way to cure some wounds. Otherwise they can go on festering forever, hurting and hurting all your life.”
“You’re not going to stop, you’re never going to stop.”
He rolled away from her, onto his side, and buried his head beneath the pillow and began to whimper.
She sat there for a long while, running her hands along his back, the knobby length of his spine. His sobs sent spasms through his body. Weeping with such force and abandon she could barely endure it She spoke his name softly again and again until his crying finally tapered away to a few last hiccups, and she bent down and held him in her arms, rocking him until his breathing eased into the quiet regularity of sleep.
When he loosened his grip on the pillow, Hannah sat up and drew it off him, lifted his head and tucked the pillow beneath. She bent close and touched her lips to his damp, fevered cheek, the salt of his drying tears. She listened for a moment to his muffled snore, the sweet drone of his oblivion. Then rose and walked back to her bedroom where she lay down again and stared into the dark.
TWELVE
Misty was dreaming about a nipple. A nipple on fire. Not just any nipple. But her own, the left one. Burning. Flames rising from it. Dark licks of fire shooting out the puckered tip. Seeing that in her dream, the red nipple twisted erect, the spurt of fire, the white jet flame of a welder’s torch. Blackness all around it like one of those surreal paintings, that guy with the clocks dripping off tree branches, a picture like that, only Misty’s picture was a floating nipple in a sea of blackness, a thin spray of fire shooting out the tip. Hurting. Her left nipple aching so bad, burning so hot and stinging, the pain dragged her up from a dark spiraling cave of sleep.
She blinked, opened her eyes, stared up into the darkness.
Nude, lying on her back in her narrow bed, peering up at the ceiling, she could barely breathe from the pain. With great effort she lifted her right hand and reached up to pat her breast, soothe the ache. Somehow knowing what she was about to find. Feeling it now, the pressure, the tight grip.
She laid her right hand on top of the hand gripping her left breast.
It wasn’t a dream anymore. She was wide fucking awake. Speechless. There was no air in the room. Dark as midnight at the bottom of the sea. She stroked the hand cupping her left breast, pinching her nipple, causing fire to spurt from it.
Her fingertips touching the back of his hand. Broad and cold and slick as marble, the hand of a statue in the park. She would’ve screamed if she could’ve filled her lungs. She would’ve twisted away, tried to scramble into the bathroom if her muscles would unfreeze.
She tried to pry the hand loose, but it wasn’t like any hand she’d ever touched. She couldn’t say why. Something about the skin. Something about the unmoving weight of it. Holding her entire body in place like that Star Trek guy with the pointy ears, the way he could pinch somebody by the shoulder, the Vulcan death grip, freezing them stock-still. Same thing. She was stiff against the mattress, the pain in her nipple so intense she was groggy, the bed starting to sink beneath her. She was w
rithing inside, deep down in her gut, but her body lay perfectly still on the mattress.
When he spoke, his voice sounded mechanical. Some kind of accent she didn’t recognize. She was usually good with accents. Amazing her customers at Hooters. Wisconsin, Virginia, Alabama, New York, west Texas, east Texas. It wasn’t all that hard. She had a good ear. You just had to listen, remember. But this guy spoke with no accent at all. Like he’d learned English from a machine, one of those tapes for foreign speakers, making you practice over and over. Hello, my name is Anne. I have a dog. My dog’s name is Wags. He spoke like that, a machine. A deep, whispery voice.
“Who are you?” is what he said.
Her throat was swollen with pain. She couldn’t reply.
She pointed at his hand, made a gargling sound.
He eased his grip, then slowly he moved his hand off her nipple. She felt his fingertip touch her throat. A sharp, cutting pain against the flesh of her neck.
“You’re hurting me,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“Why? What have I done to you?”
“Who are you?” In that same mechanical tone. Like a doll she had once, pull the string, it says, “Please hug me.”
“What do you mean, who am I? I’m a girl. I’m Misty.”
“Who are you, Misty?”
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” she said. “You mean what do I like to do? My hobbies, favorite color, like that?”
Using the long, hard fingernail on his thumb, he began to draw a simmering line down her body. Starting at her throat, running between her breasts, her sternum, down her soft white belly, to her navel and below that, a straight line, all the way to the brim of her pubic hair. Stopping there. For the moment, at least
Along the seam he’d drawn, the skin burned as if he’d been using a scalpel, opening her up. She could sense the moisture beside his thumb tip, although that might have been sweat A straight, slow razory line back to her throat. Like he was dissecting her, going to peel back her flesh, climb inside.
Misty was paralyzed. Unable to look down at her body to see if it was sweat or blood she felt. Afraid of what she’d see in the dark, the gleam of her own fluids.
“Why are you following Hannah Keller, Misty?”
Misty lay very still as once again the man drew the hot line down her body, along the exact same seam.
“Why are you following her, Misty? What do you want from her?”
“Who the hell is Hannah Keller?”
“You’re not good at surveillance, Misty. I spotted you easily. In your blue car with the peeling leather top, stalking Hannah Keller. I saw you on her street, I saw you follow her across Miami.”
“What’re you, a cop?”
“Do I look like a cop, Misty?”
“I don’t know, I can’t see you.”
“Trust me. I’m not a cop.”
“You see me driving around Miami, then you show up in my apartment. How’d you find me if you aren’t a cop?”
“That’s what I do,” he said. “I find people.”
“Yeah? And then what do you do, when you find them? You pull on their nipples? Big strong guy, got to show how tough he is.”
“I find people, then I kill them.”
Misty was quiet. Her heart was quaking. She snuck down a breath, let it out. Snuck down another one.
“Look, goddamn it,” she said. “Nobody’s stalking anybody. You broke into the wrong damn apartment.”
But Misty could hear the quiver in her voice, the lie so obvious.
“When a polar bear stalks his prey across the ice, Misty, he covers his black nose with his white paw so he won’t be seen. Even the polar bear knows more than you know.”
“Polar bear?”
“Why are you stalking Hannah Keller? Tell me, Misty?” The words broke from her like a belch.
“Because I hate the bitch.”
The man was quiet for a moment, looking down at her.
“Why do you hate Hannah Keller?”
“Forget it,” Misty said. “I’m not telling you a damn thing. You break in here, pinch my breast. Why am I going to tell you anything?”
“Why do you hate her, Misty?”
The guy didn’t listen. He was touching her throat now, fingers spreading around it, tightening.
“Okay, okay. I hate her because she’s living my life, the one I was supposed to have. She stole it from me. That’s why.”
“How did she do that, steal your life?”
“She just did. Don’t worry about it. She stole it, take my word for it.”
“Who are you, Misty?”
He started the incision line back down her throat, down between her breasts, the same exact line, all the way down. His thumbnail halting again right at the edge of her pubes. Like he was shy or polite, had his limits.
“For chrissakes, I’m Misty. Misty Anne Fielding.”
“Oh,” the man said, pausing for several moments. “You’re the daughter.”
A pale glow from the streetlight out on Flagler seeped around her orange curtains and lit up a portion of his face. She saw heavy eyebrows and a burr haircut. His lips were large, eyes with a dark glint. Beyond that, she couldn’t tell much. Not enough to pick him out of a lineup later. That is, if she was still alive.
“And what is your father’s name, Misty Fielding?”
“I don’t have a father.”
“What is your father’s name?”
“I said …”
He gripped her left nipple again, just a quick pinch.
Misty groaned.
“What is your father’s name, Misty Fielding?” She barely had breath for the words. Saying it in a burst.
“John Jackson Fielding. J.J. for short. But he’s dead.”
“Is he?’
“He’s dead to me.”
The man released her nipple and stood up slowly and she could see him tug something from his jacket pocket. Misty heard a plastic snap, then saw the gray glow of some kind of small screen.
“Is that why you are stalking Hannah Keller, Misty, because of your father?”
“Jesus,” she said. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Who are you, Misty?”
“Okay, okay,” she said. “You want to know who my daddy was. I’ll tell you who he was. He was a banker. A good successful one. He made nice money. We lived in a nice house, I went to a good school, had pretty clothes. Then they came and tried to arrest him, the police, the FBI. They had their best guys going after him, but my old man was too quick. One night he didn’t come home. Blink, he was gone. Emptied his bank accounts and ran off, left my mother and me with a ten-thousand-a-month nut and not a nickel to pay it with. That’s what happened. That’s what Hannah Keller’s old man did. My daddy never hurt anybody. Just because he had some business dealings with a couple of drug dealers, they went after him, chased him into hiding. That’s all it was, some banking bullshit. I mean drug dealers need to put their money somewhere safe like everybody else, right? Is that a crime?”
“Where is he hiding, Misty?”
“Hey, do you ever listen to anybody? You ask somebody a question, they answer it but you’re off to something else, like I never said anything. Like the subject never came up. You’re back to this other thing. Man, it’s not possible to have a fucking conversation like that. It’s too twisted.”
“Where is your father hiding, Misty?”
He laid his hand on her breast. Resting lightly, but she could still feel a slow shiver begin to take over her body.
“I told you, he’s dead as far as I’m concerned. What do you want with him anyway?”
“Your father,” the man said, “stole money. A great deal of money.”
“Oh, Christ, I knew it.”
“You knew what, Misty?”
“You’re one of them, one of the drug guys.”
The hand holding her breast was gentler now.
“Forget it,” she said. “I told you p
eople everything I knew back when it happened, which was a big fat nothing. I didn’t know where he went back then and I still don’t know. You think I’d be living here, a rattrap apartment like this, if I knew where that rich fuck was? Hell, no. He abandoned me. I was a month from starting my junior year in high school, and bang, he’s gone. Not a good-bye kiss, see you later, it’s been nice being your dad, nothing, not one word.”
“And your mother? Does she know where he is?”
“Go pinch her nipple if you want to find out. I don’t talk to my mother. We stopped seeing eye-to-eye some time back.”
The man moved the gray glow down to her belly and rested it there. A palm-top computer with a black-and-white screen no bigger than a wallet. A tiny aerial sprouting from one edge.
Misty squinted at the thing. She didn’t sleep in her contacts. So she had to bring her head off the pillow and squint hard to make out the tiny black-and-white screen.
“Where is he hiding, Misty?”
“Mother of Christ,” she said quietly. “That’s him. That’s my old man.”
“Yes,” the man said. “And he looks very alive, doesn’t he?”
“Where is he? What the hell’s going on?”
“I would like to know this same thing, Misty.”
She stared up into the dark at the man’s half-illuminated face. She could see his left eye and his left cheekbone swimming in the shaft of streetlight. He looked like someone she knew. But she couldn’t remember who or when or where. Somebody halfway cute, halfway scary. A little like the kind of guys she used to date in high school. Guys who spent all their free time souping up their cars, drag racing, smoking dope out in the parking lot. Guys going nowhere, but having a great time getting there. Only this guy didn’t seem like he had a good time doing anything. At least not anything she wanted to know about.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not sure?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Well, would you mind if I had some input on the issue? You know, make my case before you shoot me?”
“I don’t shoot. I don’t like guns.”
“Aw, shit Not knives. Don’t tell me you’re one of those, a blade guy.”
Rough Draft Page 12
