Hal opened the gate to the backyard and walked to the garbage cans. He lifted the lid on one, picked up one of the white plastic sacks, and tore it open. He had to paw around for a minute till he came to some discarded mail. A credit-card statement in the name of Marcus Shoenfeldt. It was a strange name. He’d never seen it before and had to sound it out several times, saying all the syllables to himself before he thought he had it right.
Hal put the garbage back in the can and pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and called information and got the number for Marcus Shoenfeldt. He walked to the front porch as he punched Marcus’s number in. Just as he pressed the front door bell, he heard the telephone ringing inside Marcus Shoenfeldt’s house.
On the second ring an irritated voice answered the phone. Hal heard it in stereo. One voice traveling out to the stars and back to the little piece of plastic at his ear, the second voice coming from the other side of the front door.
Hal said, “Marcus, is that you?”
“Yeah, and who is this?”
“It’s Hal. Your old buddy.”
Marcus hesitated, then said, “You must have the wrong Marcus.”
Hal pressed the bell again.
“That your doorbell?” Hal said. “Go ahead and answer it, Marcus, I’ll hold on.”
“I’m hanging up,” Marcus said. “I don’t know any Hal.”
“You do now,” Hal said.
Up close the man was even bigger than Hal had thought. He filled up the doorway. Long black hair that he wore in a braid down his back. Blue bib overalls over a white long-sleeved T-shirt. But he wasn’t a dangerous man. Hal could see that in the first second. The man was mush. Sad blubber in a big sack.
He tried to close the door in Hal’s face, but Hal put a shoulder against it and shoved it aside and nearly knocked Marcus off his feet. He was through the door and in the foyer and he turned and closed the front door and bolted it.
“What the hell you think you’re doing?”
Marcus was backing across the living room. He had bookshelves made of concrete blocks and yellow pine planks. A stereo and a small TV were squeezed in among the books. A jumble of pizza boxes filled one corner of the room. A lot of plants, little indoor trees and ferns. Against one wall was a long leather couch, black. Magazines scattered all around.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Hal said. “I want to ask you a few questions.”
Marcus was looking around the room like he was searching for a weapon.
“It won’t take long. Three or four quick questions, that’s all. Sit on the couch, make yourself comfortable. You want, I can put on some music.”
“This is breaking and entering,” Marcus said. “You’ll do time for this.”
“We’re just having a conversation. Do you see me breaking anything, Marcus, or entering anything?”
“Man, you’re in some deep shit here.”
Hal backed him across the room till Marcus was at the couch.
“All right, big fellow, why don’t you sit down?”
Marcus pushed some of the magazines aside and let himself down onto the black couch. Hal could hear the wood frame heave under his weight.
Hal came over, stood across the coffee table from him. He looked down at one of the magazines lying on the glasstopped table. There was a handsome man on the cover with his arm around a beautiful woman. Both of them were smiling. They were smiling because they were beautiful and they knew it and because they were on the cover of a magazine.
Hal picked up the magazine and paged through it. More beautiful women, and handsome men on every page. All of them smiling.
Hal dropped the magazine back on the table.
“I like pictures of animals better than pictures of people.”
“Yeah, well, each to his own.”
“I like bees a lot. Do you know anything about bees, Marcus? You know about the waggle dance?”
Marcus stared at him uncertainly.
“Look man, I don’t know what the hell you want, but if you’re looking for money, you’re out of luck. I got about ten dollars in my wallet and some change in a jar in the other room. You want my collection of nickels, hey, it’s yours, but that’s the only thing I got of any value. I’m on disability pay. You know what that is? It makes welfare look like winning the Lotto. So go on, take the TV if you want. Take the couch, everything. Just get it done and get out of here.”
“Yes, I want money,” Hal said. “Four hundred and sixtythree million dollars. Is that number familiar to you?”
Marcus stared at him, his lips quivering. All that tough talk had just been air fluttering across his larynx.
“Man, you’re mixed up. You broke into the wrong house this time, bud.”
“Where is J. J. Fielding hiding, Marcus?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Where is J. J. Fielding?”
“Like I said, you’ve made a mistake. You broke in the wrong house.”
“Why were you talking to Hannah Keller, Marcus?”
He held Hal’s gaze for a moment, then closed his eyes and looked away.
“Hey now,” Marcus said. “I don’t know anything about this shit. It’s none of my business.”
“Were you talking with Hannah about J. J. Fielding?”
“Hell, no,” Marcus said. “You want to know what we talked about, we talked about some handwriting in her book, that’s all.”
“What handwriting in what book, Marcus?”
“A copy of one of her novels. There’s all this scribbling in it. She wanted me to tell her who wrote it, what they were like, give her a profile. That’s all I know.”
“You can do that? Look at handwriting, tell about the person who wrote it?”
“That’s my job,” he said. “That’s what I do for a living.”
“What did you tell Hannah Keller about this handwriting?”
“Whoever wrote it was a woman. And she was some kind of psycho. That’s all I know. A dangerous woman. Which I guess is kind of redundant.”
Marcus smiled at him. It reminded Hal of Randy Gianetti of Detroit, Michigan, the way he smiled in the Milwaukee hotel room. Trying to get Hal to smile back. But it didn’t work that time and it didn’t work this time either. Hal didn’t smile a lot, not that he was aware of.
“Where is J. J. Fielding hiding?”
“Listen, man. I swear, if I knew who this guy was, and I knew where he was hiding, I’d give him up in a second. But I don’t know. I never heard of him. Hannah didn’t say anything about any J. J. Fielding or anybody else. I did most of the talking.”
Hal studied the man’s dark, nervous eyes for several seconds. The man was telling the truth. He didn’t know anything that could help Hal. This was a wasted trip.
“Do you have any friends or family, Marcus, people who stop by your house and say hello from time to time? Now tell the truth. Don’t lie to me. Do you have friends who stop by?”
“No,” he said. “Unless you count the postman. Why?”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah? And why’s that good?”
“Could you look at my handwriting, Marcus, and tell me about myself?”
“Hey, man, what the hell is this? I told you what I know. I’m not doing some damn parlor trick for you.”
Hal walked over to the kitchen and found a pencil lying on the counter. He came back to the coffee table and picked up one of the magazines, opened it to a page with a beautiful woman holding her beautiful child in her arms. He scribbled some words in the white border of the page.
“Read this,” Hal said. “Tell me who I am.”
“All right, but Jesus, I told you everything I know.”
Marcus took the magazine from him and glanced at what Hal had written. He read the words over again and then one more time. Then he dropped the magazine on the floor and stood up. He was wobbling a little, his eyes were wide open and watery. He was breathing through his mouth.
Hal had written these words. “Now I am goin
g to kill you by crushing your heart.”
The big man stood there for a moment longer, staring into Hal’s eyes, then he lunged to the left and broke for the bathroom. But he’d eaten too many doughnuts and potato chips, too many beers and cheese sandwiches, too many Christmas cookies and apple pies and pizza pies and all the other goodies that fat people filled their fat selves with. Stuffing and stuffing and stuffing more food inside themselves, stretching out their skins until they couldn’t run anymore, they couldn’t flee the charging predator. No way to escape the fingers that reached out and grabbed his hair and yanked backward, bringing him down. An earthquake against those wood floorboards.
No way to squirm free. Too slow and too big. No way he could pull loose from the fingers. Hal’s thick, strong fingers around his throat, choking off his air, kneeling on Marcus Shoenfeldt’s chest, strangling him till he wallowed beneath Hal and gasped and closed his eyes and his body sagged.
When the big man was quiet beneath him, Hal unbuttoned the straps of his overalls, and pulled them down. Then he rolled his shirt up over the swell of his belly. Hal squatted down over the man and used his thumbnail to gouge an opening in the flesh below his chest plate, breaking through the tough hide of Marcus Shoenfeldt. The blood began to seep, pumping with each beat of the big man’s heart.
Hal leaned over the big man and used both hands to tear the skin wider. Then he unbuttoned the sleeve of his shirt and rolled it up to his elbow. Hal squeezed his right hand into a small shape and sunk it deep into the meaty folds of Marcus Shoenfeldt. Wedging his hand through the wet, greasy layers, deeper and deeper, up to his wrist, then his forearm inside Marcus, under the bone and past the stomach, until Hal felt the big solid quivering muscle of his heart. Beating and beating and beating. And Hal Bonner spread his fingers wide around the biggest heart he’d ever held, huge, the size of a cantaloupe. It beat, it beat. And Hal closed his fingers around the living thing, the muscle, the pump. He squeezed. He clamped the man’s heart muscle inside his hand until he could feel it stumble and surge and cramp and wriggle. Blood on Hal’s arm. Blood on his pants. Blood everywhere on the floor. But Hal held on, slowing the man down till the heart beat one more time, one more after that, then was silent. And the big man lay with his eyes open. Looking up at Hal. Looking through Hal, through the ceiling, into the sky, into that place that dead men can see, the place they speed away to.
Hal needed to take a shower. He needed to wash his clothes.
He was a mess.
He walked into the big man’s kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes and roaches scrambling. Hal found a sliver of soap and ran hot water over his hands and washed himself, then he used some paper towels to dry off. He was leaving DNA everywhere, traces of himself, but he didn’t mind. They could have his DNA, for all the good it would do them.
After some of the blood was washed away, he searched the pantry until he found a gallon bottle of bleach and a roll of silver duct tape.
He went back to the hallway and took hold of Marcus Shoenfeldt’s heels and dragged the man into his bedroom. He pulled the blue bedspread off the big man’s bed and laid it over his body. He pulled the sheets off the bed and draped them over the body as well. Then he took hold of Marcus’s shoulder and turned him slowly, wrapping him in the sheets and blankets until Marcus was a mummy. A very fat, bloody mummy. Hal opened the bleach and poured it over the sheets and blankets. He would have preferred lime, but lime was not available.
He used the duct tape to seal around the edges of the two windows. Then he went to the bedroom door and shut it and stood in the hallway using more duct tape to seal up the edges. When he was done, he ran his finger over the duct tape inch by inch all the way around the door, mashing it flat against the wood frame, fixing the seal.
He stepped back. A good job.
Two or three days would go by before Marcus began to stink and the mailman smelled him. Hal thought that would be enough time. Two or three more days before anyone found out that Hal Bonner had been a bad boy again.
TWENTY
While Frank Sheffield finished his sandwich at the picnic table and Randall disappeared again into his computer, Hannah went to her bedroom, shut the door, leaned her back against it for a moment, lifting her hands and watching them quiver. She took several slow, deep breaths, willing the tremble to cease, but her hands continued to defy her. The cold palsy of panic.
She pushed away from the door, marched into the bathroom, and turned on the shower full blast, as hot as she could stand it.
A few minutes later, standing naked under the spray, running her soapy hands over the familiar contours of her body, she felt an odd flush of awareness. A man in the house, changing the chemistry, the vibrations in the air, giving this simple act of hygiene and renewal a sensuous cast. Without intending it, her own nervous hands became Sheffield’s hands, a flicker of fantasy. Frank in her shower, naked beside her, stroking her, touching those places that no man had caressed in years. The whisper of another’s flesh across her flesh, bringing the sleek skin alive with a creamy warmth, a glow. She cocked her hip against the shower wall, touching herself with another’s hands, touching and touching until her legs were soft and the shiver in her flesh finally stilled.
Then she was back in the shower alone, the hot spray in her face, feeling silly, feeling juvenile and vaguely ashamed.
She finished her shower, toweled off, gave her hair a quick blow dry. Minimal makeup. Considered, then rejected a dab of perfume.
She put on beige walking shorts, a pale blue cotton jersey with three-quarter sleeves, black leather sandals. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, still feeling foolish, a little out of breath from her reverie.
The house was quiet beyond her bedroom door. It was not yet three o’clock. She walked to her study, sat down before her computer, and clicked her way quickly back into Erin Barkley’s world.
She knew it was crazy to tinker with the story at a time like this, so much going on, so much unresolved, but it had become an automatic response to emotional turmoil, turning on the computer, slipping away into that clear, sensuous parallel universe. A world of order. Where she could neaten the edges, go from rough draft to second draft and third. Paring, shaping, eliminating the superfluous, the bothersome irrelevancies. Edit out the banal. Control the uncontrollable.
But this time as she stared blankly at the words on the bright screen, she felt nothing but a great sense of detachment. Suddenly the bodiless people on the page seemed absurdly irrelevant. Their struggles trifling. For years she’d been wasting her time in that vaporous world, resolving nothing, discovering not a single thing that mattered.
With an angry rap on her mouse, she exited the novel and hooked up with her Internet provider. When the opening browser page came up, she punched in the Web address, www.Deathwatch.com and in a few seconds she was staring at the scratchy, color image of J. J. Fielding in his hospital room. He was still napping, his adjustable bed cranked up to nearly a sitting position. The room was bare except for the IV stand and a small wood bedside table. On the table was a stack of magazines. Hannah recognized the top one, a copy of People from a week ago, a cover photograph of the teenage British prince hand in hand with one of the Kennedy girls, a giddy smile on the young royal’s lips. A paparazzi’s wet dream.
She glared at J. J. Fielding, watching his tranquil, dreamy face, feeling her blood warm and her airways tighten. Before she knew what she was doing, she reached up and pressed a finger to the screen, grinding it against Fielding’s face, smothering him, then bearing down hard against the glass as if to crush the old man’s skull.
“You cocksucker,” she said. “Hang on a little longer. I’m almost there.”
When she could stand it no longer, she drew her hand away and killed the screen. She sat there a moment more, taking long gulps of air, then she pushed away from the machine, got up, and walked back into her bedroom. The house was still quiet. The two males had not yet come to blows, no hand-to-hand, no furnit
ure overturned, no glass breaking.
She settled on the edge of her bed and opened the copy of First Light, took out the folded typing paper where she’d written the decoded message. “Your name is the next key.”
She knew what it meant. She’d known it almost from the first instant she read it, though her knowledge had remained vaporous, hovering in the back chambers of her mind. She had solved this puzzle as she solved most things, in that wordless, intuitive zone where impossible knots were unsnarled and crucial decisions took shape.
Hannah got up and walked out to the living room, and found Frank Sheffield still on the screened-in porch, still at the picnic table with his empty plate before him.
“You’ve got parrots,” he said.
“What?”
“Parrots. I’ve seen about ten of them so far. They land in that big tree there, they squawk at the other birds, then they fly off. Ten minutes later they’re back squawking again.”
“It’s a rosewood, an Indian rosewood, that tree.”
“We don’t get a lot of parrots out on Key Biscayne. What we get a lot of is tourists dressed like parrots, but not many of the birds themselves.”
She set the book down on the table and took a seat next to him on the bench. She drew out the sheet of typing paper and unfolded it and laid it before him.
“I figured it out. ‘Your name is the next key.’”
He examined the sheet a few moments longer, looked up at her.
“Can’t we just stay with the parrots? Forget all this.”
“If you want to, Frank, you can forget it, run along home. But I can’t.”
“I’m sorry. You’re right. Don’t pay any attention to me, I was just doing some wishful thinking. So tell me, what’d you figure out?”
Rough Draft Page 19
