Eyes of Prey

able to squeeze out some more . . . .”
    Bekker went to the final file. ME. “Got the ‘me’ done, anyway,” he said. He backspaced over the letters, and they were gone.
    “Well,” he said, turning back to her. “Can I convince you to keep your eyes open?”
    She closed them.
    “Time,” he said. “And this time, we’re going all the way. Really, truly, Sybil. All the way . . .”
    He stepped to the doorway and glanced down the hall. Nobody. Sybil’s eyes followed him across the room and back, dark, wet. Bekker, his eyebrows arched, placed his palm over Sybil’s mouth and gently pinched her nose with the thumb and index finger of the same hand. She closed her eyes. With the index and middle fingers of the other hand, he lifted her eyelids. She stared blankly, unmoving, for fifteen seconds. Then her eyes skewed wildly, from side to side, looking for help. Her chest began to tremble and then her eyes stopped their wild careen, fixed beyond him, and began to shine.
    “What is it?” Bekker whispered. “Do you see? Are you seeing? What? What?”
    She couldn’t tell; and at the end, her eyes, the shine still on them, rolled up, the pupils gone . . . .
    “Hello?”
    Panicked, he let go of her nose, backed away from the bed, the hair rising on the back of his neck. He was trembling violently, unable to control himself. She was so close. So close.
    “Hello-o-o?”
    He staggered to the door, barely able to breathe, peeked out. He could see a corner of the nurses’ station, but nobody there. Then a woman’s voice, two rooms down the hall toward the nurses’ station. The nurse: “Did you call me, Mrs. Lamey?”
    Bekker chanced it, crossed the hall in three long strides and went out through the internal door. He let the door close of its own weight, let it slide shut with a barely audible hiss, then started down the stairs two at a time. Just as the door shut, he heard the nurse’s voice again.
    “Hello?”
    She must have seen or heard something, or sensed it. Bekker fled down the stairs, the moccasins muffling his footfalls. He opened the door on his floor, stepped through and from far above heard another, more distant “Hello?”
    Ten seconds later he was in his office, the door locked, the lights out. Breathing hard, heart beating wildly. Safe. A Xanax would help. He popped one, two, sat down in the dark. He would wait awhile, get his clothes. The MDMA bit him again, and he went away . . . .
     
    Lucas went to pick Cassie up at the theater, and waited while she scrubbed her face, watching again for Druze. And again, Druze was somewhere else.
    “How’s the play going?” Lucas asked.
    “Pretty good. We’re actually making some money, which is the important thing. It’s kind of funny, has its message. That’s a good combination in Minneapolis.”
    “Sugar pill,” Lucas said.
    “Something like that.”
    They ate a midnight snack at a French café in downtown Minneapolis, then went for a walk, looking in the windows of art galleries and trendoid restaurants. Two of them featured raised floors, and the younger burghers of Minneapolis peered down at them through the windows, their fat legs tucked under tablecloths almost at eye level.
    “I kept looking at Carlo, I couldn’t help it,” Cassie said. “I’m afraid he’s going to catch me and think I’m coming on to him or something.”
    “Be careful around him,” Lucas said. “If he comes to your apartment, tell him you’re in the shower, still wet, or something. Or that you’ve got me in there . . . . Keep him out. Keep the door shut. Don’t be alone with him.”
    She shivered. “No way. Though . . . there’s a funny thing about this. Before I saw those pictures, I might have said, ‘Yeah, Carlo could kill somebody.’ Now, it’s hard to believe that somebody you know could be doing this. Especially the business about the eyes. Carlo doesn’t seem out of control; I mean, he could be crazy, but you feel like it would be a real cold crazy. Not a hot crazy. I could see Carlo strangling somebody and never showing any expression: I just can’t see him in some kind of frenzy . . . .”
    “Could he fake it? Could he be cold enough to do the eyes without feeling it?”
    She thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe.” She shivered again. “But I’d hate to think anybody could be that cold. And why would he, anyway?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We don’t know what’s going on,