Eyes of Prey

Four-twenty. Cassie was staring at him from the bed, her hands working frantically behind her back. He hadn’t been gone long, a few minutes at most. He listened. Anybody coming? Not so far. No knocks, no sound of running feet . . .
    He looked at Druze on the floor. He’d have to leave him like that, there might be some kind of blood pattern from the shot or something. He couldn’t do the eyes, of course. He worried about that, but there was nothing to be done. If Druze was going to take the blame . . .
    Cassie.
    She’d stopped fighting the tape, but her back was arched, her head turning, trying to see him. He had to hurry: he still had to stop at Druze’s apartment, to leave the photos. He started into the kitchen, when a door slammed down the hall, and he stopped. Listened.
    Was that a movement? Out in the hall. He strained, listening. The hall was carpeted, would muffle steps. He waited a minute, then a few more seconds.
    He couldn’t wait longer. He still had to visit Druze’s apartment. He patted his chest, confirming that the pictures were there. He’d cut the eyes out . . . .
    He’d have to be careful. If the cops had bugged Druze’s apartment and realized he was gone, but hadn’t left the building, they might be on the way. Maybe he shouldn’t try it. If he were caught in the apartment . . . that didn’t bear thinking about.
    Bekker, the PCP pounding in his blood, went into the kitchen and got a bread knife, the sharpest he could find.
    And there again . . . Movement? Somebody in the hall. He froze, listened . . . . No. He had to move.
    He didn’t do it well, and he didn’t do it quickly, but he did it: he cut Cassie’s throat from ear to ear, and sat with her, holding her green eyes open with his fingers, as she died.

CHAPTER
27
    Lucas spent ten minutes at the funeral home with a cheerful, round-faced mortician who wanted to talk golf.
    “Damn, Lucas, I already been out twice,” he said. He had a putter and was tapping orange balls across a plush carpet toward a coffee cup lying on its side. “It was a little muddy, but what the hell. In another two weeks, it’ll be every morning . . . .”
    “I need to know about the eyes . . . .”
    “So don’t talk to me about golf,” the mortician complained. He putted the last ball, and it bounced off the rim of the cup. “Nobody wants to talk golf. You know how hard it is to talk golf when you’re in the funeral business?”
    “I can guess,” Lucas said dryly.
    “So what exactly do you want to know?” the mortician asked, propping the putter against an easy chair.
    They were in a small apartment above the funeral home, where the night man stayed. A lot of people die at night, the mortician said, and if you’re not there, they might call somebody else. To the average, unknowledgeable member of the general public, one funeral home was as good as another.
    “What about the eyes? Do you leave them in or take them out, or what?”
    “Why’d we take them out?” the cheerful mortician asked, relishing the conversation. Lucas was uncomfortable, and he could see it.
    “I don’t know, I just . . . I don’t know. So you leave them in?”
    “Sure.”
    “Do you sew the eyelids shut or glue them shut or anything?”
    “No, no, once they’re shut, they stay that way.”
    “How about the viewings? Is there always somebody around?”
    “Well, there’s always somebody around, but not necessarily right there. We go by judgment. If we see a street person going into the viewing room, we’d go with him, of course—we don’t want to get any rings stolen, or whatever. But if the guy looks straight, if he’s a member of the family, then we pretty much let him go. We might check every couple of minutes, but a lot of people, when they’re saying good-bye, don’t like funeral-home people standing around staring at them. They feel like they’re being rushed, you know, like when a salesman stands right next to you in a department store. But it’s judgment. One time this whole family warned us about a particular guy, one of the grandfathers. The deceased had this gold plate, probably worth a couple hundred, and this old guy was a thief. So we hung on him. He was kneeling there praying, and he kept looking at us and then praying some more . . . . He must’ve prayed for half an hour. The family members said that was the longest prayer of his life, by about twenty-nine minutes.”
    “But theoretically, if