Eyes of Prey

he’s on the side,” Sloan called.
    “Is he coming?”
    “Naw, he’s still in his car . . . .”
     
    Bekker sat at the side of the road, his head on the steering wheel. He was afraid to sleep, waiting to move. And now here was Druze, coming back . . . .
    He made a U-turn and drove back across the Mississippi, left his car in a dormitory parking lot and walked to the library. A loose net stayed with him, watching. Inside, Bekker scanned an index for the StarTribune, looked up the appropriate issue and wrote down the details about the death of a tramp.
    From a phone booth, he called the medical examiner.
    “I’m trying to locate my father, who . . . had some mental problems,” he said. “We weren’t close, I was adopted by another family, but I’ve heard now from an old friend of his that he died and was buried by Hennepin County last year . . . . I was wondering if you could tell me which funeral homes you use, so I could find out where he’s buried.”
    The county used four funeral homes, selected on an annual bid basis. Walker & Son, Halliburton’s, Martin’s and Hall Bros. He called them in order. Martin’s took his last quarter.
    “Martin’s . . .” The voice low and already consoling.
    “I’m calling about the funeral for a Carlo Druze . . . .”
    “That’s Friday.”
    “Will there be a viewing?”
    “Uh, well, there usually is, but I’d have to check. Can you hold?”
    “Yes . . .”
    The woman was gone for three or four minutes. When she returned, she asked, “Are you a member of Mr. Druze’s family?”
    “No . . . I’m from the theater . . . .”
    “Well, Mr. Druze’s mother made some tentative arrangements which did not include a viewing, but now we understand that several theater people will be coming, so we’re planning a viewing from seven to nine o’clock tomorrow night in the Rose Chapel, with burial at Shakopee. We will have to contact his mother again for approval.”
    “Tomorrow night, from seven to nine . . .” Bekker closed his eyes. The burial was sooner than he’d expected, or dared to hope. Druze had died two days before, and he would be buried in another two days. Bekker had been afraid that it would be a week, or even more, before the body was released. He could hold out for a week, he thought, with the right medication. Longer than that, and he’d have to let go, he’d have to go down and face Druze in the territory of dreams.
    But now that would not happen. Tomorrow night and it would be over.

CHAPTER
31
    Bekker saw Druze twice more, or thought he did: he couldn’t decide, finally, whether he was seeing Druze or an image within his own eye.
    He saw him two blocks from his house, a dark thing drifting around a corner. Bekker stood, his mouth open, the newspaper in his hand, and the figure disappeared like a wisp of black fog. He saw him again at midafternoon, passing in a car half a block away. Bekker’s eye was caught first by the car, then by the obscured dark form behind the driver’s-side glass. He could feel the eyes peering out at him . . . .
    He was eating Equanil like popcorn, with an occasional taste of amphetamine; he was afraid to sleep, was living out of his study, from which he’d removed all the glass. If he could spend the day staring at the carpet . . .
    He had trouble thinking. He would be all right after Druze was done. He could clear himself out for a while, go off the medications . . . . What? He couldn’t remember. Harder to think. The units of thought, the concepts, seemed bound in threads of possibility, the threads tangled beyond his ability to follow them . . . .
    He struggled with it: and time passed.
    • • •
    The funeral home was a gloomier place than it had to be, dark red-brown brick and natural stone, with a snaky growth of still leafless ivy clinging to the stone.
    Bekker, shaky, anxious but anticipating, black beauties nestled in his pocket, drove past once, twice. There were few cars on the street but several in the funeral home driveway. As he was making his second pass, the front door opened and a half-dozen people came out and stood clustered on the steps, talking.
    Older, most of them, they were dressed in long winter coats and dark hats, like wealthy Russians. Bekker slowed, eased the car to the curb, watched the people on the steps. Their talk was animated: an argument? He couldn’t tell. After five minutes, the cluster began to break up. In ones and