Eyes of Prey

twos, they drifted out to their cars and, finally, were gone.
    Bekker tried to wait but couldn’t. The pressure to move . . . and there was nobody in sight. He didn’t much credit the funeral home receptionist’s comment that theater people were expected, but you never knew with theater people. He climbed out of the car, looked around, walked slowly up the driveway to the funeral home. A car cruised past and he turned his head. A man watching him? Druze again? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. In five minutes, he’d be done . . . .
     
    The net was with him:
    “He’s out of the car, looking at the door,” the close man said, driving on by. He didn’t look at Bekker, who was walking slowly up the driveway.
     
    There was no place to hide in the Rose Chapel, but the other rooms were worse. Lucas finally decided he could drive a nail through the top panel of one of the double doors, then pull the nail and have a hole large enough to peep through. The manager wouldn’t let him use a nail, but did loan him apower drill with a sixteenth-inch bit. When Lucas, standing in the dark behind the doors, pressed his eye to the hole, he could see the entire coffin area.
    “Go up there, bend over him,” he told Sloan. Del was leaning against the wall, faintly amused. Sloan stood over the coffin and looked back at the doors. The hole was invisible.
    “Put your hand on his head, or over it, or something,” Lucas called from behind the doors. Sloan put his hand over Druze’s head. A moment later, the doors opened.
    “Can’t see your hand,” Lucas said. He looked around the room. “But I think any other arrangement would look wrong.”
    “Yeah, with the alcove like that,” Sloan said, nodding toward the coffin.
    Del grinned. “We could, like, put, you know, a spring with a clown under his eyelids, and when Bekker pulls it open, see, it pops up . . . .”
    “I like it,” Sloan said. “Motherfucker’d have a heart attack . . . .”
    “Jesus,” Lucas said, glancing toward the body. “I think we’ll settle for the hole in the door.”
     
    “He’s moving,” said the voice on the handset.
    Sloan looked at Lucas. “You cool?”
    “I’m cool,” Lucas said.
    “So’m I,” Del said. He unconsciously dropped his hand back to his hip, where he kept a small piece clipped to his belt. “I’m cool, too.”
     
    The receptionist came from Intelligence and spent his nights working undercover. “No problem,” he said. “I could win a fuckin’ Oscar, the work I do.” There were two squads immediately available, and the surveillance team coming in with Bekker.
    “He’s here,” the radio burped ten minutes later. “He’s going past.”
    Bekker rambled through the neighborhood, looking it over, and made another pass at the front of the funeral home before he stopped.
    “He’s out of the car, looking at the door,” the radio said.
    “Everybody . . .” Lucas said.
     
    A finger of joy touched his soul. In five minutes . . .
    Bekker wore a trench coat and a crushable hat, with leather driving gloves. The scalpel, a plastic tube protecting the point, was clipped in his shirt pocket. The funeral home door, he thought, looked like the door on a bad ski chalet . . . .
    The funeral home was overly warm. An antique mirror, like those collected by Stephanie, surprised him just inside the door. He flinched, jerked his eyes away, but found them drawn back . . . .
    Druze was gone. Beauty looked back at him. Beauty looked fine, he thought, but tired. Unusual lines crossed his wide brow, gathered at the corners of his eyes. A different look, he thought, but not unattractive. French, perhaps, a world-weariness . . . like the actor with the home-rolled cigarette. What was his name? He couldn’t concentrate, his own image floating in front of him like a dream. And then a gathering darkness behind his image, and . . .
    He pulled his eyes away. Druze was there, still waiting.
    “Buchanan?”
    “What?” Bekker jumped. He’d been so engrossed in the mirror that he hadn’t heard the funeral home receptionist until the man was virtually on top of him.
    “Are you here for Mr. Buchanan?” The receptionist seemed ordinary, a thin man in a conservative coat and flannel slacks, a man with no particular relationship to death, although he worked in the middle of it. No imagination . . .
    “No . . .” Bekker said, “ah, Mr. Druze?”
    “Oh, yes. That would be the Rose Chapel. Down