Eyes of Prey

every few seconds with a lizard’s touch.
    The doctors had given him the new face, but his eyes were his own.
    His eyes were flat black and opaque, like weathered paint on the eyes of a cigar-store Indian. New acquaintances sometimes thought he was blind, but he was not. His eyes were the mirror of his soul: Druze hadn’t had one since the night of the burning . . . .
     
    The garage was silent. Nobody called out, no telephone rang. Druze tucked the key into his pants pocket and took ablack four-inch milled-aluminum penlight out of his jacket. With the light’s narrow beam, he skirted the car and picked his way through the litter of the garage. Bekker had warned him of this: the woman was a gardener. The unused half of the garage was littered with shovels, rakes, hoes, garden trowels, red clay pots, both broken and whole, sacks of fertilizer and partial bales of peat moss. A power cultivator sat next to a lawn mower and a snowblower. The place smelled half of earth and half of gasoline, a pungent, yeasty mixture that pulled him back to his childhood. Druze had grown up on a farm, poor, living in a trailer with a propane tank, closer to the chicken coop than the main house. He knew about kitchen gardens, old, oil-leaking machinery and the stink of manure.
    The door between the garage and the breezeway was closed but not locked. The breezeway itself was six feet wide and as cluttered as the garage. “She uses it as a spring greenhouse—watch the tomato flats on the south side, they’ll be all over the place,” Bekker had said. “You’ll need the light, but she won’t be able to see it from either the kitchen or the recreation room. Check the windows on the left. That’s the study, and she could see you from there—but she won’t be in the study. She never is. You’ll be okay.”
    Bekker was a meticulous planner, delighted with his own precise work. As he led Druze through the floor plan with his pencil, he’d stopped once to laugh. His laugh was his worst feature, Druze decided. Harsh, scratching, it sounded like the squawk of a crow pursued by owls . . . .
     
    Druze walked easily through the breezeway, stepping precisely toward the lighted window in the door at the end of the passage. He was bulky but not fat. He was, in fact, an athlete: he could juggle, he could dance, he could balance on a rope; he could jump in the air and click his heels and land lightly enough that the audience could hear the click alone, like a spoken word. Midway through, he heard a voice and paused.
    A voice, singing. Sweet, naive, like a high-school chorister’s. A woman, the words muffled. He recognized the tune but didn’t know its name. Something from the sixties. A Joan Baez song maybe. The focus was getting tighter. He didn’t doubt that he could do her. Killing Stephanie Bekker would be no more difficult than chopping off a chicken’s head or slitting the throat of a baby pig. Just a shoat, he said to himself. It’s all meat . . . .
     
    Druze had done another murder, years earlier. He’d told Bekker about it, over a beer. It wasn’t a confession, simply a story. And now, so many years later, the killing seemed more like an accident than a murder. Even less than that: like a scene from a half-forgotten drive-in movie, a movie where you couldn’t remember the end. A girl in a New York flophouse. A hooker maybe, a druggie for sure. She gave him some shit. Nobody cared, so he killed her. Almost as an experiment, to see if it would rouse some feeling in him. It hadn’t.
    He never knew the hooker’s name, doubted that he could even find the flophouse, if it still existed. At this date, he probably couldn’t figure out what week of the year it had been: the summer, sometime, everything hot and stinking, the smell of spoiled milk and rotting lettuce in sidewalk dumpsters . . .
    “Didn’t bother me,” he had told Bekker, who pressed him. “It wasn’t like . . . Shit, it wasn’t like anything. Shut the bitch up, that’s for sure.”
    “Did you hit her? In the face?” Bekker had been intent, the eyes of science. It was, Druze thought, the moment they had become friends. He remembered it with perfect clarity: the bar, the scent of cigarette smoke, four college kids on the other side of the aisle, sitting around a pizza, laughing at inanities . . . Bekker had worn an apricot-colored mohair sweater, a favorite, that framed his face.
    “Bounced her off a wall, swinging her,” Druze had said,