Eyes of Prey

DNA-type?
    No help for that. But he could give the police information they’d need to track the killer. Print out a statement, Xerox it through several generations, with different darkness settings, to obscure any peculiarities of the printer . . .
    Stephanie’s face came out of nowhere.
    At one moment, he was planning. The next, she was there, her eyes closed, her head turned away, asleep. He was seized with the thought that he could go back, find her standing in the doorway, find that it had all been a nightmare . . . .
    He began to choke again, his chest heaving.
    And Stephanie’s lover thought, as he sat in the car: Bekker? Had he done this? He started the car.
    Bekker.
     
    It wasn’t quite human, the thing that pulled itself across the kitchen floor. Not quite human—eyes gone, brain damaged,bleeding—but it was alive and it had a purpose: the telephone. There was no attacker, there was no lover, there was no time. There was only pain, the tile and, somewhere, the telephone.
    The thing on the floor pulled itself to the wall where the telephone was, reached, reached . . . and failed. The thing was dying when the paramedics came, when the glass in the window broke and the firemen came through the door.
    The thing called Stephanie Bekker heard the words “Jesus Christ,” and then it was gone forever, leaving a single bloody handprint six inches below the Princess phone.

CHAPTER
2
    Del was a tall man, knobby, ungainly. He put his legs up on the booth seat and his jeans rode above his high-topped brown leather shoes, showing the leather laces running between the hooks. The shoes were cracked and caked with mud. Shoes you’d see on a sharecropper, Lucas thought.
    Lucas drained the last of his Diet Coke and looked over his shoulder toward the door. Nothing.
    “Fucker’s late,” Del said. His face flicked yellow, then red, with the Budweiser sign in the window.
    “He’s coming.” Lucas caught the eye of the bartender, pointed at his Coke can. The barkeep nodded and dug into the cooler. He was a fat man, with a mustard-stained apron wrapped around his ample belly, and he waddled when he brought the Diet Coke.
    “Buck,” he grunted. Lucas handed him a dollar bill. The bartender looked at them carefully, thought about asking a question, decided against it and went back behind the bar.
    They weren’t so much out of place as oddly assorted, Lucas decided. Del was wearing jeans, a prison-gray sweatshirt with the neckband torn out, a jean jacket, a paisley headband made out of a necktie, and the sharecropper’s shoes. Hehadn’t shaved in a week and his eyes looked like North Country peat bogs.
    Lucas wore a leather bomber jacket over a cashmere sweater, and khaki slacks and cowboy boots. His dark hair was uncombed and fell forward over a square, hard face, pale with the departing winter. The pallor almost hid the white scar that slashed across his eyebrow and cheek; it became visible only when he clenched his jaw. When he did, it puckered, a groove, whiter on white.
    Their booth was next to a window. The window had been covered with a silver film, so the people inside could see out but the people outside couldn’t see in. Flower boxes sat under the windows, alternating with radiator cabinets. The boxes were filled with plastic petunias thrust into what looked like Kitty Litter. Del was chewing Dentyne, a new stick every few minutes. When he finished a stick, he lobbed the well-chewed wad into a window box. After an hour, a dozen tiny pink wads of gum were scattered like spring buds among the phony flowers.
    “He’s coming,” Lucas said again. But he wasn’t sure. “He’ll be here.”
    Thursday night, an off-and-on hard spring rain, and the bar was bigger than its clientele. Three hookers, two black, one white, huddled together on barstools, drinking beer and sharing a copy of Mirabella. They’d all been wearing shiny vinyl raincoats in lipstick colors and had folded them down on the barstools to sit on them. Hookers were never far from their coats.
    A white woman sat at the end of the bar by herself. She had frizzy blond hair, watery green eyes and a long thin mouth that was always about to tremble. Her shoulders were hunched, ready for a beating. Another hooker: she was pounding down the gin with Teutonic efficiency.
    The male customers paid no attention to the hookers. Of the men, two shitkickers in camouflage hats, one with afolding-knife sheath on his belt, played shuffleboard