Eyes of Prey

building onto Pillsbury, down the street, pulling on his driving gloves. The Jeep was there, right where it should be. He stooped, found the keys, unlocked the door and got inside. This was the risky part. Fifteen minutes’ worth. But if he got the car to the airport, the cops might be bluffed into thinking that George had taken off on his own . . . .
     
    The campus cops came back ten minutes later. The Jeep was gone. One of the cops saw something round and flat winking up at her in the headlights, and she said, “Something over there?”
    “Where?”
    “Right there. Looks like money.”
    She got out, stooped and picked it up. Lug nut. She tossed it in the back of the squad car.
    “Nothing,” she said.
     
    Bekker took the Jeep out the same way Druze had driven, down to I-94, but westbound, to I-35W, south on I-35W and then on the Crosstown Expressway to the airport. He dropped the Cherokee in the long-term parking garage andleft the ticket under the visor. Back on the street, he flagged a cab, keeping his hat down against the wind and against identification.
    “Where to?” the cabbie grunted. He wasn’t interested in talking.
    “The Lost River Theater, on Cedar Avenue . . .”
    From the Lost River, it was a twenty-minute walk to the hospital. He went in the way he’d come out, walked up to his office and sat for ten minutes. He remembered to call the answering machine and, using the touch-tone buttons, ordered it to reset. He waited a few more minutes, impatient, then turned off the lights in his office and went back down to his car.
    At home, Bekker stripped off his clothes as he walked up the stairs, dropping them wherever they came off. Stephanie would have been outraged; he smiled as he thought about it. He crawled into his closet and took two tabs of phenobarbital, two more of methaqualone, two of methadone, a heavy hit of acid, five hundred mikes. The warmth was incredible. The drugs unwound as they always did—color sequences, clips from life, fantasies, the face of God—then shaded unexpectedly from yellows and reds through pinks into purples; and finally, the fear growing in his throat, Bekker watched the snake uncurl.
    The snake was huge, scaleless, more like an eel than a snake, no mouth, just a long cold form unwinding, curling into him.
    And George was there.
    He didn’t say anything, George: he simply watched and grew. His eyes were black, but somehow bright as diamonds. He closed on Bekker, the eyes growing larger, the mouth beginning to open, a forked tongue deep inside . . . .
     
    Bekker had killed three whores in Vietnam. He’d done it carefully, confident that he’d never be exposed; he’d worn anenlisted man’s uniform, the Class A greens of a spec-5 killed in a Saigon traffic accident, the uniform dumped at Bekker’s doorstep in a black satchel that had been with the dead man in his jeep.
    Bekker had strangled the three women. It hadn’t been hard. They’d been specialists of a sort, unsurprised when he let them know that he wanted to sit on their chests. More surprised when he pinned their hands. Definitely surprised when he clamped his powerful fingers on their throats, crushing the cartilage with a powerful pinch of his thumb and fore-finger . . .
    The first one had looked straight into his eyes as she’d died, and it was there that Bekker had had his first hint that she’d seen something beyond.
    And she was the one who’d come back.
    She’d preyed on him, haunted him, followed him with her black eyes. For six weeks he’d doped himself, screaming through the nights, afraid of sleep. He’d seen her in his waking hours, too, in the shiny reflections from his instruments, from mirrors, in panes and fragments of glass . . . .
    She’d faded, finally, beaten down with drugs. And Bekker had known instinctively that the physical eyes made the difference.
    For the next woman, he’d been prepared. He’d pinned her, choked her and, with a stainless-steel scalpel, cut her eyes as she’d died. And slept like a baby.
    The third one had died quickly, too quickly, before he could cut her eyes. He had cut them dead, but he still feared that she would follow him into his dreams: that it was necessary to cut the living eyes.
    But it was not. He’d never seen that one again.
    He’d cut the eyes on the old man dying of congestive heart failure, and the old woman with the stroke—they’d delivered those two right to him, in the pathology department, and he