Night Prey

.”
    He controlled it, continued to the end of the block, and took a right. A car was easing out of a parking place across the street from the bookstore. Perfect. Koop did a U-turn, waited for the other car to get out, backed in, locked the truck.
    As he started across the street, he heard the cawing sound again. The group he’d almost hit was crossing the end of the block, looking toward him. One of them gestured, and they made the odd cawing sound, laughed, then passed out of sight behind a building.
    “Fuckin’ assholes.” People like that pissed him off, walking on the street. Ass-wipes, he oughta . . . He shook a Camel out of his pack, lit it, took a couple of angry drags, and walked hunch-shouldered down the sidewalk to the bookstore. Through the front window, he could see a cluster of people around a fat woman, who appeared to be smoking a cigar. He took a final drag on the Camel, spun it into the street, and went inside.
    The place was crowded. The fat woman sat on a wooden chair on a podium, sucking on what turned out to be a stick of licorice, while two dozen people sat on folding chairs in a semicircle in front of her. Another fifteen or twenty stood behind the chairs; a few people glanced at Koop, then looked back at the fat woman. She said, “There’s a shocking moment of recognition when you start dealing with shit—and call it what it is, good Anglo-Saxon words, horseshit and pig shit and cow shit; I’ll tell you, on those days when you’re forkin’ manure, the first thing you do is rub a little in your hair and under your arms, really rub it in. That way, you don’t have to worry about getting it on yourself, you can just go ahead and work. . . .”
    At the back of the store, a sign said “Photography,” and Koop drifted that way. He owned an old book called Jungle Fever , with pictures and drawings of naked black women. The book that still turned him on. Maybe he’d find something like that. . . .
    Under the “Photography” sign, he pulled down a book and started flipping pages. Barns and fields. He looked around, taking stock. Several of the women had that “floating” look, the look of someone reaching for connections, of not really being tuned to the author, who was saying, “. . . certain human viability from hand-hoeing beans; oh, gets hot, sometimes so hot that you can’t spit. . . .”
    Koop was worried. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be hunting. He’d had a woman last winter, and that should have been enough, for a while. Would have been enough, if not for Sara Jensen.
    He could close his eyes and see her. . . .
     
     
     
    SEVENTEEN HOURS EARLIER, having never in his life seen Sara Jensen, Koop had gone into her apartment building, using a key. He’d worn a light coat and hat against the prying eyes of the video cameras in the lobby. Once past the cameras, he took the fire stairs to the top of the building. He moved quickly and silently, padding up the stairs on the rubber-soled loafers.
    At three in the morning, the apartment hallways were empty, silent, smelling of rug cleaner, brass polish, and cigarettes. At the eleventh floor, he stopped a moment behind the fire door, listened, then went quietly through the door and down the hall to his left. At 1135, he stopped and pressed his eye to the peephole. Dark. He’d greased the apartment key with beeswax, which deadened metal-to-metal clicking and lubricated the lock mechanism. He held the key in his right hand, and his right hand in his left, and guided the key into the lock. It slipped in easily.
    Koop had done this two hundred times, but it was a routine that clattered down his nerves like a runaway freight. What’s behind door number three? A motion detector, a Doberman, a hundred thousand in cash? Koop would find out. . . . He turned the key and pushed: not quickly, but firmly, smoothly, his heart in his mouth. The door opened with a light click. He waited, listening, then stepped into the dark apartment, closed the door behind him, and simply stood there.
    And smelled her.
    That was the first thing.
    Koop smoked unfiltered Camels, forty or fifty a day. He used cocaine almost every day. His nose was clogged with tobacco tars and scarred by the coke, but he was a creature of the night, sensitive to sounds, odors, and textures—and the perfume was dark, sensual, compelling, riding the sterile apartment air like a naked woman on a horse. It caught him, slowed him down. He lifted his head, ratlike, taking