Silent Prey

enough cash to fly, he’d buy dope with the cash and take the bus. Or hitchhike. Or just not go. With enough crack, you didn’t have to go anywhere . . . . He certainly wouldn’t take several hundred dollars out to La Guardia and push it across the ticket counter.
    On the other hand, a doper doesn’t take a cab to the bus depot, not when the A train would have him there quicker and leave him enough change for a rock or two. La Guardia was another story. There was no easy way to get there, except by cab . . . .
    So maybe he was flying. And maybe he was flying on an unrefundable ticket. And that sounded like a ticket issued by a government.
    Or a police department.
    And then there was Mrs. Logan’s story.
    That was very interesting; interesting and disturbing. Had Lily not understood it? Or had she hoped that Lucas hadn’t?

CHAPTER
12
    Thirty hits of speed, two days; Bekker hadn’t slept forever. He was carried along on the chemicals like a leaf in a river, the flow of time and thought rolling about him. And he was avoiding the woman with the eyes, the woman watching him. She terrified him: but the chemicals had defeated her after two days, and she was losing her grip.
    But other things were happening.
    Late in the afternoon of the second day, the bugs came. He could feel them, lines of them, inching through his veins. All of his veins, but in particular, a vein on the forearm; he could feel them, little bumps, rattling along, doing their filthy work. Eating him.
    Eating the blood cells. He could remember, as a child, kicking open ant nests and seeing the ants running for cover, their mealy white eggs in their jaws. And this was the image that came to him: ants running, but with blood cells caught in their pincers. Thousands of them, running through his veins. If he could let them out . . .
    A voice in his head: No no no, hallucination, no no no  . . .
    He stood up, his knees and feet aching. He’d walked for miles in the basement, back and forth, back and forth. How far? A few errant brain cells wandered away and did the calculation . . . say five thousand round trips, twenty feet each way . . . thirty-seven point eight seven eight miles. Thirty-seven point eight seven eight seven eight seven eight seven eight seven . . .
    He was snared in the eight-seven loop, captivated by the sheer infinity of it, a loop that would last longer than the sun, would last longer than the universe, would go on for . . . what?
    He shook himself out of the loop, felt the bugs raging through his veins, took his forearm to the bathroom, turned on the light, looked for bumps, where the bugs scuttled along . . . .
    A voice: formication  . . .
    He pushed it away. Had to let them out, squeeze them out somehow. He walked into the operating theater, went to the instruments pan, found a scalpel, let them out . . . .
    He began to walk, the bugs draining away, began to pace again—what was that smell? So clean and coppery, like the sea. Blood?
    He looked down at himself. Blood was running from his arm. Not heavily, now slowing, but his hand and forearm looked as though they had been flayed. Where he’d been pacing, blood splattered the floor, an oval line marking his pattern, as though someone had been swinging a decapitated chicken.
    The voice: stereotypy.
    What? He stared at the arm and a bug zipped down the vein. Like Charlie Victor on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, likeCharlie Victor at the Hotel Oscar, Charlie Hotel India Mike November Lima Tango Romeo . . .
    Another loop—where had that come from? ’Nam? He shook himself out. The bugs were waiting, in all their ranks.
    Medication. He went to his medicine table, found a half-dozen pills. That was all. He popped one, then another. And a third.
    He picked up the phone, struggled with himself, put it back down. No telephone from here, not to a dealer. Cops bugged dealers, bugged . . . He looked down at his arm, at the sticky blood . . . .
    Calmed himself. Washed. Dressed. Put a bandage on the cut on his forearm. Cut? How did that . . .
    He lost the thought and fixed himself in the mirror, preparing for his public, the need always there, looking over his shoulder. The need brought up the street personality. Changed his voice. Changed his manner. When he finished dressing, he went out to the corner, to a pay phone.
    “Yes?” Woman’s voice.
    “May I speak to Dr. West?”
    Whitechurch was there a second later. “Jesus Christ, we gotta talk.