A Time of Predators

Before...

Professor Curtis Halstead yawned, looked at his watch, and settled back into his ancient leather easy chair. Paula hadn’t been on the 12:30 A.M. has, or she would have called from the depot; the next, and final, wasn’t due from San Francisco until 2:10. He stretched a heavy arm toward his glass of red wine, planning to read the dozen mimeo’d papers he’d collected that evening from his graduate seminar in anthropology at Los Feliz University.

But sitting there in the pool of light from the floor lamp, with the living room of their big old house creaking homely about him, Curt felt his eyelids getting heavy. He surrendered, draining his glass and setting aside his papers to slide lower in the chair. In a few minutes his breathing was even and steady.

“You ever had a guy try to queer you?” asked Rick Dean idly.

Rick was nineteen, lean and dark and intense, with a Barrymore profile. Sitting in the front seat of Heavy Gander’s 1956 Chevy station wagon, he turned so the remark would include the two in back as well as Heavy. One of them, Champ Mather, worked his big calloused hands and frowned with the effort of expressing himself.

“Christ, Rick, a guy do that to me, I... I’d break his neck.”

“Well, it happened to me,” said Rick, suddenly moody. His dark eyes stared at the cars straggling from the broad V-shaped lot of the drive-in movie. “It was two years ago, I was just a junior in high school and really dumb. I was walking home from this movie, see, and this guy came along and asked if I minded company.”

He stopped, as if realizing that the lights of a car swinging toward the exit might show the tautness of his features, and tipped up his beer can. They had drunk three six-packs during the movie. Since Champ Mather was twenty-one, he could buy it for them legally.

“Then, as soon as we got on a side street, he reached right over and groped me! Right there on the sidewalk!”

The boy beside him stirred. Heavy Gander fit his nickname, for he was obese and sweating under his light windbreaker. Merely because he was behind the wheel, his belly was jammed up tight against it.

“So what’d you do, Rick?”

Before Rick could answer, the other boy in the back seat, Julio Escobar, made an elaborate and well-practiced movement, and a switch blade was lying along his palm. It was unopened but deadly-looking merely by its six-inch folded length. Julio had straight black hair and an olive face whose coarse features included a long down-turned nose and a thick-lipped mouth. The lower lip was loose and petulant.

“I would have stuck him!” Julio exclaimed intensely.

In the concealing darkness, Rick’s fingers tightened around his beer can. “Well, I didn’t stick him, but I beat hell out of him. I damned near killed him.”

The others made approving noises, and Rick tossed his dead soldier out the window into the nearly empty drive-in lot. Actually, he had floundered away from the sidewalk across the sandy loam of a vacant lot, chased into darkness by the queer’s laughter. Funny, he hadn’t ever before let himself think about that night. His mouth tightened. “Say, you guys wanta have a little fun?”

“Sure, Rick,” Champ said immediately. Despite his hulking size, Champ had the alert, devoted, empty eyes of a fine retriever. Rick was the one with ideas. Rick always thought up things to do that were fun to remember afterwards, until he forgot. Champ forgot stuff easy.

“How about you, Julio?”

Julio shrugged his narrow shoulders with great nonchalance. “We should get some more beer, Rick. Or if we knew who has some pot...”

“No hash,” said Rick sharply. He had blown pot only twice, but it had made him feel vague, made him want to drift. Tonight he didn’t want to drift. Tonight he wanted to be sharp and hard and tight. He laid a hand on Heavy’s meaty shoulder. “Let’s go, man. We’ll chive down by the university somewhere, see if we can find us a queer. Then well give him a hard time, just for the hell of it.”

Heavy emitted a sudden terrific belch, and Julio started giggling. Heavy was forever breaking a guy up with all the wild noises he made.

“Geez, Rick, I don’t know...” Heavy began cautiously.

“It’s Friday — no school tomorrow. But if you’re chicken—”

Heavy grunted and twisted the ignition key sharply. He had a roundly cherubic face, but when he brushed back his long blond hair, a skull-and-crossbones ring glinted dully on his right hand. Rick grinned to himself. You could always shame chicken Heavy into doing stuff.

“I’ll pay for the beer,” Rick offered happily.

What the hell, his folks gave him a good allowance while he was going to junior college, even though he lived at home. As Heavy started the car, Rick thought with a sort of warmth that these three guys were still better friends of his than anyone he’d met at Jaycee. Julio and Heavy would be out of high school in June, and would be draft bait unless they signed up at Jaycee as he had last year. Champ was too dumb for the Army anyway; he’d even flunked all their tests and everything.

“You can tell fruiters by the way they walk, every time,” said Rick with spurious authority. “Drive down El Camino, Heavy...”

Paula Halstead hung up the phone and stepped from the booth behind the darkened Greyhound depot. Her spike heels rapped staccato messages from the blacktop, deserted except for a young man wearing a cheap suit and an undistinguished tie. He was blond and willowy, with a weak angular face.

“Did you get your husband, ma’am?”

“Yes. The big bear had fallen asleep in his chair.”

Paula might have added, over his wine. If she knew her Curt, he probably had drunk too much dago red and would have been sitting with his head back and his mouth open, snoring gently. At forty-three he couldn’t shake it off as he once had; and every night he seemed to take that glass or two too many.

“Would you like me to wait until he gets here, ma’am?” persisted the blond youth.

Paula laughed. She was thirty-six, one of those slender yet well-rounded women who remain sexually attractive into their fifties. Her mouth was generous but thin-lipped, her nose short and straight, and her eyes a startling blue in a face made tawny by the Peninsula’s inevitable sunshine.

“Lord, no! It’s only about ten minutes from our house at this time of night. But it is so very nice of you to offer...”

He shook her hand, formally with a slight bow, and she watched him start walking east toward the railroad tracks. A rather effeminate young fellow by his looks, clerk in some county office, but married and with a new child. They had begun talking on the bus because they both had been carrying that evening’s program to the San Francisco Spring Opera; his baby son had prevented his wife from accompanying him to the city. Not often young people were opera enthusiasts now.

An old green station wagon squealed into Brewer from El Camino, with shouts and laughter from the boys inside. Paula shook her head and smiled to herself. In her high school days the jalopies had carried such signs as Don’t laugh, lady, your daughter may be in this car; the world had worn primary colors then. Even sex, with its hurried tumblings in back seats, had seemed exciting then, not the messy, boring business that marriage had proved it to be.

In the next block the brake lights brightened and there was the harsh grunt of tires sliding over gravel. There was a single shout, very clear in the chilly mid-April air. Then Paula was running, toward the station wagon and the four figures which had converged on the young man who had ridden the bus with her.

“Stop!” she cried, flying toward them, too outraged to taste fear. “Stop it! You can’t...”

Rick had twisted the victim’s arms up behind his back, so high that he was bent almost double. Champ’s knee worked three times, like a piston, driving up into the strained, contorted features level with his belt buckle. Champ grunted with effort each time his knee connected.

Heavy tore at his shoulder, yelping in a voice made reedy by fear, “Quick, you guys! Champ! Run! Somebody’s coming...”

As the others scrambled for the car, Rick, transported, drove the heel of his shoe into the back of the fallen youth’s head. He twisted his leg, so he could feel the face grinding into the gravel of the railroad right-of-way. Then he too ran, bursting from the shadows just as Paula arrived.

For a moment they were face-to-face, the streetlamp shining directly on Rick’s features. Then, with a little mew of belated terror, he swept her aside and almost dove for the open rear door of the wagon. It squealed around the next corner and was gone as Paula tottered toward the fallen youth.

His breathing was shallow and labored. With sudden resolution she tugged at his shoulder to roll him over onto his side. Only then did she see what Champ’s knee and the gravel had done to his face and his eyes.

She gagged, staggered away a few steps, and threw up violently. Her body contracted jerkily with each spasm. Then heavy running footsteps raised her head. Curt’s chunky shape was pounding toward her from the bus depot where his VW was pulled up with the motor running and the driver’s side door hanging open.

“Oh, thank God,” Paula sobbed in a half-whisper.