Blow Fly

2

NIGHT ON THE BAYOU reminds Jay Talley of a Cajun band of bullfrogs playing bass, and peepers screaming on electric guitars, and cicadas and crickets rasping washboards and sawing fiddles.

He shines a flashlight near the dark, arthritic shape of an old cypress tree, and alligator eyes flash and vanish beneath black water. The light simmers with the ominous soft sound of mosquitoes as the BayStealth drifts, the outboard motor cut. Jay sits in the captain's chair and idly surveys the woman in the fish box not far below his feet. When he was boat shopping several years ago, this particular BayStealth excited him. The fish box beneath the floor is long and deep enough to hold more than a hundred and twenty pounds of ice and fish, or a woman built the way he likes.

Her wide, panicked eyes shine in the dark. In daylight, they are blue, a deep, beautiful blue. She painfully screws them shut as Jay caresses her with the beam of the flashlight, starting with her mature, pretty face, all the way down to her red painted toenails. She is blonde, probably in her early- to mid-forties, but looks younger than that, petite but curvaceous. The fiberglass fish box is lined with orange boat cushions, dirty and stained black from old blood. Jay was thoughtful, even sweet when he bound her wrists and ankles loosely so the yellow nylon rope wouldn't cut off her circulation. He told her that the rope wouldn't abrade her soft flesh as long as she didn't struggle.

"No point in struggling, anyway," he said in a baritone voice that goes perfectly with his blond-god good looks. "And I'm not going to gag you. No point in screaming, either, right?"

She nodded her head, which made him laugh, because she was nodding as if answering yes when, of course, she meant no. But he understands how haywire people think and act when they are terrified, a word that has always struck him as so completely inadequate. He supposes that when Samuel Johnson was toiling at the many editions of his dictionary, he had no idea what a human being feels when he or she anticipates horror and death. The anticipation creates a frenzy of panic in every neuron, in every cell of the body, that goes far, far beyond mere terror, but even Jay, who is fluent in many languages, has no better word to describe what his victims suffer.

A frisson of horror.

No.

He studies the woman. She is a lamb. In life, there are only two types of people: wolves and lambs.

Jay's determination to perfectly describe the way his lambs feel has become a relentless, obsessive quest. The hormone epinephrine-adrenaline-is the alchemy that turns a normal person into a lower form of life with no more control or logic than a gigged frog. Added to the physiological response that precipitates what criminologists, psychologists and other so-called experts refer to as fight-or-flight are the additional elements of the lamb's past experiences and imagination. The more violence a lamb has experienced through books, television, movies or the news, for example, the more the lamb can imagine the nightmare of what might happen.

But the word. The perfect word. It eludes him tonight.

He gets down on the boat floor and listens to his lamb's rapid, shallow breaths. She trembles as the earthquake of horror (for lack of the perfect word) shifts her every molecule, creating unbearable havoc. He reaches down into the fish box and touches her hand. It is as cold as death. He presses two fingers against the side of her neck, finding her carotid artery and using the luminescent dial of his watch to take her pulse.

"One-eighty, more or less," he tells her. "Don't have a heart attack. I had one who did."

She stares at him with eyes bigger than a full moon, her lower lip twitching.

"I mean it. Don't have a heart attack." He is serious.

It is an order.

"Take a deep breath."

She does, her lungs shaky.

"Better?"

"Yes. Please…"

"Why is it that all of you little lambs are so fucking polite?"

Her dirty magenta cotton shirt had been torn open days ago, and he spreads the ripped front, exposing her more than ample breasts. They tremble and shimmer in the faint light, and he follows their round slopes down to her heaving rib cage, to the hollow of her flat abdomen, down to the unzipped fly of her jeans.

"I'm sorry," she tries to whisper as a tear rolls down her dirt-streaked face.

"Now, there you go again." He sits back in his throne of the captain's chair. "Do you really, really believe that being polite is going to change my plans?" The politeness sets off a slow burning rage. "Do you know what politeness means to me?"

He expects an answer.

She tries to wet her lips, her tongue as dry as paper. Her pulse visibly pounds in her neck, as if a tiny bird is trapped in there.

"No." She chokes on the word, tears flowing into her ears and hair.

"Weakness," he says.

Several frogs strike up the band. Jay studies his prisoner's nakedness, her pale skin shiny with bug repellent, a small humane act on his part, motivated by his distaste for red welts. Mosquitoes are a gray, chaotic storm around her but do not land. He gets down from his chair again and gives her a sip of bottled water. Most of it runs down her chin. Touching her sexually is of no interest to him. Three nights now he has brought her out here in his boat, because he wants the privacy to talk and stare at her nakedness, hoping that somehow her body will become Kay Scarpetta's, and finally becomes furious because it can't, furious because Scarpetta wouldn't be polite, furious because Scarpetta isn't weak. A rabid part of him fears he is a failure because Scarpetta is a wolf and he captures only lambs, and he can't find the perfect word, the word.

He realizes the word will not come to him with this lamb in the fish box, just as it hasn't come with the others.

"I'm getting bored," he tells his lamb. "I'll ask you again. One last chance. What is the word?"

She swallows hard, her voice reminding him of a broken axle as she tries to move her tongue to speak. He can hear it sticking to her upper palate.

"I don't understand. I'm sorry…"

"Fuck the politeness, do you hear me? How many times do I have to say it?"

The tiny bird inside her neck beats frantically, and her tears flow faster.

"What is the word? Tell me what you feel. And don't say scared. You're a goddamn schoolteacher. You must have a vocabulary with more than five words in it."

"I feel… I feel acceptance," she says, sobbing.

"You feel what?"

"You're not going to let me go," she says. "I know it now."