Night Kills

23

Denise wasn't sure what woke her.

It was four hours after Brolan left and two hours after Greg, exhausted from the pleasant turmoil of the evening, pitched himself on the sofa and fell asleep watching a Pete Smith short subject.

At first Denise thought the sound was something in a dream. Her dreams were always vivid, especially the bad ones. Her sister used to get up and shake her hard, just to help her escape the nightmare images that had plagued her since she was a little girl.

It took a while for her to understand that the sounds were not in the fervid, sweaty cages of her nightmares but were rather… real.

Her first thought on waking was: Where am I?

Her second thought was: What is that noise?

Quickly the hours she'd spent with Greg Wagner returned to her. Nice images. Nice times. At first she'd been pleasant to the man because she'd been afraid that he was going to cedi the police. But then she genuinely started liking him, especially his sly, off-the-wall sense of humour. The only times she didn't like that was when he made fun of himself. There was too much pain in his remarks, too much disappointment. And if they ever became better friends, she'd tell him that, too. That he shouldn't make fun of himself. That he was a beautiful man. From what she'd learned on the streets, real ugliness was on the inside, not on the outside. He had wit, generosity, warmth, and compassion to boast of-which was a lot more than most people had to congratulate themselves for.

Then she realized what the noise was.

Next door, in the duplex just beyond the wall that separated the two places, somebody was wandering around.

Stumbling into things.

She came up from the bed feeling naked and vulnerable in her bra and panties. She should have asked Greg if he'd loan her a pair of pyjamas. She was sure they wore about the same size.

She slipped into her clothes quickly. Against the drawn blinds she could see the nimbus of alley light and ring of crusty ice on the window. Greg must have turned the thermostat down for sleeping. The hardwood floor was cold.

She went out into the hallway, feeling her way along the walls with her hands, moving toward the light at the front of the house; the streetlights gave the living room a faint glow from the sodium vapour lamps.

Greg looked like a child curled up inside a tangle of covers. As she leaned down to him, he smelled of sleep. She touched him gently, not wanting to frighten him. He made deep, groggy noises, but at first he didn't wake up at all. She tapped him softly on the forehead.

"Greg," she whispered.

"Huh?" he said, stirring at last.

"Sh," she said, putting her finger to his lips. "Whisper; otherwise he'll hear you."

"Who'll hear me?" Greg whispered.

She could tell that he still wasn't quite fully awake yet, but he was getting there. "Whoever's next door."

As if to oblige her, the person next door now stumbled into another piece of furniture. It wasn't a big sound, but in the stillness of the winter night, when only the creaking wood and the furnace made noise, it was a significant sound.

Hearing it, Greg sat up immediately.

Even in the shadows she could see that he had trouble manoeuvring. She felt sorry for him. She wanted to hug him.

"I'm going to get my gun," he said, still whispering.

"Why don't you call the cops?"

He shook his head, then pawed at his face. "Brolan and I don't want to get the police involved just yet."

"Involved in what?"

He patted her hand. "No time to explain things now, Denise. I need to get my gun."

He manipulated the wheelchair deftly, moving himself up into it in a single near-spectacular motion. Without pause he rolled the chair down the hall and into his bedroom.

She heard a drawer squeaking open and then closing. She heard him moving quickly back down the hall toward her. He was lost completely in the darkness.

Then he sat before her, the. 45 in his hand. "I'm going over there," he said. "No!" she said. And violated her own rule about whispering.

They both stood there listening to hear if the person next door had heard her. But apparently not. The undercurrent of sound-things being moved around, drawers opening and closing-continued.

"I'll go over there," she said.

"God, Denise, you can't go over there with this gun. You'd end up shooting yourself."

"Then I won't take a gun."

"What've you got in mind?"

"Just see who it is. He probably drove a car. I can get his licence number and maybe get a good look at him."

"He could kill you."

"Not if he can't see me."

"Aren't you getting tired of whispering?"

She laughed; she couldn't help it. He sounded so crabby when he said it, like a little kid awakened in the middle of the night by a parent. A grouchy little kid. "Yes, I'm tired of whispering, but if we talk any louder, he'll hear us."

He took her hand. "I don't want you to get hurt, Denise. Maybe we should just forget it."

"I'll be fine."

"Maybe you should take the gun."

"No, you're probably right; I'd just end up shooting myself." She nodded toward the other duplex. "I'd better hurry while he's still in there."

"I'll say a prayer for you," Greg said.

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then she grabbed her coat and knit hat and went outside.

She figured it couldn't be a heck of a lot colder at the North Pole. She had been out there maybe three minutes, and already her whole face was frozen, as if an invisible dentist had just given her an extra-strong shot of Novocain, and her leather gloves weren't doing much for her hands, either. Her fingers felt like frozen fish sticks.

The backyard was absolutely still. It was the kind of night that is so cold, it's breathless. The alley light cast a purple glow and purple shadows over the three-foot drifts of sparkling snow. In some places you could see where dogs had roamed past and peed yellow in the white snow. In other places you saw where snow was capped by ice; the surface glittered.

Her present vantage point was behind an orderly row of garbage cans next to the garage. She was approximately ten yards from the back door. Her first goal had been simple enough: get out the back door without being heard and then find a place to crouch and wait while she got her bearings.

It was time to get to work, and the first thing to do was to find his car. It was very unlikely he'd parked out front. Too easy to spot by anybody passing by, cops especially. No, more likely he parked in the back somewhere.

Keeping her eye on the back door of the duplex, she started easing herself away from the protection of the garbage cans.

Then she was in the alley, her rubber-soled boots making vague farting noises against the hard-packed snow. Farting noises; God, she always had weird thoughts like that. It was just one of many reasons that she considered herself so weird and unworthy. Other human beings-real human beings didn't have thoughts like that. She was sure she was alone in that and so many other things in the world.

It didn't take a genius to find the car. He had parked it several yards down the alley, parallel with a garage. From inside her coat she took the small tablet and pencil she'd copped from Greg and wrote down the licence number. Then she went over and peered inside the car. She had no idea what she was looking for.

She tried the driver's door. It was unlocked. Since she was looking for stuff, it would probably make more sense to open the door and start looking around that way, wouldn't it?

She opened the door and started rooting around inside. She could tell immediately that the owner of the car smoked cigarettes. The damp tobacco smell was almost foetid. She could also tell that the owner of the car was rich. The seats were real leather. They smelled that way, and they felt that way.

She found, among other things, a paperback novel, an unopened pack of cigarettes, a black pocket comb, a map of Milwaukee, some kind of brochure about the trucking industry, an empty 7-Eleven coffee cup with a lipstick smudge at the top, and a candy wrapper, which made her hungry. God, she was hungry all the time. In some ways that scared her. All her aunts and uncles were real porkers. Was she going to turn out that way herself?

She was just about to start on the glove compartment when the man grabbed her. She knew it was a man because no woman (unless she was one of those ripple-bodied steroidal bodybuilders) could ever have this much strength.

He grabbed her, yanking her out of the car, and then he struck her a mighty blow on the back of her neck. She assumed in that instant of totally blinding pain, in that instant of terrible warmth rushing up her spinal column to her neck and then exploding inside her head-she assumed that she was dying.

Then she struck the ground, her cheek smashing against the snow the man's boots had just turned into small ruts.

She thought of her sister in the mental hospital; of her first dog, Peachy-Keen; of the way sunlight and shadow played on the surface of Henderson creek in the summertime. These were weird things to think of, probably; but then, she was a very weird girl indeed.

And that became her last thought: how odd she was, how different from all others.

Then there was nothing. Nothing.