Small Town

Why the hell had she put his hands on her throat? Pressed them there, when he moved to take them away?

Please, she’d urged.

Please what?

He had dinner alone, came back and picked up a collection of O’Hara’s short stories. He skipped through it, reading a couple of old favorites, wishing he could write like that.

On his way back from the bathroom, he checked the rabbit’s dish. Susan had said the cornmeal was disappearing, and he looked for himself and decided she was seeing things. Or, more accurately, not seeing them. He picked up the dish and sniffed it, and it seemed to him that it smelled of tobacco smoke.

Now you’re really being nuts, he told himself. And dumped the dish in the garbage, wiped it out, and added fresh meal from the sack in the refrigerator.

Live a little, he told the rabbit. We’re going to be rich, you can have fresh cornmeal every day for years.

But how’d you get here, anyway?

He looked for his copy of Blake’s poems, found “The Tyger.” There was one line he wanted to check, to make sure he remembered it correctly. Yes, there it was:

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

He put the book back, picked up the rabbit, looked into his little eyes. They were some dark stone, maybe obsidian, and they gave the animal an expression of great alertness, which was all to the good; if you were going to talk to a little turquoise rabbit, you wanted to feel it was paying attention to you.

Why did I pick you up, and why don’t I remember it? And what did I do just before I picked you up, or just after?

And why did she put my hands on her throat?

forty

One purchase the Carpenter had made was a small plastic funnel, and it was proving a handy tool indeed. He had used wide-mouthed fruit juice jars for his first Molotov cocktails, and they’d been easy to fill, though less easy to fit with stoppers. Nor were they readily available by the case in a riverside marina. Thus the beer bottles, and the funnel, which speeded up the task while keeping spillage to a minimum.

The Carpenter filled twelve bottles at a time, stoppered them with the cloth wicks, and carried each full case out of the cabin and onto the open deck, where any fumes would dissipate quickly in the open air. He paused periodically to have a look at the intruder, who had not yet regained consciousness, and who might indeed be dead by now. He’d had a pulse when the Carpenter first checked, but he hadn’t stirred, and it seemed possible that he might have died of a burst blood vessel in the brain, or some other effect of the two blows he’d taken to the head.

His pockets had yielded some treasures, most notably a pair of handcuffs, which encouraged the Carpenter to look further. He’d found a gun, a fully loaded revolver, and maybe this one actually worked. He seemed to recall that pistols had a tendency to jam, as his had evidently done, and he didn’t think that was the case with revolvers. He’d put the pistol back on top of the chest of drawers, held there by the clips, and transferred the intruder’s pistol to his pocket.

Stripping the man, he’d found what he at once recognized as a bulletproof vest. Well, it wouldn’t have kept the Carpenter from putting a bullet into the back of the intruder’s neck, had the gun worked. The Carpenter tried it on and liked the feel of it, the comfort it somehow provided. He’d put his clothes on over it, liking the bulk and weight of it. Then he added the shoulder holster, and transferred the gun from his pocket to the holster. He practiced with it, drawing it, then returning it to the leather holster. He felt as though he were now secretly protected, as if by a guardian angel.

The intruder, in marked contrast, was naked, and entirely vulnerable. He had no body hair, the Carpenter noted, although he had a full head of hair and the beard of a man who’d last shaved in the morning. The Carpenter ran a hand over the smooth skin and wondered at its cause. Some disease? Or had the intruder deliberately removed the hair, perhaps for some religious reason?

Francis Buckram, that was the intruder’s name, according to the cards in his wallet. And he was some sort of policeman, which explained the gun and the handcuffs. It was while he was using those handcuffs to anchor the intruder to the chest of drawers that he remembered where he’d heard that name before, and realized why the man had looked familiar. He’d been the police commissioner once.

And how had he found his way to the Nancy Dee? That was something he might ask the man, if he ever came to. And if it wasn’t necessary to kill him right away.