When the tall Indian woman came up to him, Rebecca felt as though somebody had stuck her with a hot needle. She’d seen that woman with Adam one night, when Rebecca had followed him from work. She’d assumed the woman was another one of his perverted victims, but now here the woman was, in the hospital …

  Dr. Bowman didn’t seem to know her. They went up in the elevator together. Rebecca waited and sketched idly on her notepad; the images that came out were perverse and disturbed, dark shadowy things that seemed ready to leap off the page. She ripped the pages out and crumpled them up. As she shoved them in the trash, the elevator opened and the Indian woman got off. Rebecca hesitated, uncertain, and as she did the stairway door banged open and Michael Bowman ran out, gasping. He pelted after the Indian woman. Rebecca followed and got there in time to see her drive off in a plain green car. Dr. Bowman stood there helplessly, put his hands to his head in a gesture of absolute exasperation, and turned to go back inside. Rebecca didn’t have time to hide, was caught flatfooted, staring right at him.

  He looked right through her without recognition. He didn’t know her in street clothes with her hair tied back. God had saved her again, deserving or not. When Bowman came back and went out to the doctor’s parking area, she followed him with more confidence, but there was something so pale and terrible about him that she didn’t think he would have noticed her if she’d reached over to tap him on the shoulder. He got in his fancy car and roared off, and Rebecca had to drive too fast to follow him. He went to his house. She pulled up a block away and watched him while he looked at it, and then his face twisted as if he’d been hurt and he slammed his car in reverse. He roared past her again. She was far from surprised when he ended up—of course—at a bar. Wasn’t that where all sinners went for comfort?

  Rebecca didn’t go in bars. She never had, never would. She sat in her car and waited, all the doors locked because of the drunks and lechers who hung around in the shadows. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Dr. Bowman was doing. Drinking, dancing, making lewd comments to underage girls. Maybe even having sex with one. He was married, she knew, but that didn’t mean anything, not to someone like him. Besides that, Rebecca had met his wife, and she was a cold sharp woman, probably sleeping around herself. Her kind always did.

  She sat there in the growing darkness and watched girls walk by in their skin-tight dresses. Some of them didn’t make any pretense at underwear. One girl had on a skirt so short that it barely hid her crotch; all the men on the sidewalk watched her with identical expressions of lust. It was degrading and horrible.

  Adam Radburn was standing ten feet away when she looked back toward the bar. Rebecca flinched and sank down in her seat, but he wasn’t looking her way. He watched the bar, as she did, for a few minutes and then went inside. There was something different about him tonight, some tension she hadn’t seen before. She was glad he hadn’t seen her, because she knew what little value he placed on the lives of the godly.

  He was inside for only a few minutes. When he came out, he got in his car—the convertible—and pulled away into traffic. Rebecca followed, holding back carefully, taking every precaution. On the freeway she was forced to keep close or lose him; when he took an off-ramp, she was too close for him to miss seeing her. He didn’t turn his head or give any indication that he knew, but he kept driving, accelerating back onto the freeway through a red light and leaving her angry and steaming there in the cool night. It wouldn’t have done any good to keep following him. He knew. He always knew.

  She reached down for a pencil and methodically broke it into smaller and smaller pieces until her fingers couldn’t find the strength to divide it any more. Divide and conquer. Divide and—

  The Indian woman drove by in her green car, splendidly illuminated by the streetlights. She was singing soundlessly to her radio. Rebecca felt a wave of peace wash over her and turned to keep her red taillights in view.

  Thank you, God. Oh, thank you. I will not fail you.

  Rebecca pulled in at the curb more than a block away from the Victorian house where the woman parked. The woman had something to do with Adam, all right. Rebecca noted down the address on her notebook and doodled a bit, thinking. In the house, shadows moved back and forth across backlit curtains. She tapped the eraser on the notebook and hummed a little hymn, bringing some sense of Jesus into the car and into her suddenly scared soul.

  The passenger door opened. Rebecca jumped and started to scream, but by the time she got her mouth open he was already in and looking at her. After that first jolt she knew who he was, but that didn’t make her heart pound any less hard.

  “Ev’nin’, Miss Rebecca,” the man she’d hired to kill Julie Gilmore said, and smiled. His eyes were colorless, just the slightest tint of blue to them. He was dressed in the mismatched clothes of the bums who littered downtown, and he stank of rotten things and vomit. He frightened her, but it wasn’t because he seemed violent. Just the opposite. He was genial and quiet and clever, and the simple lack of feeling in those eyes was enough to frighten anyone, even someone with the shield of God before them.

  “Hello, William,” Rebecca said as evenly as she could. “What do you want?”

  He looked at her for a moment, something that was not quite a smile drifting across his lips, and then he leaned back and stretched. There was something oddly wrong about the way he moved. Something bad.

  “Well, now, you’ve given me a great deal of pleasure so far, Miss Rebecca. I ’spect you’ll continue to do so.” He did smile, now, at some private and lewd joke. “How’s your friend takin’ his loss?”

  “What do you want?” she repeated. Her heart was thudding hard now, beating a steady fast beat of alarm. He picked up her notebook and leafed through, examining the sketches even though it was too dark to really see them. “William!”

  “Don’t yell,” he said mildly. As mild as it was, it frightened her half to death. “I want to help you, missy. Indeed, I want you to help me, too.”

  He smiled at her, lips parting, teeth gleaming. His teeth

  Were

  Too

  Long.

  Chapter Seven

  Breakthroughs

  Maggie was still asleep when I left the house the next morning. It was hard to look at her sleeping beautiful face and imagine her with Nick, harder not to. I couldn’t sleep. The hangover wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, so I downed some vitamins and ibuprofen with juice and headed out before the sun was up.

  Oops. No car. It was still parked in front of that bar—what the hell was it called? Oh well. The walk would help me clear my head, or at least stretch my muscles. It was very quiet in the predawn darkness. I cut through the park trees and came out on the winding jogging path that I’d run in such panic the other night. I felt a little foolish walking it in my suit and dress shoes, particularly as joggers loomed up out of the dark and huffed past me. The morning was cool and a little foggy, enough to create little hollows of mist in the trees and halos around the streetlights. The moisture smelled sharp and metallic as it laced around the punctuations of honeysuckle and the faintly decayed odor of the lake. As the sun rose behind me in a diffused golden glow, I came out of the park a block away from the hospital.

  I debated for a moment; I could go and get the car, or I could just go get it after work. The lazy option won out, of course; I headed for the hospital.

  The tape recorder was still lying in pieces on the floor. I picked up the fragments and tossed it in the trash. I put the tape in a mailer to my typist and stuck it in my out box. I picked up the phone and dialed my home phone, but hung up even before the first ring. I didn’t want to talk to Maggie. If I did, the hate and hurt was going to come spilling out in one black ugly stream, and I wasn’t ready for that yet.

  When are you going to be ready, Doc? When Nick moves his suits into the spare bedroom?

  I finished the paperwork and went down to the wards. My two surgical patients of the day before were doing fine, and so were three I’d cut before I’d been incapacitated. Life was grand. I exchanged polite, but loud, conversation with my buddy Carl Voorhees, had lunch with Viv Grant and Ranesh, and consulted with Carl again on an upcoming bypass at three. By the time I got out, dusk had fallen hard on the city, and fog was creeping up again in the hollows. And I still had to walk to the bar and claim my Volvo before somebody with decent hotwiring skills did.

  I didn’t want to go home. I window-shopped all the way to the bar, went in a bookstore and bought three magazines and a new thick paperback. I caught myself looking at cards and thinking how much Maggie would have liked the funny ones; that hurt, but it gave me some reason to keep looking. I found one and carried it up to the counter with my reading material. I signed it at the counter, struggling with the few simple words, and felt a real sense of relief and accomplishment once I’d sealed the envelope.

  Score one for the doc.

  The Volvo smelled stale and hot inside, as if I’d packed it full of impotent anger. I rolled the windows down and let it bleed out into the sky. The drive home was short and uneventful. After I turned the car off, I sat in it for a while listening to it tick like a bomb, then grabbed my sack and went inside. I remembered the alarm, this time. I turned the goddamn thing off and kicked the door shut.

  Maggie jumped, surprised, and turned to look at me. She’d just gotten home herself, it seemed; she was still taking off her earrings, which had been the second thing to come off her body when she reached the door. The first—her shoes—lay halfway across the room next to her purse. We looked at each other like a pair of idiots for a few minutes, neither one saying a word, and Maggie turned away and started unbuttoning her blouse.

  I dropped my sack and walked over to her, turned her by the shoulders to face me, and cupped my hands around her face. Her blue eyes got wider, but not any more welcoming.

  “How’s your hangover?” she asked neutrally. She hadn’t stopped unbuttoning her shirt, but there wasn’t anything seductive about it. She looked bored and irritated. “Let go, Mike, you know we’re supposed to have dinner with Carl tonight.”

  We were? I blinked. Maggie had an infallible memory for dates, something I never could master; she’d probably set it up five months ago, and Carl would probably never show, and she’d never understand why he’d forgotten. She frowned a little and shook my hands off her shoulders. The blouse slid off. She turned away from me, heading for the bedroom, hands busy at the button of her skirt.

  She’s walking away, I thought numbly. Do something. Do anything.

  If I were in the movies, I’d grab her, kiss the hell out of her, and throw her on the bed. In the movies, of course, women were never out of the mood, and the male actors never had to feel that silent, hating rejection pierce through their flesh. When she turned off, Maggie turned OFF, no middle ground, and forcing her into anything was more likely to get me hurt than get me off. It wouldn’t have reached that point, of course. I couldn’t have raped my wife, whatever some lawyer might have called it.

  I followed her, though. I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched her strip off the skirt and the pantyhose and the bra. She shot me a quick glance as she yanked on a pair of blue jeans and a sweater.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. It wasn’t a warm question, but it was a question.

  “I was going to ask you the same question,” I murmured. She looked away, pulled the tie off the end of her braid, and began loosening her hair. It fell out in rich gold ripples, like wheat fields in the wind. “God, Mag, do you know how I feel? What’s going on here?”

  “I don’t know. You act like a psycho, Mike, and you ask me what’s going on? You’re sneaking around like some paranoid, you know. You look at me like I’m from another fucking planet.” She sat down at the dressing table, picked up her brush, and started attacking her hair, hissing and cursing when it snagged. Her hands were trembling. I got up and took the brush away from her; I took her hair and began slowly stroking the bristles through it, easing the tangles. Her shoulders were as tense as wire. “What are you thinking, Mike?”

  “I’m thinking,” I said quietly, “how much I love you. Do you believe that? That I love you?”

  She looked up, and the impact hit me in the pit of my stomach. Maggie’s lips smiled, then faltered into a still, tense line. I dropped the brush and just watched her, going to one knee next to her. We weren’t touching, maybe because we both knew that would be a lie.

  “I’m in trouble, Mikey,” she finally said, very softly, a lost little girl. Her eyes flooded with tears, but they didn’t fall, just covered her eyes like a hot silver shield. Her long fingers trembled spasmodically and clenched on her knees. “I never meant it to go this far. I never meant for you to be hurt. Can you believe that?”

  I just looked at her.

  “There isn’t anything I can do yet. All I can do is wait him out. If I make a move right now; I don’t know what he’ll do, and I need time …” Maggie’s voice faded out into a gray whisper. She looked down. The tears fell and shattered on her hands. One caught on the diamond crowning her wedding ring and trembled there. It melted liquidly down the gold and disappeared. “Trust me. Please trust me.”

  I felt a wild, despairing urge to laugh like some melodrama villain. Trust? Trust has no place in this, madam. You are found out.

  I didn’t laugh. I reached out to her and took her hand. The tear slid between her fingers and serpentined down her palm; it spread out over my skin and sealed us together. Tears, blood, sweat, semen—cement between lovers.

  The wall wasn’t so absolute, after all. I felt it crack between us, and something showed through to illuminate the shadows. Maggie’s eyes glowed fiercely with it, a desire that went beyond the sensual play of sex. A desire that made me ache all over with need and want. I wanted Maggie, not Maggie’s body, not the sweet slide of moving flesh—I wanted that fire.

  Love was a pale word for it.

  “Nick …” Maggie whispered. I let go of her hand and touched her lips with fingers salted with her tears. She kissed them, and I could fed that same ache in her, the ragged dark need. My fingers moved to slide up her smooth cheek, to rest over the sharp arch of her cheekbone.

  “I don’t want to hear about Nick. You know what I want.”

  She sat in silence, staring at me. The intensity of her expression, the hunger, the hope, made me fed lightheaded.

  “I’ll never leave you, Michael. Never.” Maggie’s voice was even and final. I felt the wall shatter between us in an explosion of anguished relief. “And you’d better never leave me, you bastard.”

  “Do you think I could?” I asked her. She got up and walked with decisive choppy steps to the door and swung the door shut. “What the hell are you doing?”

  She leaned against the door for a minute, not looking at me. I felt a wave of utter despair and fear. She’d changed her mind. She couldn’t stand to look at me.

  “I want you,” she said then, still without moving, “to make love to me. Now.”

  Maggie turned around and leaned against the wall, posing in a relaxed cover-girl attitude that was obviously deliberate. For the first time in what seemed like a long time, she smiled that slow, wicked smile, and I felt something surge in response. Her hands grabbed the bottom of her sweater and lifted it in one smooth move over her head.

  “Maggie?” I murmured, delighted and horrified. She unzipped her jeans, stepped out of them, and tossed them in an untidy pile next to her sweater. She crossed to me completely naked. “This is crazy”

  “Isn’t it?” She smiled. She leaned forward and put her lips on mine. I was still kneeling, she was stooping, and somehow her breasts seemed to fit naturally in the palms of my hands. Our mouths opened hungrily, damply. She slowly pulled away. I didn’t feel the slightest urge to get up, not yet. There was something left to say.

  “Don’t leave me, Maggie,” I said. It came out of me like an explosion, painful and visceral. “Stay with me. Stay my wife. I never knew how much I wanted that until now. I’ll do anything to keep you, anything at all. I love you.”

  She reached down and put one hand on my cheek. I turned my head and kissed her palm, tasting my tears on her skin, and stood up. She unbuttoned my shirt with busy, anxious fingers, yanked it out of my pants, and threw it on the floor. Our skin met and melted. It seemed to take forever to get my pants off, and my underwear. I ached for her so badly I could barely walk, but fortunately the bed was close, and I just shoved the pillows and bedspread out of the way to lie down. Maggie slid into place beside me and touched my skin with trembling, suddenly urgent hands. “Oh, God, Mike, I want you, I do …”

  I couldn’t answer. When her fingers brushed my erection, I lost the power of speech in a dean, hard rush of want of my own. I guided her up and all along my flesh. Her hips pressed hard against mine, and the painful pleasure made me say her name again, like a prayer. When she tried to move, I grabbed her arms and dragged her back down to kiss her again, as if I could somehow sink into her warm mouth and touch that fire I felt burning just out of reach beneath her skin.

  We didn’t say anything else. Maggie straightened and did her hands around my erection, then her soft body. She came down in a hot rush as if she wanted the same thing I wanted, to somehow bury herself in me, to become me as I ached to become her.

  Our loving was wordless, fierce, as urgent as the first time we’d ever joined ourselves on this bridge of flesh. Sweat and semen, tears and blood, Maggie’s nails dug deep into my hand as she shook with the force of her release and I came and came into the warm vessel of her womb. There was a feeling between us I’d never known before. I saw it reflected in her eyes as she stretched herself exhausted and trembling along my body.