Whispers (15 page)

He sipped his beer and looked around at the other customers, taking an interest in them for the first time. His attention was drawn to a group at the table nearest the door. Two couples. Good-looking girls. Darkly handsome men. All in their early twenties. The guys were putting on an act for the women, talking just a fraction too loud and laughing too much, doing the rooster act, trying too hard, determined to impress the little hens.

Frye decided to have some fun with them. He thought about it, figured out how he would set it up, and grinned happily at the prospect of the excitement he would cause.

He asked the waitress for his check, gave her more than enough money to cover it, and said, “Keep the change.”

“You’re very generous,” she said, smiling and nodding as she went off to the cash register.

He pulled on the leather gloves.

His sixth bottle of beer was still half-full, and he took it with him when he slid out of the booth. He headed toward the exit and contrived to hook a foot on a chair leg as he passed the two couples who had interested him. He stumbled slightly, easily regained his balance, and leaned toward the four surprised people at the table, letting them see the beer bottle, trying to look like a drunk.

He kept his voice low, for he didn’t want others in the restaurant to be aware of the confrontation he was fomenting. He knew he could handle two of them, but he wasn’t prepared to fight an army. He peered blearily at the toughest looking of the two men, gave him a big grin, and spoke in a low mean snarl that belied his smile. “Keep your goddamned chair out of the aisle, you stupid spic.”

The stranger had been smiling at him, expecting some sort of drunken apology. When he heard the insult, his wide brown face went blank, and his eyes narrowed.

Before that man could get up, Frye swung to the other one and said, “Why don’t you get a foxy lady like that blonde back there? What do you want with these two greasy wetback cunts?”

Then he made swiftly for the door, so the fight wouldn’t start inside the restaurant. Chuckling to himself, he pushed through the door, staggered into the foggy night, and hurried around the building to the parking lot on the north side to wait.

He was only a few steps from his van when one of the men he had left behind called to him in Spanish-accented English. “Hey! Wait a second, man!”

Frye turned, still pretending drunkenness, weaving and swaying as if he found it difficult to keep the ground under his feet. “What’s up?” he asked stupidly.

They stopped, side by side, apparitions in the mist. The stocky one said, “Hey, what the hell you think you’re doin’, man?”

“You spics looking for trouble?” Frye asked, slurring his words.

“
Cerdo!
the stocky one said.

“Mugriento cerdo!”
said the slim man.

Frye said, “For Christ’s sake, stop jabbering that damn monkey talk at me. If you have something to say, speak English.”

“Miguel called you a pig,” said the slim one. “And I called you a filthy pig.”

Frye grinned and made an obscene gesture.

Miguel, the stocky man, charged, and Frye waited motionless, as if he didn’t see him coming. Miguel rushed in with his head down, his fists up, his arms tucked close to his sides. He threw two quick and powerful punches at Frye’s iron-muscled midsection. The brown man’s granite hands made sharp, hard slapping sounds as they landed, but Frye took both blows without flinching. By design, he was still holding the beer bottle, and he smashed it against the side of Miguel’s head. Glass exploded and rained down on the parking lot in dissonant musical notes. Beer and beer foam splashed over both men. Miguel dropped to his knees with a horrible groan, as if he had been poleaxed. “Pablo,” he called pleadingly to his friend. Grabbing the injured man’s head with both hands, Frye held him steady long enough to ram a knee into the underside of his chin. Miguel’s teeth clacked together with an ugly noise. As Frye let go of him, the man fell sideways, unconscious, his breath bubbling noisily through bloody nostrils.

Even as Miguel crumpled onto the fog-damp pavement, Pablo came after Frye. He had a knife. It was a long thin weapon, probably a switchblade, probably sharpened into cutting edges on both sides, certain to be as wickedly dangerous as a razor. The slim man was not a charger as Miguel had been. He moved swiftly but gracefully, almost like a dancer, gliding around to Frye’s right side, searching for an opening, making an opening by virtue of his speed and agility, striking with the lightning moves of a snake. The knife flashed in, from left to right, and if Frye had not jumped back, it would have torn open his stomach, spilling his guts. Crooning eerily to himself, Pablo pressed steadily forward, slashing at Frye again and again, from left to right, from right to left. As Frye retreated, he studied the way Pablo used the knife, and by the time he backed up against the rear end of the Dodge van, he saw how to handle him. Pablo made long sweeping passes with the knife instead of the short vicious arcs employed by skilled knife fighters; therefore, on the outward half of each swing, after the blade had passed Frye but before it started coming back again, there was a second or two when the weapon was moving away from him, posing no threat whatsoever, a moment when Pablo was vulnerable. As the slim man edged in for the kill, confident that his prey had nowhere to run, Frye timed one of the arcs and sprang forward at precisely the right instant. As the blade swung away from him, Frye seized Pablo’s wrist, squeezing and twisting it, bending it back against the joint. The slim man cried out in agony. The knife flew out of his slender fingers. Frye stepped behind him, got a hammerlock on him, and ran him face-first into the rear end of the van. He twisted Pablo’s arm even farther, got the hand all the way up between the shoulder blades, until it seemed something would have to snap. With his free hand, Frye gripped the seat of the man’s trousers, literally lifted him off his feet, all hundred and forty pounds of him, and slammed him into the van a second time, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, until the screaming stopped. When he let go of Pablo, the slim man went down like a sack of rags.

Miguel was on his hands and knees. He spit blood and shiny white bits of teeth onto the black macadam.

Frye went to him.

“Trying to get up, friend?”

Laughing softly, Frye stepped on his fingers. He ground his heel on the man’s hand, then stepped back.

Miguel squealed, fell on his side.

Frye kicked him in the thigh.

Miguel did not lose consciousness, but he closed his eyes, hoping Frye would just go away.

Frye felt as if electricity was coursing through him, a million-billion volts, bursting from synapse to synapse, hot and crackling and sparking within him, not a painful feeling, but a wild and exciting experience, as if he had just been touched by the Lord God Almighty and filled up with the most beautiful and bright and holy light.

Miguel opened his swollen dark eyes.

“All the fight gone out of you?” Frye asked.

“Please,” Miguel said around broken teeth and split lips.

Exhilarated, Frye put a foot against Miguel’s throat and forced him to roll onto his back.

“Please.”

Frye took his foot off the man’s throat.

“Please.”

High with a sense of his own power, floating, flying, soaring, Frye kicked Miguel in the ribs.

Miguel choked on his own scream.

Laughing exuberantly, Frye kicked him repeatedly, until a couple of ribs gave way with an audible crunch.

Miguel began to do something he had struggled manfully not to do for the past few minutes. He began to cry.

Frye returned to the van.

Pablo was on the ground by the rear wheels, flat on his back, unconscious.

Saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” over and over again, Frye circled Pablo, kicking him in the calves and knees and thighs and hips and ribs.

A car started to pull into the lot from the street, but the driver saw what was happening and wanted no part of it. He put the car in reverse, backed out of there, and sped off with a screech of tires.

Frye dragged Pablo over to Miguel, lined them up side by side, out of the way of the van. He didn’t want to run over anyone. He didn’t want to kill either of them, for too many people in the bar had gotten a good look at him. The authorities wouldn’t have much desire to pursue the winner of an ordinary street fight, especially when the losers had intended to gang up on a lone man. But the police would look for a killer, so Frye made sure that both Miguel and Pablo were safe.

Whistling happily, he drove back toward Marina Del Rey and stopped at the first open service station on the right-hand side of the street. While the attendant filled the tank, checked the oil, and washed the windshield, Frye went to the men’s room. He took a shaving kit with him and spent ten minutes freshening up.

When he traveled, he slept in the van, and it was not as convenient as a camper; it did not have running water. On the other hand, it was more maneuverable, less visible, and far more anonymous than a camper. To take full advantage of the many luxuries of a completely equipped motor home, he would have to stop over at a campground every night, hooking up to sewer and water and electric lines, leaving his name and address wherever he went. That was too risky. In a motor home, he would leave a trail that even a noseless bloodhound could follow, and the same would be true if he stayed at motels where, if the police asked about him later, desk clerks would surely remember the tall and extravagantly muscled man with the penetrating blue eyes.

In the men’s room at the service station, he stripped out of his gloves and yellow sweater, washed his torso and underarms with wet paper towels and liquid soap, sprayed himself with deodorant, and dressed again. He was always concerned about cleanliness; he liked to be clean and neat at all times.

When he felt dirty, he was not only uncomfortable but deeply depressed as well—and somewhat fearful. It was as if being dirty stirred up vague recollections of some intolerable experience long forgotten, brought back hideous memories to the edge of his awareness, where he could sense but not see them, perceive but not understand them. Those few nights when he had fallen into bed without bothering to wash up, his repeating nightmare had been far worse than usual, expelling him from sleep in a screaming flailing terror. And although he had awakened on those occasions, as always, with no clear memory of what the dreams had been about, he had felt as if he’d just clawed his way out of a sickeningly filthy place, a dark and close and foul hole in the ground.

Rather than risk intensifying the nightmare that was sure to come, he washed himself there in the men’s room, shaved quickly with an electric razor, patted his face with aftershave lotion, brushed his teeth, and used the toilet. In the morning, he would go to another service station and repeat the routine, and he would also change into fresh clothes at that time.

He paid the attendant for the gasoline and drove back to Marina Del Rey through ever-thickening fog. He parked the van in the same dockside lot from which he had made the call to his house in Napa County. He got out of the Dodge and walked to the public phone booth and called the same number again.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” Frye said.

“The heat’s off.”

“The police called?”

“Yeah.”

They talked for a minute or two, and then Frye returned to the Dodge.

He stretched out on the mattress in the back of the van and switched on a flashlight he kept there. He could not tolerate totally dark places. He could not sleep unless there was at least a thread of illumination under a door or a night light burning dimly in a corner. In perfect darkness, he began to imagine that strange things were crawling on him, skittering over his face, squirming under his clothes. Without light, he was assaulted by the threatening but wordless whispers that he sometimes heard for a minute or two after he awakened from his nightmare, the blood-freezing whispers that loosened his bowels and made his heart skip.

If he could ever identify the source of those whispers or finally hear what they were trying to tell him, he would know what the nightmare was about. He would know what caused the recurring dream, the icy fear, and he might finally be able to free himself from it.

The problem was that whenever he woke and heard the whispers, that tail end of the dream, he was in no state of mind to listen closely and to analyze them; he was always in a panic, wanting nothing more than to have the whispers fade away and leave him in peace.

He tried to sleep in the indirect glow of the flashlight, but he could not. He tossed and turned. His mind raced. He was wide awake.

He realized that it was the unfinished business with the woman that was keeping him from sleep. He had been primed for the kill, and it had been denied him. He was edgy. He felt hollow, incomplete.

He had tried to satisfy his hunger for the woman by feeding his stomach. When that had not worked, he had tried to take his mind off her by provoking a fight with those two Chicanos. Food and enormous physical exertion were the two things he had always used to stifle his sexual urges, and to divert his thoughts from the secret blood lust that sometimes burned fiercely within him. He wanted sex, a brutal and bruising kind of sex that no woman would willingly provide, so he gorged himself instead. He wanted to kill, so he spent four or five hard hours lifting progressive weights until his muscles cooked into pudding and the violence steamed out of him. The psychiatrists called it
sublimation
. Lately, it had been less and less effective in dissipating his unholy cravings.

The woman was still on his mind.

The sleekness of her.

The swell of hips and breasts.

Hilary Thomas.

No. That was just a disguise.

Katherine.