Rose Madder (59 page)

The Beav dropped like a lead bar. Norman looked around for his partner, and here was something incredible: the partner was gone.

Norman wheeled around, eyes glaring, and spotted him. He was walking up the sidewalk very slowly, with his hands
held out in front of him like a zombie in a fright-film. Norman turned a complete circle on his heels, looking for witnesses to this comedy. He didn't see any. There was a lot of hooting and hollering drifting over from the park, teenagers running around in there, playing grab-ass in the fog, but that was all right. So far his luck had been fantastic. If it held for another forty-five seconds, a minute at most, he'd be home free.

He ran after the older cop, who had now stopped to have another go at pulling Anna Stevenson's letter-opener out of his throat. He had actually managed to get about twenty-five yards.

“Officer!” Norman said in a low peremptory voice, and touched the cop's elbow.

The cop turned jerkily. His eyes were glassy and bulging from their sockets, the eyes of something that belonged mounted on the wall of a hunting lodge, Norman thought. His uniform was drenched scarlet from neck to knees. Norman didn't have the slightest idea how this man could still be alive, let alone conscious.
I guess they must build cops tougher in the midwest,
he thought.

“Caw!”
the cop said urgently.
“Caw! Fuh! Bah-up!”
The voice was bubbly and choked, but still amazingly strong. Norman even knew what the guy was saying. He'd made a bad mistake back there, a rookie's mistake, but Norman thought this was a man he could have been proud to serve with, just the same. The letter-opener handle sticking out of his throat bobbed up and down when he tried to talk, in a way that reminded Norman of how the bullmask looked when he manipulated the lips from the inside.

“Yes, I'll call for backup.” Norman spoke with soft, urgent sincerity. He closed one hand on the cop's wrist. “But for now, let's get you back to the car. Come on. This way, Officer!” He would have used the cop's name, but didn't know what it was; the name-tag on his uniform shirt was covered with blood. He couldn't very well call him Officer Al. He gave the cop's arm another gentle tug, and this time got him moving.

Norman led the staggering, bleeding Charlie-David cop with the letter-opener in his throat back to his own black-and-white, expecting someone to come out of the steadily thickening fog at any moment—a man who'd gone to get a sixpack, a woman who'd been to the movies, a couple of kids
on their way home from a date (maybe, God save the King, an amusement-park date at Ettinger's)—and when that happened he'd have to kill them, too. Once you got started killing people it never seemed to stop; the first one spread like ripples on a pond.

But no one came. There were only the disembodied voices floating across from the park. It was a miracle, really, like how Officer Al could still be on his feet even though he was bleeding like a stuck pig and had left a trail of blood behind him so wide and thick it was starting to puddle up in places. The puddles gleamed like engine oil in the fog-faded glow of the streetlamps.

Norman paused to pluck the Beav's fallen hat off the steps, and when they passed the open driver's-side window of the black-and-white, he leaned through quickly to drop it on the seat and pluck the keys from the ignition. There were a formidable number of them on the ring, so many that they couldn't lie flat against one another but stuck out like sun-rays in a child's crayon drawing, but Norman had no trouble picking out the one which opened the trunk of the car.

“Come on,” he whispered comfortingly. “Come on, just a little further, then we can get backup rolling.” He kept expecting the cop to collapse, but he didn't. He had given up on trying to pull the letter-opener out of his throat, though.

“Watch the curb here, Officer, whoops-a-daisy.”

The cop stepped off the curb. When his black uniform shoe came down in the gutter, the wound in his throat gaped open around the blade like the gill of a fish and more blood squirted onto the collar of his shirt.

Now I'm a cop-killer, too,
Norman thought. He expected the idea to be devastating, but it wasn't. Perhaps because a deeper, wiser part of him knew that he really hadn't killed this fine, tough police officer; someone else had. Something. Most likely it had been the bull. The longer Norman thought about it, the more plausible that sounded.

“Hold it, Officer, here we are.”

The cop stopped where he was, at the back of the car. Norman used the key he had picked out to open its trunk. There was a spare tire in there (bald as a baby's ass, too, he saw), a jack, two flak vests—kapok, not Kevlar—a pair of boots, a grease-stained copy of
Penthouse,
a toolkit, a police radio with half its guts spilling out. A pretty full trunk, in other words, like the trunk of every other police-car he'd ever seen.
But like the trunk of every other police-car he'd ever seen, there was always room for one more thing. He moved the toolkit to one side and the police radio to the other while the Beav's partner stood swaying beside him, now completely silent, his eyes seemingly fixed on some distant point, as if he now saw the place where his new journey would begin. Norman tucked the jack behind the spare tire, then looked from the empty space to the person for whom he had created it.

“Okay,” he said. “Good. But I need to borrow your hat, okay?”

The cop said nothing, simply swayed back and forth on his feet, but Norman's sly bag of a mother had been fond of saying, “Silence gives consent,” and Norman thought it a good motto, certainly better than his father's favorite, which had been “If they're old enough to pee, they're old enough for me.” Norman took off the cop's hat and put it on his own bald head. The baseball cap went into the trunk.

“Bluh,”
said the cop, holding one smeared hand out to Norman. His eyes didn't bother; they seemed to have floated away completely.

“Yes, I know, blood, that goddam bull,” Norman said, and shoved the cop into the trunk. He lay there limply, with one twitching leg still sticking out. Norman bent it at the knee, loaded it in, and slammed the trunk shut. Then he went back to the rookie. The rook was trying to sit up, although his eyes said he was still mostly unconscious. His ears were bleeding. Norman dropped to one knee, settled his hands around the young cop's throat, and began to squeeze. The cop fell backward. Norman sat on him and kept squeezing. When the Beav had ceased all movement, Norman put his ear against the young man's chest. He heard three heartbeats from in there, random and disordered, like fish flopping on a riverbank. Norman sighed and slid his hands around the Beav's throat again, thumbs pressing into his windpipe.
Now someone will come,
he thought,
now someone'll come for sure,
but no one did. Someone called, “Yo, muthafucka!” from the white blank of Bryant Park, and there was shrill laughter, the kind only drunks and the mentally retarded can manage, but that was all. Norman bent his ear against the cop's chest again. This guy was stage-dressing, and he didn't want his stage-dressing coming to life at a crucial moment.

This time there was nothing ticking but the Beav's watch.

Norman picked him up, carted him around to the passenger side of the Caprice, and loaded him in. He jammed the rookie's hat down as far as he could—black and swollen, the kid's face was now the face of a troll—and slammed the door. Now every part of Norman's body was throbbing, but the worst pain of all had once more settled in his teeth and jaws.

Maude,
he thought.
That's all about Maude.

Suddenly he was very glad he couldn't remember what he had done with Maude . . . or
to
her. And of course it really hadn't been him at all; it had been ze bool, el toro grande. But dear God, how everything
hurt.
It was as if he were being dismantled from the inside out, taken apart a bolt and a screw and a cog at a time.

The Beav was sliding slowly to the left, his dead eyes bulging out of his face like croaker marbles. “No you don't, whoa, Nellie,” Norman said, and pulled him upright again. He reached in farther and buckled the Beav
's
seatbelt and harness. That did the trick. Norman stood back a little and took a critical look. He didn't think he'd done badly, all in all. The Beav just looked conked out, catching an extra forty or fifty winks.

He leaned in the window again, careful not to disturb the Beav's position, and pawed open the glove compartment. He expected to find a first-aid kit, and he wasn't disappointed. He popped the lid, took out a dusty old bottle of Anacin, and swallowed five or six. He was leaning against the side of the car, chewing them and wincing at the sharp, vinegary taste, when his mind took another of those skips.

When he came back to himself time had passed, but probably not too much; his mouth and throat were still filled with the sour taste of aspirin. He was in the vestibule of her building, snapping the light-switch up and down. Nothing happened when he did it; the little room stayed dark. He'd done something to the lights, then. That was good. He had one of the Charlie-David cops' guns in his other hand. He was holding it by the barrel, and he had an idea he'd used the butt to hammer something. Fuses, maybe? Had he been down cellar? Maybe, but it didn't matter. The lights here didn't work, and that was enough.

This was a rooming-house—a nice one, but still a rooming-house. It was impossible to mistake the smell of cheap food, the kind that always got cooked on a hotplate.
It was a smell that seeped into the walls after awhile, and nothing could get rid of it. Two or three weeks from now the characteristic sound of rooming-houses in summer would be added to that smell: the low, intermingled whine of small fans set in many different windows, trying to cool rooms that would be walk-in ovens in August. She had traded her nice little house for this cramped desperation, but there was no time to puzzle over that mystery now. The question right now was how many roomers lived in this building, and how many of them would be in early on a Saturday night. How many, in other words, might be a problem?

None of them will be,
said the voice from the pocket of Norman's new topcoat. It was a comfy voice.
None of them will be, because what happens after doesn't matter, and that simplifies everything. If anyone gets in your way, just kill them.

He turned, went out onto the stoop, and pulled the vestibule door shut behind him. He tried it and found it locked. He supposed he'd picked his way in—the lock certainly didn't look like much of a challenge—but it was mildly disquieting not to know for sure. And the lights. Why had he gone to the trouble of killing them, when she would most likely come in alone? For that matter, how did he know she wasn't in already?

This second was easy—he knew she wasn't in because the bull had told him she wasn't, and he believed it. As to the first question, she might
not
be alone. Gertie might be with her, or . . . well, ze bool had said something about a boyfriend. Norman found that frankly impossible to believe, but . . . “She likes the way he kisses her,” Ferd had said. Stupid, she'd never dare . . . but it never hurt to be safe.

He started down the steps, meaning to go back to the cop car, meaning to slide behind the wheel and start waiting for her to show up, and that was when the last flip happened, and it was a flip this time, a flip and not a skip, he went up like a coin flipped from the thumbnail of a referee in a pregame ritual, who to kick, who to receive, and when he came back down he was slamming the vestibule door behind him, lunging into the darkness, and locking his hands around the neck of Rose's boyfriend. He didn't know how he knew the man
was
her boyfriend and not just some plainclothes cop who had been charged with seeing her home safe, but who cared?
He
did
know, and that was enough. His whole head was vibrating with outrage and fury. Had he seen this guy

(she likes the way he kisses her)

swapping spit with her before going in, maybe with his hands sliding down from her waist to cup her ass? He couldn't remember, didn't
want
to remember, didn't
need
to remember.

“I told you!” the bull said; even in its fury its voice was perfectly lucid. “I told you, didn't I? That's what her friends have taught her! Nice! Very nice!”

“I'm going to kill you, motherfucker,” he whispered into the unseen face of the man who was Rose's boyfriend, and forced him back against the vestibule wall. “And oh boy, if I can, if God lets me, I'm gonna kill you twice.”

He clamped his hands around Bill Steiner's throat and began to squeeze.

“N
orman!”
Rosie screamed in the darkness.
“Norman, let him go!”

Bill's hand, which had lightly been touching the back of her arm ever since she had pulled her key out of the door, was suddenly gone. She heard stumbling footfalls—
foot-thuds
—in the darkness. Then there was a heavier bump as someone drove someone else into the vestibule wall.

“I'm going to kill you, motherfucker,” came whispering out of the dark. “And oh boy, if I can, if God lets me—”

I'm gonna kill you twice,
she finished in her head before he could finish out loud; it was one of Norman's favorite threats, often yelled at the TV screen when an umpire made a call that went against Norman's beloved Yankees, or when someone cut him off in traffic.
If God lets me, I'm gonna kill you twice.
And now she heard a choking, gargly sound, and of course that was Bill. That was Bill in the process of having the life choked out him by Norman's large and powerful hands.