Shadow Games (20 page)

"Huh?"

"
Nookie
. You know, pussy." When I didn't say anything, he said, "You're the TV kid, all right, and don't tell me different. That's why I asked you about the
nookie
."

The guy was bald, at least as old as my grandfather. He had pinched little eyes behind pinched little eyeglasses, and every few minutes passed enough gas to start his own utility company. And he was using the word "
nookie
." There was something obscene about it.

"All those little sluts with those mini-skirts
—
I'll bet you get a lot of 'em, don't you?"

He followed me to the door with his deranged conversation, grinning, farting, insinuating.

I went out into the cold rain and drove fast back to the cabin.

The lights were off. When I got inside, I found her hunched over the toilet bowl, vomiting.

I got her dressed and into the car. She alternately raved—talking about things that made no sense, not to me anyway—and sobbed, begging me to forgive her for what she'd done.

Halfway back to L.A., she said, hunched over there against the passenger door, "I followed you one night to Van Nuys when you said you were rehearsing. I know about that girl you're seeing."

I turned and looked at her. So beautiful—and now—so unfathomable in her schizophrenia. Some other species entirely there in the dim green glow of dashboard light and the pang and patter of rain on the roof.

"Veronica, she didn't mean anything to me."

"You betrayed me,
Cobey
."

"You're looking at it the wrong way. Honest to God you are."

"No, I'm not,
Cobey
. I'm looking at it in the only way I can. You betrayed me..."

She got better, of course, once she'd had twelve hours of the medication. We stayed in her apartment for two full days, never leaving, watching old, late night movies and fucking our brains out and eating what we felt like and going on these crazed laughing binges about nothing at all. And I apologized in this kind of nonstop way because I could see how badly I'd hurt her and could see that she felt a little better and more reassured each time I did it.

Of course, two nights later I saw the same Van Nuys girl again, this Arthur Murray dance instructress who, for some reason, really liked to take it in the ass and who gave blow jobs that brought me right to the brink of insanity...

The knife wound eventually became nothing more than a ragged snake of puckered flesh—the old pervert who'd sewn me up had done a lousy job, actually—and the Van Nuys girl gave way to a Bel Air girl who'd gone to convent school—Scout's Honor—and then she gave way to...

During it all, Veronica was the constant, however. The only time we had difficulties was when one of the girls on the side began to claim a little too much of my attention... I think Veronica got suspicious, at these times, times when I always seemed distracted by something...

But when the Swallows girl was killed and I started thinking about who might have done it...

It didn't take me long to conjure up an image of Veronica above me with that butcher knife that night...

Driving it down into me...

All that rage...

All that sense of betrayal...

Veronica...

1

L
ate afternoon. Chicago sky a bleeding red. Silhouetted office building black against golden disk of early moon.

In bed. Lightly sweating from lovemaking. Anne's head in the crook of his arm.

"Puckett? Are you going to tell me you love me?"

"Sometime."

"Like when?"

"Like now."

2

S
he had recognized him. The bitch waitress had recognized him.

Cobey
sat in a small diner near Union Station. After failing to reach Puckett earlier, he'd mostly wandered about, losing himself in the crowds, and had ended up here. At this point in the early evening, the place was packed with people
who had just walked over from the Amtrak station and people who were waiting to go over to the Amtrak station. They were generally older people, wearing the threadbare clothes of the working class, and the threadbare smiles of the American traveler, frustrated at every turn. They talked among themselves about the Southern Route train to California being delayed by six hours. The place smelled of coffee and chili and cigarettes.

Cobey
had been thinking about Amtrak—going up through the snowy mountain peaks, looking down into the rocky gorges and the shining silver bands of river—when he noticed the girl's attention.

She could at least have had the decency to be pretty.

Instead, she was anorexic, pimply, sweaty and furtive-looking. Her white polyester uniform was soiled.

She had been jamming glasses under the Coke fountain and watching him all the while. Watching him closely. Knowing exactly who he was.

He set his chili dog back down, unable to eat.

He wasn't sure what to do.

Even though he'd been recognized, should he jump up and take off running?

A chunky man in a white T-shirt and soiled white pants came out from the kitchen. He had broad, meaty shoulders and broad, meaty arms, on the left of which was a faded anchor tattoo. Homage, no doubt, to his uncle Popeye.

The man, bald and sweating, passed by the pimply girl at the Coke fountain. It appeared he goosed her because just then he grinned and her pelvis jerked forward and a tiny, momentary frown soured her mouth.

Then she leaned back and started whispering something to him.

At first, as she spoke, the man's eye contact went nowhere in particular. He just seemed to be staring off into space as he listened.

But gradually his eyes began working around the restaurant and, ultimately, they stopped when they reached
Cobey
.

Now the man knew who
Cobey
was, too.

The girl said a few more words. The man's gaze became even more intent.

The man looked at the front door and then the rear door through which he'd come.

There were only two ways out of this place.

Cobey
stood up.

The man visibly tensed.

Cobey
looked frantically at the front door.

The man was already leaving the side of the girl and coming around the edge of the counter.

He moved fast and sure, the man did, fast and sure.
Cobey
turned and started working his way through the crowd of old folks in front of the door.

He pushed hard. An old lady muttered something nasty to him.

Cobey
kept pushing. Had to make it to the front door.

"Hey!"

No mistaking who the voice belonged to. The voice above all the conversations. Above the din from the kitchen in back. Even above the jukebox, Whitney Houston's voice almost as pretty as her face.

"Hey! Don't let him outta here!"

Cobey
lunged, having no choice now, pushing through the final knot of old folks, despite all their cursing and complaining, and finally getting a hand on the door handle.

"Hey! Stop!"

The street: dusk, heavy rumbling traffic noise, the smells of the train station, heat and oil and a century of age.

"You
sonofabitch
! I said stop!"

The man diving through the door, almost falling forward he was moving so fast.

And then
Cobey
starting to run.

Down the block, against a red light—horns honking; cursing—up a sidewalk where faces appeared and disappeared like blips on a radar screen—black man with gold tooth, white man with big nose, black woman with white turban, sweet-faced white woman pushing a stroller—he ran.

And so did the man behind him.

He was good and fast, especially for a man his age, which had to be around fifty, and his size, which had to go two-, two-twenty.

Cobey
kept running.

More honking. More shouting. More faces appearing and disappearing.

Cobey
saw an alley, old, ragged bricks for the floor, an endless number of dumpsters for decoration, and took it.

By now, he was starting to feel the strain. Even though he exercised every day, the stress of all this was murderous, his breath coming in great, hot, sobbing heaves, his legs starting to feel like impossibly heavy dead weights that he had to keep picking up...picking up...picking up.

He wasn't even aware of falling down.

The toe of his shoe caught on one of the ragged bricks and he was tossed downward.

He heard his own voice, the sudden voice of a child afraid to be injured, on the warm, sunny air and felt the searing heat of his lungs and felt his bladder crying out to be emptied and—

And then he was thrown face downward.

And then, hearing the heavy
slap-slap-slap
of the man's shoes,
Cobey
turned to see the man just entering the alley now, coming straight down the narrow brick aisle between the dumpsters and the garbage cans and the back door stoops and all the wandering, homeless cats and dogs who had stopped whatever they were doing to watch the human drama unfolding before them.

Obviously, the man was heartened by what he saw,
Cobey
there flat on the ground, a perfect target. His hands became
wide fists. He was about done with all this sissy running. Now he could get into what real men got into, which was the violence of retribution, of punishment.

This was going to be a lot of fucking fun. Some punk TV star who chopped some poor girl's head off
—

And then the man, in his glee and exultation, miscalculated:

He dove for
Cobey
without noticing that
Cobey
had started to turn over and inch away.

Just as the man dove, his hands reaching out for
Cobey's
throat,
Cobey
had a surprise for him.

A nice, white fist that he managed to throw, without very much leverage at all, directly into the man's face.

It was like watching a video game—face meets fist and then the explosion: in this case, the man's nose.

Cobey
felt the man's nose disintegrate beneath his fist. And then blood exploded all over the man's face. And then the man cried out.

And
Cobey
, who'd never even played a scene like this on TV and therefore had no experience whatsoever with moments like this, jumped to his feet and kicked the man square in the side of the head.

At first, the blow seemed to have no effect.

Enraged because his nose had been broken, the beefy man in the white (and now bloodstained) T-shirt and white trousers started to grapple and grab at the air to reach his feet.

He started cursing and he started spitting blood and he started making huge, terrible fists.

"You
sonofabitch
, you
sonofabitch
." he said.

And then he fell over backwards. Almost like a comic pratfall.

Unconscious. Or maybe even dead.

He lay there in his white kitchen uniform, bloody and dirty and sweaty now, his eyelids closed and unmoving, his Popeye tattoo looking old and faded and sad.

"Shit,"
Cobey
said. "
Shit
."

All he'd planned to do was stop the guy from beating him and now look what had happened.

He started to bend down to make sure that the guy was still breathing when he heard, coming around the corner like the wail of a siren, a man shouting with great, theatrical urgency.

"There he is! There he is!"

Then the man followed his voice around the corner of the alley. He was dressed in the uniform of a Chicago policeman.