The Pressure of Darkness (16 page)

A small smile creases Willie's dirty face. He has scored enough cash for another quart of Red Mountain. Willie looks up, squinting into harsh slivers of sunset that are bouncing off the windows of the executive suites on the fifth floor of Kingsley Towers. He scans the sidewalk for any likely score, but the streets are already filling with expensive cars. The business men and women who work nearby have already descended
en masse
into the parking garage and will soon pack the streets like shiny roaches. The night crowd will eventually arrive to attend theater events, but not for a couple more hours.

Willie decides to call it a night. He eases his small, rolling platform—made of roller skates and wood—back into the rapidly expanding shadows at the mouth of the alley. He searches his pockets, finds a damp Camel that is bent in a V, sagging but unbroken. He tears the filter off, fires up a smoke, and leans back against the wall. The razor-edge tobacco rush makes his scalp tingle and takes the edge off the shakes.

He looks around. Satisfied no one is watching him, the tramp unbuckles the straps that keep his lower legs hidden in the platform. Tucked beneath him on a carpeted surface, his calves have long since gone numb from lack of circulation. He eases them straight and massages until the blood flow returns. His quietly healthy feet wear two sets of white socks and a pair of unlaced black basketball shoes. When he raises his eyes, he jumps a bit.

A man is watching him from the end of the alley.

Willie Pepper squints. The man has a stocky build and what appear to be smears of dirt on his exposed lower arms. He is wearing a blue Navy watch cap with eye slits. It is pulled down over his face to keep out the cold. Or perhaps hide his features.
Fuck, did that bastard see me count out my change?
Willie Pepper lives in a world where a man may be killed for less than ten dollars.
Or did he think I was really crippled until just now and maybe he's checking out how to do the scam for himself?

Willie keeps his head down and fumbles with his platform. He designed it himself. Willie used to work in 'the trades' as a carpenter, until his drinking got too bad. The device neatly folds up and weighs next to nothing. Willie even left an empty space for hiding a bedroll, some smokes, money, or a little bit of extra booze. He takes a quick peek up the street. The man is still watching.

Willie slips a long, formerly Phillips screwdriver up his right sleeve. He sharpened the point years ago, and can take out a man's eye if he has to. He looks up, yawning and stretching. The stranger has vanished . . .
but there ain't no other way out of that alley. Did he go into one of the restaurants through the kitchen?

Willie Pepper shivers in the grip of a memory: the way his alcoholic father had chased him through the darkened house growling like an animal
grrrrrrrrr, rrrrrrrrruff.
Willie had pretended to enjoy it; acted like it was all a game. But his father—a red-nosed trucker with fists like old baked hams—had long since fried his brains on speed and boilermakers. Willie had seen what happened to his mother and his brother when the old man got pissed, and it wasn't pretty. He didn't want that kind of a whipping laid upside his own head, no fucking way. His momma used to tell him "Willie, there ain't no boogie man," but Willie Pepper knew better. He knew a monster lived in his house and its name was Daddy.

Now why the hell did I just think of that after all this time . . . ?

Whatever, because the strange man is gone, maybe he's a dishwasher at the Eye-talian place or something and came out to grab a smoke—
yeah, but I didn't see any cigarette in his hands
—and Willie has important business to tend to, so he'd best get hopping.

There is an impossibly small, tightly packed convenience store located one long block south near the subway station. Willie Pepper insists on referring to it as the subway station, because that's what it is, no matter what these fancy L.A. fuckheads want to try and call it. The store is owned by a Korean guy whose name sounds like something off a take-out menu, but Willie likes him well enough. He stays open a little late and lets the street dwellers pick up last minute things with the change they've scored that day, like packaged junk food, but mostly they get wine, beer, or cigarettes. Willie hurries on down the street, but he can't shake the stranger, not completely, because his body breaks out in bumps and somebody seems to be walking just a step behind him going
grrrrrrrr, rrrruff.
He lets the screwdriver drop down into his hand completely, doesn't try to hide the blade, figuring if he's being followed, let the bastard see he's packing, spot his shiv and know that Willie Pepper won't be anybody's bitch.

"Watch where you're going, damn it!"

Willie has rammed into some portly schmuck on his way through revolving doors trying to catch him a taxi. "Watch your own self," he grumbles. The guy stinks of expensive cologne and even more expensive cigars. Willie knows cigars, can tell a Nicaraguan from a Honduran just by his nose, and this guy just did a Cuban, probably a pyramid Monte C, the fat fuck. Some people have all the luck. Probably ripped the money off in the stock market and walked away with millions after two years in some country club and left the rest of the country holding the bag.

Wun Hung Low, or whatever his name is, has already started to lower the sliding metal panels and lock up his stand. Willie is about to rip the skinny old guy a new one when he smiles that wide dink smile of his and bows a bit. It's hard to get really pissed at somebody who comes off so nice, especially when most of the world doesn't seem to give a damn anymore. Willie slips the screwdriver back up his sleeve. He counts out his money—dimes, quarters, and smelly, oft-folded dollar bills—until he has the requisite purchase price in the Korean's outstretched palm.

Two minutes later, Willie Pepper has a gallon jug of cheap California Red to carry, along with his folded-up platform. He scuttles along the darkening sidewalk, hunched over to hide the bottle—but also because the night chill has begun to slice through the holes in his stiff, unwashed garments like strands of razor wire. Like anyone who lives on the streets, Willie knows his own body oils can provide some protection against the cold, especially in a relatively warm clime such as the one here in Southern California. Although his olfactory senses remain keen enough to recognize the bite and tone of a specific cigar, he has long since lost the ability to recognize the stench emanating from his own body. Truth be told, it is intense enough that a tracker could follow him by stink alone. And someone does.

Willie pauses to finish his cigarette. The man one block behind melts into the shadows until the tramp resumes walking. Willie turns left, toward the L.A. Center parking lot, intending to camp for the night in the large garbage area next to Cheesecake Factory. Back there, the amount of food thrown out every night is truly staggering. A man can get a terrific drunk on, stuff himself on the remains of expensive meals, and then pass out, all in relative comfort.

The area is nearly deserted. Across the lot Willie can see headlights turning and hear the horns honking; it's a seemingly endless parade of weary, irate worker ants heading home for the night, only to pack the cracked and sagging freeways and return downtown the next morning. On the other side of the row of restaurants and empty office complexes, the brightly-lit nightspots will remain busy until after midnight. As for Willie, he intends to be out cold by then. Or perhaps 'out warm' says it better.

He approaches the back of restaurant. The grate near the kitchen gives off huge amounts of steam. If a man burrows back into the garbage and cardboard boxes, he can remain undetected by the head chef or the kitchen crew, who wander out occasionally to grab a smoke or take a piss. At this moment, no one is looking out through the rear doorway.

Willie Pepper relaxes. He opens the jug and takes a deep swig, then another. He wants a smoke, but can't light up without the risk of self-immolation when he's buried in boxes. Best have one now. He finds a Marlboro, tears the filter off, lights up and puffs.

Click-click!

The fuck was that? Willie whirls around, spraying sparks, excited breath hissing out in a smooth, white wave. Shoes on concrete, hitting something, maybe a soft drink can? Willie needs glasses, can't see for shit at night. He now figures somebody is after his hootch for sure.

He drops the sharpened screwdriver back down into his palm and tries to see if he can spot anything, any
one
, moving back there behind him. The headlights around the corner create tricky geometric of light; the encroaching shadows appear, rapidly change shape, almost seem to chuckle.

Odd. For the first time, Willie Pepper—a man quite given to bluff and bluster, a pro who is used to living on the streets—feels truly afraid to be alone.

"Don't try and fuck with me," Willie calls, but his voice cracks and seems a tad too shrill to be intimidating, even to his own ears. He listens intently but nothing else happens.
Maybe it was just the wind and a piece of paper, Willie. When did you get to be such a pussy?
Willie backs away, his eyes still roaming the darkness
grrrrrrrr, rrrrufff,
but he doesn't see anything. He swallows, notices he's breathing too rapidly, takes another drag of his smoke and a deep drink of wine.

Willie decides to turn his back on the ominous, rippling black. He will prove he is not afraid. He does face the other way. But then, like a man leaving a darkened garage, he has that one brief moment of atavistic, horrific dread where he realizes that something evil might be sneaking up behind him. He stumbles forward anyway, red-veined eyes glued to the sidewalk in front of his dirty black sneakers. He struggles to keep his panic hidden and to reach the safety of the back porch light behind the restaurant before the boogie man can get him.

Willie runs into something solid; hard enough to take his breath away. His vision clears. It is not a something, it is a man. The man he saw standing across the street. Before Willie can react, the man smiles, spins him like a top, and kicks at the back of his knees. Willie drops like a sack of apples. The jug of wine goes flying, shatters against the pavement, and leaves a blood-dark, widening stain.

"Don't!"

But Willie Pepper's voice is already someone else's voice and coming from somewhere far away. He wheezes and gasps. A soft/tough something has drifted down around his neck and pulled itself taut. The rope cuts into his windpipe and steals his air. Willie struggles but it is useless to resist. The man behind him expertly places a knee in the center of his back and pulls again, hard enough to strangle but not sharply enough to crush his neck. Willie, kneeling in terror, tries to fight back but cannot quite muster the strength as the world spins noisily away.

NINETEEN

FRIDAY

The Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies was located in an otherwise ordinary office complex on Balboa Avenue in the L.A. suburb of Encino. Burke parked in the nearly deserted lot, where a sign curtly informed him that tenants of the building did not validate their clients. That struck Burke as funny. The large black board in the lobby revealed that the school occupied most of the third floor, a sizeable chunk of very costly real estate.

Burke rode up in the elevator next to a tired-looking young couple in business clothing who were squabbling about money. Meanwhile, their infant, who was fussing in a dark blue stroller, grinned and created a stink powerful enough to peel paint from the walls. The argument seamlessly shifted to whose turn it was to change the diaper.

Burke exited onto plush, beige carpeting and into a zone so quiet the Muzak speakers had probably been disconnected. He located the right suite.

In the lobby, a cheerful young woman with impossibly large blue eyes and glasses peered up owlishly from a garish romance novel. The receptionist was under the impression Burke was a reporter, on leave from the
Daily News
and doing research for a novel. To her, Burke might as well have been a rock star. She asked about and arranged for coffee before ushering him into the inner sanctum of Dr. Theodore Merriman.

Before Burke could thank her, the girl vanished like a chaos-theory butterfly determined to set off a tropical storm in the Bahamas.

"Man eating himself is largely a myth."

Dr. Theodore Merriman, the fellow who made the statement in sonorous tones, was perhaps six feet tall, with a carefully shaved head. He wore neat, wire-rim glasses, an expensive salmon-colored tie, and a Men's Wearhouse knockoff of a thousand-dollar suit.

Burke widened his eyes. "Is that so?"

"Absolutely." Merriman tucked the fingers of one hand into his jacket like a man imitating Abe Lincoln. He cleared his throat, began to pace at the front of the empty classroom. "My assistant said you wanted something of a lecture, here. This is so?"

"Actually, that is exactly what I need." Burke started his miniature tape recorder, placed it on the desk in front of him. He summoned his most obsequious smile. "Just pretend you are in a classroom."

"That's where I'm most comfortable anyway."

"Sir, if anthropophagy is largely a myth, what about the sadistic rituals of the Aztecs, for example? Didn't they cut out the human heart and eat it as a way of absorbing their enemies? I have also read that certain African tribes would . . ."

Merriman cut him off. "Those stories may be apocryphal. At the very least, let us say that we have little evidence to support that cannibalism itself, ranging from those sixteenth century Aztecs to the cultures of New Guinea, was ever actually a socially accepted custom, rather than a bizarre aberration of some kind."

"Still . . ."

Dr. Merriman waved a finger, mock scolding him. "Now, now. I believe I am teaching this 'class,' and you are the student?"

Burke pretended to be chastened. "Of course. Please go on, Professor."

"If you get a chance, pick up a book by Arens called
The Man-Eating Myth
. It will lay out the case much more effectively than I can in the time allowed here."