The Killing Kind

“If you're a private eye,” asked Angel at last, “how come you ain't got no office?”

“I can't afford an office. If I had an office, I'd have to sell the house and sleep on my desk.”

“Wouldn't be such a big stretch. You got next to nothing in this old house anyway. You ever worry about burglars?”

“Burglars in general, or just the one who happens to be standing in my kitchen right now?”

He scowled. “In general.”

“I don't have anything worth stealing.”

“That's what I mean. You ever think of the effect a big empty place like this is going to have on some guy who goes to the trouble of breaking into it? You better hope he ain't agoraphobic, else you go

“What are you, some kind of organizer for Burglars Local three-oh-two?”

“No, just a fly on the wall. One of many, judging by the state of your kitchen.”

“What are you implying?”

“What am I always implying? You need some company.”

“I was thinking of getting a dog.”

“That wasn't what I meant, and you know it. How long you pla

“Opportunity only knocks once, man,” drawled his partner. “It don't knock, knock again, then leave a note asking you to give it a call back when you got your shit together.”

Behind us there came the sound of bare feet on boards. Rachel stood at the door, drying her hair. Louis glanced at me, then rose and placed his empty bottle in the recycling bin.

“Time for my bed,” he said. He jerked his chin at Angel as he reached the door. “You too.” He kissed Rachel on the cheek and headed out to the car.

“You two kids don't be staying up late smoochin' and all,” Angel said, then followed Louis into the night.

“Brought together by a pair of gun-toting gay matchmakers,” I said as we heard their car pull away. “It'll be something to tell the grandchildren.”

Rachel looked at me, as if trying to determine if I was being flippant or not. Frankly, I wasn't sure myself.

She immediately cut to the chase. “Did you hire people to watch over me in Boston?” she asked.

“You spotted them?” I was impressed with her, although I got the feeling that it wasn't mutual.

“I guess I was on my guard. I called in the license plate of their car when I saw them change shifts. One of them followed me all the way to your front gate.” Rachel's brother had been a policeman, killed on duty some years back. She still had friends on various forces.

“I was worried about you.”

Her voice rose. “I told you, I don't want you feeling you have to protect me.”

“Rachel,” I said, “these people are dangerous. I was concerned for Angel too, but at least he carries a gun. What would you have done if they came for you? Thrown plates at them?”

“You should have told me!” She slapped her hand hard on the table. There was real anger in her eyes.

“If I had, would you have let it go ahead? I love you, Rach, but you're stubborn enough to head up the Teamsters.”

Some of the fury in her eyes died and the hand on the table curled into a small tight fist that shook as the tension gradually eased from her.

“How can we be together if you're always afraid of losing me?” she asked gently.

I thought of the dead of St. Froid, crowding a narrow street in Portland. I thought of James Jessop and the figure I had glimpsed leaning over him, the Summer Lady. I had seen her before: in a subway train; outside the Scarborough house; and once, reflected in the window of my kitchen, as if she were standing behind me, but when I turned to look there was nobody there. Sitting in Chumley's only a few nights before, it seemed that an accommodation with the past might be possible. But that was before Mickey Shine's head was impaled on a tree, before James Jessop emerged from a dark forest and took my hand. How could I bring Rachel into that world?

“I can't compete with the dead,” she said.

“I'm not asking you to compete with the dead.”

“It's not a question of asking.” She sat across from me, cupped her chin in her hands, and looked sad and distant.

“I'm trying, Rachel.”

“I know,” she said. “I know you are.”

“I love you. I want to be with you.”

“How?” she whispered, lowering her head. “On weekends in Boston, or weekends here?”

“How about just here?”

She looked up, as if unsure of what she had heard.

“I mean it.”

“When? Before I'm old?”

“Older.”

She slapped at me playfully and I reached out to touch her hair. “We'll get there,” I said and felt her nod against my hand. “And sooner rather than later. I promise.”

“We'd better,” she said, so quietly that it was almost as if I had heard her thoughts. I held her, sensing somehow that she had more to say, but nothing came.

“What kind of dog were you pla

I smiled down at her. She had probably heard my entire conversation with Angel and Louis. I think she had been meant to.

“I hadn't decided. I thought you might help me pick one from the pound.”

“That's a very couply thing to do.”

“Well, we are a couple.”

“But not a normal one.”

“No. Louis would never forgive us if we were.”

She kissed me, and I kissed her back. Past and future receded from us like creditors temporarily denied their demands, and there was only the brief, fleeting beauty of the present to hold us. That night, I gathered her in my arms as she slept and tried to imagine a future for us together, but I seemed to lose us in tangles and weaves. Yet when I awoke my fist was clenched tightly, as if I had grasped something vital in my dreams and now refused to let it go.

21

I LAY WITH RACHEL and listened to the rising wheeps of a flycatcher from high in the trees. His stay in New England would be short; he had probably arrived in the past week, and would be gone by the end of September, but if he managed to avoid the hawks and the owls, then his little yellow belly would soon be filled with a smorgasbord of insects as the bug population exploded. Already the first of the horseflies were circling, their large green eyes glittering hungrily. They would quickly be joined by greenheads and locusts, ticks and deerflies. At Scarborough Marsh, clouds of golden saltmarsh mosquitoes would converge, the males sipping on plant juices while the females scoured the waters and the roadsides for meatier pickings.

And the insects would feed, and the spiders would grow fat upon them.

Beside me, Rachel murmured softly in her sleep, and I felt the warmth of her back against my stomach, the line of her spine beneath her pale skin like a stone path blanketed by new fallen snow. I raised myself gently to look at her face. Strands of red hair had caught between her lips, and carefully, I brushed them away. She smiled, her eyes still closed, and her fingers softly grazed my thigh. I kissed her gently behind the ear and she leaned her head into the pillow, exposing her neck to me as I followed its lines down to her shoulder and the small hollow at her throat. Her body arched as she pressed herself against me, and all other thoughts were lost in sunlight and birdsong.

It was almost 1 P.M. when I left Rachel singing in the bathroom while I went out for bagels and milk, conscious still of the weight of the Smith amp; Wesson in its holster beneath my arm. It made me uneasy how quickly I had slipped back into the old routine of arming myself before I left the house, even for something as simple as a trip to the store.

It was, by then, late in the morning, but today I hoped to find Marcy Becker. Circumstances had forced me to postpone the hunt for her, but more and more I was convinced that she was the key to what had taken place on the night Grace Peltier died, one more piece of a greater picture whose dimensions I was only now begi