The Blue Hour (14 page)

Izma lumbered into the
other room and she heard the suck of air and gasket, then water running. Tricky
bastard, she thought. He wore a white singlet and a pair of very tight shorts,
a swimsuit probably, that made him seem even bigger than he was. The swimsuit
was yellow with white piping. His legs were trunklike and pale and mostly
smooth, with an occasional patch of very dark hair. His feet looked enormous.
He wore the kind of cheap rubber thongs that click when they hit the bottom of
a heel.

Merci felt the hair
on her neck rise.

Luck. Peace. The
nine.

She took a deep breath,
then another.

Hess was seated well away
from her but close to the huge bed that sat against the wall. He was looking at
the bed. His legs were crossed and his hands were folded over one knee, and
Merci saw him for the first time as a calm and strong man, a man you wouldn't want
to mess with, and she was happy to see him this way. He looked at her but said
nothing and his eyes asked the same of her.

She felt trapped in the
dismal room and her palms were still damp but she could feel her reason coming
back. Hess's level stare helped. She nodded, gazed around. There were
indentations on the carpet at the midway point along each wall. They looked to
Merci about twenty by twenty inches, the size a TV set might make, or a small
nightstand, or a file cabinet. They were a darker shade of yellow than the
carpet around them—no sun on them.

What had been there,
and why had Izma moved them?

The light diminished as a
body darkened the doorway and moved toward her with a glass of ice water.

"Just
kidding," he said.

"You're a
crack-up." She took the glass.

He chuckled quietly and
moved away. He sat at the foot of his bed.

Then he arched his back
and hiked up his feet and walked himself backward across the bedspread on feet
and hands. His legs were spread and his hips raised high. His genitals slopped
out from behind the mesh liner of his bathing suit, and he smiled at her over
his groin—a bloated, four-legged, upside-down spider dragging melons across a
web.

It only took
about three seconds. It was the single most vulgar thing Merci Rayborn had
witnessed in her thirty-four
years. She
had no idea if Hess saw it because she refused to look anywhere but back into
Ed Izma's happy gray eyes.

"Now," he
said. "What can I do for law enforcement?'

He was sitting
cross-legged on the mattress with the pillows behind his back and his back
against the wall. His hands were in his lap and Merci could see that he could
move his trunks aside and flash her whenever he wanted.

She looked to Hess in
appeal. He was already looking at her, with a bland, admonishing expression on
his face.

Up both of yours,
she thought.

"We've got a guy
who's taken two women, Ed. He's got them somewhere—home on ice, preserved in a
storage unit— we're not sure where."

Izma's head angled to
Hess. "Preserved how?"

"We don't know
that yet, either. But we found chemical."

"The Ortega Highway
women. They were nice-looking babes, from the TV pictures."

"Nice women,
Ed."

Izma said nothing. Merci
watched his small still head and wondered what was arcing between the poles of
his brain. Then he was looking at her. She could see his hands doing something
down in his lap but she wouldn't offer him the satisfaction of discovering
what.

"Ed, put your
hands to your side."

She had never heard this
tone of voice from Hess. There was a threat in it and it was a threat that she
would have taken seriously. But it was calm. Izma was staring at him.

"But I'm
not—"

"—Hands at your
side or I'll hurt you."

The big arms flopped
to the bed.

"There. There
you go."

The giant sighed and his
head pivoted and he gave Merci a look of contempt.

"Keep them there,
Izma," said Hess, his voice still flat with latent violence. Merci wished
she could get a tone like that, although,
Hey Jack, you gonna be just
another dead asshole?
had worked just fine.

"So, Ed," Hess
continued, "we got to thinking about this guy out in Ortega. He seems to
like women, like you did. He's keeping them with him, like you did. He's probably
making sure they're in good shape, like you tried to. So I thought to myself:
Ed Izma might be able to tell us something about him. Ed's a bright guy,
tested in at just under genius. Maybe he understands this guy, can help us
understand him too."

Izma sighed and seemed to
relax. His hands moved from the mattress onto his lap again. He looked down at
them, then put them back on the bedspread. He looked at Merci, then to Hess.

"The difference is,
he's not man enough to deal with them alive. Like I did. I always wanted
Lorraine to be alive. I wanted Lorraine alive and happy. But I needed her in
every sexual way, constantly. I was quite a virile young man back then."

"She had come to
your door selling... what was it?"

"Cutlery. TrimCo.
I'm Lorraine Dulak with TrimCo?
is
what she said. And sometimes, well, everything just comes together for a man.
Inside a man. You know what I mean. I had to invite her in. The DA didn't
believe I could truly love a woman after knowing her less than two minutes. I
disagree. I mean look at what happened. You don't do something like that to a
woman you don't love.

"Merci looked down
and she wondered again what had left the square dents in the carpet, and why Ed
Izma had removed them from her view. She looked at these things and knew the
whole time that Izma was looking at her. She disliked being held captive in
someone else's thoughts, someone this close and this hateful. It was like being
fucked by his imagination.

Hess's voice seemed to
rescue her. "Okay. This guy isn't man enough to deal with them alive. I
think you're right. But now what?"

"He wants them
lifelike. So, maybe a freezer. Not parts, though.
Whole.
A guy who would
cut a woman into parts to freeze her isn't a real man at all."

"Why keep them?
Why not just use them and let them go?"

"Because that would
be just like letting them run away. This is about love, Hess, not just sex. He
really loves them. That's why he wants to be with them. This is all about keeping
your true love from running away from you. You don't just discard it. I mean,
when you get right down to it, us special types are awfully sentimental."

Merci felt her
throat tighten and her stomach shift. "Especially vile and disgusting, is
what you are," she said.

"You could have
her de-barked."

Hess's lethal voice again.
"Look at me, Izma. Not the woman. What's he looking for in them? Why take
one but let another go?"

"It's just his needs.
They're different for all of us, what makes things come together for us. I
noticed the faces on the TV. They're both very beautiful women."

"But what
else,
Ed? What's he see that makes things come together for him?"

"Well, they were both
extremely sophisticated, you could tell. They had intelligent faces. Now to me,
when 1 see a woman that intelligent and educated, with that kind of look on her
face, I want to smash it. I prefer humble women. I like women who work with
their hands. I like no-frills women, but they've got to be pretty. Blue collar.
Peasant stock. Like Lorraine. Or Merci."

She returned Ed
Izma's stare.

Merci saw the giant's pelvis
start to move. His hands were still on the bed. His head was small and distant,
like a remote controller left on top of the set.

Hess stood. "I'm
going to show her what's in your closet,

Ed."

"Don't touch,
please."

Merci felt the blood rush
from her head as she stood. "Keep your balls in your shorts, pinhead. I'll
be right back."

She followed Hess
into the back room.

Hess gestured toward the
open closet. At first Merci was startled, then it made some kind of sense, then
she was just chilled. There were five of them in there, standing along the wall
of the closet, looking at her.

"These are what made
the carpet impressions you were looking at. He had some of these sweethearts
back when he took Lorraine Dulak."

Four were
mannequins dressed like tradeswomen—construction worker, a Post Office
employee, a mechanic or plumber, a cop. The fifth wore a smart little skirt and
had a head of luxuriant black hair that suggested to Merci her own. This last
one held a card in her hand. Merci leaned in and read it:
Lorraine Dulak,
TrimCo.
The mannequin bases were square.

"I should have puked
when I first got here, gotten it over with."

"I'm sure he does the
hair and makeup himself. Probably changes them around, buys different clothes.
I don't know why he wanted to hide them from us. Maybe he thought I'd be
envious. Or you'd be jealous. Or maybe he thought he was being a bad boy."

She saw his small dry
smile and shook her head. "Let's get the hell out of here, Hess. I mean,
what did he really tell us?"

"He doesn't
understand himself well enough to help us on purpose. But I thought we might
see something in him that we could apply."

"Well, did you?”

"I think the Purse
Snatcher loved Janet Kane and Lael Jillson the same way Izma loved Lorraine.

I think the Purse Snatcher
is a collector. He's collecting them like Izma does mannequins and pictures of
mannequins. This is all about keeping your true love from running away from
you."

"It makes me want to
vomit."

"Why?"

"Because it's a lie.
And I'm sick of creeps who try to justify what they do by calling it
love."

"It doesn't matter
what they call it. It's only a lie to us. To guys like Izma and the Purse
Snatcher, it's the truth."

"F
uck
guys
like Izma and the Purse Snatcher. You spend an hour with this guy to find out
that?"

"It was worth it.
We've been here exactly thirty-two minutes. I learned something about our man
and you got a chance to understand something you don't understand yet."

"Yeah?
What."

"That other people
don't think like you. So you have to think like them. They don't feel like you.
So you have to empathize. They don't behave like you, so you have to get a feel
for what they're going to do next. That goes for creeps, so you can catch them,
and everybody else, so you can get along with them."

"And what if I
just decide not to?"

"Then you won't
make sheriff by sixty."

The rage hit her heart
like a shot of speed. "Fifty-eight. And that's not a joke to me."

"I'm not joking. And
you could handle that job, so long as you understood that the only person in
the world who thinks like you is you. Being a good hunter isn't about being in
touch with your feelings, Rayborn. It's about being in touch with everyone
else's. That's how you find the people you need, no matter what you plan on
doing to them. Creeps or husbands, you find them the same way."

"I don't want a
husband. And you picked a helluva time for a lecture on feelings."

"It was
important."

"I'm not convinced.
Now, can we just get the hell out of this room? I've had enough. And if I spend
another two minutes with that...
gentleman
out there who thinks and
behaves differently than me, I'm going to draw my cheap Chinese Italian
stiletto, cut off his tiny gonad-sized
head
and flush it down the
nearest toilet. Can you understand me and
my
feelings now?"

He shut the closet door.
"I don't feel that great either."

That afternoon after work Tim Hess received his first treatment of
thoracic radiation. The stifling atmosphere of Ed Izma's room was still within
him as he lay back and the technician aimed the contraption at his chest. Hess
wondered if the radiation could kill the sickness of Izma's soul that had
surely gotten into him. The doctors had told Hess it was intended to
"clean up" any small cell carcinomas residing in his lymph system.
If they'd found any there during his operation, they'd have sewed him shut and
he'd be dead in half a year. They'd found nothing, but the radiation came
heavily recommended.

It was painless and took about thirty
seconds. But the radiologist told Hess that the side effects—fatigue, hair
loss, appetite drop, insomnia, gastrointestinal upset—built up over time and
he'd feel a whole lot worse after six weeks of daily treatments than he did
right now.

"If you guys don't kill me I don't
see how a little cancer will," he said.

The radiologist smiled serenely.
"We're doing everything we can, Detective."