John Lutz - Fear the Night

He squinted and looked at the clock on the nightstand.

Damn!

He’d overslept again. Gonna catch hell from the sergeant, never get off traffic detail.

Where the hell is Maggie?

He sat up on the edge of the mattress, a fleshy but powerful man in his thirties, with pleasant but homely features reminiscent of an amiable bulldog’s. Sitting there in only his jockey shorts, he knew he’d never get to the precinct on time. He needed a shower, a shave, something to eat.

Maggie.

He called her name, then stood up and plodded to the door and opened it.

She was asleep on the sofa, in the middle of the afternoon.

Irritated, he called her name again, louder, and her dark eyes opened wide and she sat up. She looked at her watch. “Oh, damn! I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I’m sorry.”

“Doesn’t help,” he mumbled, and plodded toward the bathroom to shower.

“I’ll fix you something to eat,” his wife said behind him. “You’re gonna need your energy.”

“Damned straight,” Skeppy muttered to himself, wondering which of Manhattan’s busy intersections were going to demand his services this afternoon and evening.

Twenty minutes later, showered, shaved, and in uniform, he made it a point to kiss Maggie good-bye before leaving for work on the afternoon shift. They had their problems right now, plenty of them. And he knew how she hated it when he worked this shift. It meant she had to sit alone most of the evening and wait up late if she wanted to see him at all that day.

A cop’s wife, Skeppy thought. A hard life.

But not as hard as standing on your feet all day waving your arms at people who’d just as soon run you over.

Alex made sure the door to his workshop was locked. He wouldn’t want Detective Meg to enter unexpectedly, as she might very well do. It seemed to be her nature. The cop in her.

The hiss of fine sandpaper on the custom gun stock he was toiling over soothed him as his hands lovingly worked the fine walnut. He’d created the stock out of a single block of prime wood over a yard long. Hours with the saws, the lathe, the sander, and now his hands separated from the wood only by the flimsy, clothlike sandpaper that allowed him almost to feel the grain. The graceful gun stock, of Alex’s own design, was for a.280 Remington rifle with an extended barrel. After the fine sanding, he’d get his wood chisels and spend long hours engraving the stock with exotic, sometimes erotic designs. It would become a work of art that Detective Meg might not comprehend.

There were plenty of ready customers for his custom stocks. Lots of people understood, like Alex, the fascination and repulsion of long guns that delivered death from a distance. While in a sense he loathed such weapons, he was also drawn to them, and he didn’t want to consider too carefully the depth of satisfaction he got out of creating beautiful wooden stocks for such firearms. Hate and love, fear and love, were sometimes so similar as to be indistinguishable. Like opposite sides of a rapidly spinning coin.

Detective Meg wouldn’t understand that.

Or maybe she’d understand it too well.

He sanded until the muscles in his arms began to cramp, thinking about Meg.

After a dinner of potatoes, broccoli, and cheese, all mixed in some kind of casserole she’d learned about on one of those half-hour-recipe TV cooking shows, Meg surveyed the mess in the kitchen and vowed never to make the dish again. It hadn’t been bad, but then it hadn’t been good. It had tasted like potatoes, broccoli, and cheese, and so what?

Well, there was enough of the stuff left over for tomorrow night, that was what. And these days Meg had a lot on her mind and was mostly eating for fuel rather than pleasure.

After cleaning up the kitchen and putting the leftover casserole in the refrigerator, she went into the living room.

She didn’t feel like watching television; she’d had enough of the world outside the apartment and didn’t want to watch news or some idiot’s idea of reality. Instead of sitting down on the sofa, she went to her desk chair, booted up her computer, and was told she had mail.

E-mail. One message from AR3276@Kno.com.

Alex.

She fought against opening the e-mail, then admitted to herself that eventually she was going to read it anyway, so why not soon? She moved the mouse on its Dilbert rubber pad and clicked.

Alex’s message was brief, like most of his others: Thinking of you.

Meg deleted it from her e-mail but not from her mind.

She leaned back in her desk chair, thinking of Alex. Damn him! Why couldn’t he leave her alone? At least until the Night Sniper case was solved? He’d been a cop. He should understand.

She shut down the computer, went to the sofa, and used the remote to turn on the TV in order to pass the time and not strain her brain. A commercial was playing, a woman sitting on top of a speeding car with her legs down through the open sunroof. A handsome young guy was driving while fondling her bare feet. They were both grinning. Music blared and another, identical car was speeding toward the first, driven by a woman. A handsome man was sitting on that car with his legs down through the open sunroof, and the woman driving was fondling his bare feet. They were smiling, too. Everyone was smiling and speeding. Both men needed to shave. Both women looked as if every hair other than the ones on their heads had been depilatoried out of existence.

Meg wondered what any of this had to do with cars, then stopped watching and listening, and saw and heard nothing more of it. With so much else to occupy her thoughts, there was no way she could concentrate on television fare.

Thinking of you. .

1991

To Adam Strong’s amazement, Dante’s performance on the target range wasn’t a fluke. He continued to shoot well, though he was such a natural shot that learning the fine points only marginally improved his aim. He was phenomenal at both skeet and still target shooting, accurate with a handgun, but particularly efficient with rifle or shotgun. And Dante continued to grow scholastically, especially in mathematics. Calculating distance, speed, and angles in shooting, and taking aim at solutions requiring similar calculations in mathematics, were talents that nourished each other.

Dante became increasingly important to Adam Strong, and Strong made it obvious. It was as if he’d found a son, and Dante had a father again. Dante grew in confidence and ability. The other boys respected him, especially when he began to defeat them regularly in the games they played. In everything from matchstick poker to chess, Dante became an obsessive and fiercely competitive opponent. He seldom lost. Then, after a while, when he had the measure of each of his opponents on the ranch, he never lost.

Strong gave Dante much more individual attention than he did any of the other children, and none of them complained. They all seemed to see something special in the relationship of Strong and the boy with the scarred face. Or maybe they figured that Dante had an extra measure of grief in the world, the way his face was, so he deserved special attention.

After one of their shooting expeditions plinking varmints-mostly jackrabbits and voles-on the ranch’s outskirts, Dante and Strong were walking side by side toward Strong’s pickup truck. The Arizona sun was brilliant and the temperature high. Neither Dante nor Strong was perspiring, but the heat still had to be taken into account. It worked internally and created a slight nausea. It discouraged fast or sudden movement.

They walked leisurely without talking, as they often did, content and comfortable with silence and each other’s company. The only sound was the regular slapping of their leather boot soles on the dry ground. Rooster tails of dust sprang up at their heels and settled back to earth slowly in the dry, still air.