Michael Prescott: Shiver

Before leaving the bathroom, she took a final glance in the mirror. The woman she saw shocked her just for a moment. Dressed, groomed, and wide-awake, she looked attractive and intelligent, clear-skinned and clear-eyed; when she smiled in surprised pleasure, her cheeks dimpled sweetly.

That’s me, Wendy thought as she experienced a flash of positive self-appraisal so rare as to feel almost hallucinatory. I can be pretty, see?

Then she shook her head, dispelling the thought and the mirage in the mirror.

From the hall closet she grabbed her coat; from the refrigerator she plucked a brown-bag lunch, her first name neatly printed on it in Magic Marker. She left her apartment at eight-thirty-five, taking care to shut the door firmly and secure the dead bolt.

She hurried along the outdoor gallery, then down the stairs. As she reached ground level, the door to the apartment directly beneath hers swung open, and Jennifer Kutzlow, patron saint of the hearing-impaired, emerged.

“Hey, Wen!” Jennifer flashed a Pepsodent smile. “How’s it going?”

“Hi, Jenny.” Wendy’s voice lilted up, making the words a question. Why the hell did you play your stereo so loud last night? she wanted to say, but didn’t.

She glanced at the suitcase swinging loosely in Jennifer’s hand-an overnight bag, it looked like. Under her light spring coat, her blue stewardess’s outfit was visible, glamorous as a comic-strip crimefighter’s costume half-concealed beneath street clothes. Wendy envied the lifestyle implied by that uniform, the casual trips to distant places, the casual affairs in hotel rooms with men who smelled of Brut or Lectric Shave.

“Off to Seattle today,” Jennifer said, as if reading Wendy’s thoughts and confirming them. “Probably be raining up there.”

“Probably.”

“They get lots of rain. I knew this guy once, he was from Seattle, and he told me-”

A Mazda hummed up to the curb, and a horn blatted.

“Oh, hey, there’s my ride.” Jennifer ran for the car, her strawberry-blond hair raveling behind her in slow motion, a TV-commercial cliche. “‘See you!”

Her free hand flapped a wave. She hopped into the passenger seat, and the Mazda sped off.

Wendy stared after it. Her mouth, she noticed, was still smiling. Very weak-willed, that mouth. It had this pitiful, childish need to be liked. She was very annoyed with her mouth right now.

At the side of the building, she found her blue Honda Civic sedan parked in its assigned space. She climbed behind the wheel, snugged her seatbelt firmly in place, and backed carefully into the street, checking both the rearview and sideview mirrors.

She drove west on Palm Vista Avenue, past rows of apartment buildings. The radio was on, turned to KTWB, the all-news station. The newscaster informed her that the recent spell of warm weather, unseasonable for mid-March, would continue through the end of the week; a Santa Ana condition was predicted for later this afternoon. Wendy frowned. She hated the Santa Anas, those dust-dry devil winds that blew in from the desert, whistling through the canyons like banshees to suck the moisture from the air and leave eyes red and skin parched.

At Beverwil Drive she turned north, easing into a sluggish stream of traffic. The newscast reported a shooting at an automatic teller machine. A customer making a withdrawal after dark had been ambushed; apparently he’d offered resistance. Now he was in critical condition at Cedars-Sinai.

Not me, Wendy thought reflexively; she always had the same reaction to stories like that. I wouldn’t put up a fight. If they want my money, they can have it.

Of course, she reminded herself, I wouldn’t have visited an automatic teller machine after dark in the first place.

She hooked left onto Olympic Boulevard. Before her, the twin Century Plaza Towers leaped up, crowding out the sky. They were three-sided modernistic high rises, the sharp edges of their roofs cutting the morning mist like scalpel blades, forming a starkly modern backdrop to the rows of townhouses and shops lining the street-older, homier buildings, almost Victorian in appearance, that reminded Wendy for some reason of false fronts on a Hollywood studio lot.

After an irritating commercial in which the toll-free 800 number was repeated at least ten times, the newscaster updated the story that had dominated local news for weeks. The serial killer known as the Gryphon remained at large; no apparent progress had been made in the case since the discovery of his third victim, Elizabeth Osborn, thirteen days ago.

Wendy clicked off the radio. She wished she hadn’t heard that report. She should never listen to the news. The things that went on today were too awful. It was better not to know.

Still, she couldn’t help thinking about that killer. His three victims had all been women in their twenties or thirties, and they had all lived on the Westside-her part of town. Unconsciously her hand strayed to her neck, as if feeling her head to confirm that it was still attached.

She reminded herself to double-check the locks on her front door and windows before she went to bed tonight. Of course, she always double-checked them anyway.

A sign marking the Avenue of the Stars glided into view. Flashing her directional signal, she turned right. She checked the dashboard clock. Eight-forty-seven. She would make it easily. Not that it would be any big deal if she were a few minutes late. Except she hated being late, because she always made such profuse apologies for it. She couldn’t seem to help herself.

“God, what a wimp,” she said aloud, sighing.

She wished she weren’t so… so damn timid. She wanted to be strong and confident and free, yet it seemed she felt safe only when alone in her apartment with the door locked, huddled in her hidey-hole like a rabbit in its den. The city scared her; it was so big, so loud, so full of senseless violence-like that serial killer with his hacksaw and his heads. But she couldn’t fool herself, couldn’t place all the blame on L.A. and its craziness. She’d grown up in the suburbs of Cincinnati, and she had been afraid there, too.

A headache was coming on. Suddenly the car was stuffy and too warm. She thumbed a button on the dash, and fresh air jetted through the vents, cooling her face. She felt a little better. But the bad thoughts, the unwanted, unkind, unsparing thoughts, still pressed in on her.

She was afraid of life. It was that simple. Her fear had stunted her, crippled her, cut her off at the knees and left her half a person, an invalid wary of human contact, shunning closeness and intimacy, avoiding love or simple friendship. So she’d learned to live through books and videocassette movies and crappy TV shows, which offered an escape of sorts-but she knew they were an escape to nowhere, a dead end.

For the most part she could brush aside that knowledge and go on sleepwalking through her days; but sometimes, late at night, when darkness had fallen like a hush over the earth and she lay awake, unable to sleep, in an apartment that had become a cage of shadows, her mind turned restlessly to the life she wasn’t living, the chances left untaken and the things left undone, the years of her youth passing by, never to be hers again. She would press her face to the pillow and listen to the slow rhythms of jazz playing low on her bedside radio, a lonely saxophone crying for her in its mournful voice, as she thought of the city beyond her four walls, the great sprawling expanse of lighted streets and glass towers, of nightclubs where couples danced till the sky ran red with dawn, of neon signs aglow with promise, beckoning her-all the mysteries and wonders of this city she hadn’t dared to know. She felt old on those nights; she knew the hollowness of a life lived only in dreams.