Michael Slade - Headhunter

Her hands moved up to his shoulders.

She then said: "Tell me what's bothering you."

"He's laughing at me, Genny — and perhaps he has reason to be."

"Robert, it's common knowledge that the insane laugh without reason. This is so unlike you. I thought you were the one who believed that order and precision could always meet the match of chaos."

"Maybe once, but not now."

"Believe me, Robert, if you still weren't Number One they'd never have brought you back. In fact, what with your reading in tactics you're more equipped for this investigation than you were in the past. Just trust your knowledge and use it. Put it into practice and I'll bet it sees you through."

From out of nowhere DeClercq said: "Genny, I'm having nightmares. Actually one nightmare, over and over again."

"So tell me," she said.

The dream is all in silver.

He can see a silver room beyond the door, a room of silver walls with silver windows and a mist of silver vapor rising up from the floor. Even the sound of the sobbing has a metallic tone about it. And the silver blade of the silver knife is silver-cold in his stomach.

A tree beyond the window is stripped and bare of leaves.

Now his hands are closing about a neck and his fingers are pushing in, crushing the muscles and the veins and the pipes that feed life to this man's brain. The man's silver eyes seem to bulge out of their sockets. Suddenly with a pop they fall out on the floor. But it doesn't stop him squeezing. Now the tongue of the man is slithering out of his silver mouth like an eel dropping down from a hole in a rock five feet up from the ocean floor.

Silver, all is silver. Silver sobbing electric in the air.

Then abruptly there is color in this monochromatic dream, for the face of the man whom he holds in his hands has now turned livid blue. He opens his grip to let the dead man drop to the floor.

Janie, he whispers. Janie. For it is her sobbing in this room.

Turning toward the sound he sees a silver figure shrouded in mist lying on a bed. He crosses the floor; he opens his arms; he holds her against his chest. Then he screams in anguish at the source of the sobbing sound. For the surface of the cut that has taken her head is fiat and silver-smooth. The sobs are coming from an open tube sticking out of her throat.

Screaming, he tears the room apart.

But he doesn't find her head.

"Robert," Genevieve asked, "what does the dream mean to you?''

He thought for a moment, then said: "That I'll never find those heads."

"You're wrong. It means that you are afraid that you'll never find those heads. Not that you'll never find them. You see the difference, don't you?"

DeClercq forced a smile. "Genny, they never caught Jack the Ripper. Nor Zodiac in San Francisco. Nor the Axe Man of New Orleans. The Thames Nude Killer was never found. Nor the murderer of the Black Dahlia. Nor the…"

"So what," Genevieve said, almost spitting out her words. "None of those killers ever went up against the RCMP."

The force of her exclamation stopped him in midsentence.

"Steele. Walsh. McIllree. Blake. Get it through your head. I've read your book. I know where you're coming from and so does most of the world. Men who wore the tunic: it's time to believe the myth. For all your doubts about modern times they still produce some wisdom." Then she softened. "Don't you think it's time you took a lesson from Obee Wan Kenobe?"

"And what's that?" DeClercq asked frowning, for he rarely went to the movies.

"Let the Force be with you," she said — and DeClercq actually laughed.

For even he understood. Such is the grapevine of culture.

She waited until he was asleep, knowing that she had soothed him and made him forget his work for a while, then she curled herself in against the warmth of his body and let the void take her too. She fell asleep smiling.

At 3:00 a.m. Robert DeClercq woke up in a sweat. For the dream had come again.

He lay on his back for several minutes listening to his wife's even breathing. Then he slipped out of bed and out of the room and dressed to go down to the sea.

Next morning Genevieve DeClercq found her husband in the greenhouse with a pistol in his hand. The revolver was almost one hundred years old, a six shot Enfield Caliber.476.

The Superintendent didn't tell his wife about the nightmare.

9:15 p.m.

That evening Katherine Spann arrived home to find a cockroach in her kitchen.

Actually three cockroaches.

After she and Scarlett had left the University library late that afternoon they had driven downtown once again to look for the Indian and John Lincoln Hardy. When they had found neither one by 9:00 p.m. they had agreed to call it a day. With Scarlett at the wheel of the unmarked Ford the two Constables had driven along Fir Street under a half-hidden moon, the dull silver glow of the moonlight shimmering on the pavement, then had crossed 16th to enter Shaughnessy where the car slowly picked its way among the shadows of the trees. A wind was coming up from the direction of the sea so the light-ghosts were moving. Scarlett pulled the cruiser into the curb and Katherine Spann climbed out.

"Pleasant reading," he said as she closed the door. Then the car drove away.

For a moment Spann stood on the curb listening to the autumn wind moan in the boulevard trees, then removing a ring of keys from her pocket, she unlocked the gate at the servants' entrance and entered the yard of the mansion. Tonight the grounds were aromatic with the smell of decaying autumn leaves, and as she walked toward the groundkeeper's house those same leaves crunched beneath her feet like cellophane candy wrappers. Having closed the gate on squeaking hinges she had locked the city outside.

The groundkeeper's house stood in the shadows this side of Sussex Manor. As she approached it, her hands shoved deep in her pockets, both library books on voodoo clamped firmly under one arm, Spann could hear the chill November wind skating under the eaves of the mansion. The sound was like a thin scream escaping from an aged mouth lost somewhere in the darkness. Mixed with that noise she could also feel the gathering storm as it rattled through the old gutters and downspouts, scraping with it the rusty leaves that clawed at the metal.

Altogether it was a night fit to follow Halloween. The type of autumn night that Katherine Spann enjoyed. Eerie. Weird. Mysterious. A night to curl up at home.

With her windbreaker still zipped up under her chin to keep out the creeping cold, she came in through the back door of the groundkeeper's house and switched on the overhead light. And that was when she saw it, smack-dab in the middle of her kitchen floor.

Like all cockroaches this bug had a flat shiny body, six hairy legs, and a pair of long feelers that waved above a head hidden beneath a plate of armor. The insect was nibbling at a spot of goo caked to the linoleum floor. But the moment the light lit up the room it began to move. And though the roach moved quickly, Katherine Spann was quicker. She caught the ugly insect over near the sink.

Crunchhh! With a heavy stomp the woman squashed both the external skeleton and internal pulp underneath the heel of her boot.

It was as she was cleaning the mess from her foot that she saw the other two insects. There were two more shiny roaches in front of the garbage container. With two successive stomps she managed to get them also. Ughh, she thought.

At first Spann's reaction was to blame the age of the building: When you live in Edwardian premises, kiddo, what do you expect?

Katherine Spann had made up her mind to go out and buy some Raid, in fact she had opened the back door to venture forth with that purpose, when a realization slipped in and tugged at her brain. She stopped in her tracks, turned, and looked about the kitchen. The problem was not, it would appear, the advancing age of the building. The problem was her.