Jeffery Deaver - Bloody River Blues

"I guess I'm watching TV."

"With the sound oft?"

He clicked the off switch. He'd denied himself the treat of the commandos' rescue and now she'd sense his resentment and leave.

But, no, she was walking around the room in a very leisurely way, straightening his magazines. Then she started on the vases.

"I think I'm becoming a curmudgeon," he said by way of apology. "What is that exactly?"

"Got me. An old fart, I guess." She began to throw out the dead flowers. "I'd think the nurses'd take better care of them."

"They're pretty busy. Everybody's busy."

Except me. I sit on my ass all day long. I can tell you all about fabric softener, breakfast cereal, and tampons. I could learn how to hijack ships if you'd leave me the hell alone.

She washed the vases in the bathroom and left them upside down to dry on the top of the toilet. Buffett took grudging pleasure in watching her. The glass was immaculate. Some women are good at this, he thought. Give them a dirty bar of Ivory and a cheap paper towel and they'd make anything spotless. Penny had been this way.

Penny is this way, he corrected.

Nina walked to a low dresser across the room. Nothing more to wash. No more silent hijackers or Monistat commercials.

No more crazy location scouts.

No more nothin'.

"Well, I'm pretty tired," Buffett said, and yawned a fake but large yawn. "I think I'd like to get some sleep."

"Naw," Nina said, picking up a deck of cards from the dresser. "Don't you think you'd really like to play gin rummy?"

John Pellam, his bomber jacket covering Samuel Colt's deadly brainchild, walked with the oblivion of landed gentry through the streets of Maddox, Missouri.

He kicked at a tuft of tall grass springing from a perfect hole in the middle of a cracked sidewalk slab. He continued on. There was no traffic here, foot or auto, along this row of buildings. The tallest structure on the block-a three-story factory-may have bustled in its heyday but the building now mocked its past; the roof had collapsed long ago and the old green sign on the facade read FINERY, the RE ironically worn down by some trick of erosion.

Looking behind him, looking down alleys, looking more often in the reflections of windows than at*the sidewalk where he planted his brown Nokonas, Pellam saw no one following.

He turned from this part of town and ambled down Third-past the spot where Donnie Buffett had been shot. Here, too, he lingered. The rains had washed away the blood he'd seen, if it had been blood, and the cobblestones were everywhere clean. This is one advantage of ghost towns-fewer residents to toss litter on the streets. Pellam, unzipping his jacket slightly, paced back and forth. He wandered several blocks to the alley through which he had eluded the sedan several days before. All deserted.

Tony Sloan and the film company-still without their precious machine guns-were filming the few remaining scenes. Sloan was also, Pellam guessed, spending many hours on the phone arranging for extensions of the financing. Pellam himself avoided the set. Sloan wouldn't speak to him. Besides, he had friends there and he wanted to keep what was about to happen as far removed from them as he could.

He lingered outside the camper at the Bide-A-Wee. He walked slowly around, then through, the old factory where Nina had been attacked. He wandered among the gray, corrugated metal Quonset huts, uninhabited, it seemed, since World War II. He walked along sidewalks of stores selling dusty office supplies and medical supplies. He found himself scanning the street in a window's reflection for a long moment and realized he had been staring intently at thick mannequins wearing heavy girdles, chastely muted by an amber plastic sunscreen and the store clerk had been studying him with amused curiosity.

Where is he? Where is Stiles killer?

Pellam walked to the river and watched the sunset from a disintegrating bench in the scrubby remains of Maddox Municipal Park. The ambitions of the entire town were expressed in a small store behind him. The wood sign that proclaimed the owner's name was illegibly faded, but on the facade itself was a larger message, sloppily hand-painted: Scrap Metal Bought. All Kinds. All Grades. Cash NOW!

After a dinner of a hamburger and a beer, Pellam wandered the streets again, streets he shared only with the few people meandering between the Jolly Rogue and Callaghan's, and with packs of scrawny dogs with wild eyes but hopeful prances that sadly suggested domesticated puppyhoods.

At midnight he sat again in the park, with a beer he did not drink, watching the moon's stippled reflection in the water, smelling the cold, marshy air and an oily smell from some distant factory or refinery. When is he going to find me?

Yet nothing found him that night but sleep, and Pellam woke on the bench at 4:00 A.M., astonished at first at the extent of his exhaustion, then at his carelessness, and finally at his extraordinary good luck at escaping unharmed. He returned to the camper, sore and chilled, his hands shivering and the only warm aspect about him the wood grip of the Colt pressing hard against his belly.

Dr. Wendy looked good.

Breezy. That was the way she walked. Breezy. What did they say in high school? There was a word. What was it?

Bopping.

Right. And you had to snap your fingers when you said it. Bopping. Yeah, you see that girl? You see the way she bopped into the lunchroom?

"Yo, Dr. Wendy."

"Morning, Donnie."

He wondered if she sailed. He pictured her in a white bikini, with thin straps. She would have a small mound of a belly-he remembered the leather near-miniskirt-but that was okay. He wondered if she owned a boat. No, probably not; she spent all her money on clothes and weird earrings. But her boyfriend might have one.

He wondered if she spent every Sunday on his boat. He wondered what it would be like to be married to her.

He wondered if she ever went out with patients. Donnie Buffett decided he was going to ask her on a date.

She swung the door shut and did her cigarette routine. "I wanted to come right by. We've got the results, Donnie. The sexual response tests."

"Okay, I'm sitting down-as if I had an option." His smile faded and his brow creased with concern. "What's the verdict?"

"You're reflex incomplete."

He had forgotten what this meant, but the way she said it, the significant tone and smile of minor triumph, he guessed it was good news.

"… nearly one hundred percent of these patients can have erections, either reflexogenic or psychogenic. Not all of them, but a good percentage, can ejaculate. There will be a lowered sperm count but all that means is if you want to have children, you'll have to try harder."

Weiser shook his hand as if they'd just completed a business deal.

"Well, there you go," Buffett said happily, and began to sob.

The cop's eyes flooded with tears and his breath shook out of his body in spasms. His face swelled with a huge pressure.

He tried to speak but was unable to.

What's happening to me?

Weiser said nothing.

Buffett was choking on tears, he was drowning in them. They were going to kill him, drain away his life like spurting blood.

Was he going crazy? Had it finally happened? What stage of recovery is hysteria, sweetheart? Crying harder than when he was a kid, harder than when he broke his nose, harder than when his mother died… He could… not… breathe… He struggled to control the jag. Finally he did. The air sucked in deeply and he relaxed. "I…" Another attack struck. He buried his face in wads of Kleenex. "I…" He substituted a pillow for the tissue and cried some more. Gradually the tears ceased.