Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

“I don’t know where the vein is, sir.”

“I’ll show it on you. It’s right here. Feel that? Right there. Feel it?”

“Yessir. I feel it.”

“Now, what you do is you find a family – doe and fawns. You come up close. That’s the hard part, getting up close. To kill the doe, you endanger the fawn. You move for her baby. You threaten the fawn and then the mother won’t run off. She’ll come after you. Then, swick! Cut through her neck. Not sideways, but at an angle. Okay? A V-shape. You feel that? Good, good. Hey, boy, aren’t we having a high old time!”

Then Lou would go inside to inspect the plates and bowls and make sure they were lined up on the checkered tablecloth, four squares from the edge, and sometimes when they were only three and a half squares from the edge or there was still a dot of grease on the rim of a melamine plate Stephen would listen to the slaps and the whimpers from inside the house as he lay on his back beside the fire and watched the sparks fly toward the dead moon.

“You gotta be good at something,” the man would say later, his wife in bed and he outside again with his bottle. “Otherwise there’s no point in being alive.”

Craftsmanship. He was talking about craftsmanship.

Jodie now asked, “How come you couldn’t be in the marines? You never told me.”

“Well, it was stupid,” Stephen said, then paused and added, “I got into some trouble when I was a kid. D’you ever do that?”

“Get into trouble? Not much. I was scared to. I didn’t want to upset my mother, stealing and shit. What’d you do?”

“Something that wasn’t real bright. There was this man lived up the road in our town. He was, you know, a bully. I saw him twisting this woman’s arm. She was sick, and what was he doing hurting her? So I went up to him and said if he didn’t stop I’d kill him.”

“You said that?”

“Oh, and another thing my stepfather taught me. You don’t threaten. You either kill someone or let them be but you don’t threaten. Well, he kept on hassling this woman and I had to teach him a lesson. I started hitting him. It got out of hand. I grabbed a rock and hit him. I wasn’t thinking. I did a couple years for manslaughter. I was just a kid. Fifteen. But it was a criminal record. And that was enough to keep me out of the marines.”

“I thought I read somewhere that even if you’ve got a record you can go into the service. If you go to some special boot camp.”

“I guess maybe ’cause it was manslaughter.”

Jodie’s hand pressed Stephen’s shoulder. “That’s not fair. Not one bit fair.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“I’m real sorry,” Jodie said.

Stephen, who never had any trouble looking any man in the eye, glanced at Jodie once then down immediately. And from somewhere, totally weird, this image came to mind. Jodie and Stephen living together in the cabin, going hunting and fishing. Cooking dinner over a campfire.

“What happened to him? Your stepfather?”

“Died in an accident. He was hunting and fell off a cliff.”

Jodie said, “Sounds like it was probably the way he’d’ve wanted to go.”

After a moment Stephen said, “Maybe it was.”

He felt Jodie’s leg brush his. Another electric jolt. Stephen stood quickly and looked out the window again. A police car cruised past but the cops inside were drinking soda and talking.

The street was deserted except for a clutch of homeless men, four or five whites and one Negro.

Stephen squinted. The Negro, lugging a big garbage bag full of soda and beer cans, was arguing, looking around, gesturing, offering the bag to one of the white guys, who kept shaking his head. He had a crazy look in his eyes and the whites were scared. Stephen watched them argue for a few minutes, then he returned to the mattress, sat down next to Jodie.

Stephen put his hand on Jodie’s shoulder.

“I want to talk to you about what we’re going to do.”

“Okay, all right. I’m listening, partner.”

“There’s somebody out there looking for me.”

Jodie laughed. He said, “Seems to me after what happened back at that building there’s a buncha people looking for you.”

Stephen didn’t smile. “But there’s one person in particular. His name’s Lincoln.”

Jodie nodded. “That’s his first name?”

Stephen shrugged. “I don’t know… I’ve never met anyone like him.”

“Who is he?”

A worm…

“Maybe a cop. FBI. A consultant or something. I don’t know exactly.” Stephen remembered the Wife describing him to Ron – the way somebody’d talk about a guru, or a ghost. He felt cringey again. He slid his hand down Jodie’s back. It rested at the base of his spine. The bad feeling went away.

“This is the second time he’s stopped me. And he almost got me caught. I’m trying to figure him out and I can’t.”

“What do you have to figure out?”

“What he’s going to do next. So I can stay ahead of him.”

Another squeeze to the spine. Jodie didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t look away either. He wasn’t timid anymore. And the look he gave Stephen was odd. Was it a look of…? Well, he didn’t know. Admiration maybe…

Stephen realized that it was the way Sheila had looked at him in Starbucks when he was saying all the right things. Except that, with her, he hadn’t been Stephen, he had been somebody else. Somebody who didn’t exist. Jodie was now looking at him this way even though he knew exactly who Stephen was, that he was a killer.

Leaving his hand on the man’s back, Stephen said, “What I can’t figure out is if he’s going to move them out of their safe house. The one next to the building where I met you.”

“Move who? The people you’re trying to kill?”

“Yeah. He’s going to try to out-guess me. He’s thinking…” Stephen’s voice faded.

Thinking…

And what was Lincoln the Worm thinking? Would he move the Wife and the Friend, guessing I’ll try the safe house again? Or would he leave them, thinking I’ll wait and try for them at a new location? And even if he thinks I’ll try the safe house again, will he leave them there as bait, trying to sucker me back for another ambush? Will he move two decoys to a new safe house? And try to take me when I follow them?

The thin man said, almost whispering, “You seem, I don’t know, shook up or something.”

“I can’t see him… I can’t see what he’s going to do. Everybody else’s ever been after me I can see. I can figure them out. Him, I can’t.”

“What do you want me to do?” Jodie asked, swaying against Stephen. Their shoulders brushed.

Stephen Kall, craftsman extraordinaire, stepson of a man who never had a moment’s hesitation in anything he did – killing deer or inspecting plates cleaned with a toothbrush – was now confounded, staring at the floor, then looking up into Jodie’s eyes.

Hand on the man’s back. Shoulders touching too.

Stephen made up his mind.

He bent forward and rummaged through his backpack. He found a black cell phone, looked at it for a moment, then handed it to Jodie.

“Whatsis?” the man asked.

“A phone. For you to use.”

“A cell phone! Cool.” He examined it as if he’d never seen one, flipped it open, studying all the buttons.

Stephen asked, “You know what a spotter is?”

“No.”

“The best snipers don’t work alone. They always have a spotter with them. He locates the target and figures out how far away it is, looks for defensive troops, things like that.”

“You want me to do that for you?”

“Yep. See, I think Lincoln’s going to move them.”

“Why, you figure?” Jodie asked.