Thomas Harris - Red Dragon

"I have one." Dolarhyde found it rather pleasant, talking to the woman in the dark. He heard the rattle of a purse being rummaged, the click of a compact.

He was sorry when the timer rang.

"There we go. I'll put this stuff in the Black Hole," she said.

He felt a breath of cold air, heard a cabinet close on rubber seals and the hiss of a vacuum lock. A puff of air, and fragrance touched him as she passed.

Dolarhyde pressed his knuckle under his nose, put on his thoughtful expression and waited for the light.

The lights came on. She stood by the door smiling in his approximate direction. Her eyes made small random movements behind the closed lids.

He saw her white cane propped in the corner. He took his hand away from his face and smiled.

"Do you think I could have a plum?" he said. There were several on the counter where she had been sitting.

"Sure, they're really good."

Reba McClane was about thirty, with a handsome prairie face shaped by good bones and resolution. She had a small star-shaped scar on the bridge of her nose. Her hair was a mixture of wheat and red-gold, cut in a pageboy that looked slightly out-of-date, and her face and hands were pleasantly freckled by the sun. Against the tile and stainless steel of the darkroom she was as bright as Fall.

He was free to look at her. His gaze could move over her as freely as the air. She had no way to parry eyes.

Dolarhyde often felt warm spots, stinging spots on his skin when he talked to a woman. They moved over him to wherever he thought the woman was looking. Even when a woman looked away from him, he suspected that she saw his reflection. He was always aware of reflective surfaces, knew the angles of reflection as a pool shark knows the banks.

His skin now was cool. Hers was freckled, pearly on her throat and the insides of her wrists.

"I'll show you the room where he wants to put it," she said. "We can get the measuring done."

They measured.

"Now, I want to ask a favor," Dolarhyde said.

"Okay."

"I need some infrared movie film. Hot film, sensitive up around one thousand nanometers,"

"You'll have to keep it in the freezer and put it back in the cold after you shoot."

"I know."

"Could you give me an idea of the conditions, maybe I-"

"Shooting at maybe eight feet, with a pair of Wratten filters over the lights." It sounded too much like a surveillance rig. "At the zoo," he said. "In the World of Darkness. They want to photograph the nocturnal animals."

"They must really be spooky if you can't use commercial infra-red."

"Ummm-hmmmm."

"I'm sure we can fix you up. One thing, though. You know a lot of our stuff is under the DD contract. Anything that goes out of here; you have to sign for."

"Right."

"When do you need it?"

"About the twentieth. No later."

"I don't have to tell you – the more sensitive it is, the meaner it is to handle. You get into coolers, dry ice, all that. They're screening some samples about four o'clock, if you want to look. You can pick the tamest emulsion that'll do what you want."

"I'll come."

Reba McClane counted her plums after Dolarhyde left. He had taken one.

Strange man, Mr. Dolarhyde. There had been no awkward pause of sympathy and concern in his voice when she turned on the lights. Maybe he already knew she was blind. Better yet, maybe he didn’t give a damn.

That would be refreshing.

In Chicago, Freddy Lounds’s funeral was under way. The National Tattler paid for the elaborate service, rushing the arrangements so that it could be held on Thursday, the day after his death. Then the pictures would be available for the Tattler edition published Thursday night.

The funeral was long in the chapel and it was long at the grave-side.

A radio evangelist went on and on in fulsome eulogy. Graham rode the greasy swells of his hangover and tried to study the crowd.

The hired choir at graveside gave full measure for the money while the Tattler photographers’ motor-driven cameras whizzed. Two TV crews were present with fixed cameras and creepy-peepies. Police photographers with press credentials photographed the crowd.

Graham recognized several plainclothes officers from Chicago Homicide. Theirs were the only faces that meant anything to him.

And there was Wendy of Wendy City, Lounds’s girlfriend. She was seated beneath the canopy, nearest the coffin. Graham hardly recognized her. Her blonde wig was drawn back in a bun and she wore a black tailored suit.

During the last hymn she rose, went forward unsteadily, knelt and laid her head on the casket, her arms outstretched in the pall of chrysanthemums as the strobe lights flashed.

The crowd made little noise moving over the spongy grass to the cemetery gates.

Graham walked beside Wendy. A crowd of the uninvited stared at them through the bars of the high iron fence.

“Are you all right?” Graham asked.

They stopped among the tombstones. Her eyes were dry, her gaze level.

“Better than you,” she said. “Got drunk, didn’t you?”

“Yep. Is somebody keeping an eye on you?”

“The precinct sent some people over. They’ve got plainclothes in the club. Lot of business now. More weirdos than usual.”

“I’m sorry you had this. You did… I thought you were fine at the hospital. I admired that.”

She nodded. “Freddy was a sport. He shouldn’t have to go out that hard. Thanks for getting me in the room.” She looked into the distance, blinking, thinking, eye shadow like stone dust on her lids. She faced Graham. “Look, the Tattler ’s giving me some money, you figured that, right? For an interview and the dive at the grave-side. I don’t think Freddy would mind.”

“He’d have been mad if you passed it up.”

“That’s what I thought. They’re jerks, but they pay. What it is, they tried to get me to say that I think you deliberately turned this freak on to Freddy, chumming with him in that picture. I didn’t say it. If they print that I did say it, well that’s bullshit.”

Graham said nothing as she scanned his face.

“You didn’t like him, maybe – it doesn’t matter. But if you thought this could happen, you wouldn’t have missed the shot at the Fairy, right?”

“Yeah, Wendy, I’d have staked him out.”

“Do you have anything at all? I hear noise from these people and that’s about it.”

“We don’t have much. A few things from the lab we’re following up. It was a clean job and he’s lucky.”

“Are you?”

“What?”

“Lucky.”

“Off and on.”

“Freddy was never lucky. He told me he’d clean up on this. Big deals everywhere.”

“He probably would have, too.”

“Well look, Graham, if you ever, you know, feel like a drink, I’ve got one.”

“Thanks.”

“But stay sober on the street.”

“Oh yes.”

Two policemen cleared a path for Wendy through the crowd of curiosity-seekers outside the gate. One of the gawkers wore a printed T-shirt reading “The Tooth Fairy Is a One-Night Stand.” He whistled at Wendy. The woman beside him slapped his face.

A big policeman squeezed into the 280ZX beside Wendy and she pulled into the traffic. A second policeman followed in an unmarked car.

Chicago smelled like a spent skyrocket in the hot afternoon. Graham was lonely, and he knew why; funerals often make us want sex – it’s one in the eye for death.

The wind rattled the dry stalks of a funeral arrangement near his feet. For a hard second he remembered palm fronds rustling in the sea wind. He wanted very much to go home, knowing that he would not, could not, until the Dragon was dead.