Jack Ketchum - Sleep Disorder

You haven't written, Clara.

Surely you're not still angry with me over our spat. I won't believe that. What I said to you I said out of love — you know I did the purest love. I know I was jealous, childish. Even harsh. But a love like ours is rooted in truth. We must be truthful, Clara, and what in this world can be more important than truth? I know that you still love me. And I also know that once I've returned, our love will bloom again like the beautiful night flowers here, opening gently to each other in the dark.

Until then, never forget. You own my heart.

"Ready for a gander?"

Straker turned out of the station and cruised past the administration buildings. The campus shimmered in the high summer sun, a blinding green haze.

Bilks felt bored. Straker bored him and the campus work bored him and he damn near bored himself.

White…string…bikini, was all he could think.

Yeah, he was ready.

He knew he shouldn't complain. That was why he'd quit the city in the first place — he couldn't hack the rough stuff. He'd walked into a project laundry room one day and found two of his crack stools strung upside-down and gutted like deer. The M.E. noted that their genitals had been burned off first with a blowtorch. Another time Bilks and his partner had answered a routine domestic just in time to see some PCP Cowboy pull a tire iron out of his wife's head. The guy's little girl was in the bedroom, sliced up like cold cuts. The baby was in the tub.

Fuck that shit, man.

Whereas here, on the campus department, your real tough call was breaking up a frat party or running smoochers off the quad at night. And this time of year was even slower. The campus was in between summer sessions. No students — though most of the profs and TA's stayed on. That's what this babe was — Clara Holmes — a grad student working for the botany department.

And an eyeful.

How many times I jacked myself thinking of that rock-hard bod? he articulately asked himself. How many times I jumped Barbara's tired bones pretending she was Clara Holmes?

"You're a pretty quiet fella today," Straker remarked behind the cruiser's wheel. "What, the wife wear out your tongue last night?"

"I'm bored," said Bilks. "As in shitless. And you ain't helping any."

Straker laughed. When he laughed he cackled like the witch in The Wizard of Oz . It was a skinny laugh and Straker was a skinny person. Bilks hated Straker's laugh.

"Well, you won't be bored long. I got that new pair of binocs I was telling you about. Bushnells, man, with a zoom. We'll be able to count her eyelashes. Zoom right up her crack when she's lying on that tight, killer belly of hers."

It sounded good to Bilks. While scoping female grad students with binoculars did not exactly equate to conduct becoming of an officer, he saw little harm. He figured god made women beautiful for a reason; therefore, peeping on Clara Holmes was, in some esoteric sense, accommodating the Will of the Creator. Besides, a job like this had damn few perks, and she sure as shit was one of them. A jam-packed, bodacious hunka-hunka red-hot woman.

Every day at noon she'd lie out on the grassy campus quadrangle, working on her tan. Bilks considered the sexist-cop image: the tight, tan skin shining with oil, the zero body fat, the 36C's with nipples as big as the end of your thumb, all wrapped up in that white string bikini.

Jesus wept , thought Bilks.

"I saw her coming out of North Administration the other day," Straker said. "No bra. Just this tight orange halter and cutoffs creepin' so high up her ass her cheeks were showing. I swear it's hard to believe a dish like that was dating Moley. Bet his dick was one happy camper in that pie."

"Hold on. Back up a minute," said Bilks. "Who?"

"Moley. Howard Moley. Assistant prof in the botany department. You know. The guy who died."

Howard Moley. Oh yeah. He remembered the item in the campus paper. Some kind of mushroom scientist or something. Or fungus maybe. The guy got sent down to the Rain Forest on a Smithsonian grant. And died. But…

"Howard Moley dated Clara Holmes?"

"S'what I heard. For a couple months at least."

"But Moley was a fucking creamcake!"

"You got that right. Egghead wimp to the max. Word is she was only after him for his family's money, but in the end she couldn't keep her hands off other guys, so she dumped him."

Bilks sighed. Some things just didn't make a whole lot of sense in this life. Moley dating Clara Holmes was like Sharon Stone dating Mr. Rogers. "Jesus. Clara Holmes could be in Penthouse. Moley must have the Loch Ness Monster in his pants."

"Like I said, he comes from money," reminded Straker.

"Still."

"Funniest part is she dumped him a month before he croaked."

Straker parked in the back lot of the undergrad library which overlooked the vast quadrangle. He reached for the Bushnells in back.

"Hey, don't look so sad, good buddy. The lady is the biggest, toughest cocktease on campus. Everybody knows that. She was cheating on Moley right and left. Probably goes through box springs like you go through cigarettes."

It meant something to Bilks. He was a three pack a day man and counting. Still…

"How do you like that shit?" Straker griped. He was combing the quadrangle with the Bushnells. "First day she's missed all freakin' summer. Figures, don't it? We're all set to viddy that hot sweet tush with my brand new glasses and she ain't even here. Piss!"

Piss was right. Bilks felt disheartened. "Let's wait a while," he said, trying to be optimistic. "Maybe she'll show. What've we got to do anyway? Fight crime?" He stuck another Marlboro in his mouth, lit the match and then paused over the flame. "By the way," he said. "How did Moley die?"

The first letter came about a week after he'd left. She remembered it clearly even now, a week after he was dead.

Her memory was about a half-step from photographic. In matters regarding Howard there was reason to wish it were poorer.

Dearest Clara , the letter had read.

I feel awful about our spat. I want to forget it ever happened. Can we? You know how much I love you, don't you? And that I always will? Write and tell me you do know. And that you love me too. Make me the happiest man alive.

I miss you terribly, darling.

All my love, Howard

And she'd thought at the time, the man can't take a hint .

Okay, so she'd been involved with him a couple of months. The guy's parents had millions! What girl in her right mind wouldn't take a crack at it? Maybe the two of them could get along awhile, she thought, enough time for her to get her hands on a little of that green for her old age. Marriages could be short. Real short.

She'd tried it out, tested the water so to speak.

And decided it wasn't worth the swim.

The guy was pathologically dull. Didn't dance. Didn't like the movies. Never even wanted to go to any of the campus parties. Too busy reading about goddamn shelf fungus and mushrooms. Clara was interested in botany, sure (it was the easiest masters the college offered) but she wasn't obsessed with it, for god's sake. Howard pored over botany journals the way most men pored over skin mags. And that was another thing about Howard: he was equipped with neither the zeal nor the architecture to, uh, satisfy a woman's, uh, needs.

And a woman such as Clara had many such needs. But of course she'd filled that gap — no pun intended — with all the other guys, unbeknownst to poor little Howard.

No problem.

But he took too damn much attention. Smothering her with flowers and sticky displays of affection. She got sick of it.