Dean Koontz - Whispers

Today, Bobby was a free man.

But maybe not for long, Tony thought.

In May, one month after his release from prison, Bobby "Angel" Valdez failed to keep an appointment with his parole officer. He moved out of his apartment without filing the required change of address form with the proper authorities. He vanished.

In June, he started raping again. Just as easy as that. As casually as some men start smoking again after shaking the habit for a few years. Like renewed interest in an old hobby. He molested two women in June. Two in July. Three in August. Two more in the first ten days of September. After eighty-eight months behind bars, Bobby had a craving for woman-flesh, an insatiable need.

The police were convinced that those nine crimes--and perhaps a few others that had gone unreported--were the work of one man, and they were equally certain the man was Bobby Valdez. For one thing each of victims had been approached in the same way. A man walked up to her as she got out of her car alone, at night, in a parking lot. He put a gun in her ribs or back or belly, and he said, "I'm a fun guy. Come to the party with me, and you won't get hurt. Turn me down, and I'll blow you away right now. Play along, and you've got no worries. I'm really a fun guy." He said pretty much the same thing every time, and the victims remembered it because the "fun guy" part sounded so weird, especially when spoken in Bobby's soft, high-pitched, almost girlish voice. It was identical to the approach Bobby had used more than eight years ago, during his first career as a rapist.

In addition to that, the nine victims gave strikingly similar descriptions of the man who had abused them. Slender. Five-foot-ten. A hundred and forty pounds. Dusky complexion. Dimpled chin. Brown hair and eyes. The girlish voice. Some of Bobby's friends called him "Angel" because of his sweet voice and because he had a cute baby face. Bobby was thirty years old, but he looked sixteen. Each of the nine victims had seen her assailant's face, and each had said he looked like a kid, but handled himself like a tough, cruel, clever, and sick man.

The chief bartender in Paradise left the business to his two subordinates and examined the three glossy mug shots of Bobby Valdez that Frank Howard had put on the bar. His name was Otto. He was a good-looking man, darkly tanned and bearded. He wore white slacks and a blue body shirt with the top three buttons undone. His brown chest was matted with crisp golden hairs. He wore a shark's tooth on a gold chain around his neck. He looked up at Frank, frowned. "I didn't know L.A. police had jurisdiction in Santa Monica."

"We're here by sufferance of the Santa Monica P.D.," Tony said.

"Huh?"

"Santa Monica police are cooperating with us in this investigation," Frank said impatiently. "Now, did you ever see the guy?"

"Yeah, sure. He's been in a couple of times," Otto said.

"When?" Frank asked.

"Oh ... a month ago. Maybe longer."

"Not recently?"

The band, just returned from a twenty-minute break, struck up a Billy Joel song.

Otto raised his voice above the music. "Haven't seen him for at least a month. The reason I remember is because he didn't look old enough to be served. I asked to see some ID, and he got mad as hell about that. Caused a scene."

"What kind of scene?" Frank asked.

"Demanded to see the manager."

"That's all?" Tony asked.

"Called me names." Otto looked grim. "Nobody calls me names like that."

Tony cupped one hand around his ear to funnel in the bartender's voice and block some of the music. He liked most Billy Joel tunes, but not when they were played by a band that thought enthusiasm and amplification could compensate for poor musicianship.

"So he called you names," Frank said. "Then what?"

"Then he apologized."

"Just like that? He demands to see the manager, calls you names, then right away apologizes?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"I asked him to," Otto said.

Frank leaned farther over the bar as the music swelled into a deafening chorus. "He apologized just because you asked him to?"

"Well ... first, he wanted to fight."

"Did you fight him?" Tony shouted.

"Nah. If even the biggest and meanest son of a bitch in the place gets rowdy, I don't ever have to touch him to quiet him down."

"You must have a hell of a lot of charm," Frank yelled.

The band finished the chorus, and the roar descended from a decibel level high enough to make your eyeballs bleed. The vocalist did a bad imitation of Billy Joel on a verse played no louder than a thunderstorm.

A stunning green-eyed blonde was sitting at the bar next to Tony. She had been listening to the conversation. She said, "Go on, Otto. Show them your trick."

"You're a magician?" Tony asked Otto. "What do you do--make unruly customers disappear?"

"He scares them," the blonde said. "It's neat. Go on, Otto. Show them your stuff."

Otto shrugged and reached under the bar and took a tall beer glass from a rack. He held it up so they could look at it, as if they had never seen a beer glass before. Then he bit off a piece of it. He clamped his teeth on the rim and snapped a chunk out of it, turned, spat the sharp fragment into a garbage can behind him.

The band exploded through the last chorus of the song and gifted the audience with merciful silence.

In the sudden quiet between the last note and the burst of scattered applause, Tony heard the beer glass crack as Otto took another bite out of it.

"Jesus," Frank said.

The blonde giggled.

Otto chomped on the glass and spat out a mouthful and chomped some more until he had reduced it to an inch-thick base too heavy to succumb to human teeth and jaws. He threw the remaining hunk in the can and smiled. "I chew up the glass right in front of the guy who's making trouble. Then I look mean as a snake, and I tell him to settle down. I tell him that if he doesn't settle down I'll bite his goddamned nose off."

Frank Howard gaped at him, amazed. "Have you ever done it?"

"What? Bitten off someone's nose? Nah. Just the threat's enough to make them behave."

"You get many hard cases here?" Frank asked.

"Nah. This is a class place. We have trouble maybe once a week. No more than that."

"How do you do that trick?" Tony asked.

"Biting the glass? There's a little secret to it. But it's not really hard to learn."

The band broke into Bob Seeger's Still the Same as if they were a bunch of juvenile delinquents breaking into a nice house with the intention of trashing it.

"Ever cut yourself?" Tony shouted to Otto.

"Every once in a while. Not often. And I've never cut my tongue. The sign of someone who can do the stunt well is the condition of his tongue," Otto said. "My tongue has never been cut."

"But you have injured yourself."

"Sure. My lips a few times. Not often."

"But that only makes the trick more effective," the blonde said. "You should see him when he cuts himself. Otto stands there in front of the jerk who's been causing all the trouble, and he just pretends like he doesn't know he's hurt himself. He lets the blood run." Her green eyes shone with delight and with a hard little spark of animal passion that made Tony squirm uneasily on his barstool. "He stands there with bloody teeth and with the blood oozing down into his beard, and he warns the guy to stop making a ruckus. You wouldn't believe how fast they settle down."

"I believe," Tony said. He felt queasy.

Frank Howard shook his head and said, "Well...."

"Yeah," Tony said, unable to find words of his own.

Frank said, "Okay ... let's get back to Bobby Valdez." He tapped the mug shots that were lying on the bar.

"Oh. Well, like I told you, he hasn't been in for at least a month."

"That night, after he got angry with you, after you settled him down with the glass trick, did he stick around for a drink?"