Dean Koontz - Whispers

"Got to go to work," he said, sliding off the barstool. "See you around."

"I hope so."

For fifteen minutes, Tony and Frank showed the mug shots of Bobby Valdez to the customers in Paradise. As they moved from table to table, the band played Rolling Stones and Elton John and Bee Gees material at a volume that set up sympathetic vibrations in Tony's teeth. It was a waste of time. No one in Paradise remembered the killer with the baby face.

On the way out, Tony stopped at the long oak bar where Otto was mixing strawberry Margaritas. "Tell me something," he shouted above the music.

"Anything," Otto yelled.

"Don't people come to these places to meet each other?"

"Making connections. That's what it's all about."

"Then why the hell do so many singles' bars have bands like that one?"

"What's wrong with the band?"

"A lot of things. But mostly it's too damned loud."

"So?"

"So how can anyone possibly strike up an interesting conversation?"

"Interesting conversation?" Otto said. "Hey man, they don't come here for interesting conversation. They come to meet each other, check each other out, see who they want to go to bed with."

"But no conversation?"

"Look at them. Just look around at them. What would they talk about? If we didn't play music loud and fairly steady, they'd get nervous."

"All those maddeningly quiet spaces to fill."

"How right you are. They'd go somewhere else."

"Where the music was louder and they only needed body language."

Otto shrugged. "It's a sign of the times."

"Maybe I should have lived in another time," Tony said.

Outside, the night was mild, but he knew it would get colder. A thin mist was coming off the sea, not genuine fog yet, but a sort of damp greasy breath that hung in the air and made halos around all the lights.

Frank was waiting behind the wheel of the unmarked police sedan. Tony climbed in on the passenger's side and buckled his seatbelt.

They had one more lead to check out before they quit for the day. Earlier, a couple of people at that Century City singles' bar had said they'd also seen Bobby Valdez at a joint called The Big Quake on Sunset Boulevard, over in Hollywood.

Traffic was moderate to heavy heading toward the heart of the city. Sometimes Frank got impatient and darted from lane to lane, weaving in and out with toots of the horn and little squeals of the brakes, trying to get ahead a few car lengths, but not tonight. Tonight, he was going with the flow.

Tony wondered if Frank Howard had been discussing philosophy with Otto.

After a while, Frank said, "You could have had her."

"Who?"

"That blonde. That Judy."

"I was on duty, Frank."

"You could have set something up for later. She was panting for you."

"Not my type."

"She was gorgeous."

"She was a killer."

"She was what?"

"She'd have eaten me up alive."

Frank considered that for about two seconds, then said, "Bullshit. I'd take a crack at her if I had the chance."

"You know where she's at."

"Maybe I'll mosey back there later, when we're done."

"You do that," Tony said. "Then I'll come visit you in the rest home when she's finished with you."

"Hell, what's the matter with you? She wasn't that special. That kind of stuff can be handled easy."

"Maybe that's why I didn't want it."

"Send that one by me again."

Tony Clemenza was tired. He wiped his face with his hands as if weariness was a mask that he could pull off and discard. "She was too well-handled, too well-used."

"Since when did you become a Puritan?"

"I'm not," Tony said, "Or ... yeah ... okay, maybe I am. Just a little. Just a thin streak of Puritanism in there somewhere. God knows, I've had more than a few of what they now call 'meaningful relationships.' I'm far from pure. But I just can't see myself on the make in a place like Paradise, cruising, calling all the women 'foxes,' looking for fresh meat. For one thing, I couldn't keep a straight face making the kind of chatter that fills in between the band's numbers. Can you hear me making that scene? 'Hi, I'm Tony. What's your name? What's your sign? Are you into numerology? Have you taken est training? Do you believe in the incredible totality of cosmic energy? Do you believe in destiny as an arm of some all-encompassing cosmic consciousness? Do you think we were destined to meet? Do you think we could get rid of all the bad karma we've generated individually by creating a good energy gestalt together? Want to fuck?'"

"Except for the part about fucking," Frank said, "I didn't understand a thing you said."

"Neither did I. That's what I mean. In a place like Paradise, it's all plastic chatter, glossy surface jive talk formulated to slide everyone into bed with as little friction as possible. In Paradise, you don't ask a woman anything really important. You don't ask about her feelings, her emotions, her talents, her fears, hopes, wants, needs, dreams. So what happens is you end up going to bed with a stranger. Worse than that, you find yourself making love to a fox, to a paper cut-out from a men's magazine, an image instead of a woman, a piece of meat instead of a person, which means you aren't making love at all. The act becomes just the satisfying of a bodily urge, no different than scratching an itch or having a good bowel movement. If a man reduces sex to that, then he might as well stay home alone and use his hand."

Frank braked for a red light and said. "Your hand can't give you a blow job."

"Jesus, Frank, sometimes you can be crude as hell."

"Just being practical."

"What I'm trying to say is that, for me at least, the dance isn't worth the effort if you don't know your partner. I'm not one of those people who'd go to a disco just to revel in my own fancy choreography. I've got to know what the lady's steps are, how she wants to move and why, what she feels and thinks. Sex is just so damned much better if she means something to you, if she's an individual, a quirky person all her own, not just a smooth sleek body that's rounded in all the right places, but a unique personality, a character with chips and dents and marks of experience."

"I can't believe what I'm hearing," Frank said as he drove away from the traffic signal. "It's that old bromide about sex being cheap and unfulfilling if love isn't mixed up with it somehow."

"I'm not talking about undying love," Tony said. "I'm not talking about unbreakable vows of fidelity until the end of time. You can love someone for a little while, in little ways. You can go on loving her even after the physical part of the relationship is over. I'm friends with old lovers because we didn't look at each other as new notches on the gun: we had something in common even after we stopped sharing a bed. Look, before I'm going to go for a tumble in the sack, before I'm going to get bare-assed and vulnerable with a woman, I want to know I can trust her: I want to feel she's special in some way, dear to me, a person worth knowing, worth revealing myself to, worth being a part of for a while."

"Garbage," Frank said scornfully.

"It's the way I feel."

"Let me give you a warning."

"Go ahead."

"The best advice you'll ever get."

"I'm listening."

"If you think there's really something called love, if you honest-to-God believe there's actually a thing called love that's as strong and real as hate or fear, then all you're doing is setting yourself up for a lot of pain. It's a lie. A big lie. Love is something writers invented to sell books."

"You don't really mean that."

"The hell I don't." Frank glanced away from the road for a moment, looked at Tony with pity. "You're how old--thirty-three?"

"Almost thirty-five," Tony said as Frank looked back at the street and pulled around a slow-moving truck that was loaded down with scrap metal.