Shimmer (15 page)

‘So where are we going?' the stranger asked.

He smelled of something Cal believed might be jasmine, and though he had no gift for identifying perfumes, he knew what he liked, and that nice scent seemed like a bonus, so he paused for a moment and kissed Tabby on the mouth, and found that he tasted of Jack Daniel's, which Cal had never liked, but then again, he'd tasted a whole lot worse on the mouths of strangers.

‘We're going to my boat.' Cal started walking again. ‘If that's OK with you.'

‘You have a boat?' Tabby smiled and tucked his arm a little more snugly through Cal's.

‘A small cruiser,' Cal said. ‘Nothing fancy, but all mine.'

‘Boats make me horny,' Tabby said.

And Cal realized – not for the first time, though he guessed he'd always done his damnedest to suppress it – that the fact was black men made
him
hornier than white men or women, which amused him because of how appalled Jewel would be if she knew, but which also made him simmer with a weird kind of deep-down rage.

‘How about bicycles?' he asked, seeing Daisy up ahead, right where he'd left her, chained to a black lamppost outside an upscale fashion store.

Tabby laughed. ‘Last time I rode a bike, I was ten.'

‘It'll come right back,' Cal said, unlocking the padlock. ‘And I'll do most of the pedalling.'

‘In those?' The other man looked at his platform boots.

‘Easy.' Cal patted the front saddle, remembered the guy who'd sold it to him third-hand back in Wilmington talking about it. ‘Spring gel,' he said. ‘Very comfy.' His new friend swung one leg over the crossbar. ‘All aboard then,' he said.

Which was when Cal saw her.

The old bag lady – his stinky old bird –
again.
Stepping along Washington Avenue like she had a right to be there same as anyone else, as if she had a real
life
and a home to go to now, instead of just some lousy bench.

Cal didn't like coincidences.

And what if she was
not
the old derelict she seemed – what if she was an undercover pig?

Except he'd seen her out there a few times now, had
smelled
her, and if she wasn't the real thing, then he was a fucking nun.

‘What's up?' Tabby asked, all poised and ready on the back saddle.

Cal stepped closer, took the brown-skinned hand and laid it over his dick.

‘Only me,' he said, putting the old woman out of his mind.

‘Not only,' the other man said.

His eyes were deep and dark as night, Cal observed close up, and there was something in them that was making him . . .

Shiver.

44

Mildred, on her way back to her bench, wished she had not seen him again.

Wished, even more, that he had not seen her.

He'd been too far away, on the opposite side of the street, for her to see his eyes, but she had felt them resting on her, no doubt about that, had felt his disrespect, even, she'd fancied, his dislike.

All silver again, tonight.

Riding off into the night with that spiffily dressed young black man.

She wondered about that one, about how well he knew her
angel
.

Not well enough, she suspected, and feared for him, though it was hard to say exactly why.

Mildred so hoped to be wrong.

But she did surely wish she had not seen him again.

45

Cal and Tabby were on Alton Road, pedalling smoothly through light traffic.

‘How much further?' Tabby asked.

‘Just a few blocks,' Cal said over his shoulder.

‘I still don't see why you left this damned thing so far from the club when it wasn't even on our way.'

‘Her name's Daisy,' Cal said, staying amiable. ‘I need the exercise.'

‘Yeah, yeah,' said Tabby.

‘It'll be worth the trip,' Cal said.

‘I sure hope so,' the other man said.

He stayed silent for the next five blocks.

Then stayed silent when Cal turned left on to 16th.

‘You OK?' Cal asked.

‘Getting bored,' Tabby said.

Two turnings on, and Cal saw the road to the right where his first
friend
had told him he lived.

‘We could just as easily go to my place,'
he'd said.

‘But I have a boat,'
Cal had told him.

‘And I have a comfortable bed,'
the other man had said,
‘just around the corner.'

‘My cruiser is sexier,'
Cal had insisted and kept on pedalling.

And the other man had quit arguing and gone with the flow.

Straight on now, past the No Outlet sign.

The sound of the water was tranquil and welcoming.

And of boats, being rocked like babies, their bottoms gently slapped.

Nice and easy tonight.

‘Almost there,' Cal said.

46

He had not expected this.

That was a lie. It was
exactly
what he'd anticipated – just not, perhaps, the speed with which it had happened.

He'd thought there would be heat first, like the last time; a little sensuality, some rolling around on the new quilt – which he accepted now that he had bought for fucking, not sleeping.

Not even for fucking, as it turned out.

‘Oh,' Tabby had said, when they came down the steps into the tiny, dark, claustrophobic cabin.

Cal, behind him, stooping a little because of his height, had turned on the light and glanced at the small blacked out portholes.

‘It's not much, I know,' he'd said modestly.

‘That's true enough,' the other man had said.

Which, after all the griping on the way, had made Cal really mad.

The cord had been there, on the bench seat, ready and waiting, looking as harmless as a fat comatose towelling worm.

Cal wasn't sure just how deliberately he'd prepared that earlier, when he'd come for his clothes and face paint, and he didn't suppose it mattered much now.

What mattered was that it had been there.

So that when the anger had risen in him, hot and fast as a rocket, the other man still standing just ahead of him, Cal hadn't had to stop to consider, had just gone for it.

Picked up the cord.

Smooth and seamless, the motion almost graceful, like a cowboy lassoing a stallion, the white cord looping over the dark head, around the sinewy neck, yanking hard, pulling the man off balance – and that had been so
easy
, because the guy was relaxed, believing Cal wanted him.

Easy.

Just like the last time.

Harder to describe the rest of it, the
killing
, and Cal thought that he might want, in time, to chronicle it in the Epistle, but it wouldn't be easy to put on paper.

A roaring going through him, a power surge, consuming him completely, and he might almost have been some wild, ravening beast or a Harley or maybe even a goddamned combat jet . . .

Not just a man anymore, in other words.

A killer.

Only now, afterwards, he had this
dead
guy at his feet, didn't he, lying sprawled face down on Cal's nice new quilt, which was really messed up because sudden death was like that, all kinds of fluids spilling out, and that made him mad all over again.

That was what Jewel had said the first time she'd seen him speaking to a black person in the street.

‘You
disgust
me,' Cal said now to the dead man.

You know what I have to do now,
she'd said to him later, when they were alone.

‘You know what I have to do now,' Cal told Tabby.

Who said nothing, did nothing, just lay there in a heap.

What Jewel had done that time was whip him first.

But Cal didn't have a whip.

And after she'd whipped him, she'd kissed and then cleaned the fresh wheals on his back and chest and stomach and limbs with chlorine bleach, which had burned him and stabbed at his eyes and nasal passages and choked his throat. And from then on, if he came home with so much as a little dirt on him, she'd order him into the bathtub – and sometimes just the sound of Jewel's voice
ordering
him that way would make him shiver with excitement – but then she'd scrub him until his skin was raw, and sometimes, because she hated body hair as much as stubble, she'd want to shave him, and if he fought her off, he'd always end up getting cut, and then those wounds would have to be disinfected with more bleach. And he knew he should have, could have stopped her, but Jewel was always telling him that if he hurt her, she'd see to it that he'd be locked away in one of those places where
they
lived, and he knew what would become of him then.

So take it like a man,
she'd told him.

‘So take it like a man,' Cal told Tabby now.

He put on his new gloves and looped one of the masks over his ears, and undressed Tabby, unbuttoned the brown silky shirt and tugged off his D&G loafers, unbuckled the gorgeous belt and unzipped the pants and pulled them off, and he was perspiring as he dragged off the dead man's wine-coloured underpants, but then he remembered – because even then that part of his mind was still working – that his own clothes needed protection, too, didn't they, needed folding away in the boat's dry box. And he was moving real fast, getting it all done, sweat pouring now because it was goddamned hot down here, it was stifling, but he was almost ready for what came next, and he reached for the big plastic two-gallon container and unscrewed the big cap . . .

The smell made him retch, the way it always did, but the need was filling him, pumping through him, there was no fighting it, and so he picked up the already-human-coated scrubbing brush and knelt down beside the naked man-that-was.

One stroke.

Just
starting
made the fire inside him burn hotter.

Made him unstoppable.

He had to go on, had to,
had
to.

Oh, Jesus, yes.

47

Back home on her bench, Mildred felt cold.

Which was absurd, since she didn't believe she was running a fever, and it was particularly warm tonight and very humid.

She never got sick, could not remember the last time she'd had so much as a sniffle. But tonight, sitting here where she had come to belong, in this tolerant, kindly spot where she often imagined that night itself was wrapping snugly around her, enfolding her, keeping her safe . . .

Sitting here tonight, she felt sick at heart, and too lonely even to talk to Donny.

Lonely as death.

And so cold.

48

Cal had done.

His worst.

He had stopped a while ago, limp and quivering with exhaustion, and then he'd seen what he had done and gotten sick to his stomach, and when that was finished, too, he'd taken the brush – coated with a thousand, give or take, shreds of the man who had called himself Tabby, coated with his skin, his flesh and his blood – and had begun to punish himself with it.

Diagonal strokes across his chest, from his left shoulder – bypassing his heart because of his tattoo – down to his upper abdomen.

Raking himself.

Too weak to do the job properly, the way Jewel would have.

And then he stopped doing it at all, becoming
aware
again.

Of time passing.

Of the dead man on the quilt at his feet.

‘One hundred and one things to do with a dead Tabby,' he said out loud, paraphrasing the title of some old best-seller, he thought.

And felt suddenly appalled by his own flippancy.

More appalled by that, it seemed to him, than by his deed.

Though maybe that was the only way he could deal with what still needed to be done.

Best not to think too much, he decided, about any of this. Neither about the killing nor the stealing of the hundred and eighty bucks in Tabby-the-cheapskate's Gucci wallet (he'd considered briefly helping himself to the man's Okamato condoms, but then, for some reason, that idea had repelled him, besides which Cal was an ‘America's Most Trusted' Trojan guy himself).

Best not to think about that either.

Most of all, not about the premeditation of it all.

Not just the cord left ready, nor the rest of his paraphernalia, but also the fact that he had already thought through what to do next.

Better prepared than last time, but still an imperfect plan.

He could be caught out, found out, at any point.

Dangerous stuff.

Fool's luck the last time.

He took a long slug from a bottle of Bombay Sapphire that he'd been keeping since Wilmington for a special occasion, and then he rolled the body in the quilt, took two lengths of nylon dock line from the dry box to secure the bundle and felt immense relief as the dead man's head disappeared from view – his feet and ankles less weird, less
disturbing
to look at, somehow, almost laughable and certainly pathetic, poor bastard.

His anger at Tabby was almost all gone now.

The last time, he'd taken
Baby
out afterwards, and that had been some kind of a miracle of amateur's luck, because so far as he knew no one had taken a scrap of notice when he'd started the engine in the middle of the night, and also because it was tough navigating safely in darkness, staying within the channels dredged and marked by the Coast Guard to keep boats from running aground in the shallow waters and constantly shifting seabed all around Miami. Cal had given thanks that night for many things: mostly, though, for the few hours of tuition he'd bought along with the cruiser, and also for the fact that his brain was a whole lot sharper than he'd ever realized – certainly than Jewel had ever given him credit for.