The Eye: A Novel of Suspense (33 page)

The pressure on his throat lessened. And Collier fell away from him, mouth agape, blood streaming down his face. Oxman kicked at him, drove him back into the couch. Then he struggled to his knees, gasping painfully as he tore the telephone cord from around his neck.

Collier lurched to his feet, using the couch arm as a fulcrum. He hesitated for a moment, seemed about to launch himself at Oxman again; but Oxman was up too, swaying, bracing himself. Collier yelled something that sounded like “Evil!” and ran for the balcony door.

Oxman stumbled after him, saw Collier wrench the door open, go through onto the balcony, then push the door closed behind him and lean his weight back against it. Without thinking, acting on reflex, Oxman stopped two paces from the door and drove his foot against the metal frame just above the latch. There was enough force behind the kick to burst the door outward, to shatter part of the glass. And to propel Collier in an off-balance stagger across the balcony.

Collier might have caught his momentum at the railing if the Eye had not been in his way. But his foot struck the metal tripod of the telescope, spinning him half around; his arms slashed the air, wrapped around the heavy telescope and jerked it backwards with him. Eyes wide and luminous with fright, he teetered for an instant against the waist-high railing——

And then he and the Eye flipped over backwards, out into empty air twenty stories above the earth, and were gone.

Oxman ran to the railing, his shoes crunching on broken glass, and looked over. Collier screamed all the way down, his arms still wrapped around the telescope. When the screaming stopped, vertigo seized Oxman and forced him to back away. He took one long look at the city across the river, the city that teemed and stifled and altered and destroyed; then he turned and went back inside the apartment.

People were milling around out in the hall; he could hear their querulous, alarmed voices. But he didn’t pay any attention to them. One of his hands was bleeding, studded with slivers of broken glass, and more blood continued to leak from his bitten ear; he didn’t pay any attention to those things, either. He picked up the phone, saw that it was still working, and sank wearily onto the couch.

Surrounded by the refuse of other people’s lives, by the dark distorted world of Lewis Collier, he called Manders to tell him it was finally finished.

EPILOGUE

LATE OCTOBER

E.L. OXMAN

He stood at the window of Jennifer’s apartment, looking down at the traffic and pedestrians on Riverside Drive. The neighborhood had returned to normal. For a while the media had reveled in the aftermath of the mass murders and in the bizarre nature of their perpetrator, making much of the fact that Lewis Collier had believed himself to be God, the fact that he had virtually lived on West Ninety-eighth Street in the guise of Willie Lorsec; they had even implied that the police should have picked up on the clue that Willie Lorsec was an anagram for Lewis Collier, that it had been some sort of subconscious desire by Collier to be caught and stopped—completely ignoring the fact, as Lieutenant Manders had pointed out in print, that no one in the Department had heard of Lewis Collier until the night of his death. But eventually the murders had become news as old and uninteresting as last season’s sport’s page, and the media had turned to other sensationalism to sate the appetites of their readers and viewers. And the people of West Ninety-eighth had digested their fear, had begun to breathe again and to come back into the world. They had survived; and life went on.

Art Tobin had survived too. He had spent two weeks in the hospital, in considerable pain at first, and another two weeks recuperating at home. Oxman had talked to him just that afternoon; Tobin was scheduled to return to work a week from Monday. Oxman was glad of that. Glad that Artie, his friend Artie, was alive and well. Even glad that Artie was starting to taunt him again with the same old thinly disguised insults.

Oxman himself had survived. Manders had not reported his relationship with Jennifer to Internal Affairs, but there was nothing he’d been able to do about Oxman’s conduct on the night Lewis Collier died—the failure to report from the photo lab, the lone-wolf confrontation with Collier that had taken place out of his jurisdiction in another state. Oxman had been suspended from the force without pay. There had been a hearing, he had been severely reprimanded, and he was still on suspension. But his spotless prior record was in his favor, and Manders and some others in the Department were on his side; there seemed to be a pretty good chance he would be back to work soon. Maybe at about the same time Artie came back, so they could be a team again. He hoped it would work out that way; whatever else he was, he was a cop. Being a cop was all he knew. Being a cop was all he was.

Except for Jennifer, of course. Their relationship had also survived, had grown stronger now that Beth had moved in permanently with her mother and completed the mercy killing of their marriage by filing for divorce. He spent some nights here with Jennifer, and she spent other nights with him at his house in Queens—Beth had agreed to let him keep the house, because he had agreed to let her have everything else. And it had been good between them. And it kept getting better. And now he was sure.

Jennifer came up next to him at the window. “What are you thinking, E.L.?”

He turned to smile at her. “I was thinking about you.”

“Good thoughts?”

“Very good. Jennifer … would you consider marrying me when the divorce is final?”

She cocked her head at him; her eyes were serious. “Is that a proposal?”

“Yes. I’ve been thinking about asking you for a week now. This seems like as good a time as any.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Marriage … I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

But her eyes said differently; he thought he saw the answer in her eyes. He put his arm around her. “All right,” he said. “You think about it. We’ve got plenty of time.”

She nodded.

“Plenty of time,” he said again. Because with all that had happened to them, they had been victims only for a little while, only in a small way. In this place, in this time, it wasn’t so easy not to be a victim in some way; what mattered was whether or not you survived. Maybe they could keep on surviving. Maybe the future was going to be good to them both. It was something to hope for. It was something to believe in.

Right now, it was enough.

About the Authors

John Lutz is the author of more than forty novels and more than two hundred short stories and articles, covering nearly every mystery subgenre. Among his awards are the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award and the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award. His novels and short fiction have been translated into almost every language and adapted for almost every medium. He and his wife split their time between St. Louis, Missouri, and Sarasota, Florida.

Bill Pronzini is the author of the Nameless Detective mysteries, America’s longest-running PI series, as well as more than thirty suspense novels. He has won or been nominated for every prize offered to crime fiction writers, including the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives in California with his wife, the crime novelist Marcia Muller.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1984 by Bill Pronzini and John Lutz

Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox

ISBN: 978-1-4804-8509-9

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com