Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(23)

He loved the sensuality of it, the anticipation, the sensory assaults from all directions. And when gone came into his head now, all gone, it struck like a hammer blow so vicious and sudden that he fell sideways against a tree and sobbed and whispered “Claire” again and again, his cheek scraping, abrading against the bark…

Time passed…

He breathed…

He could not will his heart to stop.

The convenience store across the road. Cold lights, cold asphalt. He watched the vehicles come and go.

Christ, how he ached for the snuggery of his office, the familiar building. There were vending machines in the basement, a coin changer. This was Tuesday. He could live on crackers and candy bars until Thursday, couldn’t he?

But no, the keys to Campbell Hall were on his key chain and his key chain was hanging from the peg by the kitchen door. And the police, he told himself. They’ll be watching the building, won’t they? And everybody will know, the whole town must know by now.

This is Tuesday, he told himself. It happened Saturday night.

Every time Saturday night came back to him—and it was never far away now, always crouching in the nearby shadows—every time it came back to him, it was worse than a hammer blow, it was alive and ferocious, sprang out like a lion, ripped him to pieces.

For a long time, he stood against the tree and could not move, tried to will his heart to cease. But it would not work, it never worked. So he had to keep going for a while yet. He had to live a while longer.

Get some food, he told himself. Do what you have to do.

He watched the convenience store. A pickup truck at the pumps now.

He wished the numbness would come back, that strange sense of watching himself from a distance. But it had abandoned him for some reason, the two selves coalescing. He knew now that he was not a fictional character clinging to a fictional tree, waiting for his creator to tell him what to do. It was Thomas Huston standing there on the edge of the woods, Thomas Huston dirty and hungry and cold. He had only to look at his hands to confirm it. They were filthy and scratched now, but they were Thomas Huston’s hands, the hands of a writer and professor, callus free, hands made for typing, for wielding a pen or a stick of chalk. Hardly a semester passed that some coed did not say something complimentary about his hands. In response to his question “What did you like most about this course?” on the end-of-semester evaluation form, one of them had written, “Your hands. Your voice. Your butt in tight blue jeans.”

Those hands in front of him now, yes, they were his, but he detested them, wished he could cut them off, wished he had cut them off a week ago. Had they ever really held a pen or had Saturday night erased all that? Had they ever stroked the hair of a sweetly scented woman? Ever traced a circle of desire on her breast, felt the soft rise of her stomach, the slow curve of her thigh? Had this hand ever lay in her velvet cleft of heat, ever felt the undulations of her muscles ripple and tighten around his fingers?

He wanted Claire’s body against him again, wanted her breasts crushed against his chest, wanted his dick in her mouth, wanted to taste her pussy and to feel her body rocking against him wave after wave. He wanted all of it and he would never have any of it ever again. Only a man like Thomas Huston deserved those things. Who he was now, he did not know. And the whimpering noises rising from his throat now, these were not his sounds. He had never heard such sounds before.

Christ, why did you ever leave her bed? he wondered. You and your fucking writing. You and your fucking words.

Again he could not breathe. There was no air. Breathe, he told himself. Inhale. Exhale. Nothing came naturally anymore. Nothing happened of its own accord.

He sagged against the tree, clung to it, pushed hard against the horrible images while he chanted to the bark, She is a dark-haired woman, green eyed and dusky with secrets. Her mouth is sensuous but sad, limbs long and elegant, every movement languid…





Seventeen


Now begins the hard time, DeMarco thought. He had washed and dried his dinner plate, washed and dried his hands, and refilled his glass with four more inches of whiskey. He stood by the kitchen sink now and looked out the window at the small back lawn enshrouded in darkness. When he was a younger man, he used to sit on the porch step on summer evenings, a cold beer or glass of iced tea in hand, and talk to Laraine while she worked in the flower beds bordering the porch. She had especially loved daffodils and lilies and gladioli, tall, stately flowers that required a lot of attention. His own preferences ran to mums and marigolds, black-eyed Susans and sunflowers—showy blasts of exuberant color. But even more than those, he had loved watching Laraine’s elegant hands as they worked the topsoil and peat moss and excised weeds. Back then, he had thought her care merely evidence of a meticulous nature and never guessed the fragility of spirit at its foundation.

But that was all a long time ago, and flowers no longer grew around the house.

It was for her that he had started the brick path from the back porch to the small barnlike garage across the alley. For her he had started converting the second floor of the garage. It was going to be her sewing room, exercise room, reading room, whatever she wanted it to be. “You can use it too,” she had told him. “I don’t want you to think of it as just mine.”

But he had. It was all for her. Now the unfinished path. Now the unfinished room.

DeMarco stared into the darkness and wished he had the energy to return to work. He wished he had the stamina to work twenty hours a day, to push himself to an exhaustion that would reward him with four hours of dreamless sleep. Unfortunately, his body tired and his attention always began to wander before he was ready for sleep. If he dragged himself to bed now, he would end up having to silence his thoughts with an all-night radio talk show. His favorite was a program devoted to the supernatural, to considerations of shadow people, spirits and demons, poltergeists and ghosts. Stories of a happy or purposeful afterlife held his attention, kept him listening for shreds of credibility. Other times he dozed off, only to have the demons and poltergeists ride their radio waves into his brain.