Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(25)

Or maybe that’s only my pornographic movie, DeMarco told himself now. Maybe Laraine doesn’t even see it anymore. Maybe she’s managed to shut it all off.

But he doubted it. Otherwise, she would not have been coming out of the Holiday Inn at nearly midnight in the middle of the week, would not be standing beside her car while a man DeMarco had never seen before rubbed a hand over her breasts, up under her blouse, let his other hand fall between her legs. It always intrigued DeMarco to see the aplomb with which Laraine absorbed these pawings and gropings. Her hands rested lightly atop the man’s shoulders. She stood as still and stately as a gladiola while his hands moved over her.

Five minutes later, Laraine’s car pulled out of the parking lot and was followed by a dark green Hyundai. She would drive home in no hurry now—she always did. DeMarco, on the other hand, sped down familiar side streets so as to reach the Cape Cod before she did. He parked half a block away.

He waited until she had unlocked the front door, until she and her friend for the night were inside. Then he drove forward and parked at the curb in front of the house. He climbed out and walked to the front door and rang the bell.

Laraine opened the door and stood there looking at him. There was no surprise on her face, no anger.

“Do you even know this one?” he asked.

She said nothing. She blinked once but otherwise did not move.

“You’ve got to stop doing this,” he told her. “You don’t know who these guys are, what they might do. Sooner or later, you’re going to get yourself hurt.”

And now she smiled, as if there were an inherent humor to the notion of being hurt.

“I’ll be in my car,” he finally said. “In case you need me.”

Her look was void of any emotion he recognized.

She closed the door and turned the lock, and he returned to his vehicle. He laid the seat back until he was comfortable, then he watched the dark house for a while, and then he didn’t. He listened to the radio for twenty minutes or so, listened to Ry Cooder’s agonized guitar weeping all the way from Texas, listened to Norah Jones, Dinah Washington, Clapton and Raitt and John Lee Hooker. Then he turned the radio off because he did not need a soundtrack for what he was feeling.

He spent the next half hour or so reciting snatches of prose and poetry to himself, phrases first heard aloud when Laraine had read to him in bed. She had loved what she called the music of words, and when she read to him, he heard the music too. Later, when she stopped reading to him and the house was too empty, he would read the same books alone and always hear them in Laraine’s voice, but with a sadness then in both her voice and in his heart because he did not know if she would ever speak to him again.

“My mother is a fish,” Faulkner had written. “Roosters wear out if you look at them so much,” Marquez had said. He remembered the entire first paragraph from Hemingway’s “In Another Country.” But he could not recall the lines from Rilke’s “The First Elegy” that followed Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of cosmic space invades our frightened faces…

After a while, Laraine’s new friend came sauntering out of the house. At the door he turned to kiss her, but she said good-bye with a smile, stepped back, and closed the door. He stood there perplexed for a few seconds, wondering what he had done wrong. DeMarco sipped the last of his watery whiskey and thought, They are always perplexed.

Finally, the man turned and crossed to his Hyundai, climbed in, and drove away.

A few minutes later, the light blinked on in the upstairs bathroom. She’ll be taking a shower now, DeMarco told himself. Then she would towel dry her hair, brush her teeth, run the blow-dryer for a while. The important thing was that she was safely alone inside her home now and the doors were locked. DeMarco started the engine and turned the radio on again. He was grateful for the company on the drive back home.





Eighteen


Inhale, Thomas Huston told himself. Exhale. Do it again. Do it again.

Nothing came easily anymore. Nothing came naturally.

You need to keep your thoughts straight, man. Get some food. You need to eat.

It was surely midnight now, maybe later. No car had stopped at the convenience store in quite a while.

Go now, he told himself.

He came out of the trees and crossed the street and tried his best to look like a man out for a stroll. He kept his head down, knew there would be security cameras. He looked up only long enough to glance through the window before entering, saw the boy behind the counter. Tall, thin, scraggly, reddish beard. Not one I know, he thought. Not one of mine.

So he pulled open the door, walked inside, and headed straight down the center aisle as if he knew where he was going. What he knew was that the restrooms would be in a rear corner, and there they were, to his right, between the fountain drinks and the milk cooler.

At the sink, Huston avoided the mirror until the soapy water he had rubbed over his face had been rinsed off. Then he raised his head, allowed himself to look. His face was more familiar than he expected. Maybe he was still Thomas Huston after all. A three-day beard, bits of hair sticking up here and there. But he knew that face. The eyes were tired, face drawn, but that was not the face of a beast, was it?

Next he scrubbed his hands clean, picked the dirt from beneath his fingernails. Then he scrubbed himself again with a damp paper towel, as far down the neck as he could reach without getting his shirt wet. He dried himself, finger combed his hair, rinsed his mouth out, scrubbed a finger over his teeth, and rinsed again.