Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(82)

For just an instant, he thought he saw himself looking back from one of those black windows, but then the image was gone. Must have been the me that never was, he thought. Never was or will be.

He wanted a drink, but Bowen’s white pills were in his pocket and he knew he should not mix them with alcohol. He told himself he should heat up a can of soup. He should eat some soup and maybe a can of fruit cocktail. Eat something sensible, then take the pills and sleep for twelve hours, then wake up refreshed and ready to kick some tail again.

It was a good, simple plan. He was glad he had thought of it. To celebrate, he went inside and took a bottle of Corona out of the refrigerator and drank it down in four gulps. He drank another one while studying the eight cans of food in the cupboard. There was one can each of sliced beets, whole potatoes, mushroom pieces and stems, and five cans of tuna. He drank another beer while standing at the back door and looking out through the screen. Beer is okay, he told himself. Beer is mostly water. Water is supposed to be good for you.

To keep the first three beers company, he carried a fourth beer into the living room and swallowed the white pills and turned on the TV. With the beer in one hand and the TV remote in the other, he surfed channels for a while before finally settling on a cooking show. He watched a slender, pretty woman demonstrate how to prepare a chicken breast with caramelized onions and mushrooms and a sauce made with white wine, capers, and the juice of one lemon. The pretty woman told him that the sauce could also be used with shrimp and that it was wonderful for poaching salmon.

“That’s wonderful to know,” he told her. He imagined that if he lifted the hair off the back of her neck, she would smell like moonlight with a hint of lemon. He watched her until his eyes grew heavy, then he closed his eyes and listened to her voice become a murmur, and when she leaned close to whisper to him, he could feel her breath on his cheek and the clean, cool scent of her body filled him with the soft, unhurried heaviness of magic light.

“That’s wonderful,” he told her, and he let the empty bottle slip from his hand and onto the floor.





Fifty-Seven


The remote slid upward past DeMarco’s fingers. He thought about tightening his hand around it, but he was in a gray, soft place and could not summon sufficient interest to hold on. He heard the television click off and the silence that followed, and he wondered about that too but from a long distance away.

After what seemed a long time, the thought registered that somebody other than himself must have lifted the remote from his hand and shut off the television. He tried to force his eyes open, but they were enormously heavy, so he surrendered to the heaviness and went back into the grayness.

After a while the grayness lifted again, and again the thought registered that someone else must be in the living room with him. He hoped it was the pretty woman with capers and the juice of one lemon, but when he looked back at the grayness from just outside the edge of it, he saw that it was separating into rising wisps like fog over water. He did not want it to go, but it was quickly becoming too thin to take him in again, too thin to cover and hold him.

A while later he reasoned that Bowen had sent a trooper to wake him. He did not wonder how the trooper had gotten inside or which trooper it was. After all, he had left his back door open. Maybe he had left his cupboard open too. Maybe the refrigerator as well. None of that mattered. All that mattered was that the white pills were a wonderful thing and the gray nothing had been wonderful too and also the sweet indifference that came with it.

What finally intruded upon the indifference and spoiled it was the scent of cigarette smoke. It began distantly, like a memory that nagged but would not quite materialize. Had the scent been sweeter, as of leaf smoke on an autumn evening, he might have used it to deepen the indifference, a boost to the white pills’ sedation. But the stink of cigarette smoke was unmistakable. And as the scent increased in his consciousness, the wonderful indifference gave way to annoyance.

The scent buzzed and pricked at him. DeMarco wanted to return to the gray nothing, but the scent would not allow it, and before long, he was hearing his own thoughts again, and he knew he had to listen.

His instincts told him to remain still while his stumbling thoughts found their footing, and when they did his pulse began to hammer and his breath grew quick and shallow. The last time he had experienced that scent was in Bonnie’s house. But he had never seen Bonnie smoking nor had he smelled the scent on her. And he finally put a name to the scent and the prickling sensation that accompanied it.

He kept his eyes closed and wondered how close Carl Inman was to him, on which side of the recliner. He listened for Inman’s breathing and tried to sense the heat from Inman’s body and decided that the man was on his left and very close. Probably he was sitting on the sofa and watching DeMarco, had been there long enough for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Probably he was holding a knife, though maybe also the handgun he had used to threaten Huston. DeMarco wondered what fraction of a second would be needed for him to vault up out of the chair and dive for cover and, with luck, race into the bedroom where his service weapon in its holster hung from the chair.

Not time enough, he told himself. He was still groggy from the white pills. He was still struggling to piece his thoughts together, to fit them into a linearity. Whereas Inman was wide awake and alert.

You don’t stand a chance, he thought.

He opened his eyes and slowly turned his head toward the sofa. In the darkness, Inman was little more than a hulking shadow. The only light in the room came from the blue digital readout on the DVD player atop the television and from the dull glow of the streetlamp against the Persian blinds and drawn sheer curtains. He remembered the day he had hung those blinds. Remembered Laraine as his cheerful assistant, her hand on the small of his back as he drilled the pilot holes. You’re so sexy with a power tool in your hand, she had teased. She was young and beautiful and clear-eyed in his memory. The man drilling the holes was middle-aged and tired beyond his years, and he knew he was soon going to die.