Page 37 of The Undead

He looked right through her without recognition. He didn’t know her in street clothes with her hair tied back. God had saved her again, deserving or not. When Bowman came back and went out to the doctor’s parking area, she followed him with more confidence, but there was something so pale and terrible about him that she didn’t think he would have noticed her if she’d reached over to tap him on the shoulder. He got in his fancy car and roared off, and Rebecca had to drive too fast to follow him. He went to his house. She pulled up a block away and watched him while he looked at it, and then his face twisted as if he’d been hurt and he slammed his car in reverse. He roared past her again. She was far from surprised when he ended up—of course—at a bar. Wasn’t that where all sinners went for comfort?

Rebecca didn’t go in bars. She never had, never would. She sat in her car and waited, all the doors locked because of the drunks and lechers who hung around in the shadows. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Dr. Bowman was doing. Drinking, dancing, making lewd comments to underage girls. Maybe even having sex with one. He was married, she knew, but that didn’t mean anything, not to someone like him. Besides that, Rebecca had met his wife, and she was a cold sharp woman, probably sleeping around herself. Her kind always did.

She sat there in the growing darkness and watched girls walk by in their skin-tight dresses. Some of them didn’t make any pretense at underwear. One girl had on a skirt so short that it barely hid her crotch; all the men on the sidewalk watched her with identical expressions of lust. It was degrading and horrible.

Adam Radburn was standing ten feet away when she looked back toward the bar. Rebecca flinched and sank down in her seat, but he wasn’t looking her way. He watched the bar, as she did, for a few minutes and then went inside. There was something different about him tonight, some tension she hadn’t seen before. She was glad he hadn’t seen her, because she knew what little value he placed on the lives of the godly.

He was inside for only a few minutes. When he came out, he got in his car—the convertible—and pulled away into traffic. Rebecca followed, holding back carefully, taking every precaution. On the freeway she was forced to keep close or lose him; when he took an off-ramp, she was too close for him to miss seeing her. He didn’t turn his head or give any indication that he knew, but he kept driving, accelerating back onto the freeway through a red light and leaving her angry and steaming there in the cool night. It wouldn’t have done any good to keep following him. He knew. He always knew.

She reached down for a pencil and methodically broke it into smaller and smaller pieces until her fingers couldn’t find the strength to divide it any more. Divide and conquer. Divide and—

The Indian woman drove by in her green car, splendidly illuminated by the streetlights. She was singing soundlessly to her radio. Rebecca felt a wave of peace wash over her and turned to keep her red taillights in view.

Thank you, God. Oh, thank you. I will not fail you.

Rebecca pulled in at the curb more than a block away from the Victorian house where the woman parked. The woman had something to do with Adam, all right. Rebecca noted down the address on her notebook and doodled a bit, thinking. In the house, shadows moved back and forth across backlit curtains. She tapped the eraser on the notebook and hummed a little hymn, bringing some sense of Jesus into the car and into her suddenly scared soul.

The passenger door opened. Rebecca jumped and started to scream, but by the time she got her mouth open he was already in and looking at her. After that first jolt she knew who he was, but that didn’t make her heart pound any less hard.

“Ev’nin’, Miss Rebecca,” the man she’d hired to kill Julie Gilmore said, and smiled. His eyes were colorless, just the slightest tint of blue to them. He was dressed in the mismatched clothes of the bums who littered downtown, and he stank of rotten things and vomit. He frightened her, but it wasn’t because he seemed violent. Just the opposite. He was genial and quiet and clever, and the simple lack of feeling in those eyes was enough to frighten anyone, even someone with the shield of God before them.

“Hello, William,” Rebecca said as evenly as she could. “What do you want?”

He looked at her for a moment, something that was not quite a smile drifting across his lips, and then he leaned back and stretched. There was something oddly wrong about the way he moved. Something bad.

“Well, now, you’ve given me a great deal of pleasure so far, Miss Rebecca. I ’spect you’ll continue to do so.” He did smile, now, at some private and lewd joke. “How’s your friend takin’ his loss?”

“What do you want?” she repeated. Her heart was thudding hard now, beating a steady fast beat of alarm. He picked up her notebook and leafed through, examining the sketches even though it was too dark to really see them. “William!”

“Don’t yell,” he said mildly. As mild as it was, it frightened her half to death. “I want to help you, missy. Indeed, I want you to help me, too.”

He smiled at her, lips parting, teeth gleaming. His teeth

Were

Too

Long.

Chapter Seven

Breakthroughs

Maggie was still asleep when I left the house the next morning. It was hard to look at her sleeping beautiful face and imagine her with Nick, harder not to. I couldn’t sleep. The hangover wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, so I downed some vitamins and ibuprofen with juice and headed out before the sun was up.

Oops. No car. It was still parked in front of that bar—what the hell was it called? Oh well. The walk would help me clear my head, or at least stretch my muscles. It was very quiet in the predawn darkness. I cut through the park trees and came out on the winding jogging path that I’d run in such panic the other night. I felt a little foolish walking it in my suit and dress shoes, particularly as joggers loomed up out of the dark and huffed past me. The morning was cool and a little foggy, enough to create little hollows of mist in the trees and halos around the streetlights. The moisture smelled sharp and metallic as it laced around the punctuations of honeysuckle and the faintly decayed odor of the lake. As the sun rose behind me in a diffused golden glow, I came out of the park a block away from the hospital.

I debated for a moment; I could go and get the car, or I could just go get it after work. The lazy option won out, of course; I headed for the hospital.

The tape recorder was still lying in pieces on the floor. I picked up the fragments and tossed it in the trash. I put the tape in a mailer to my typist and stuck it in my out box. I picked up the phone and dialed my home phone, but hung up even before the first ring. I didn’t want to talk to Maggie. If I did, the hate and hurt was going to come spilling out in one black ugly stream, and I wasn’t ready for that yet.

Whenareyou going to be ready, Doc? When Nick moves his suits into the spare bedroom?

I finished the paperwork and went down to the wards. My two surgical patients of the day before were doing fine, and so were three I’d cut before I’d been incapacitated. Life was grand. I exchanged polite, but loud, conversation with my buddy Carl Voorhees, had lunch with Viv Grant and Ranesh, and consulted with Carl again on an upcoming bypass at three. By the time I got out, dusk had fallen hard on the city, and fog was creeping up again in the hollows. And I still had to walk to the bar and claim my Volvo before somebody with decent hotwiring skills did.

I didn’t want to go home. I window-shopped all the way to the bar, went in a bookstore and bought three magazines and a new thick paperback. I caught myself looking at cards and thinking how much Maggie would have liked the funny ones; that hurt, but it gave me some reason to keep looking. I found one and carried it up to the counter with my reading material. I signed it at the counter, struggling with the few simple words, and felt a real sense of relief and accomplishment once I’d sealed the envelope.

Score one for the doc.

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