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slowly, carefully on the edge of the counter, straightening up a thin swipe of red that looked as if
someone wounded and dying had slid against it.
He began to talk. He told Angie everything he had seen, all that he knew.
"My God," Angie said. "Here in Cold Shepherd. I've never known anything like that to happen."
"Me either," Pale Boy said. "They always say more goes on in small towns than most suspect, but on
the whole I haven't found that true of Cold Shepherd. I hope this doesn't open the gate."
"The gate?"
"An expression for letting in the bad things," Pale Boy said, regretting that he had remembered one of
his grandfather's expressions, and had therefore shown himself not immune to the superstitions of his
past after all. "During the early sixties things weren't just peachy, never have been, but they were
innocent times until John Kennedy was assassinated. After that, it was like the gate had been thrown
open and a rampaging murdering horde had come through. One assassination, murder, serial killer after
another. Thing I liked about this town was it seemed pretty free from even the faintest hint of that sort
of thing, the craziness of Gotham, the downright drudgery of the reservation. I was wrong."
"Like I said, it surprises me, but it doesn't mean any more than what it means," Angie said. "A hit-
and-run. Bad . . . horrible. But bad things are going to happen now and then, anywhere. Even Cold
Shepherd. Let's just hope that's our quota of badness for a while and that you find whoever did this and
lock them up."
"Let's hope."
"You're squinting. Still having headaches?"
"Yeah, some. What happened tonight didn't help any."
"You should see Catherine about it. Get a checkup."
"I will."
"Promise?"
"Sure."
"Good. I'll get that newspaper."
She went away and he took three more aspirins and had just put the tin away when Angie came back
with a bundle of paper.
While Angie watched, he arranged the newspapers around the kitchen floor and put his mind off the
events of the night and concentrated on his painting. After a while the red paint was just red paint and
the motions of the job worked a sort of physical hypnotism. His headache went away and he didn't
notice when Angie left the room.
Some time later, she called to him from the back of the house. "Can you come here?"
"In a moment."
He paused and looked at his work. Not bad. He could clean up and stop for the night. Tomorrow he
would paint the trim blue, have the whole garish job out of the way. He examined himself. He didn't
even have a spatter on his uniform, his revolver, or his boots. He hadn't lost his handyman touch.
He scraped the brush clean on the edge of the paint can and put it in the can of cleaner and started to
rise, but his eye caught something on one of the paint-speckled newspapers. It was a Gotham Gazette
and it was an article about a hit-and-run in Gotham. He bent and read it.
The event had been so strange and brutal, it had made front page, and the Batman had been
mentioned. He hadn't actually been involved, but he had caught a young boy who had taken a leg from
one of the victims.
A leg?
Pale Boy was once again reminded of his grandfather's gate, the one that let in the bad things.
It struck him as peculiar. A hit-and-run in Gotham, and here he was investigating the same sort of
crime. It seemed too coincidental.
He rose and went to the back, into Angie's studio, where the smell of paint was as strong as a blow
from a baseball bat.
Angie was standing under the light looking at the painting on her easel. The light was a single naked
bulb dangling down on a wire, and he couldn't understand why she didn't light her work better. She
claimed it gave her the right shadow in which to view her work the way she wanted it viewed, that she
painted accordingly. An eccentricity, like the mirrors she kept on the wall and sometimes used to look
at her paintings, instead of examining them straight on.
She was holding a small brush in her hand, and it was dripping paint onto the already much-spattered
stone floor. New colors had mixed with the red on her T-shirt, and now her face was splotched and her
hair had come undone and was dangling across her forehead, over her ears, a large strand stuck to her
cheek with sweat. Pale Boy thought she looked beautiful.
"What do you think?" she asked.
He examined the painting.
"Nice," he said, but didn't entirely mean it. It was a pyramid of cars. They were stacked high and it
was night and the moonlight was shining through the windshields and the light looked so rich and
golden it was hard to believe the effect had been accomplished by paint alone; the light appeared to be
coming from a moon different from the one he knew, a moon of the netherworld.
The cars were built up with layers of paint and they stood out from the canvas in hard, crusty rust
colors. They looked ancient and Gothic and full of sin, the headlights like eyes, the roofs and hoods [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]