The Bad Place Read online

  They sat and listened for a while.

  Then Julie said, “I’m tough, Bobby, I really am.”

  “I know you are.”

  “I don’t want you thinking I’m lame.”

  “Never.”

  “It wasn’t the shooting that made me sick, or using the Toyota to run that guy down, or even the thought of almost losing you—”

  “I know. It was what you had to do to Rasmussen.”

  “He’s a slimy little weasel-faced bastard, but even he doesn’t deserve to be broken like that. What I did to him stank.”

  “It was the only way to crack the case, because it wasn’t near cracked till we’d found out who hired him.”

  She drank more eggnog. She frowned down at the milky contents of her glass, as if the answer to some mystery could be found there.

  Following Tobin’s vocal, Ziggy Elman came in with a lusty trumpet solo, followed by Goodman’s clarinet. The sweet sounds made that boxy, tract-house room seem like the most romantic place in the world.

  “What I did... I did for The Dream. Giving Decodyne Rasmussen’s employer will please them. But breaking him was somehow . . . worse than wasting a man in a fair gunfight.”

  Bobby put one hand on her knee. It was a nice knee. After all these years, he was still sometimes surprised by her slenderness and the delicacy of her bone structure, for he always thought of her as being strong for her size, solid, indomitable. “If you hadn’t put Rasmussen in that vise and squeezed him, I would’ve done it.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have. You’re scrappy, Bobby, and you’re smart and you’re tough, but there’re certain things you can never do. This was one of them. Don’t jive me just to make me feel good.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it. But I’m glad you did. Decodyne’s very big time, and this could’ve set us back years if we’d flubbed it.”

  “Is there anything we won’t do for The Dream?”

  Bobby said, “Sure. We wouldn’t torture small children with red-hot knives, and we wouldn’t shove innocent old ladies down long flights of stairs, and we wouldn’t club a basketful of newborn puppies to death with an iron bar—at least not without good reason.”

  Her laughter lacked a full measure of humor.

  “Listen,” he said, “you’re a good person. You’ve got a good heart, and nothing you did to Rasmussen blackens it at all.”

  “I hope you’re right. It’s a hard world sometimes.”

  “Another drink will soften it a little.”

  “You know the calories in these? I’ll be fat as a hippo.”

  “Hippos are cute,” he said, taking her glass and heading back toward the kitchen to pour another drink. “I love hippos.”

  “You won’t want to make love to one.”

  “Sure. More to hold, more to love.”

  “You’ll be crushed.”

  “Well, of course, I’ll always insist on taking the top.”

  13

  CANDY WAS going to kill. He stood in the dark living room of a stranger’s house, shaking with need. Blood. He needed blood.

  Candy was going to kill, and there was nothing he could do to stop himself. Not even thinking of his mother could shame him into controlling his hunger.

  His given name was James, but his mother—an unselfish soul, exceedingly kind, brimming with love, a saint—always said he was her little candy boy. Never James. Never Jim or Jimmy. She’d said he was sweeter than anything on earth, and “little candy boy” eventually had become “candy boy,” and by the time he was six the sobriquet had been shortened and capitalized, and he had become Candy for good. Now, at twenty-nine, that was the only name to which he would answer.

  Many people thought murder was a sin. He knew otherwise. Some were born with a taste for blood. God had made them what they were and expected them to kill chosen victims. It was all part of His mysterious plan.

  The only sin was to kill when God and your mother did not approve of the victim, which was exactly what he was about to do. He was ashamed. But he was also in need.

  He listened to the house. Silence.

  Like unearthly and dusky beasts, the shadowy forms of the living-room furniture huddled around him.

  Breathing hard, trembling, Candy moved into the dining room, kitchen, family room, then slowly along the hallway that led to the front of the house. He made no sound that would have alerted anyone asleep upstairs. He seemed to glide rather than walk, as if he were a specter instead of a real man.

  He paused at the foot of the stairs and made one last feeble attempt to overcome his murderous compulsion. Failing, he shuddered and let out his pent-up breath. He began to climb toward the second floor, where the family was probably sleeping.

  His mother would understand and forgive him.

  She had taught him that killing was good and moral—but only when necessary, only when it benefited the family. She had been terribly angry with him on those occasions when he had killed out of sheer compulsion, with no good reason. She’d had no need to punish him physically for his errant ways, because her displeasure gave him more agony than any punishment she could have devised. For days at a time she refused to speak to him, and that silent treatment caused his chest to swell with pain, so it seemed as if his heart would spasm and cease to beat. She looked straight through him, too, as if he no longer existed. When the other children spoke of him, she said, “Oh, you mean your late brother, Candy, your poor dead brother. Well, remember him if you want, but only among yourselves, not to me, never to me, because I don’t want to remember him, not that bad seed. He was no good, that one, no good at all, wouldn’t listen to his mother, not him, always thought he knew better. Just the sound of his name makes me sick, revolts me, so don’t mention him in my hearing.” Each time that Candy had been temporarily banished to the land of the dead for having misbehaved, no place was set for him at the table, and he had to stand in a corner, watching the others eat, as if he was a visiting spirit. She would not favor him with either a frown or a smile, and she would not stroke his hair or touch his face with her warm soft hands, and she would not let him cuddle against her or put his weary head upon her breast, and at night he had to find his way into a troubled sleep without being guided there by either her bedtime stories or sweet lullabies. In that total banishment he learned more of Hell than he ever hoped to know.

  But she would understand why Candy could not control himself tonight, and she’d forgive him. Sooner or later she always forgave him because her love for him was like the love of God for all His children: perfect, rich with forbearance and mercy. When she deemed that Candy had suffered enough, she always had looked at him again, smiled for him, opened her arms wide. In her new acceptance of him, he had experienced as much of Heaven as he needed to know.

  She was in Heaven now, herself. Seven long years! God, how he missed her. But she was watching him even now. She would know he had lost control tonight, and she would be disappointed in him.

  He climbed the stairs, rushing up two risers at a time, staying close to the wall, where the steps were less likely to squeak. He was a big man but graceful and light on his feet, and if some of the stair treads were loose or tired with age, they did not creak under him.

  In the upstairs hall he paused, listening. Nothing.

  A dim night-light was part of the overhead smoke alarm. The glow was just bright enough for Candy to see two doors on the right of the hall, two on the left, and one at the far end.

  He crept to the first door on the right, eased it open, and slipped into the room beyond. He closed the door again and stood with his back to it.

  Although his need was great, he forced himself to wait for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Ashen light, from a streetlamp at least half a block away, glimmered faintly at the two windows. He noticed the mirror, first, a frosty rectangle in which the meager radiance was murkily reflected; then he began to make out the shape of the dresser beneath it. A moment later he was also able to see the be
d and, dimly, the huddled form of someone lying under a light-colored blanket that was vaguely phosphorescent.

  Candy stepped cautiously to the bed, took hold of the blanket and sheets and hesitated, listening to the soft rhythmic breathing of the sleeper. He detected a trace of perfume mingled with a pleasant scent of warm skin and recently shampooed hair. A girl. He could always tell girl-smell from boy-smell. He also sensed that this one was young, perhaps a teenager. If his need had not been so intense, he would have hesitated much longer than he did, for the moments preceding a kill were exciting, almost better than the act itself.

  With a dramatic flick of his arm, as if he were a magician throwing back the cloth that had covered an empty cage to reveal a captive dove of sorcerous origins, he uncovered the sleeper. He fell upon her, crushing her into the mattress with his body.

  She woke instantly and tried to scream, even though he had surely knocked the wind out of her. Fortunately, he had unusually large and powerful hands, and he had found her face even as she began to raise her voice, so he was able to thrust his palm under her chin and hook his fingers in her cheeks and clamp her mouth shut.

  “Be quiet, or I’ll kill you,” he whispered, his lips brushing against her delicate ear.

  Making a muffled, panicky sound, she squirmed under him, though to no avail. Judging by the feel of her, she was a girl, not a woman, perhaps no younger than twelve, certainly no older than fifteen. She was no match for him.

  “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want you, and when I’m done with you, I’ll leave.”

  That was a lie, for he had no desire to rape her. Sex was of no interest to him. Indeed, sex disgusted him; involving unmentionable fluids, depending upon the shameless use of the same organs associated with urination, sex was an unspeakably repulsive act. Other people’s fascination with it only proved to Candy that men and women were members of a fallen species and that the world was a cesspool of sin and madness.

  Either because she believed his pledge not to kill her or because she was now half-paralyzed with fear, she stopped resisting. Maybe she just needed all of her energy to breathe. Candy’s full weight—two hundred and twenty pounds—was pressing on her chest, restricting her lungs. Against his hand, with which he clamped her mouth shut, he could feel her cool inhalations as her nostrils flared, followed by short, hot exhalations.

  His vision had continued to adapt to the poor light. Although he still could not make out the details of her face, he could see her eyes shining darkly in the gloom, glistening with terror. He could also see that she was a blonde; her pale hair caught even the dull gray glow from the windows and shone with burnished-silver highlights.

  With his free hand, he gently pushed her hair back from the right side of her neck. He shifted his position slightly, moving down on her in order to bring his lips to her throat. He kissed the tender flesh, felt the strong throb of her pulse against his lips, then bit deep and found the blood.

  She bucked and thrashed beneath him, but he held her down and held her fast, and she could not dislodge his greedy mouth from the wound he had made. He swallowed rapidly but could not consume the thick, sweet fluid as fast as it was offered. Soon, however, the flow diminished. The girl’s convulsions became less violent, as well, then faded altogether, until she was as still beneath him as if she had been nothing more than a tangled mound of bedclothes.

  He rose from her and switched on the bedside lamp just long enough to see her face. He always wanted to see their faces, after their sacrifices if not before. He also liked to look into their eyes, which seemed not sightless but gifted with a vision of the far place to which their souls had gone. He did not entirely understand his curiosity. After all, when he ate a steak, he did not wonder what the cow had looked like. This girl—and each of the others on whom he’d fed—should have been nothing more than one of the cattle to him. Once, in a dream, when he had finished drinking from a ravaged throat, his victim, although dead, had spoken to him, asking him why he wanted to look upon her in death. When he had said that he didn’t know the answer to her question, she had suggested that perhaps, on those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims’ faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed. “Deep down,” the dream-victim had said, “you know that you’re already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you’ve killed them than before.” Those words, though spoken only in a dream, and though amounting to the purest nonsense, had nevertheless brought him awake with a sharp cry. He was alive, not dead, powerful and vital, a man with appetites as strong as they were unusual. The dream-victim’s words stayed with him over the years, and when they echoed through his memory at times like this, they made him anxious. Now, as always, he refused to dwell on them. He turned his attention, instead, to the girl on the bed.

  She appeared to be about fourteen, quite pretty. Captivated by her flawless complexion, he wondered if her skin would feel as perfect as it looked, as smooth as porcelain, if he dared to stroke it with his fingertips. Her lips were slightly parted, as if they had been gently prised open by her spirit as it departed her. Her wonderfully blue, clear eyes seemed enormous, too big for her face—and as wide as a winter sky.

  He would have liked to gaze upon her for hours.

  Letting a sigh of regret escape him, he switched off the lamp.

  He stood for a while in the darkness, enveloped by the pungent aroma of blood.

  When his eyes had readjusted to the gloom, he returned to the hall, not bothering to close the girl’s door behind him. He entered the room across from hers and found it untenanted.

  But in the room next to that one, Candy smelled a trace of stale sweat, and heard snoring. This one was a boy, seventeen or eighteen, not a big kid but not small either, and he put up more of a struggle than his sister. However, he was sleeping on his stomach, and when Candy threw back the covers and fell upon him, the boy’s face was jammed hard into the pillow and mattress, smothering him and making it difficult for him to shout a warning. The fight was violent but brief. The boy passed out from lack of oxygen, and Candy flopped him over. When he went for the exposed throat, Candy let out a low and eager cry that was louder than any sound the boy had made.

  Later, when he opened the door to the fourth bedroom, the first pewter light of dawn had pierced the windows. Shadows still huddled in the corners, but the deeper darkness had been chased off. The early light was too thin to elicit color from objects, and everything in the room seemed to be one shade of gray or another.

  An attractive blonde in her late thirties was asleep on one side of a king-size bed. The sheets and blanket on the other half of the bed were hardly disturbed, so he figured the woman’s husband had either moved out or was away on business. He noted a half-full glass of water and a plastic bottle of prescription drugs on the nightstand. He picked up the pharmacy bottle and saw that it was two-thirds full of small pills: a sedative, according to the label. From the label, he also learned her name: Roseanne Lofton.

  Candy stood for a while, staring down at her face, and an old longing for maternal solace stirred in him. Need continued to drive him, but he did not want to take her violently, did not want to rip her open and drain her in a few minutes. He wanted this one to last.

  He had the urge to suckle on this woman as he had suckled on his mother’s blood when she would permit him that grace. Occasionally, when he was in her favor, his mother would make a shallow cut in the palm of her hand or puncture one of her fingers, then allow him to curl up against her and be nursed on her blood for an hour or longer. During that time a great peace stole over him, a bliss so profound that the world and all its pain ceased to be real to him, because his mother’s blood was like no other, untainted, pure as the tears of a saint. Through such small wounds, of course, he was able to drink no more than an ounce or two of her, but that meager dribble was more precious and
more nourishing to him than the gallons he might have drained from a score of other people. The woman before him would not have such ambrosia within her veins, but if he closed his eyes while he suckled on her, and if he let his mind reel backward to memories of the days before his mother’s death, he might recapture at least some of the exquisite serenity he had known then ... and experience a faint echo of that old thrill.

  At last, without casting the covers aside, Candy gently lowered himself to the bed and stretched out beside the woman, watching as her heavy-lidded eyes fluttered and then opened. She blinked at him as he cuddled next to her, and for a moment she seemed to think that she was still dreaming, for no expression tightened the muscles of her slack face.

  “All I want is your blood,” he said softly.

  Abruptly she cast off the lingering effects of the sedative, and her eyes filled with alarm.

  Before she could spoil the beauty of the moment by screaming or resisting, thereby shattering the illusion that she was his mother and was giving voluntarily of herself, he struck the side of her neck with his heavy fist. Then he struck her again. Then he hammered the side of her face twice. She slumped unconscious against the pillow.

  He squirmed under the covers to be close against her, withdrew her hand, and nipped her palm with his teeth. He put his head on the pillow, lying face to face with her, holding her hand between them, drinking the slow trickle from her palm. He closed his eyes after a while and tried to imagine that she was his mother, and eventually a gratifying peace stole over him. However, though he was happier at that moment than he had been in a long time, it was not a deep happiness, merely a veneer of joy that brightened the surface of his heart but left the inner chambers dark and cold.

  14

  AFTER ONLY a few hours of sleep, Frank Pollard woke in the backseat of the stolen Chevy. The morning sun, streaming through the windows, was bright enough to make him wince.

  He was stiff, achy, and unrested. His throat was dry, and his eyes burned as if he had not slept for days.

  Groaning, Frank swung his legs off the seat, sat up, and cleared his throat. He realized that both of his hands were numb; they felt cold and dead, and he saw that he had curled them into fists. He had evidently been sleeping that way for some time, because at first he could not unclench. With considerable effort, he opened his right fist—and a handful of something black and grainy poured through his tingling fingers.

  He stared, perplexed, at the fine grains that had spilled down the leg of his jeans and onto his right shoe. He raised his hand to take a closer look at the residue that had stuck to his palm. It looked and smelled like sand.

  Black sand? Where had he gotten it?

  When he opened his left hand, more sand spilled out.

  Confused, he looked through the car windows at the residential neighborhood around him. He saw green lawns, dark topsoil showing through where the grass was sparse, mulch-filled planting beds, redwood chips mounded around some shrubs, but nothing like what he had held in his tightly clenched fists.

  He was in Laguna Niguel, so the Pacific Ocean was nearby, rimmed by broad beaches. But those beaches were white, not black.

  As full circulation returned to his cramped fingers, he leaned back in the seat, raised his hands in front of his face, and stared at the black grains that speckled his sweat-damp skin. Sand, even black sand, was a humble and innocent substance, but the residue on his hands troubled him as deeply as if it had been fresh blood.

  “Who the hell am I, what’s happening to me?” he wondered aloud.

  He knew that he needed help. But he didn’t know to whom he could turn.

  15

  BOBBY WAS awakened by a Santa Ana wind soughing in the trees outside. It whistled under the eaves, and forced a chorus of ticks and creaks from the cedar-shingle roof and the attic rafters.

  He blinked sleep-matted eyes and squinted at the numbers on the bedroom ceiling: 12:07. Because they sometimes worked odd hours and slept during the day, they had installed exterior Rolladen security shutters, leaving the room coal-mine dark except for the projection clock’s pale green numerals, which floated on the ceiling like some portentous spirit message from Beyond.

  Because he had gone to bed near dawn, and instantly to sleep, he knew the numbers on the ceiling meant that it was shortly past noon, not midnight. He had slept perhaps six hours. He lay unmoving for a moment, wondering if Julie was awake.

  She said, “I am.”

  “You’re spooky,” he said. “You knew what I was thinking.”

  “That’s not spooky,” she said. “That’s married.”

  He reached for her, and she came into his arms.

  For a while they just held each other, satisfied to be close. But by mutual and unspoken desire, they began to make love.

  The projection clock’s glowing green numerals were too pale to relieve the absolute darkness, so Bobby could see nothing of Julie as they clung together. However, he “saw” her through his hands. As he reveled in the smoothness and warmth of her skin, the elegant curves of her breasts, the discovery of angularity precisely where angularity was desirable, the tautness of muscle, and the fluid movement of muscle and bone, he might have been a blind man using his hands to describe an inner vision of ideal beauty.

  The wind shook the world outside, in sympathy with the climaxes that shook Julie. And when Bobby could withhold himself no longer, when he cried out and emptied himself into her, the skirling wind cried, too, and a bird that had taken shelter in a nearby eave was blown from its perch with a rustle of wings and a spiraling shriek.

  For a while they lay side by side in the blackness, their breath mingling, touching each other almost reverently. They did not want or need to speak; talk would have diminished the moment.

  The aluminum-slat shutters vibrated softly in the huffing wind.

  Gradually the afterglow of lovemaking gave way to a curious uneasiness, the source of which Bobby could not identify. The enveloping blackness began to seem oppressive, as if a continued absence of light was somehow contributing to a thickening of the air, until it would become as viscid and unbreathable as syrup.

  Though he had just made love to her, he was stricken by the crazy notion that Julie was not actually there with him, that what he had coupled with was a dream, or the congealing darkness itself, and that she had been stolen from him in the