Blood Music by Jessie Prichard Hunter Page B

above—the streetlight, the moon.
    The girl shrugged and followed him. “My car is this way,” he said. “I was having a few beers with some friends and I’m on my way back to the car. But I forgot to ask how to get back to the Midtown Tunnel.”
    â€œI’m with friends, too. They’re waiting for me back at—I forget the name of the bar. Kenny’s something?”
    â€œKenny’s Castaways.”
    â€œIf you know so much, how come you don’t know how to get to the Midtown Tunnel?” He suddenly became aware of the saliva in his throat, his clenched teeth: don’t leave me now, don’t turn away—just a little bit more, half a block—don’t leave me. She wasn’t talking any longer and he was afraid he had spoken aloud. “I’ve always—”
    â€œLook at those curtains,” she said, pointing. “I’ve always wanted lace curtains. But John says they make him think of old Italian women.” John. The lover? The husband? She was very young, and she wore no ring. The boyfriend, John. It always amazed him when he read the things they said in the paper, later. It amazed him that they knew anything at all about what he was doing. This girl was his, given to him out of the sky, the moon; she could have no antecedents. “My car’s up here,” he said casually. “The store is on the corner, up ahead. I just want to get a map out of the glove compartment, just a minute. Then you can show me what everybody else already knows.”
    â€œJust from Fourteenth Street.”
    â€œI remember I came down what, Second Avenue?” He reached casually for his keys. The couple had turned the corner at Seventh, and there were no dog walkers along the length of the street, there were no figures at the windows of the old brownstones, there were no lovers sitting in the shadows of the ivy-covered stoops. She was standing two feet away from him under the arc of the streetlight, digging through her purse. She was completely unconcerned, unaware of any danger. He wanted to hear her speak again.
    â€œI’ve got a map in here somewhere,” he said; the van door let a flood of light out onto the sidewalk. Her lips were pursed with the particular female concentration of trying to find something in a pocketbook. When the light hit the sidewalk she looked up and smiled. “This darn bag,” she said, and he was touched by that “darn”; that would become part of the memory. That, and her voice, and the way the light hit her hair.
    She walked over to the van, right up to the door, and turned her back and held up her pocketbook at an angle to catch the light from inside the door. What was she looking for? She had come with him. She had trusted him. Now she was waiting for him. There was an old handle of a hammer in the glove compartment, something he had never used before but had always wanted to use. It felt light in his hand, as though it were only an extension of his hand and not a separate thing.
    Just as he reached for her she started to turn. “I think I remember,” she said. “You go—” Her surprise was so great—her honey head bent, a little spot of skin at the nape exposed, the silver dangle of a feather-shaped earring at her ear, her honey voice music at the altar of his sacrifice—that for a moment he didn’t do anything. They stood, his arms around her in a parody of love, and then he struck her with the handle, just like that, silent, and her breath was a tiny ooh of exhalation and she slumped and he caught her. There was no sound.
    The simplicity of her falling, of his striking and her falling, enraptured him. He held her dead weight a moment and everything else was silence, and then he felt a familiar throbbing in his groin where her back slumped against him. He held her with his right arm while with his left he opened the sliding back door of the van. It made a terrible