A Time of Predators

Surprised also, and a little startled, Debbie said, “Hi, yourself, Rick Dean.” She laughed with the sheer joy of living; the wind of their quick passage down palm-lined University Way ruffled her hair. She almost timidly returned the pressure of his hand. “I’m going to have the biggest, gooiest sundae you’ve ever seen.”

Rick took the Triumph across El Camino on the overpass, to join the northbound traffic. After a couple of miles he spotted a little café on the right-hand side where he could pull in without crossing lanes.

Inside, in a booth, Debbie returned to the previous Friday. “It was creepy, sitting there in the dark and waiting for you to call or something. And then seeing my folks’ old paper boy...”

Rick caught himself just starting to ask if she meant the boy on the bike, which really would have been stupid. “Paper boy?”

“He came right up to the booth like he wanted to use the phone.” Looking at Rick, she felt her heart quicken. Even as kids growing up in the same subdivision with him, she’d had a sort of thing about Rick. Her folks had waited until after her graduation last June to move across the Bay to San Leandro, so she wouldn’t have to switch high schools her senior year. “It was just as a car passed and I could see him real plain. And then when I heard what happened later...”

If Debbie only knew what really happened later! Anyway, now they didn’t have to worry about the kid on the bike, because Paula wouldn’t ever go to the police about them. He felt so good that when the waitress, who was old, about twenty-five, brought their orders, he winked at her. Cheeseburger and chocolate malt for Rick, something called the Awful Delight for Debbie, with three kinds of ice cream and nuts and sauces.

“Will there be anything else, kids?” asked the waitress, pencil poised over her book of stubs. Her blond hair, he saw, was dyed.

“That’ll be it, ma’am, I guess,” Rick said politely.

She wrote, totaled, tore out the check and laid it face-down on the table. As she turned away, with her back to Debbie, she very deliberately returned Rick’s wink.

Feeling great about that, he tore into his cheeseburger and said around it, “So what happened later, Deb?”

“It’s all over the campus, with Professor Halstead teaching at the U and everything, but there was just a paragraph in the papers...”

Rick felt something freeze inside him. Slowly he lowered the ravaged cheeseburger to the plate, mustard diluted with beef juice running unnoticed over his fingers. “What... happened to the professor?”

Debbie was enjoying herself. “Oh, nothing to him. It was Mrs. Halstead.” Rick had stopped chewing; he was afraid the skin over his temples would burst. “She killed herself. On Friday night, it couldn’t have been very long after I left the booth...” Her voice trailed off. “Rick, what’s the matter? Are you sick or something? What...”

Rick clamped his teeth together in a desperate effort to keep back the surge of bile. Killed herself? But she... the way she’d been with him that second time, she couldn’t have... couldn’t...

“What is it, Ricky?” Debbie’s face was stiff and frightened. “Rick, you’re just white! What...”

“I... ah... just felt awful sick all of a sudden. I...”

“I bet you’re getting the flu, honey.” She used the term of endearment automatically; he had been so vulnerable there for a moment, the look on his face wrenched at her heart. “You ought to go right home and get into bed.”

In a sort of sleepwalking, Rick paid the cashier and took Debbie out to the Triumph. She just couldn’t have. Maybe the professor had come home and she’d told him and... Maybe he’d killed her, made it look like suicide.

But then, after he’d handed Debbie into the squatty sports car and had started around to the driver’s side, he had a flashing vision, compellingly clear, of Paula’s face: the high cheekbones, the wounded mouth, the eyes so startlingly blue against her tawny skin, and so filled with sick knowledge and with self-loathing. Not loathing for Rick, not even contempt for him. Seeing him as nothing more than the almost impersonal object which had caused her degradation.

No. His mind rejected the image. He personally, he, Rick Dean, had aroused her. She’d dug him, really dug him. She had killed herself for some other reason. She had cancer or something.

He forced himself to move on, get into the car, drive Debbie back to the dorm. No goodnight kiss; barely aware that she had expected one. Later, at home, he was hours getting to sleep; hours of turning and tossing, watching restless leaf shadow-patterns cast on his window shade by the streetlight outside. Suddenly he sat bolt upright in bed.

The paper hoy! He had seen them, had seen the wagon, had seen Rick. What if the cops found out that Paula had been with a man — his mind already rejected rape — and started looking, and found that kid...