A Time of Predators

Rick slammed on the brakes, shrieked sideways down a hundred feet of concrete, watching with almost clinical detachment the on-rushing rear of the car he’d almost tailgated. He straightened her out, got into the right lane. Goddamn old creep, barely moving! His hands were shaking a little. Cup of coffee? Sure. Relax a minute. Ahead was the little café where Debbie first had told him about Paula’s suicide. That had really been a shock. But as far as he was concerned, Paula had never happened. He’d never laid eyes on her. Safer that way.

He slowed, pulled into the white-lined parking area to the right of the café. His fear at the near-crash had begun melting into his lingering arousal from Debbie’s goodnight. The trouble with young stuff like Deb was that you had to play the game with them. The older ones, they wanted it and they admitted it, just like a guy would.

Older women.

He peered through the windshield and lighted square window of the little diner. Older women like that blond waitress here who’d tipped him the wink that night. Funny, he’d forgotten about her until right now, but there she was, just putting down a hamburger in front of some guy. Bleached blonde, twenty-five, maybe pushing thirty almost. The sort who’d let a guy try goddamn near anything he wanted with her. He checked his image in the mirror, ran a comb through his hair. Debbie, get him all turned on and then... goodnight, huh? Well, maybe this chick... just maybe...

Chapter 12

Curt awoke early on Friday morning with a profound feeling of depression, like a delayed hangover from the previous afternoon’s beer. But the depression was emotional, not physical, compounded in part from the nagging inadequacy he had felt the previous evening, standing in the downstairs room where the rape of Paula had taken place. Without classes, without his seminar to prepare, he walked through the household chores he had set himself; by two o’clock he was staring glumly out a window and through the trees to the dazzling green of the golf course.

Four men carrying their bags in little wheeled carts were trudging up the fairway, dwarfed by distance into plastic toy figures. Up that way on that Friday night would have come the predators, four of them, sheltered by darkness. One of Paula’s favorite Latin aphorisms came to mind: He who is bent on doing evil can never want occasion. Certainly, if those who had attacked Paula also had attacked Rockwell, they had come here bent on evil.

One of the toy figures swung a club; after a long moment, Curt heard the hollow slap of wood on golf ball, saw the tiny gleaming shape roll to a stop on the other side of the fourteenth green. A good shot.

Feeling suddenly stifled in the house, Curt went down to the VW, got in, slid back the sun roof. That had been Paula’s idea; she had thought the convertible ugly but had wanted the sun on bright days. He started the car, went down the drive and north of Linda Vista. As he had come home that night, past the Longacres intersection. Down there a passing boy had seen the four, getting from their car, while Curt had dispensed wisdom in a drive-in booth. No such thing as evil: just poor, frustrated humanity occasionally snapping under the enormous impersonal pressures of society. While Paula’s life drained redly to the floor...

Stop it, damnit! There was nothing you could have done.

But what if certain maverick students of humanity like Dart and Leakey and Laurens were right: that in man there still stalked about an atavistic, unschooled self from the older, mindless days of his journey? And what if Curt should let his control of that self slip? Then what?

He took a right from Entrada into El Camino, then left into Brewer toward downtown Los Feliz. Time to stop indulging his Bogart fantasies: he was a middle-aged law-abiding university professor whose wife had killed herself and who was feeling guilty about her death. He tried to turn his mind outward, away from his compulsive scabpicking. The town was full of students whom Sunday’s commencement would release — from the university, from this town. Out they would go, sky-diving: it would all be free-fall for them then. You tried to prepare them for it, but you never knew whether you had succeeded; the surprise, really, was how well most of them landed.

He realized he was crossing the railroad tracks where Rockwell had been attacked. Some vague urge made him pull in and park across from the laundromat beyond the tracks, and walk back to the edge of the gravel-scattered planks. Right here Rockwell had fallen; here the faceless ones had struck. Kids, probably in a stolen car; kids, hopped-up or stoned or drunk, acting out some private fantasy projection. One read of it, the random violence, but never applied it to one’s own life.