A Time of Predators

“No, nothing like that. It’s just that, ah, yesterday I’d had a couple of beers and was coming from the parking lot at the bar I’d been in up by Five Points, and I just touched fenders with this other car.”

“And Professor Halstead was driving the other car?”

“His wife was.” Rick’s imagination was in full flight now, he could almost see the tall slender woman getting out of her car — a Mercedes, say — with a flash of shapely woman leg and a dazzling smile. “This morning I got thinking that if she went to her insurance company and it got back to Dad, somehow...”

He stopped there, watching her. Women were really dumb about cars and insurance, anyway, and Deb knew his old man was a broker.

“But... what can I do, Rick?”

“Do you think maybe you could find out when she’d be home alone? I mean, I wouldn’t want to ask her in front of her husband to not report an accident to her insurance company, and just let me pay her for the repairs. Not with her old man a college prof and all.”

Men were such babies with their precious male pride. Just in her one year at the U, Debbie had learned that a wide-eyed look of rapture during class lectures meant a better grade from any male prof, even the old ones past thirty who should know better. But she was really glad that Rick had come to her for help; she’d been crushed last summer when he’d dropped her, after she’d gone further with him than she had with any other man before.

“All right,” she said, smiling abruptly. Her teeth were white and even; Rick could remember when she had worn braces. “I’ll pretend I’m interviewing him for the student newspaper or something.” She stood up. “I’ll be late for glee club rehearsal, Rick, but you can call me tomorrow at Forrest Hall.”

Leaving, she wondered if he had called her just for help in straightening out about the accident. Maybe, when he called tomorrow... She wondered if he still ran around with those icky kids, that Julio who gave her the creeps, and that fat one, Heavy, and the big dumb one with the funny eyes who’d quit school before he graduated. Champ, that was it. They’d always been the ones who were sent down to the principal’s office to be disciplined.

Watching her slip away through the crowd with a wave of her hand, Rick suddenly realized that she was really a wild-looking chick. In the months since he’d last seen her, she’d staled wearing her hair different, and her figure sure had filled out. But then, unexpectedly, he thought of Paula Halstead. Blue eyes binning in a brown, slender face. Maybe if he just went over to her place, alone, told her how it had happened, maybe she’d just agree not to tell the cops about him. And then maybe she and he could...

Wiggy, for Christ sake. That’s what he was, wiggy. She was a hell of a big danger to him. Period. What did they do to you for blinding some guy? And it all had started out so simple, too; just a little fun, like they used to have with kids in high school from the lower grades, getting them down behind the boiler in the basement and taking their lunch money away from them. Instead of wiggy ideas about Paula Halstead, he ought to be figuring out how he could make sure she couldn’t identify him. If she couldn’t, he was safe. If she could...

Well, if she could, he somehow had to make sure that she wouldn’t. That meant he had to find some leverage, something to scare her with.

But how? Maybe he could get old Debbie to help him, he thought, with the vague outline of a plan forming in his mind. Without her knowing what he really was doing, of course.

And when all this was over, maybe he’d start picking up on old Debbie again. She’d developed into some real prime stuff.

Chapter 2

“All right, all right,” growled Curt Halstead. He jerked his tie savagely, bulging the flesh over his shirt collar. His muscular, thickening body was encased in gray slacks and an old flannel sports jacket with leather patches over the elbows. “So you’ll go down to the police department and look at more pictures on Monday. Why?”

“Because they blinded that boy,” Paula said in a cold voice.

She was leaning in the bathroom doorway, arms folded. They were on the second floor of the old isolated frame house which had been their home since Curt had joined the Los Feliz University staff in 1954. Their bedroom windows overlooked the university golf course.

“I’m sure they didn’t mean to blind him; it probably was some horseplay that got out of hand. And since it happened a week ago, why would you be able to recognize any of them if you did see them again?”

“I’d recognize that one,” she said grimly.

Curt finished with his tie, and ran a comb perfunctorily through his black, close-cropped hair. It hadn’t yet begun to gray, but it was thinning, especially around the crown of his head. He looked impatiently at his watch. “Why do you always start these conversations when I’m late for my Friday night seminar?”