A Time of Predators

Jimmy was a slender boy with straight dark hair always in his eyes, his mother’s enchanting smile, and fey, slightly tilted eyes of the same greenish color as hers. He had come in with the rush and flurry which belongs so peculiarly to youth, had gone shy at the presence of a stranger, then had expanded, during supper, under the male attention. Curt introduced the four men by the golf course casually, easily.

“Those guys?” Jimmy was scornful. “I wasn’t scared of ’em, not really. I just said I was, ’cause... ’cause...” His voice slowed as he realized where his tongue was leading him, and he cast a quick sideways glance at his mother.

“Go right ahead, young man,” Barbara said. “I know perfectly well that you wanted to make me think that they had made you late.”

“Ma can’t spank hard enough to hurt me anyway,” Jimmy bragged, recovering. “I didn’t see anything, really, ’cept the Chevy wagon.”

That was all until dessert, which was ice cream and the freshly baked brownies. Curt described the “Mexican-looking” boy who had been seen on Edgewood Drive, but Jimmy didn’t react. Worden had been right; it was hopeless. They went into the living room, leaving Barbara to stack the dishes, and Jimmy leaned forward confidentially.

“I was gonna call Ma from that phone booth there by the golf course an’ tell her my bike had a flat tire,” he admitted. “You won’t tell her, will ya? I know that woulda been lyin’, but I didn’t really do it...”

“Between us men, strictly,” said Curt with a straight face. The phone booth, he decided, must have been the one across Linda Vista, where he had found his lucky dime. “Why didn’t you call, Jimmy?”

Barbara called from the kitchen, “Dish washer or dish dryer, Curt?”

“Uh? Washer, I guess.” He stood up.

Jimmy was going on. “I couldn’t call ’cause there was this girl sittin’ in the booth.”

Something in what the boy said stopped Curt dead; he felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck. But what? What was so odd about a girl making a phone call? Then he realized that the oddness was in Jimmy’s phrase. Not making a phone call; sitting in a phone booth.

“You mean that the girl was using the phone, Jimmy?”

The boy shook his head. “She didn’t even have the receiver off the hook or nothing. Just sittin’ in there with the door open an’ her feet sorta stickin’ out—”

“But it was dark, Jimmy. How could you see that clearly?”

“I’d walked right up to the booth, see, wheeling my bike, and this car was coming by and I seen — saw her, plain as anything.”

“And you didn’t tell the man from the sheriff’s office about her?”

“Him? He acted like I was eight years old or somethin’,” the boy said scornfully.

Eight. Instead of ten. That figured; boys straining for those fabulous teens resented being called younger than they were. And Curt had his fact that Worden didn’t have. Why would a girl be merely sitting in that particular phonebooth on that particular night, in the dark, not using the phone, not doing anything? Like a lookout, or something.

A lookout.

Almost not daring to breathe for fear of tensing the boy up, hoping desperately that Barbara would not choose that instant to call again from the kitchen, he said, “Ah... you wouldn’t remember anything much about this girl, I guess, huh, Jimmy?”

“She was just a... uh, girl, you know. Older, sorta. Not real old, like Ma, but, uh, nineteen or twenty or somethin’.” He chewed his lip, then brightened suddenly. “Her dad’s name is Marsden, ’cause I used to deliver papers to him before they moved away.” His mouth was hanging slightly open as he looked into his own brief past. “Big white house with a stone front on it, on the right-hand side of Glenn Way. The daily an’ the Sunday, both. Her dad gave me a baseball once.”

Curt’s drive home was a kaleidoscopic whirl of half-formed questions and bits of sensual image: the faint remembered fragrance of Barbara’s perfume, the way she had seemed to bend toward him as she had said goodnight, the fervor of her demand that he call her with whatever he might uncover about the predators. And the questions. A lookout? But how? Why? What sort of girl helped a gang rape an innocent woman?

He walked across the road to the booth, sat in the little metal seat, leaned out to stare up and down Linda Vista. Yes. Across the road he could see the dull gleam of his VW’s chrome at the bottom of his drive; higher, he could see fragments of light from his own house gleaming through the foliage.

A lookout. They would have set sentries — a sentry, anyway. And even on a black night such as this he could have seen anyone walking up the driveway toward the house. Or driving, of course.

From the front porch, he stared down toward the invisible booth. How would such a lookout communicate with those inside the house? A phone call? Feasible, of course, but subject to dialing error...

A car whipped by down on Linda Vista, its headlights showing for a moment the empty booth, the open door, even the metal seat inside.