A Time of Predators

The top half of the office Dutch door was open. Preston, at the desk, looked up and his cold blue eyes met Curt’s — again, like a stranger’s. But then he was on his feet, grinning his wide infectious grin, sticking out his hand. “Well, well, the prodigal returns.”

After a moment’s hesitation Cart shook with him. “I’m sorry about the skin-diving gear, Floyd.”

“Somebody from the sheriff’s office brought it back yesterday.” He gestured Curt to the couch. “Going to take a workout?”

“I... can’t. I’ve got a couple of ribs that...”

Curt stopped there; he had come intending to pick up his workout gear, break entirely with Preston. During that long night below the bluffs, he had traveled such distances, probed such depths, that a return to normal life seemed impossible. It was like what Hemingway had said somewhere about men coming of age: it was not always a matter of their twenty-first birthdays.

Into the pause, Preston said, “Your girl friend has been calling here twice a day, leaving messages. Says you weren’t answering your phone over the weekend, and that she’d been worried.”

“I... haven’t felt like talking to anyone...”

“Why don’t you hang your head?” demanded Preston abruptly.

“I... what?”

The big weight-lifter sat down on the front edge of his desk. “Do you think you’re the only guy who ever woke up in the morning and wanted to puke into the face looking at him from the bathroom mirror? How do you think I felt after I realized that I didn’t have the guts to go down there with you?”

“That’s different,” said Curt coldly. “It wasn’t your fight. Floyd, I wanted to kill. Do you know what my first thought was when I looked down at that poor dead Mexican kid the papers talked about? That I hadn’t lost my speed with a knife. How’s that, huh? All the time I was after them, I was no better than they. Just as vicious, just as sick...”

Preston merely grunted. “You know, Curt, when I was a kid my dad was a circuit preacher — they still had them in Missouri, places like that, in the thirties. I was in and out of a dozen rural schools by the time I was ten, which for a skinny little runt like me meant fighting. All the time, because I was the new kid in town. I got so that my first day in a new school I’d find the school bully and I’d whup him... I’d whup him because I had to whup him.”

“But what’s that got to do with—”

“Then I grew up and went into the Army and started getting regular meals and exercise, and working with the weights, and I ended up as a big guy. Big enough so I could punch a guy in the snot-locker one minute and buy him a beer the next. Bat... Let me feel that I’ve been cornered, and suddenly I’m that little guy again, fighting hard and dirty to beat the school bully.”

Curt looked at him strangely. “Then you’re saying that—”

“I’m saying that whatever happened down there last Friday night, you didn’t have any choice. But you did have the training. And I’m saying that if a bunch of guys push another guy off a window ledge, they can’t blame him for whatever he does on the way down.”

“You bother me, Professor.” Detective-Sergeant Monty Worden reached for a cigarette. “I underestimated you, and that can be fatal for a cop.”

When Curt had come home from Floyd Preston’s gym, he had found Worden’s dark sedan parked in the driveway, and Worden parked on the couch in the living room. He was glad he’d talked with Preston first; it had somehow braced him for this ordeal.

“I gave your men my statement at San Conrado on Saturday morning.”

Worden feathered smoke through his nostrils. “The university gave me the background, Professor. Enlisted 1942 in the British military at the age of seventeen. Volunteered for an irregular warfare group called the Special Air Services which was being set up by a guy named David Sterling. Trained in parachute and rubber-boat landings, skilled in killing with the knife, the pistol, and the hand. Awarded the George Cross in 1943 after a desert operation against some German airfields.”

Curt shrugged. “Did you come to hear my war stories?”

“I came to admit that I goofed in checking you out. I should have realized it then.”

“Realized what, Sergeant?”

“That you’re a born killer, baby. It’s in your blood, you like to see ’em die. This little exercise against these kids must have been manna from heaven to you, huh, Halstead?”

For a vivid moment Curt could see Champ’s contorted face pleading up at him from the cliff; Julio’s sightless eyes in the little clearing below the cliffs. A born killer? Or a man, as Preston had said, who had been pushed off a window ledge and who was not responsible for his actions on the way down? Or someone in between the two? An amalgam of college professor and wild-eyed seventeen-year-old in the desert?

“You’re doing the talking, Sergeant,” he said.