Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) Read Free Page B

actually there wasn't a lot of waking up going on in the alley behind the shop. Every once in a while I heard a bus go by.
    Four more dead by Catskinner's hand. I wondered if maybe it was time to move on. There was nothing to tie me directly to this killing, and the eyewitness accounts would be useless. The witnesses would be confused and unsure themselves what they saw, and the police would keep working over the stories until they had something that made sense. Looking for something that made sense meant they weren't looking for me.
    Still, they could get lucky, and the longer I operated in this area the better their odds got.
    Victor would be a problem. He probably could move, but it'd be tough. We'd need a refrigerated truck, probably, and have to have something set up on the other end. It was too complex for me. I could tell him that I was planning on moving and then let him make his own arrangements, but what if he didn't want to go?
    What if he didn't want me to go? Could he stop me? Could he stop Catskinner?
    I really had no clear idea of Victor's capabilities. If I was going to leave him it would best to just go, disappear into the night. I was good at that.
    But, dammit, I liked this town. I liked my little house.
    How about it, I asked, should we move on?
    all places are the same place.
    Yeah. No help there. I finished my breakfast and decided not to make a choice. Instead I washed dishes.
    I opened the shop at ten. As soon as I was in, Victor called me on the intercom.
    “How did it go?”
    “Great,” I told him. “Just peachy. A bunch of dead guys face down in their fettuccine alfredo.”
    A pause. Then, “Are you feeling okay?”
    I sighed. “Yeah. Just tired. You know he gets me wound up—it was hard to get to sleep.”
    “Well, if you want to close up. . . .”
    And do what, I wondered? Get drunk and maudlin and think about being a monster? At least in the shop I could pretend that I was doing something useful. “Naw, I'm fine.”
    “Well, if you want to talk, you know I'm here.”
    “Thanks,” I said. Talk about what? I was suddenly quite sure that if I did move on, I wouldn't tell Victor.
    I got on my computer, loaded the music program with a bunch of Tom Waits and Nick Cave. It was that kind of day, Friday or not.
    I played some games of solitaire, moved some of the stock around so I could dust the shelves, wrote a couple of checks to pay for the stock I bought last month, and played solitaire some more. I kept losing the card games, which should have told me something, but I've never been good at auguring omens.
    The skinny woman came back at noon. This time she had friends with her.
    Of course, at first I didn't know that. At first she had nothing but an index card with her. She came through the door and I smiled because I always smile when I see customers, and then I recognized her and my smile kind of faltered and by then—since she's such a long-legged bitch—she was right up to the counter and she whipped out this index card and said, “Would you look at this please?”
    and
    everything
    stopped.
    It was a simple 3x5 index card, the kind you use for jotting down addresses or recipes if you're the kind of person who jots down things, one side with lines on it and the other side blank. She held the side that had been blank towards me, but it wasn't blank, it had four characters on it arranged in a diamond, not English. Maybe Hebrew?
    I had plenty of time to study them because my body froze. I stood and looked at the card. She nodded a kind of I-thought-so nod, said, “Please keep looking at this,” and walked—my head and then my body and then my legs followed her—over to the wall. She put the card against the wall and stuck a push pin through the card into the drywall.
    I looked at the card. Four Hebrew letters in a diamond.
    She walked to the door and opened it. More people came into the shop but I couldn't look at them. I was looking at the card and the letters. Things were