Slipping Into Darkness Read Free Page B

She was helping me write the essay for my college application.”
     
    “Yeah? Where you applying?”
     
    “Columbia. My father always wanted me to go there.”
     
    “Good for you.” Francis stuck his lip out. “I’m just a Fordham guy myself.”
     
    Slowly the hand came down from his chin, allowing Francis to focus on the pair of dark diagonal scabs.
     
    “Still, seems kind of surprising in your type of building,” he said. “People in Manhattan don’t usually know their neighbors.”
     
    “Oh, I know everybody.” The scabs stretched, revealing tiny cracks. “I grew up in that house since I was three. My father says I’m like the mayor, talking to people on the service elevator, going in and out of their kitchens with groceries. She’d only been there subletting about eight, nine months, but we got tight right away. We were both into Star Trek. . . . ”
     
    “Yeah?”
     
    “Yeah, I came up one night to fix her sink when she was watching ‘The Menagerie.’ You know that one? It’s the two-part episode they made out of the original pilot, ‘The Cage,’ with Jeffrey Hunter playing Captain Pike. You know, the one where the Talosians with the big lightbulb heads are keeping him behind the glass and projecting these crazy pictures into his mind, trying to get him to stay. . . .”
     
    Francis nodded sagely, thinking: This is why some men never get laid.
     
    “Not a lot of girls into science fiction, are there?”
     
    “I don’t know. I think her older brother got her into it.”
     
    Hoolian glanced over at the glass in the wall, gradually realizing that someone on the other side might be watching him .
     
    They were certainly trying to project images into Francis’s mind. Telling him to speed it up, get the damn statement, wrap it up for the mayor and the PC on Live at Five. Any minute, Francis Senior Himself would be in the house, ready to put his two cents in.
     
    “So, what time did you get done fixing her toilet?” Francis asked, paying them no mind and setting up the next part of the trap.
     
    “’Bout ten o’clock. I remember she was watching Channel Five and they say that same thing every night. ‘It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?’”
     
    Francis flipped back through his notes and was disappointed to see that the answer was consistent with what Hoolian had told Sully. That fucking useless civic-minded slogan must have provided about eight hundred alibis a year.
     
    “So how long did you stay after you fixed the leak?”
     
    “Dunno.” Hoolian pinched his shoulders. “Hour, maybe a half hour. It was hard to tell.”
     
    “Why? Didn’t you say you had the news on?”
     
    Don’t lunge, he warned himself. Be patient. Remember: Time is better than a kick in the balls or a phone book upside the head. Time is better than a polygraph or an eyewitness. Time can weigh on you. Time can sit on your shoulders and play with your head. Time can make you hungry and weak. Time will give you time.
     
    “We switched to MTV and made some popcorn,” Hoolian said, faintly aware of his own words stacking up into a teetering pile. “She’d just got cable. And once those Duran Duran videos come on, one after another, man, you just sort of zone out. And then after a while, she started to get sleepy. She had to be at the hospital at eight o’clock the next morning.”
     
    It sounded almost sweet, this pretty young doctor falling asleep in front of the TV with this horny little seventeen-year-old mooning over her.
     
    “Did she, like, have her head on your shoulder?”
     
    “She might have.” An earnest little nub of flesh bulged between the boy’s eyebrows. “Why do you want to know?”
     
    “Just, you know, it’s important to get all the details right. We collect fingerprints, hair fibers. We have to figure out what belongs to who so we don’t make any mistakes and lock up the wrong people.”
     
    The long eyelashes fanned out. “I still don’t understand.”
     
    “Look. I have a set of facts I’m trying to make sense