![]() Druze tucked the key into his pants pocket and took a black four-inch milled-aluminum penlight out of his jacket. His eyes were the mirror of his soul: Druze hadn’t had one since the night of the burning. New acquaintances sometimes thought he was blind, but he was not. His eyes were flat black and opaque, like weathered paint on the eyes of a cigar-store Indian. The doctors had given him the new face, but his eyes were his own. He licked them, unconsciously, his tongue flicking out every few seconds with a lizard’s touch. ![]() His lips were stiff and thin, and dried easily. His nose had been fixed, as best the doctors could, but it was too short, his nostrils flaring straight out, like black headlights. His skin was no better, a patchwork of leather, off-color, pebbled, like a quilted football. The features of his face seemed fused together, as though an invisible nylon stocking were pulled over his head. When they’d finished he looked better, but not good. ![]() They’d harvested the skin from his thighs-he remembered the word, all these years later, harvested, it stuck in his mind like a tick-and used it to patch his face. He was four weeks in the county hospital, shrieking with pain as the nurses put him through the baths and the peels, as the doctors did the skin transplants. But in the morning light, when they’d seen his nose, they took him. His mother had smeared lard on him, hoping not to pay, as Druze howled through the night. They hadn’t taken him to the hospital until the next day. On his hands, his face, running like liquid, in his nose, his hair, his mother screaming, throwing water and milk, his father flapping his arms, shouting, ineffectual. He’d wake in his childhood bed, the fire on him. Some nights, bad nights, the memories ran uncontrollably through his head, and he’d doze, wretchedly, twisting in the blankets, knowing what was coming, afraid. A scurrying? A mouse in the loft? The sound of the wind brushing over the shingles. He shut the door behind him and stood in the dark, listening. He reached out to the doorknob with his gloved left hand, tried it. He’d tied the string to a belt loop, so there’d be no chance he’d lose the key in the house. “Christ, I wish I could be there to see it.”ĭruze took the key out of his pocket, pulled it out by its string. The pencil had trembled on the paper, leaving a shaky worm trail in graphite. He’d drawn the floor plan on a sheet of notebook paper and traced the hallways with the point of his pencil. Bekker had been aglow, his face pulsing with the heat of uncontrolled pleasure. “If she’s not in the kitchen, she’ll be in the recreation room, watching television,” Bekker had said. The door at the end of the breezeway would not be locked it led straight into the kitchen. It was connected to the house by a glassed-in breezeway. With a casual step, then, rather than a sudden move, Druze turned into the darker world of the alley and walked down to the garage. An out-of-place furtiveness, like a bad line on the stage, would be noticed. Druze could see him in his mind’s eye, and was wary: the people here had money, and Druze was a stranger in the dark. It wasn’t likely that a neighbor was watching, but who could know? An old man, lonely, standing at his window, a linen shawl around his narrow shoulders. The garage was dark.ĭruze didn’t look around he was too good an actor. Four windows were lit on the ground floor of the target house, two more up above. A few garbage cans, like battered plastic toadstools, waited to be taken inside. If he met anyone-a dog-walker, a night jogger-they’d get nothing but eyes.įrom the mouth of the alley, he could see the target house and the garage behind it. The collar of his ski jacket rose to his ears on the sides, to his nose in the front. So he strolled, hands in his pockets, a man at his leisure. He took care: he would not spend his life in prison. A vagrant snowflake drifted past, then another.ĭruze could kill without feeling, but he wasn’t stupid. He watched the window, but nothing else moved. Two blocks ahead, to the right, a translucent cream-colored shade came down in a lighted window. A Mötley Crüe song beat down from a second-story bedroom: plainly audible on the sidewalk, it had to be deafening inside. Back around the corner, near his car, the odor of cigar smoke hung in the cold night air a hundred feet farther along, he’d touched a pool of fragrance, deodorant or cheap perfume. He was acutely aware of his surroundings. He sauntered down the old, gritty sidewalk with its cracked, uneven paving blocks, under the bare-branched oaks. He is the author of the Prey novels, the Kidd novels, the Virgil Flowers novels, The Night Crew, and Dead Watch. John Sandford is the pseudonym of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John Camp.
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