The cruiser slowed to a crawl as it passed the Red Apple. The spotlight mounted on its right hand side snapped on, and the beam began to slide across the fronts of the sleeping houses on the far side of the street. In most cases it also slid across the street-numbers mounted beside doors or on porch columns. When it lit on the number of May Locher's house (86, Ralph saw, and he didn't need the binoculars to read it, either), the cruiser's taillights flashed and the car came to a stop.
Two uniformed policemen got out and approached the walk leading up to the house, oblivious of both the man watching from a darkened second-floor window across the street and the fading green-gold footprints over which they were walking. They conferred, and Ralph raised the binoculars again to get a closer look. He was almost positive that the younger of the two men was the uniformed cop who had shown up with Leydecker at Ed's house on the day Ed had been arrested.
KnoB? Had that been his name?
"No," Ralph murmured. "Nell. Chris Nell. Or maybe it was Jess."
Nell and his partner seemed to be having a serious discussion about something-much more serious than the one the little bald doctors had been having before they strolled away. This one ended with the cops drawing their sidearms and then climbing the narrow steps to Mrs. Locher's stoop in single file, with Nell in front. He pressed the doorbell, waited, then pressed it again. This time he leaned on the button for a good five seconds. They waited a little more, and then the second cop brushed past Nell and had a go at the button himself.
Maybe that one knows The Secret Art of Doorbell-Ringing, Ralph thought. Probably learned it by answering a Rosicrucians ad.
If so, the technique failed him this time. There was still no response, and Ralph wasn't surprised. Strange bald men with scissors notwithstanding, he doubted May Locher could even get out of bed.
But if she's bedridden, she might have a companion, someone to get her her meals, help her to the toilet or give her the bedpanChris Nell-or maybe it was Jess-stepped up to the plate again.
This time he forwent the doorbell in favor of the old wham-wham wham, open-in-the-name-of-the-law technique. He used his left fist to do this. He was still holding his gun in his right, the barrel pressed against the leg of his uniform pants.
A terrible image, every bit as clear and persuasive as the auras he had been seeing, suddenly filled Ralph's mind. He saw a woman lying in bed, with a clear plastic oxygen. mask over her mouth and nose.
Above the mask, her glazed eyes bulged sightlessly from their sockets.
Below it, her throat had been opened in a wide, ragged smile. The bedclothes and the bosom of the woman's nightgown were drenched with blood. Not far away, lying on the floor, was the facedown corpse of another woman-the companion. Marching up the back of this second woman's pink flannel nightgown were half a dozen stab-wounds, made by the points of Doc #1's scissors. And, Ralph knew, if you raised the nightgown for a closer look, each would look a lot like the wound under his own arm... like the sort of oversized period made by children just learning to print.
Ralph tried to blink the grisly vision away. It wouldn't go. He felt dull pain in his hands and saw he had closed them into tight fists; the nails were digging into his palms. He forced his hands open and clamped them on his thighs. Now the eye in his mind saw the woman in the pink nightgown twitching slightly-she was still alive. But maybe not for long. Almost certainly not for long unless these two oafs decided to try something a little more productive than just standing on the stoop and taking turns knocking or Jazzing the doorbell.
"Come on, you guys Ralph said, squeezing at his thighs. "Come on, come on, let's get with it, what do you say?"
You know the things you're seeing are all in your head, don't -you?
he asked himself uneasily. I mean, there might be a couple of women living dead over there, sure, there might be, but you don't know that, right? It's not like the auras, or the tracks...
No, it wasn't like the auras or the tracks, and yes, he did know that. He also knew that no one was answering the door over there at 86 Harris