for it and touched rubber. The mask. He wasn’t exactly surprised. “All you have to do is tell me what I want to know, Pam. Then you go on your happy way and I go on mine. ”
“How do you know my name?”
He gave her that evocative interrogation-room shrug, the one that said he knew lots of things, that was his job.
She sat in the pile of tumbled dark maroon coverlets just like the one on his bed up on the ninth floor, smoothing her skirt down over her knees. Her eyes were a really extraordinary shade of blue. A tear gathered on the lower lid of the left one, trembled, then slipped down her cheek, leaving a trail of mascara-soot.
“Are you going to rape me?” she asked. She was looking at him with those extraordinary baby blues of hers, great eyes—who needs to pussywhip a man when you’ve got eyes like those, right, Pammy?—but he didn’t see the look in them he wanted to see. That was a look you saw in the interrogation room when a guy you’d been whipsawing with questions all day and half the night was finally getting ready to break: a humble look, a pleading look, a look that said I’ll tell you anything, anything at all, just let off me a little. He didn’t see that look in Pammy’s eyes.
Yet.
“Pam—”
“Please don’t rape me, please don’t, but if you do, if you have to, please wear a condom, I’m so scared of AIDS. ”
He gawped at her, then burst out laughing. It hurt his stomach to laugh, it hurt his diaphragm even worse, and most of all it hurt his face, but for awhile there was just no way he could stop. He told himself he had to stop, that some hotel employee, maybe even the house dick, might happen by and hear laughter coming from in here and wonder what it meant, but not even that helped; in the end, the throe had to pass on its own.
Blondie watched him with amazement at first, then smiled tentatively herself. Hopefully.
Norman at last managed to get himself under control, although his eyes were streaming with tears by that time. “I’m not going to rape you, Pam, ” he said at last—when he was capable of saying anything without laughing it into insincerity.
“How do you know my name?” she asked again. Her voice was a little stronger this time.
He hauled the mask out, stuck his hand inside it, and manipulated it as he had for the asshole accountant in the Camry. “Pam-Pam-bo-Bam, banana-fanna-fo-Fam, fee-fi-mo-Mam, ” he made it sing. He bopped it back and forth, like Shari Lewis with fucking Lamb Chop, only this was a bull, not a lamb, a stupid fucking fagbull with flowers on its horns. Not a reason in the world why he should like the fucking thing, but the fact was, he sort of did.
“I sort of like you, too, ” Ferd the fagbull said, looking up at Norman with its empty eyes. Then it turned back to Pam, and with Norman to move its lips, it said: “You got a problem with that?”
“N-N-No, ” she said, and the look he wanted still wasn’t in her eyes, not yet, but they were making progress, she was terrified of him—of them—that much was for sure.
Norman squatted down, hands dangling between his thighs, Ferdinand’s rubber horns now pointing at the floor. He looked at her sincerely. “Bet you’d like to see me out of this room and out of your life, wouldn’t you, Pammy?”
She nodded so vigorously her hair bounced up and down on her shoulders.
“Yeah, I thought so, and that’s fine by me. You tell me one thing and I’ll be gone like a cool breeze. It’s easy, too.” He leaned forward toward her, Ferd’s horns dragging on the floor. “All I want to know is where Rose is. Rose Daniels. Where does she live?”
“Oh my God.” What color there still was in Pammy’s face—two spots of red high up on her cheekbones—now disappeared, and her eyes widened until it seemed they must tumble from their sockets. “Oh my God, you’re him. You’re Norman. ”
That startled and angered him—he was supposed to know her name, that was how it worked, but she wasn’t supposed to know his—and everything else followed upon that. She was up and off the coverlets while he was still reacting to his name in her mouth, and she almost got away completely. He sprang after her, reaching out