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'Where's Alafair?' I said, and kissed her on the cheek. I could smell cigarette smoke in her clothes and hair.
'In the living room. Doing her homework,' she said. She kept her face turned toward the open window when she spoke.
'Where'd you go today?' I said.
'What does it matter?'
'Beg your pardon?'
'What does it matter where we go?'
'I don't understand, Boots.'
'It doesn't matter where we go. He's going to be there.'
'You mean Buchalter?'
'He called.'
'Here? When?'
'This afternoon.'
'Why didn't you call me at the office?'
'And tell you what?'
I put my hands lightly on her shoulders and turned her toward me. She breathed through her nose and kept her face at an angle to me.
'What did he say, Boots?'
'Nothing. I could hear music, like the kind you hear in a supermarket or an elevator. And then a man breathing. His breath going in and out, like he was waiting for something.'
'Maybe it was somebody else, maybe just a crank.'
'He did something else. He scratched a fingernail back and forth on the receiver. The way a cat paws at the door.'
Her mouth parted, and she looked up into my face. Her breath smelled like bourbon-scented orange slices.
'We'll get an unlisted number in the morning,' I said.
'It was Buchalter, wasn't it?'
'Maybe. But what we have to remember, Boots, is that when these guys try to scare people with telephone calls, they're running on the rims. They don't have anything else going.'
Her eyes went back and forth, searching inside mine.
'We've got a computer sketch of the guy all over town,' I said, 'I don't think he'll come back.'
'Then who killed the man in the hospital?'
'I don't know.'
'He's out there, Dave. I know he is.'
Her experience with Buchalter had been even worse than mine, and I knew that my words could not take the unrelieved sense of vulnerability out of her face. I held her against me, then walked her into the bedroom, turned on the shower, waited while she got inside the stall, locked the house, then said Alafair's prayers with her. The moon was down, the pecan and oak trees were motionless and black outside the screens, and the only sound I could hear besides the suck of the attic fan was Tripod running up and down on his chain and wire clothesline.
I poured a glass of milk, fixed a ham and onion sandwich, and ate it at the kitchen table. When the phone on the wall rang, I knew who I would be talking to.
