Not a Creature Was Stirring(55)

Maybe the murder had knocked all the imagination out of him, so he could no longer make threats to his thumbs seem real. At the moment, nothing seemed real, except the drumming restlessness in his arms and head. He was so tired, he was nearly blind. The last time he’d been this whacked, he’d pulled three all nighters in a row his junior year exam week at Yale. What had happened then was happening now. The air in front of his eyes was full of tiny points of light.

In the seat next to him, Bobby was going through one of those accordion-sheet computer printouts, checking things off with a gold Mark Cross pen. It was ten o’clock in the morning, late by the world’s standards, but Bobby was going to work. He looked it—white shirt, black tie, grey pin-striped suit. Away from Bobby, Chris was never sure people really dressed like that. Looking at Bobby always made Chris feel stoned.

It also made him wonder.

Chris rolled his window down and stuck his head into the cold, wet air. They were nearing downtown Philadelphia, site of the Laedemon Building, where Bobby had moved the offices of Hannaford Financial less than three years ago. It was a monied part of town. The sidewalks were crowded. The store windows were full of decorations that looked expensive by virtue of also looking as if they’d cost a lot of work. Gigantic foil snowflakes, hand-cut in varying patterns. Tableaux of Victorian Christmas scenes, complete with authentically crafted miniature furniture and dolls dressed in velvet and bustles. Did people like doing this sort of thing?

A robed choir had begun to assemble itself on the steps of one of the churches. Because Chris had never liked Christmas carols—they were either sentimental or bloody—he pulled his head back into the car and rolled his window up again. Bobby was staring at him. He had taken his coat off as soon as he got into the car, probably to keep his suit from wrinkling. The open window had frozen his face into a mass of goose bumps.

“You could at least think of Morgan,” he said. “Just because your relatives put up with your nonsense doesn’t mean the servants will.”

“Sorry,” Chris said.

“You’re always sorry. Jesus Christ Almighty, Chris. Didn’t Mother teach you anything?”

Mother had taught him a lot of things, but Chris didn’t want to go into them at the moment. Once Bobby got started on an argument like this, he could go on for hours—and it wouldn’t make any more sense when he’d finished than it had -when he’d started. Chris wondered what Bobby did for excitement. His own restlessness had just jacked itself up another notch, making him feel really wild. Wild and invincible. That was what it was about betting, what betting had that nothing else did. When you got on a real roll, you could do anything. You really could. It wasn’t an illusion. You picked up the dice and you threw them against the board and you saw them in the back of your mind, saw them turning. You made them turn just the way you wanted them to. It was better than being God and better than magic, too. It was even better than being stoned. You got going and the world changed color. Your head exploded. Your skin merged with the air and your nerves plugged right into the great river of cosmic energy and you—

And you stole your mother’s best pair of sterling silver candlesticks.

Chris looked down at his backpack. The doubt was creeping up his spine, spreading across his back like a nasty attack of boils.

He jerked his head away and stared determinedly up at the ceiling, breathing in and out, in and out, in long whooshing streams of air that just might calm him down.

Beside him, Bobby folded the computer printout into some semblance of its original shape and put it away in his briefcase. Bobby’s movements were prissy and awkward, as if he had lost the knack of moving the way he normally moved, and was now trying to reproduce the effect by rote.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Chris told him.

“You don’t look fine.” Bobby dumped the briefcase on the floor. They were moving very slowly through heavy traffic, in a scene that seemed to Chris to be entirely unreal. A stretch limousine with tinted windows. A uniformed driver. A telephone and television and a fully stocked bar, all built into a cabinet between the regular passenger seat and the rumble. What had Daddy been thinking of?

Bobby put his pen away, in a little pocket in his wallet that had been designed for the purpose. “You look like death,” he said. “I know you say you haven’t got AIDS, but—”

“I haven’t got AIDS,” Chris said.

“You ought to get it checked out. You look ready to collapse. You’ve got to be thirty pounds underweight. If you haven’t got AIDS, you’re killing yourself some other way, and let me tell you—