Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter 3)

Clarice Starling peered out at Barney from the deep hood of her jacket and let him get a half-block lead on the other side of the street before she hitched her tote bag on her shoulder and followed. When he passed both the parking lot and the bus stop, she was relieved. Barney would be easier to follow on foot. She wasn’t sure where he lived and she needed to know before he saw her.

The neighborhood behind the hospital was quiet, blue-collar and mixed racially. A neighborhood where you put a Chapman lock on your car but you don’t have to take the battery in with you at night, and the kids can play outside.

After three blocks, Barney waited for a van to clear the crosswalk and turned north onto a street of narrow houses, some with marble steps and neat front gardens. The few empty storefronts were intact with the windows soaped. Stores were beginning to open and a few people were out. Trucks parked overnight on both sides of the street blocked Starling’s view for half a minute and she walked up on Barney before she realized that he had stopped. She was directly across the street when she saw him. Maybe he saw her too, she wasn’t sure.

He was standing with his hands in his jacket pockets, head forward, looking from under his brows at something moving in the center of the street. A dead dove lay in the road, one wing flapped by the breeze of passing cars. The dead bird’s mate paced around and around the body, cocking an eye at it, small head jerking with each step of its pink feet. Round and round, muttering the soft dove mutter. Several cars and a van passed, the surviving bird barely dodging the traffic with short last-minute flights.

Maybe Barney glanced up at her, Starling couldn’t be positive. She had to keep going or be spotted. When she looked over her shoulder, Barney was squatting in the middle of the road, arm raised to the traffic.

She turned the corner out of sight, pulled off her hooded jacket, took a sweater, a baseball cap and a gym bag out of her tote bag, and changed quickly, stuffing her jacket and the tote into the gym bag, and her hair into the cap. She fell in with some homeward-bound cleaning women and turned the corner back onto Barney’s street.

He had the dead dove in his cupped hands. Its mate flew with whistling wings up to the overhead wires and watched him. Barney laid the dead bird in the grass of a lawn and smoothed down its feathers. He turned his broad face up to the bird on the wire and said something. When he continued on his way, the survivor of the pair dropped down to the grass and continued circling the body, pacing through the grass. Barney didn’t look back. When he climbed the steps of an apartment house a hundred yards farther on and reached for keys, Starling sprinted a half-block to catch up before he opened the door.

“Barney. Hi.”

He turned on the stairs in no great haste and looked down at her. Starling had forgotten that Barney’s eyes were unnaturally far apart. She saw the intelligence in them and felt the little electronic pop of connection.

She took her cap off and let her hair fall. “I’m Clarice Starling. Remember me? I’m—”

“The G,” Barney said, expressionless.

Starling put her palms together and nodded. “Well, yes, I am the G. Barney, I need to talk with you. It’s just informal, I need to ask you some stuff.”

Barney came down the steps. When he was standing on the sidewalk in front of Starling, she still had to look up at his face. She was not threatened by his size, as a man would be.

“Would you agree for the record, Officer Starling, that I have not been read my rights?” His voice was high and rough like the voice of Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan.

“Absolutely I have not Mirandized you. I acknowledge that.”

“How about saying it into your bag?”

Starling opened her bag and spoke down into it in a loud voice as though it contained a troll. “I have not Mirandized Barney, he is unaware of his rights.”

“There’s some pretty good coffee down the street,” Barney said. “How many hats have you got in that bag?” he asked as they walked.

“Three,” she said.

When the van with handicap plates passed by, Starling was aware that the occupants were looking at her, but the afflicted are often horny, as they have every right to be. The young male occupants of a car at the next crossing looked at her too, but said nothing because of Barney. Anything extended from the windows would have caught Starling’s instant attention—she was wary of Crip revenge—but silent ogling is to be endured.

When she and Barney entered the coffee shop, the van backed into an alley to turn around and went back the way it came.

They had to wait for a booth in the crowded ham and egg place while the waiter yelled in Hindi to the cook, who handled meat with long tongs and a guilty expression.

“Let’s eat,” Starling said when they were seated. “It’s on Uncle Sam. How’s it going, Barney?”

“The job’s okay.”

“What is it?”

“Orderly, LPN.”

“I figured you for an RN by now, or maybe medical school.”

Barney shrugged and reached for the creamer. He looked up at Starling. “They jam you u

p for shooting Evelda?”

“We’ll have to see. Did you know her?”