“Yes.”

“Six months of your life, probably.”

She didn’t say anything.

Crawford stubbed at the grass with his toe. He looked up at her, at the prairie distance in her eyes. She had backbone, like Bella. “Who would you start with?”

“The first one. Fredrica Bimmel, Belvedere, Ohio.”

“Not Kimberly Emberg, the one you saw.”

“He didn’t start with her.” Mention Lecter? No. He’d see it on the hotline.

“Emberg would be the emotional choice, wouldn’t she, Starling? Travel’s by reimbursement. Got any money?” The banks wouldn’t open for an hour.

“I’ve got some left on my Visa.”

Crawford dug in his pockets. He gave her three hundred dollars cash and a personal check.

“Go, Starling. Just to the first one. Post the hotline. Call me.”

She raised her hand to him. She didn’t touch his face or his hand, there didn’t seem to be any place to touch, and she turned and ran for the Pinto.

Crawford patted his pockets as she drove away. He had given her the last cent he had with him.

“Baby needs a new pair of shoes,” he said. “My baby doesn’t need any shoes.” He was crying in the middle of the sidewalk, sheets of tears on his face, a Section Chief of the FBI, silly now.

Jeff from the car saw his cheeks shine and backed into an alley where Crawford couldn’t see him. Jeff got out of the car. He lit a cigarette and smoked furiously. As his gift to Crawford he would dawdle until Crawford was dried off and pissed off and justified in chewing him out.

CHAPTER 49

On the morning of the fourth day, Mr. Gumb was ready to harvest the hide.

He came in from shopping with the last things he needed, and it was hard to keep from running down the basement stairs. In the studio he unpacked his shopping bags, new bias seam-binding, panels of stretchy Lycra to go under the plackets, a box of kosher salt. He had forgotten nothing.

In the workroom, he laid out his knives on a clean towel beside the long sinks. The knives were four: a swa

y-backed skinning knife, a delicate drop-point caper that perfectly followed the curve of the index finger in close places, a scalpel for the closest work, and a World War I–era bayonet. The rolled edge of the bayonet is the finest tool for fleshing a hide without tearing it.

In addition he had a Strycker autopsy saw, which he hardly ever used and regretted buying.

Now he greased the head of a wig stand, packed coarse salt over the grease and set the stand in a shallow drip pan. Playfully he tweaked the nose on the face of the wig stand and blew it a kiss.

It was hard to behave in a responsible manner—he wanted to fly about the room like Danny Kaye. He laughed and blew a moth away from his face with a gentle puff of air.

Time to start the aquarium pumps in his fresh tanks of solution. Oh, was there a nice chrysalis buried in the humus in the cage? He poked with his finger. Yes, there was.

The pistol, now.

The problem of killing this one had perplexed Mr. Gumb for days. Hanging her was out because he didn’t want the pectoral mottling, and besides, he couldn’t risk the knot tearing her behind the ear.

Mr. Gumb had learned from each of his previous efforts, sometimes painfully. He was determined to avoid some of the nightmares he’d gone through before. One cardinal principle: no matter how weak from hunger or faint with fright, they always fought you when they saw the apparatus.

He had in the past hunted young women through the blacked-out basement using his infrared goggles and light, and it was wonderful to do, watching them feel their way around, seeing them try to scrunch into corners. He liked to hunt them with the pistol. He liked to use the pistol. Always they became disoriented, lost their balance, ran into things. He could stand in absolute darkness with his goggles on, wait until they took their hands down from their faces, and shoot them right in the head. Or in the legs first, below the knee so they could still crawl.

That was childish and a waste. They were useless afterward and he had quit doing it altogether.

In his current project, he had offered showers upstairs to the first three, before he booted them down the staircase with a noose around their necks—no problem. But the fourth had been a disaster. He’d had to use the pistol in the bathroom and it had taken an hour to clean up. He thought about the girl, wet, goosebumps on her, and how she shivered when he cocked the pistol. He liked to cock it, snick snick, one big bang and no more racket.

Tags: Thomas Harris Hannibal Lecter Horror
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