AWARE THAT SHE’D RISEN to her feet, Bernhardt glanced up, saw her standing beside the pool, looking down into the water, obviously deciding whether she would go in. He’d seen her swimming earlier in the day. She was a good, strong, smooth swimmer, someone who probably loved the water, someone who’d probably had lessons. As she walked to the edge of the pool, their eyes met briefly, impersonally. Now she was standing poised, knees flexed, frowning slightly as she concentrated, took a deep breath—and committed herself to the dive. She entered the water cleanly, swam for a few yards underwater, then surfaced, changed to a crawl, began swimming to the far end where she turned, shook water from her eyes, began swimming back toward him. As he watched her, he wondered whether she suspected that he’d been keeping her under close surveillance wherever she went. Could she know that he’d watched her, stood guard over her? Last night, from the window of his cabin, he’d had a view of her front door. He’d been able to see the side of her cabin, too, the only side that had a window, except for one tiny frosted bathroom window, set high in the rear wall. She’d turned out her light about midnight. Sitting back from his own window, listening to his faithful Walkman, with his Ruger .38 on the floor beside his chair, he’d remained on watch until 3 A.M. before he’d finally surrendered to sleep. A car with only one passenger had arrived at the motel office about twelve-thirty, but the driver had been a white-haired man with a huge paunch and a debilitating limp, hardly the stereotype of a hit man.
Had it been a fool’s errand, this trip that would cost several hundred dollars, this impulse that had begun with nothing more profound than yet another argument with Dancer? What would he have done, if someone had tried to kill her? He fired the gun once a year at the police range in Daly City, to qualify for the permit that allowed him to carry it. But he’d never drawn the gun in anger, much less fired it.
Yet when he did carry the gun, it comforted him—just as it had comforted him last night. The gun was a stainless steel .38 revolver with a four-inch barrel, one of the best revolvers in the world. Dancer had given it to him at the end of his first year with the firm, a symbolic gold watch for faithful service. But, as always, Dancer had attached a condition. If Bernhardt couldn’t qualify at the police firing range with the pistol, he must agree to give it back. And—yes—he’d had to buy his own holster, ten dollars at a Mission Street pawnshop. It was a spring holster, the kind detectives used, the pawnshop clerk had told him.
After he’d bought the holster, exactly as if he’d been a kid with a new toy, he’d practiced his quick draws—and his combat crouch, and his snap firing. And, yes, he’d been aware of the pleasure it gave him, simply to hold the gun, to handle it—to fondle it, some would say. It was a deep, elemental pleasure—that much he’d discovered, to his own surprise. But what were the origins, the true origins, of that secret pleasure? He’d often thought about it, applied all the liberal-left theories he’d been brought up to believe: that a gun was the extension of his penis, a symbol of male dominance. But he’d never been very good at analyzing the symbols of his own libido. So he’d concluded that the gun represented power, more than sexual potency. If the male’s sex drive was primary, which he believed, then the urge to protect the family inside the cave was certainly secondary. If the male instinctively fornicated, then he also instinctively fought. He fought with predators, for self-protection. And he fought with other males, for sexual dominance. So if the caveman’s instinct was to pick up the fallen limb of a tree, his first club, then that same deep instinct accounted for the way the steel of a gun felt to the hand of the male—and the steel of a knife, too, another deep, elemental pleasure. And, without doubt, whatever they made the buttons from, that launched the missiles from their silos—that would feel the same, too.
At the far end of the pool, Betty Giles was getting out of the water. Bernhardt glanced at his watch. The time was six o’clock. If she did as she’d done yesterday, she would lie beside the pool for a half hour, drying out and reading. Then she’d go to her cabin, to change her clothes. At seven o’clock, give or take, she’d get in her car and drive to a restaurant, one of the two that were open in town. It would probably be dark, when she returned from dinner, almost completely dark. Understandably, she would be reluctant to let him into her cabin, after dark.
So it must be before she left for dinner, that he’d do what he’d come to do. Showered and scented, he would change into fresh clothes, with his gun concealed beneath his loose-fitting sports shirt. Then he would walk the fifty feet to the door of her cabin. He’d knock, and he’d smile—and he’d do what he came to do.