The Diehard by Jon A. Jackson Page B

had been caught in the act. There was an attempt to inject a sex angle, since the victim was beautiful and had been found nude. The paper carefully avoided any notion of a racial aspect. Detroit had had enough of race trouble.
    Also in the paper was a bizarre story about citizens and cops pursuing one another with drawn guns. It had ended badly for one of the participants.
    Mulheisen went up to his room and sprawled across his bed with a half-finished book, Morison's Admiral of the Ocean Sea , a biography of Columbus. He fell asleep at the point where the Great Discoverer had left Isabella's court with his final rejection of the proposed voyage to the East, only to be called back before he had gone five miles down the road.
    Mulheisen was on muleback in deep snow, pursuing a figure in black. The snow was spotted with blood. And then he himself was pursued. Looking over his shoulder he could see that it was a woman, but she had no face. And then the face itself became detached and loomed closer. He could almost recognize it.
    His mother stood over him, shaking him.
    “What the hell . . .?” he said, rubbing his eyes. He lay on the bed fully clothed. His mother had already changed into a flannel nightgown.
    “You were talking in your sleep,” she said.
    “Oh yeah? What did I say?”
    “Something about a black glove,” she said, “and then a woman. Who is the woman?”
    “I don't know any women. Not any women you want to know about,” he said. “Get out of here and let me undress.”
    She came back when he was ready for bed. She sat down on the bed, a slim woman of sixty-five, with long teeth.
    “See lots of birds?” her son asked.
    “Not many,” she said. “A handful of chickadees, and oh, yes, a purple finch. It was much too cold.”
    “So, what do you do it for?”
    “It's absurd, I suppose. But that's bird watching for you. It gets obsessive. Every little flicker of a shadow past the window gets you running around with binoculars. You just can't bear not to know what species it might be. Why, it might be a purple finch, or even a Northern shrike. It was nice seeing the purple finch today, even if I almost froze. Something new for my Life List.”
    “Ma, you're nuts.”
    “Thanks,” she said. “But not really. I've been thinking . . .”
    “What?” he said.
    She laid a bony finger along her bony jaw and looked like a parody of Thought. “Do you suppose,” she said, “that you could get along by yourself here for a week or so?”
    “Now what? You going on a survival hike?”
    She hurried on. “No, I've been looking at those TV commercials, the one where they show a big jet taking off into the sun and a voice says, ‘It's ten o'clock, folks, and another Delta Fan-Jet is on its way to Miami.’ They have a flight every hour, Mul.” She was suddenly protesting. “It's just too darn cold to be bird watching in Michigan. I understand that they also have birds in Miami.”
    Mulheisen laughed aloud. “What have I been saying?”
    But she wasn't listening to him. She was detailing how she could arrange for him to have dinner every night of the week with a different old friend of hers, and someone would come in to clean . . .
    “Ma, it's all right. I'm nearly forty years old. I can hack it on my own. Go to Florida. Go tomorrow.”
    “I was thinking about leaving tomorrow,” she said. “But then, oh, Mul, it would be the first time we didn't have Christmas together, except when you were in the Air Force. And I haven't put up any decorations yet. I haven't even bought your present. I'd better wait until after Christmas.”
    “You can't,” he said.
    “Why not?”
    “Cause that's my present to you. A ticket to Miami.”
    “You won't have any orgies here, will you?”

Nine
    The Tuttle Hotel wasn't fancy. They didn't mind if you had forgotten your luggage. To some the rooms might seem cheap and shabby, but they were private. There was a lock on the door. There was a bed with steel springs and the