Victims by Collin Wilcox Page B

awakening me. Then he asked me to clean the striper, since he was late for a karate lesson.
    As I was cleaning the fish, I realized that I was wondering how I’d come to be in that particular kitchen, in that particular flat, cleaning that particular striper. More than a year ago, after a spaced-out cultist had fractured my skull with a ceremonial Mayan spear, I’d moved into Ann’s place to recuperate after my release from the “police wing” of the county hospital. I’d returned to duty after only two weeks of recuperation, as good as new. But somehow the time never came for me to pack my bags and return to my own apartment.
    Before I’d gotten injured, Ann and I had been lovers for months—lovers, and friends. Often, pillow talking, we spoke of the pleasures and the problems of living together, and wondered whether it would work for us. We could never quite decide, never quite summon the courage to make the commitment, take the chance. We’d talked about marriage, too—but always tentatively. Both of us had been badly scarred by divorce. Without ever having spoken about it in so many words, we’d come to realize that neither of us could quite find the strength to propose marriage. We’d tried to find the strength. Separately, both of us had tried. Once I’d actually started to propose. But Ann had stopped me. Then she’d started to cry—hard. It was the only time I’d seen her cry. As I’d held her in my arms, comforting her, I realized that we simply weren’t ready for marriage. Later—years later—marriage might work for us. But not now.
    Besides, marriage would mean financial problems. Ann had once said, ruefully, that she was an alimony junkie—like millions of other women. Victor Haywood, the society psychiatrist, paid her both alimony and child support. Adding her ex-husband’s payments to her teacher’s salary, Ann had been able to raise her two boys and still put aside enough money to pay half their college expenses, as stipulated in her divorce decree. But if she remarried, she lost the alimony. It was income I couldn’t replace. I had children, too—a son and a daughter, both teenagers, living with their mother in Michigan. Claudia, my daughter, was beginning college, and I was paying the bills. Darrell, my son, would be starting college in two more years.
    So, thanks to a blind-side blow from a Mayan spear, Ann and I had backed into a commitment that we probably wouldn’t otherwise have made. For more than a year, Ann and Billy and Dan and I had been living together. We’d had problems, most of them caused by Victor Haywood. But there’d been pleasures, too. Billy, age fourteen, was still young enough to think policemen were romantic figures. And Dan, three years older, was mature enough to realize that his mother was fulfilled when she was in love.
    By four o’clock, I’d finished cleaning the striper. I put it in the refrigerator, cleaned up the fish scales and got dressed. An hour later, I was ringing Marie Kramer’s doorbell.
    She lived on Telegraph Hill, in a townhouse worth more than a million dollars. The house was a soaring marvel of cast concrete, plate glass, redwood beams, and natural rock. It was built in three tiers that clung to the side of the hill, each tier with a balcony cantilevered out over the hill’s steep, rocky slope. The house was built on the east side of Telegraph Hill, where homeowners were rewarded with world-famous views of the city skyline, San Francisco Bay, the city’s two bridges, and the green hills of Berkeley and Marin County. To the north, midway out in the bay, Alcatraz provided a note of grim, ugly reality, accenting the picture-postcard beauty that surrounded it.
    But, as I rang Marie Kramer’s doorbell, I was thinking that she’d chosen a house for adults, not for children. It wasn’t a house designed for family life. It was a house for party-giving, for indulging the visual senses—a house that others were meant to envy. On the east