Lawrence Block

Warm and Willing

CHAPTER ONE

That night she dreamed the dream once again. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and yet it terrified her each time. This time she awoke before the dream could end; awoke with her forehead damp with cool beads of perspiration, awoke with her heart hammering furiously, and her eyes staring, and her hands-small hands, narrow fingers, nails immaculately manicured-curled into tight little fists, with the nails digging harshly into the palms of her hands.

A dream of flight, of a chase with her own self cast as victim, as person pursued. And with the pursuer unknowable. In the dream she was running eternally down an endless hallway, a hallway which grew gradually but inexorably narrower as she raced through it, the walls closing slowly on her.

The walls, an ivory white, were unbroken by windows or doors. Sometimes, smoking a cigarette in the sweaty aftermath of the nightmare, she would force herself back over the dream and try to figure out its setting, and try to establish what sort of hallway she ran through night after endless night. A hospital? But hospital walls were always that weak gray-green of impending death, and the walls in the dream were white. And the floor was black, not tile or linoleum or wood or stone-an endless ribbon of black which seemed to be made of no particular material at all.

And she ran in the dream, ran until her legs ached, ran while her heart pounded, ran with a whirlwind behind her, and her mouth parted for a scream that never came, and something, something, behind her and coming ever closer.

She had dreamed the dream a countless number of times. She had never been caught. She had never reached the end of the corridor, if indeed it had an end. Each time she awoke with terror shrieking through her body.

Now she sat very still in the narrow bed. A shaft of light came through her window. She looked around quickly, making sure of where she was, focusing upon familiar objects in an effort to assure herself of what was reality and what was the dream. Her cigarettes were on the bedside table. She lit one, shook out the match, reached over to turn on the bedside lamp. There was a clock on the table beside the lamp. She looked at it. It was a few minutes past four. She had gone to sleep a little after midnight, so she had slept just four hours.

She would not be able to sleep any more now. She knew this. Once the dream brought her swiftly awake, sleep was over and done with for the night. She could only get up and bide her time, read a book or take a shower or have a few cups of inky coffee, waiting out the hours until it was time for breakfast and then for work.

There was a hot plate on her dresser, a teakettle centered upon it. She filled the teakettle at the sink and put water on to boil. Then she slipped into a cotton robe and sat down in the room’s one chair and smoked her cigarette all the way down. When the water boiled she made instant coffee and sat in the chair to drink it.

Her name was Rhoda Moore. Not long ago it had been Rhoda Moore Haskell, but the Haskell part had since been carefully cut away through the aseptic surgery of the judicial process. She had thought at the time that this was one of the chief advantages of annulment as opposed to divorce; one automatically returned to one’s maiden name. Legally, one had never been married.

Her lawyer had been against the annulment. “You’re not a Catholic,” he had told her. “You’ve got no basic feeling against divorce. And God knows you’ve got grounds, Rhoda. Why shouldn’t you make him pay?”