Death Will Have Your Eyes by James Sallis

emptied the rest into his own cup.
    â€œMy friend has an awesome curiosity. Not for the information itself, you understand—actually he cares little at all for that—but for the getting of it. Says it’s the only thing he’s ever been good at. And so he dug in, blind as a mole, buried like a dung beetle, burrowing the contemporary world’s real subterrain.”
    He drank coffee for a while, smiling across at me.
    â€œEventually, my friend tells me, he managed to find a few cracks, get his foot in a door or two. But then, almost as though his presence somehow had been detected, those doors slammed shut, all at the same instant. And he was left with only a glimpse, the barest intimations of something, a dissolving shape.”
    He looked into his cup, moved it in slow circles.
    â€œHow old are you, Mr. Edwards? What: late thirties? Forty?”
    I picked an age at random. “Thirty-nine.”
    â€œYet, up until nine years ago, your life’s a fortune cookie.”
    I inclined my head slightly, asking that he go on, inviting further information, by my own silence.
    â€œI don’t suppose there’s a number I should call, anything like that?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œSo,” he said. “The horns of the moment’s dilemma.”
    He looked towards the window. A wasp flew in, circled the room quickly and fled back outside.
    â€œObviously you’ll provide me no information. Yet on the other hand I am enjoined, by my profession and by my charge to this community, to insist upon the answers I cannot have.”
    He leaned closer to me, arms flat on the table.
    â€œMr. Edwards. Are you willing, or able, at least to tell me what you’re doing here?”
    â€œI haven’t misrepresented myself in any way, Sheriff, nor do I have reason to do so. I truly am just passing through. There’s no more to it than that.”
    â€œAnd if I should release you now, you would continue that passage?”
    I nodded.
    â€œYour presence here has nothing to do with Lee Raincrow?”
    â€œNothing.”
    He looked into my face. A kind of information beyond words, small tides of recognition, passed between us.
    â€œBuy you a drink,” he said shortly, rising. “Said you had need of a car, I believe?”
    I nodded.
    He nodded back. “Reckon I might know where you could locate one.”

26
    It was in a town called Cross, standing before an acrylic painting of a melting, chromatic city, that I became someone else.
    It had happened before—once already this time out, in fact, with my to-be assassin in Memphis. I’d find myself in peril, nerve-ends singing, and suddenly everything out there would change, the world would shimmer, go away for a moment, come back transformed. But it had never before happened when I wasn’t in clear, direct danger. And never before with such intensity.
    I’d been reading signs for fifty miles or more, GREATER SOUTHEAST ART SHOW , rocking along in my VW bug the color of a perpetual bruise (someone had painted a dark-blue car maroon, badly), so when I finally got to Cross, subject of the signs, host to GSAS, I thought why not? and pulled into the parking lot of a Rodeway Inn festooned with plastic red, blue and gold banners.
    Everyone in Cross was already there. Most of them seemed to be milling about the parking lot drinking beer. The rest were clustered around tables hurriedly pulled together in the coffee shop. A high school class and I pretty much had free run of the ballroom, where the artwork was on display.
    It was largely what I might have expected: landscapes, a few still lifes, primitive portraits and rustic collage, some art-school pieces. Lots of flowers, trees and animals. Still, overall quality of technique was high. The edge wears just a little finer each year, it seems. And the quantity of work was truly astonishing. Had everyone turned into an artist of some sort?
    The car, incidentally, was Lee