The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [109]
He went to the workroom and got his pistol.
The string to the sanitation bucket was broken. He still wasn't sure how she'd done it. Last time the string was broken, he'd assumed she'd broken it in an absurd attempt to climb. They had tried to climb it before--- ?they had done every fool thing imaginable.
He leaned over the opening, his voice carefully con?trolled.
“Precious, are you all right? Answer me.”
Catherine pinched the dog's plump behind. It yipped and paid her back with a nip on the arm.
“How's that?” Catherine said.
It seemed very unnatural to Mr. Gumb to speak to Catherine in this way, but he overcame his distaste.
“I'll lower a basket. You'll put her in it.”
“You'll lower a telephone or I'll have to break her neck. I don't want to hurt you, I don't want to hurt this little dog. Just give me the telephone.”
Mr. Gumb brought the pistol up. Catherine saw the muzzle extending past the light. She crouched, holding the dog above her, weaving it between her and the gun. She heard him cock the pistol.
“You shoot motherfucker you better kill me quick or I'll break her fucking neck. I swear to God.”
She put the dog under her arm, put her hand around its muzzle, raised its head. “Back off, you son of a bitch.” The little dog whined. The gun withdrew.
Catherine brushed the hair back from her wet fore?head with her free hand. “I didn't mean to insult you,” she said. “Just lower me a phone. I want a live phone. You can go away, I don't care about you, I never saw you. I'll take good care of Precious.”
“No.”
“I'll see she has everything. Think about her welfare; not just yourself. You shoot in here, she'll be deaf whatever happens. All I want's a live telephone. Get a long extension, get five or six and clip them together--- ?they come with the connections on the ends--- and ?lower it down here. I'd airfreight you the dog any?where. My family has dogs. My mother loves dogs. You can run, I don't care what you do.”
"You won't get any more water, you've had your last water.''
“She won't get any either, and I won't give her any from my water bottle. I'm sorry to tell you, I think her leg's broken.” This was a lie--- the lithe dog, along with the baited bucket, had fallen onto Catherine and it was Catherine who suffered a scratched cheek from the dog's scrabbling claw. She couldn't put it down or he'd see it didn't limp. “She's in pain. Her leg's all crooked and she's trying to lick it. It just makes me sick,” Cath?erine lied. “I've got to get her to a vet.”
Mr. Gumb's groan of rage and anguish made the little dog cry. “You think she's in pain,” Mr. Gumb said. “You don't know what pain is. You hurt her and I'll scald you.”
When she heard him pounding up the stairs Cather?ine Martin sat down, shaken by gross jerks in her arms and legs. She couldn't hold the dog, she couldn't hold her water, she couldn't hold anything.
When the little dog climbed into her lap she hugged it, grateful far the warmth.
The Silence of the Lambsr
CHAPTER 50
Feathers rode on the thick brown water, curled feathers blown from the coops, carried on breaths of air that shivered the skin of the river.
The houses on Fell Street, Fredrica Bimmel's street, were termed waterfront on the weathered realtors' signs because their backyards ended at a slough, a backwater of the Licking River in Belvedere, Ohio, a Rust Belt town of 112,000, east of Columbus.
It was a shabby neighborhood of big, old houses. A few of them had been bought cheap by young couples and renovated with Sears Best enamel, making the rest of the houses look worse. The Bimmel house had not been renovated.
Clarice Starling stood for a moment in Fredrica's backyard looking at the feathers on the water, her hands deep in the pockets of her trenchcoat. There was some rotten snow in the reeds, blue beneath the blue sky on