Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

A lady with a couple of dogs walked toward him and he yelled at her to put them on a leash. She looked pissed until she saw what he was fussing about. By the time the cops showed up there was a ring of people and dogs around the arm. Plainclothes detectives and the coroner showed up twenty minutes later. They spent an hour poking at it, taking its temperature, snapping photos. I even saw one of the detectives bend down and sniff it. Finally, they put the arm in a blue plastic bag and drove off with it.

It wasn’t until that evening, after I told the kids and the wife about it, and the neighbors on both sides, and my cousin Paco who dropped by just in time for dinner, after the house finally got quiet and I was drinking a glass of tequila behind the garage on the brick patio I’ll finish one of these days, that I thought about the woman the arm belonged to, of what she must’ve looked like.

That was when I realized I knew who she was.

Laura Finnegan woke with a start, her heart pounding, her white tank top sweaty, clinging to her breasts, the sheets twisted around her ankles. She let her head fall back onto the pillow, exhaling with a bleating sound. She could feel the blood throbbing in her neck, and she imagined her heart and its network of veins and arteries as an octopus caught in a trap, convulsing, thrashing its arms. A dull headache began above her eyebrows. She wiped the pools of sweat from under her arms with the bottom of her shirt.

What a horrible dream.

As soon as she was awake enough to command her muscles, she propped herself up on her elbows and turned her head.

Scott lay sleeping beside her, soundless, oblivious. He never seemed to wake up gradually to morning sounds — birds, traffic, garbage trucks — but slept deeply until the alarm went off, like a child dead to the world. The top sheet, white with blue cornflowers, curtained over his shoulder and tucked under his chin. She found it odd that it had never before occurred to her that sheets with flower prints were meant to give you the impression of sleeping in a field of blossoms. She squinted, blurring her focus, and imaged a boy napping on the hindquarter of his dog in a meadow of wildflowers. He looked so sweet, so harmless.

She shuddered, remembering him in her dream. Her terror lingered, leaving her drained, her stomach raw and nauseated.

Slowly she pulled the sheet off his body, admiring his shoulders, his chest, his muscular thighs and calves.

He slept on his right side, facing her, his right arm draped over the pillow, his left thigh at a forty-five-degree angle as if he were climbing. He had a long face with a squared-off chin, tanned skin, and a mop of straight blond hair. She noticed faint wrinkles on his neck and at the corners of his eyes, which were set a little too close. He was a perfect L.A. boy-man.

As if pricked, she jerked her hand back to touch her neck. Never had she been so frightened by a dream. Never had a dream felt so real. She seldom remembered her dreams, but this dream she could still smell — the stench of red tide at dawn, decaying fish, rancid seaweed. Even with her eyes open, faint images, black, white, and red, flashed like danger signs over her irises. She could see the coldness in his eyes and an odd twist in his mouth, like when he was close to coming.

Yet here he was, nuzzling the pillow, sweet as a toddler.

Scott was a generous man, an enthusiastic although not a particularly adventurous lover. He claimed to adore her. He was handsome, athletic, attentive, and funny. He acted as if she were the first and only girl he’d ever loved. Her girlfriends told her that when he asked — for there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he would ask — she should agree to marry him. When they said this, they looked invariably wistful, yet happy for her at the same time, as if she’d won the lottery, as if having a guy like this be nuts about you happened only to the lucky few.

But in her dream he stood glaring at her with red in his eyes and black in his heart, an image far more vivid than the man who lay beside her.

Was her subconscious telling her that Scott was dangerous? Warning her? She tried to think of anything about Scott that ever frightened her. He was a little jealous, she admitted. He acted proud when other men looked at her, but bristled if they looked too long. She avoided talking about her male colleagues, hating the way his face froze, his eyes stabbing hard into hers until she explained that Ralph, Harry, or Tom was gay or sixty.

But most men were like that, weren’t they? A little insecure? Scott couldn’t hide his emotions. He complained obsessively about imagined slights, his face turning beet red, his voice rising, usually out of proportion to the transgression. But he’d never directed his anger at her. He’d never raised a hand to her, never yelled at her. Never.