The Empty Head

Blue Diamond Eyes

The cop dropped his pencil and reached for the pack of cigarettes on the table in front of him. He shook one free and lit it—squinting at her through the smoke. “What did he look like, Miss, uh...”

“Lacey. My name is Lacey. And he had blue diamond eyes.”
Yawn from the cop. “Pretty name. Anyway, you were saying?”
Lacey got mad. She'd been up all night and this bored cop wasn't listening.

“Blue diamond eyes. He had blue diamond eyes.”
She could tell he wasn't getting it. What was his name again? Paul something. Maybe he thinks I'm crazy. But I don't care anymore. Not after last night. Not after him.

He shook his head. Thick brown hair fell down in waves and he brushed it back. “What do you mean, blue diamond eyes? Are you tripping? You can trust me, you know.”
Lacey felt like screaming. “Listen. I know this is Las Vegas, and you've probably seen like 10,000 strung-out hookers, but I'm not one of them. This guy was real. This thing happened. Now you gotta do something about it!”

Paul the cop grunted, feeling his mind slip sideways. It was happening again. The cold sweat thing. Like frozen ants creeping all over his body. The growing certainty of destruction opening like a black flower in his soul. Shot in the back, the headlines would scream. He wasn't going to make it.

The blood knows. Somehow it knows. And I'm running out of time.

“What's wrong?”
"Nothing," he lied. "The eyes, Lacey. Let's talk about them. I want to understand."
“Okay.” Lacey sipped cold coffee from a paper cup. “Just shut up and listen. The eyes were only covers. Just things he wore, you know? Like when he was doing it, when it was the worst, he'd gone someplace else. He wasn't there anymore. A real Nowhere Man.”

Maybe tonight. This girl...the stalker with the blue diamond eyes...is this how it's gonna go down?

“You're not giving me much to work with.”
“I can't help it. You weren't there. You don't know. The whole thing...well...it was like the Night Stalker, just like that.”
He shivered violently. It was close. It was coming. “Night Stalker?”
“Yea. You know, Darren McGavin, the Night Stalker. Like on TV.”
“I never saw it.”

Lacey sighed. She rubbed her eyes with tiny fists. “Too bad. It was a good show. Really scary.”

My body...feels like it's held together with string...thin white kite string...

He saw his own death mirrored in her eyes. A cheap black and white snapshot was all it was. A dark street just before dawn. A motionless body like a tossed doll lying broken and bloody. “Okay, okay,” he said, hiding trembling hands under the table. “But I need more. A lot more.”

Lacey hesitated. “They might have been red.”

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