store, indistinct images behind damp-streaked and sign-plastered glass.
I didn’t need gas, but I did need some hot coffee to keep me awake. And something to fill the hollow under my breastbone: I hadn’t taken the time to eat anything before leaving Fresno. So I swung off into the lot, parked next to the older car. Yawned and stretched and walked past the Buick to the store. Walked right into it.
Even before I saw the little guy with the gun, I knew something was wrong. It was in the air, a heaviness, a crackling quality, like the atmosphere before a big storm. The hair crawled on the back of my scalp. But I was two paces inside by then and it was too late to back out.
He was standing next to a rack of potato chips, holding the weapon in close to his body with both hands. The other two men stood ten feet away at the counter, one in front and one behind. The gun, a long-barreled target pistol, was centered on the man in front; it stayed that way even though the little guy’s head was half turned in my direction. I stopped and stayed still with my arms down tightly against my sides.
Time freeze. The four of us staring, nobody moving. Light rain on the roof, some kind of machine making thin wheezing noises-no other sound.
The one with the gun coughed suddenly, a dry, consumptive hacking that broke the silence but added to the tension. He was thin and runty, midthirties, going bald on top, his face drawn to a drum’s tautness. Close-set brown eyes burned with outrage and hatred. The clerk behind the counter, twenty-something, long hair tied in a ponytail, kept licking his lips and swallowing hard; his eyes flicked here and there, settled, flicked, settled like a pair of nervous flies. Scared, but in control of himself. The handsome, fortyish man in front was a different story. He couldn’t take his eyes off the pistol, as if it had a hypnotic effect on him. Sweat slicked his bloodless face, rolled down off his chin in little drops. His fear was a tangible thing, sick and rank and consuming; you could see it moving under the sweat, under the skin, the way maggots move inside a slab of bad meat.
“Harry,” he said in a voice that crawled and cringed. “Harry, for God’s sake…”
“Shut up. Don’t call me Harry.”
“Listen…it wasn’t me, it was Noreen…”
“Shut up shut up shut up.” High-pitched, with a brittle, cracking edge. “You,” he said to me. “Come over here where I can see you better.”
I went closer to the counter, doing it slowly. This wasn’t what I’d first taken it to be. Not a hold-up-something personal between the little guy and the handsome one, something that had come to a crisis point in here only a short time ago. Wrong place, wrong time for the young clerk, too.
I said: “What’s this all about?”
“I’m going to kill this son of a bitch,” the little guy said, “that’s what it’s all about.”
“Why do you want to do that?”
“My wife and my savings, every cent I had in the world. He took them both away from me and now he’s going to pay for it.”
“Harry, please, you’ve got to…”
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up? Didn’t I tell you not to call me Harry?”
Handsome shook his head, a meaningless flopping like a broken bulb on a white stalk.
“Where is she, Barlow?” the little guy demanded.
“Noreen?”
“My bitch wife Noreen. Where is she?”
“I don’t know…”
“She’s not at your place. The house was dark when you left. Noreen wouldn’t sit in a dark house alone. She doesn’t like the dark.”
“You…saw me at the house?”
“That’s right. I saw you and I followed you twenty miles to this place. Did you think I just materialized out of thin air?”
“Spying on me? Looking through windows? Jesus.”
“I got there just as you were leaving,” the little guy said. “Perfect timing. You didn’t think I’d find out your name or where you lived, did you? You thought you were safe, didn’t you? Stupid old Harry Chalfont, the cuckold, the sucker…no threat at all.”
Another head flop. This one made beads of sweat fly off.
“But I did find out,” the little guy said. “Took me two months, but I found you and now I’m going to kill you.”
“Stop saying that! You won’t, you can’t…”
“Go ahead, beg. Beg me not to do it.”
Barlow moaned and leaned back hard against the counter. Mortal terror unmans some people; he was as crippled by it as anybody I’d ever seen. Before long he would beg, down on his knees.
“Where’s Noreen?”
“I swear I don’t know, Harry…Mister Chalfont. She…walked out on me…a few days ago. Took all the money with her.”
“You mean there’s still some of the ten thousand left? I figured it’d all be gone by now. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the money anymore. All I care about is paying you back. You, and then Noreen. Both of you getting just what you deserve.”
Chalfont ached to pay them back, all right, yearned to see them dead. But wishing something and making it happen are two different things. He had the pistol cocked and ready and he’d worked himself into an overheated emotional state, but he wasn’t really a killer. You can look into a man’s eyes in a situation like this, as I had too many times, and tell whether or not he’s capable of cold-blooded murder. There’s a fire, a kind of death light, unmistakable and immutable, in the eyes of those who can, and it wasn’t there in Harry Chalfont’s eyes.
Not that its absence made him any less dangerous. He was wired to the max and filled with hate, and his finger was close to white on the pistol’s trigger. Reflex could jerk off a round, even two, at any time. And if that happened, the slugs could go anywhere-into Barlow, into the young clerk, into me.
“She was all I ever had,” he said. “My job, my savings, my life…none of it meant anything until I met her. Little, ugly, lonely…that’s all I was. But she loved me once, at least enough to marry me. And then you came along and destroyed it all.”
“I didn’t, I tell you, it was all her idea…”
“Shut up. It was you, Barlow, you turned her head, you corrupted her. God damn’ traveling salesman, god damn’ cliche, you must’ve had other women. Why couldn’t you leave her alone?”
Working himself up even more. Nerving himself to pull that trigger. I thought about jumping him, but that wasn’t much of an option. Too much distance between us, too much risk of the pistol going off. One other option. And I’d damned well better make it work.
I said quietly, evenly: “Give me the gun, Mister Chalfont.”
The words didn’t register until I repeated them. Then he blinked, shifted his gaze to me without moving his head. “What did you say?”
“Give me the gun. Put an end to this before it’s too late.”
“No. Shut up.”
“You don’t want to kill anybody. You know it and I know it.”
“He’s going to pay. They’re both going to pay.”
“Fine, make them pay. Press theft charges against them. Send them to prison.”
“That’s not enough punishment for what they did.”
“If you don’t think so, then you’ve never seen the inside of a prison.”
“What do you know about it? Who are you?”
A half-truth was more forceful than the whole truth. I said: “I’m a police officer.”
Barlow and the clerk both jerked looks at me. The kid’s had hope in it, but not Handsome’s; his fear remained unchecked, undiluted.
“You’re lying,” Chalfont said.
“Why would I lie?”
He coughed again, hawked deeply in his throat. “It doesn’t make any difference. You can’t stop me.”
“That’s right, I can’t stop you from shooting Barlow. But I can stop you from shooting your wife. I’m off duty but I’m still armed.” Calculated lie. “If you kill him, then I’ll have to kill you. The instant your gun goes off, out comes
