'Elaine.'
'I thought so. I didn't recall her name, but I thought it must be the same one. I liked her.'
'She's a good woman.'
'You've been friends a long time then.'
'Years and years.'
He nodded. 'When it all started,' he said. 'Your man said you framed him. Is he still saying it now?'
'Yes.'
'Did you?'
I'd left that part out, but I couldn't see any reason to hold it back.
'Yes, I did,' I said. 'I got a lucky shot in and he went out cold. He had a glass jaw. You wouldn't remember a boxer named Bob Satterfield, would you?'
'Wouldn't I though? His fights looked fixed. The ones he lost, that is. He'd be way ahead, and then he'd get tapped on the jaw and go down like a felled steer. Of course you'd never fix a fight that way, but the average man's reasoning powers don't reach that far. Bob Satterfield, now his is a name I've not heard in years.'
'Well, Motley had Satterfield's jaw. While he was out I stuck a gun in his hand and squeezed off a few rounds. It wasn't a complete frame. I just made the charges more serious so that he'd draw a little jail time.'
'And you trusted her to back you?'
'I figured she'd stand up.'
'You thought that well of her.'
'I still do.'
'And rightly so, if she did stand up. Did she?'
'Like a little soldier. She thought it was his gun. I had a throw-down with me, an unregistered pint-size automatic I used to carry around just in case. I palmed it and pretended to find it when I frisked him, so she had no reason not to believe it was his gun. But she was there to see me wrap his fingers around it
and shoot holes in her plaster, and she still went in and swore he'd done the shooting and he'd been trying to kill me when he did it. She put it in her statement and signed it when they typed it up and handed it to her. And she would have sworn to it all over again in court.'
'There's not many you could count on like that.'
'I know.'
'And it worked. He went to prison.'
'He went to prison. But I'm not sure it worked.'
'Why do you say that?'
'Since he got out he's killed eight people that I know of. Three here, five in Ohio.'
'He'd have killed more than that if he'd spent the past twelve years a free man.'
'Maybe. Maybe not. But I gave him a reason to select certain people as his targets. I broke some rules, I pissed into the wind, and now it's blowing back in my face.'
'What else could you do?'
'I don't know. I didn't take a lot of time to think it through when it happened. It was the next thing to instinctive on my part. I figured he belonged inside and I'd do what it took to put him there. Now, though, I don't think I'd do it that way.'
'Why? All because you gave up the drink and found God?'
I laughed. 'I don't know that I've found Him yet,' I said.
'I thought that was what your lot did at those meetings.'
Deliberately he uncorked the bottle and filled his glass. 'I thought you all learned to call Him by His first name.'
'We call each other by our first names. And I suppose some people develop some kind of a working relationship with whatever God means to them.'
'But not you.'
I shook my head. 'I don't know much about God,' I said. 'I'm not even sure if I believe in Him. That seems to change from one day to the next.'
'Ah.'
'But I'm not as quick to play God as I used to be.'
'Sometimes a man has to.'
'Maybe. I'm not sure. I don't seem to feel the need as often as I used to. Whether or not there's a God, it's beginning to dawn on me that I'm not Him.'
He thought that over, working on the whiskey in his glass. If it was having any effect on him, I couldn't see it. Nor was it affecting me. The incident in my hotel room that afternoon had been some sort of watershed, and the threat of picking up a drink had lifted for the time being once the bourbon was done splashing in the sink basin. There were times when it was dangerous for me to be in a saloon, sipping Coke among the whiskey drinkers, but
