“I will kill that bastard with my own bare hands,” she said.
“I wouldn’t try that.”
“Get away from me! Don’t you dare try to stop me.”
“I will stop you if you take another step.”
“Don’t you threaten me…”
“I’m trying to reason with you. Do you want to listen or do you want to fly off half-cocked and screw everything up?”
She sat and folded her hands primly. She made no effort to blot her spilled drink, which was seeping into the carpet at her feet.
“First of all,” I said, “we still don’t know for a fact that it happened that way. Two, I still don’t know if it was him: it could be you. Three, whoever it is has killed three people. I’m not talking metaphorically here, Ms. Davis. Have you ever seen anyone who’s been shot in the face?”
She looked at her hands, which were trembling uncontrollably.
“It’s one thing to say you’re gonna kill somebody. This boy, whoever he is, is the one with the track record. He bashed the bookscout’s brains out and shot two people in the head not two days ago. Do you think you want to get involved in something like that?”
She spoke through clenched teeth. “What do you want?”
“I want you to do nothing… understand? Don’t make any phone calls, don’t go ripping over there. Just sit tight and wait for me.”
“God!” she cried. “How can I sit back and let that flaming asshole get away with this!”
“Nobody’s getting away with anything. You can’t hide eight thousand books in your hip pocket. I’m gonna find them, if I can get you to stay out of the way.”
She didn’t say anything. I said, “Can I get a couple of straight answers out of you?”
“About what?”
“You and him.”
“There is no me and him. Never was. He has nothing to do with me.”
“You were raised together.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“Come on, Ms. Davis, what happened between you two?”
“Nothing. It was just a case of hate at first sight.”
“Were you jealous of each other?”
“He always was.” She lit another smoke; didn’t realize that she had one going in the ashtray. “He was an adopted child. He always hated that. Hated me. I never had a chance with him, not from the first.”
“Did he ever show any signs of violence, either as a child or later?”
“He never had the guts. He was always sneaky.”
“Sneaky how?”
“I caught him looking in the window once…I was thirteen… that kinda stuff.”
“Do you think he’s capable of murder?”
She seemed to melt suddenly, and for a long, strange moment, I thought she might cry. She pulled herself out of it just as quickly.
“No,” she said.
“That took a lot of effort.”
“Damn right. I’d like to say yes, but I just don’t think he could ever find the nerve to shoot someone. No, he’d be more the type to hire it done.”
I thought of Neff’s turtle-faced man.
“A hit man,” I said.
“Sure. He’d do that, all right. I wouldn’t put that past him at all.”
I drove south, into the coming snowstorm. I thought about the U-Haul truck and the mileage that Bobby Westfall had racked up. I thought about Greenwald and the screwed-up Ballards and the turtle-faced man. Snow began to crust around the edges of my windshield. The road was getting slick. I had an odd feeling of some omniscient demon riding with me, a malignant force waiting to spring. The strange thing was, I couldn’t remember Val Ballard’s face: I could hear his voice and see his hands working as he sifted through his uncle’s stuff; I could see his red tongue flicking as he licked and stuck labels on this item and that, but his face remained a blank. 1 could see Bobby Westfall easily enough, and we had only met a few times, months ago. I could see Peter and Pinky: silent passengers with the demon curled up between them.
