my biggest advantage, surprise. I drove around the block and parked in the dark behind a pickup truck. Again I was walking in the rain. I approached the fat man’s car cautiously. Walked around to the driver’s side and looked in. His wallet lay open on the seat. It was stuffed with money…five, six hundred dollars. I fished out his driver’s license and stared at his picture. William James Carmichael, it said. I wrote down his name and address. I looked in the glove compartment and found several letters addressed to Willie Carmichael. I put them back, got out of the car, and walked to the driveway that led back to the house.
It was heavily draped with trees. I could see lights off in the distance, and a walk that skirted the drive. The walk was shrubbed but too visible, I thought, from the house. I came up the drive, dark as a load of coal, planting each step firmly. It converged with the walk near a flagstone approach to the front door. The only light came from the front windows, dimmed by curtains and reflecting off the slick stones of the walkway.
Three long strides brought me flat against the house. I moved to the door, looking and listening. There was nothing doing anywhere. The door was locked, hardly a surprise. I put my head against it, listening for footsteps, movement, anything that betrayed some living presence. There was nothing.
Just…a faint strain of music.
I took my head away and the music stopped. I listened again. The beat sounded tauntingly familiar, like something I knew but couldn’t quite call up. The steady hiss of the rain all but drowned it out. It quivered just outside my senses, one of those half-remembered bits of business that drives you crazy at two o’clock in the morning. Other than that, the house was still, so quiet it gave me a queasy feeling. I eased back into the brush and around to the side. I saw a light in a window, dim and distant, escaping from another room well back in the house. I pushed through the undergrowth and looked through a small crack in the curtain. I could see a piece of a drawing room, neat and well-furnished with what looked to be antique chairs. Somehow it didn’t fit what I knew about Pruitt, but you never can tell about people: I really didn’t know the man. I squinted through the crack and saw a doorway that led off to a hall. The light came through from the front, and nothing was going on back here.
I touched the glass and there it was again, that rhythmic vibration, as much feeling as sound. I put my ear against it, and on came that faraway melody, that staccato tune that was right on the tip of my…
I froze, unable to believe what had just gone through my head.
“Eleanor Rigby.”
Somewhere inside, someone was playing that song.
Over and over.
Loud enough to shake the walls.
At two o’clock in the morning.
I kept moving. Everything was the color of ink. I came into the backyard, taking a step at a time. Around the edge of a porch, groping, groping. I touched a screened door and saw a long, dim, narrow crack of light. I pulled open the door and moved toward it. It was the back door of the house itself, cracked open like the fat man’s car. The music seeped through it like some dammed-up thing that couldn’t get through the crack fast enough. I had my gun in my hand as I nudged the door with my shoulder. It swung open and the music gushed out.
I was in a black kitchen, lit only by the glow from another room. I could see the dim outlines of a range and refrigerator, nothing more…then, straight ahead, a table with chairs around it. I crossed the room, feeling my way. The music was loud now: I had come into a hallway that led to the front. I walked to the end, to the edge of the parlor. It looked like some proper sitting room from Victorian days. The light came down from above, where the music was playing. I reached the stairs and started up. There was a blip that sounded like a bomb, and the music started again, a shock wave of sound.
I saw a smudge on the stair, a red smear ground into the carpet…
Another one…
…and another one.
More at the top.
I heard a soft sigh. It was my own. The overhead light at the top revealed a dark hallway. I could see a room at the end of it, dimly lit as if by a night-light. I saw more red marks on the carpet coming out of the hall. I moved that way, the hall closing me in like a tunnel. There was a door on each side halfway down, the one on the left open, the room there dark. I kept flat against the wall, breathing deeply, aware of the sudden silence again as the record ended. The room smelled strongly of ashes. My mind caught the smell but it didn’t hold: there was too much going on. I reached inside and felt along the wall with the palm of my hand, found the light, flipped it up, and the flash turned the room the color of white gold. I could see my reflection in a mirror across the room: I was standing in a half-crouch with the gun in my hand, moving it slowly from side to side. It was some kind of office. There was a desk and a filing cabinet, with one drawer hanging open and several files strewn across the floor. The walls were painted a cream color: the only window was covered by a dark curtain.
I turned and faced the room across the way. I could see the thin line of light at the bottom of the door, and in the light cast out from the office, more crusty red smears on the floor. There, I thought: that’s where all the blood’s coming from. I pivoted back on my heel and flattened against the wall. Turned the knob, pushing the door wide. And there he was, Fat Willie Carmichael, and I didn’t need a medical degree to know he had done Pruitt his last favor. The room looked like a slaughterhouse, with blood on the bed and the floor and the walls: splotches of it spewed as if by a high-pressure pump. The fat man had fallen on his back and died there. His head was wrenched back and I could see that his throat had been cut. His fingers were rigid and clawlike, clutching at nothing. I stood in the
