Rugar made a motion with his mouth which he probably thought was a smile.
'Yes, liking or not liking has never had much to do with my work either,' he said.
We were on Causeway Street now. There were cabs lined up in front of North Station. Rugar signaled to one and waited while it pulled forward to him.
As he waited he turned and looked at me. 'You won this time.'
'Yep.'
'There may never be a next time.'
'Yep.'
'But if there is,' he said, 'I plan to win.'
He stared at me. His eyes had no animation in them. It was like looking at the underside of two bottle caps.
'I like a cheery optimism,' I said. 'It's good to get up each morning as if your hair were on fire.'
Rugar continued to look, the way you might survey a project you might someday undertake. He stood stock still while he looked. But the low throb of deadliness seemed somehow alive between us, as if his gray corporeal self was an insignificant replication of the near Satanic energy that was his real self. Then the cab pulled up and he turned toward it.
'Rugar,' I said.
He turned half bent to step in the cab and looked back at me.
'I took you once,' I said. 'I'll take you again.'
Rugar's expression didn't change. For all I know he didn't hear me. He turned back to the cab and stepped in and shut the door. He said something to the driver and the cab pulled away in the steady straight-down snowfall. I watched it until it was out of sight.
Not killing him may have been an error.
Chapter 56
SUSAN AND I were standing with Pearl on the sidewalk of the Larz Anderson Bridge, leaning on the parapet, looking down at the river on a late afternoon in early winter, while the homebound traffic edged toward Harvard Square. The light that lingered after sunset colored the atmosphere blue, and the snow along the river looked whiter than I knew it to be. A couple of hundred yards downstream, the Weeks Footbridge was a graceful arch over the current.
'A year,' Susan said, staring down at the slick black surface of the water. Between us, Pearl reared up on her hind legs and put her forepaws on the parapet and stared downriver, too. I didn't wonder what she was thinking. It was aimless, and I was glad I didn't know. It was one of the things about the link between people and dogs that I liked. Neither would ever fully know the other. Maybe it was true of the link between people and people, too.
'Why was the relationship between Clint and Melissa such a secret? Was it Clint being black?'
'Yes.'
'How awful.'
'Yes.'
'How awful for her parents,' Susan said. 'How awful for the Stapleton family.'
'Yeah.'
'They had everything, money, position, each other. The girl was lovely and successful, wasn't she?'
'So they tell me.'
'The boy was handsome and accomplished.'
'And he didn't mean to kill her,' I said. 'Just a little exotic sex.'
'And it destroys his whole family, the father, the son-the mother must be devastated…'
'To save a career criminal who'll be back in jail in no time,' I said.
'And a professional killer goes free to accomplish it.'
'Yeah.'
'You don't even need his testimony, now,' Susan said. 'The Stapletons confessed.'
'Yep.'
'But he goes free anyway.'
'A deal's a deal,' I said. 'We needed the threat of his testimony to get the confessions.'
'And the Stapletons go to jail while two career criminals go free.'
'Couldn't have said it better myself.'
'They are both guilty of things,' Susan said. 'But the people going free are probably guilty of more things.'
'Almost certainly.'
'And the father was trying to save his son.'
