surprised him by turning off the light. He would have shot me as soon as I got to the top of the stairs. I realized that I was holding my penlight along the barrel of the revolver, aiming it at Hogan like another gun as if I had been planning my next act all along, and when Hogan's hand reached his jacket button, I switched it on. Tom instantly extinguished his own light.
'Lenny Valentine,' I said.
Hogan had already turned to face into my light, and he was not smiling anymore. A shadow moved into his eyes, and he opened his mouth to say something. The thought of hearing his next words sent a wave of pure revulsion through me. Almost involuntarily, I pulled the trigger and sent a bullet down the bright, hot beam of light.
There was a red flash and a loud, flat crack that the cement walls amplified into an explosion. A black hole appeared just beneath Hogan's hairline, and the light illuminated a bright spatter from the back of his head. Hogan rocked back out of the beam and disappeared. His body hit the floor, and the stench of blood and cordite filled the air. A twist of white spun in the beam of light and disappeared.
'You took a while to make up your mind,' Tom said, shining his light on me. My stiff, outstretched arms were still aiming the revolver at the place where Hogan had been. I let them drop. I could not remember what I'd seen in Hogan's face. Tom shone his light downward. Hogan lay sprawled on the cement with most of his weight on his shoulder and hip, his legs bent and his arms flopped on either side. Blood flowed steadily out of the back of his head and pooled beneath his cheek.
I turned away and wobbled toward the wall. I groped around on the cinderblocks until I found the switch. Then I turned on the lights and looked back at him. A narrow line of red trickled out of the hole at his hairline and slanted across his forehead.
Tom came forward, holstering his automatic, and knelt beside Hogan's body. He rolled him onto his back, and Hogan's right arm landed softly in the growing pool of blood. The odor lodged in my stomach like a rotten oyster. Tom thrust his hands into one of the pockets of the gray suit coat
'What are you doing?' I asked.
'Looking for a key.' He moved to the other side of the body and slid his hand into the other pocket. 'Well, well.' He brought out a small silver key and held it up.
'What's that for?'
'The papers,' he said. 'And now…' He put his hand into the inner pocket of his own jacket and came out with a black marker pen. He uncapped the pen and looked up at me as if daring me to stop him. 'I'm no policeman,' he said. 'I'm not interested in justice, but justice is probably what this is.' He duck-walked a step away from the body, brushed a layer of dust off the cement, and wrote BLUE ROSE in big slanting letters. He spun himself around and looked at me again. 'This time, it really was the detective,' he said. 'Give me that gun.'
I came toward him and handed him the .38. Tom wiped it carefully with his handkerchief and bent over to place it in Hogan's right hand. Then he wrapped the fingers around the handle and poked the index finger through the trigger guard. After that, he raised the front of the suit jacket and pulled Hogan's own .38 out of its holster. He stood up and came toward me, holding out Hogan's gun. 'We'll get rid of this later.'
I slid the revolver into the little wallet clipped to my belt without taking my eyes off Hogan's body.
'We'd better get out of here,' Tom said.
I didn't answer him. I stepped forward and looked down at the face, the open eyes, the slack, empty face.
'You did the right thing,' Tom said.
'I have to make sure,' I said. 'You know what I mean? I have to be sure.'
I knelt beside the body and gathered the material at the waist of the black T-shirt. I pulled the fabric up toward Hogan's neck, but could not see enough. I yanked up the entire shirt until it was bunched under his arms and leaned over to stare at the dead man's chest. It was pale and hairless. Half a dozen circular scars the size of dimes shone in the white skin.
A wave of pure relief went through me like honey, like gold, and the reek of blood suddenly smelled like laughter.
'Good-bye, Fee,' I said, and yanked the shirt back down.
'What was that about, anyhow?' Tom asked behind me.
'The body squad,' I said. 'Old habit.'
I stood up.
Tom looked at me curiously, but did not ask. I switched off the light, and we went up the stairs in the dark.
Less than three minutes later, we were outside in the alley, and five minutes after that, we were back in the Jaguar, driving east.
'Hogan reacted to the name.'
'He sure did,' I said.
'And the business about his chest?'
'Bachelor had little round scars on his chest.'
'Ah, I forgot. The punji stick scars. One of those books I have mentioned them.'
'They weren't punji stick scars. Fee had them, too.'
'Ah,' Tom said. 'Yes. Poor Fee.'
I thought: Sail on, Fee, sail away, Fee Bandolier.
In the dark of the night, we threw Michael Hogan's revolver into the Millhaven River from the Horatio Street bridge. It was invisible even before it smacked into the water, and then it disappeared from history.
The last thing I remembered was the pistol smacking down into the water. I walked out of the garage, having spent all the time between Horatio Street and Eastern Shore Drive with Michael Hogan in the basement of the Beldame Oriental, and went across the top of the driveway in the dark of the night. The moon had long ago gone down, and there were no stars. The world is half night, and the other half is night, too. I saw his face in the sharp, particular beam of the penlight; I saw the black little hole, smaller than a dime, smaller than a penny, appear like a beauty spot beneath his thinning hair.
He had grown to the age of five a block away from me. Our fathers had worked in the same hotel. Sometimes I must have seen him as I wandered through the neighborhood—a little boy sitting on the front steps beside a bed of carefully tended roses.
Tom came up beside me and opened the kitchen door. We went inside, and he flicked a switch, shedding soft light over the old sinks and the white wainscoting and the plain, scarred wooden counter. 'It's a little past three,' Tom said. 'Do you want to go to bed right away?'
'I don't really know,' I said. 'What happens now?' I meant: Whom do we tell? How do we tell?
'What happens now is that I have a drink,' Tom said. 'Do you feel like going straight upstairs?'
