and poured salt over them. They were alive when they went to work. Man. Ronnie, such a pretty girl. And even as the skin came off her skull, her eyes—they looked so big without the skin—there was still hope in them. And then Caroline pulled her eyes out with pliers, said she didn’t want them looking at her.”
“You sonofabitches,” I said. “Don’t tell me any more about it. Don’t tell me one little thing more.”
“I’m interested,” Booger said.
“For Christ sakes, Booger,” I said.
“All right, all right,” Booger said. “Want me to hit him some more? Just for fun this time?”
“No. It’s time to tell the cops, stop this whole thing.”
“Well, you can do that, but that means we got some explaining to do,” Booger said. “I’m not much wanting to get in the middle of this thing that way. I’ll go to the wall for you, brother, but I don’t want to go to jail. Torture, it’s frowned on. It upsets some people’s stomachs.”
“Mine among them,” I said.
“Hell,” Gregore said. “You ought to be on this side of it.”
“You get us in the middle of it,” Booger said to me, “then your brother Jimmy has some explaining to do. I don’t think it’s the way to go. I believe a man ought to take care of his own problems. Do his own work.”
“This isn’t my work.”
“Sure it is,” Booger said. “You signed on a long time ago for this one. You’re riding for the brand till this range war is over.”
I looked Gregore over. He was pathetic. I almost felt sorry for him. I said, “Anything else we should know?”
“I can’t think of anything,” Gregore said.
Booger raised the phone book. “Oh, come on, Gregore, give us a little more. Anything as long as it isn’t a lie.”
Gregore gave a nod; his voice was hardly audible. “They’re gonna pick up the money from Dinkins and leave town, but before they do, they’re gonna fuck Dinkins up too.”
“Kill him?” I asked.
“No,” Gregore said. “When it’s over, they’re going to send a note with a DVD Caroline has been holding back. One of her and Dinkins doing the crawdad shuffle. That’ll ruin him.”
“Who’s going to see it?” I asked.
“Whoever they want. Cops maybe. Dinkins gets picked up, he can tell them all the conspiracy theories he wants, but he’ll have to implicate himself in the assassination plot. He’ll have to prove Caroline’s alive, and that she’s some kind of co-mastermind with some guy who looks like something out of a horror movie. It’s so complex and weird, it’ll be better he just takes a fucking for doing the fucking.”
“Why screw Dinkins?”
“You still don’t get it,” Gregore said. “The game, man. The game.”
“Cops, they got to wonder where the DVD came from, don’t they?” I said.
Gregore studied me. I could tell he was reluctant.
I said, “Tell the truth, and I won’t have him hit you any more.”
Booger raised the phone book. “Give me a reason not to believe you,” he said.
“It’ll be mailed from your brother,” Gregore said, keeping an eye on Booger. “The note to the cops will be typed. She got your brother’s signature off an old test paper, and she can copy it. She’s a damn good forger. That way, he doesn’t get off scot-free. Way Caroline sees it, your brother has got to get his too. She’s mad about those two geeks stealing the DVDs, and she’s mad you and Jimmy got them away from them. She likes throwing curveballs, but she don’t like catching them. God, man. If I could just have a little water.”
“You know,” Booger said, “I’m a little thirsty myself. Working this phone book has dried me out. But, you know, I still got my swing.”
42
We put Gregore in the car and drove on out toward the scenic overlook. As we went along, me at the wheel, Gregore weak and bloody beside me, Booger leaned over the seat and pressed the .45 against Gregore’s head.
“Man,” said Booger, “you’re not looking so good.”
“I’m not feeling so good,” Gregore said. “You didn’t have to hit me so much.”
“Hell,” said Booger, “I know that.”
“I’m still thirsty,” Gregore said.
“People in hell want ice water too,” Booger said.
I thought about everything Gregore had said. I understood a lot of it now. Mostly I understood Stitch was playing Dinkins through Caroline, and he was playing the black and white communities like a finely tuned instrument.
He had done the same sort of thing in other towns, playing his games, all of them ending in an assassination that didn’t seem connected to other events and oddities. It was all a happy game to Stitch.
As for Caroline, once upon a time Stitch had been her mother’s lover, and then he had been hers. He had impregnated her, then gone away. Caroline had dumped their love child, and then, in time, Stitch came back. He was full of promises, rich with lies about love and how he wanted her and needed her back.
Caroline wanted to believe, and so she had. He was probably the only person in the world she would believe. I bet he was the one who had given her the Fitzgerald book when she was a child. Maybe he had read the Poe stories to her, including her favorite, “The Premature Burial.”
The whole goddamn thing creeped me, big-time.
I remembered a line I had read from Jerzy Fitzgerald’s book. He said life was full of holes and the trick was to live between them. Stitch was not living between them. He was living in them, and loving it.
We came to the top of the hill and I parked in front of a lightning-struck oak that had split down the middle almost to the ground. The tree was still alive and the split was wide and made a large V of darkness, and from that height the moon seemed wedged there in the fork. I turned off the lights and the motor. We got out of the car. Gregore could hardly stand up. He looked as if he had lost ten pounds and an inch in height.
Booger gave him a kick in the ass, said, “Go up there and stand by that tree, limp dick.”
Gregore trudged up the hill like Jesus carrying the cross up Calvary. When Gregore got up there, he stood in the fork of the lightning-struck tree. He put one hand on half of the tree to right himself. The moon was at his back like a spotlight. He was a silhouette up there.
“You said you’d let me go,” Gregore said. His voice sounded hollow, floated down from the top of the hill like a dead leaf falling from a tree.
“We’re going to leave you here,” I said. “I advise you not to come back to town. You stay out of this mess. Be done. You deserve worse than what we’re giving you.”
“Doesn’t everybody?” he said.
“Not everybody,” Booger said. “Some are just unlucky. They get nominated for the big ticket. Right now, I’m punching yours.”
By the time I realized what Booger meant, the .45 went up and the sound of it going off was like a mortar shot. Gregore’s head split and something jumped out of it and landed wetly in the grass and he went down, falling backward into the fork in the tree. He hung there for a moment and then his head went back and his body flipped after him. All that was left was his shoe hung up in the fork. I could hear him tumbling down the hill in the grass on the other side, and then I didn’t hear anything but the ringing in my ear from the blast of the .45.
“Goddamn, Booger. Why, man?”
“Don’t be silly,” Booger said. “You think he was just going to hitchhike to Lufkin, catch a bus to Vegas? He’d have been back in the game in no time. He might have warned that other guy, Numb Nuts…whatever his name is.”
“Jesus, Booger.”
“No one heard that shot. Not out here. And like all my guns, it’s a cold piece. You couldn’t trace this gun if you were Sherlock Holmes. Any of my weapons. There’s no record. Shit, I pretty much made some of them. Give me a pipe and a wrench and a cutting torch, I can make something that will shoot like a sniper rifle.”
