“Oh, shut up. Every jackass that shoots the wrong guy talks that way. It makes me sick.”
He looked sheepish. He had the same thick dark hair as Cynthia and Charles, but it was shot through with gray. His chin was weak, and rimmed with folds of fat. His eyes were large with dark circles. He was just as rundown and creaky as this building, and just as depressing.
His hand was still in his desk drawer. He began to slowly move it, still searching for that gun.
I lunged out of my seat and slammed the drawer on his hand. Then I grabbed the top edge of the drawer and yanked it out of the desk. It flew backward and smashed the corner of his window before falling. Papers and pens scattered to the floor, but I focused on the heavy clunk of a handgun.
Another pistol. Cabot started toward it, but I shoved him back with all my strength. He fell against the chair and crumpled into the corner.
I picked up the handgun. It was a.45, and a little old-fashioned. Pulling back the slide, I saw that it was loaded but hadn’t been cleaned recently. Sloppy. Everything about this guy was sloppy.
“Go sit down,” I told him.
He moved like a little kid being sent to the corner, but he did it. “Who are you? What do you want?” he asked.
It was a relief to find someone who did not already know my whole history. “Just a guy doing a favor for a friend. What are you going to do, Cabot?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m going to go to jail. And I’m going to go bankrupt. I’ll probably have to sell the house on Whidbey and…” He was withdrawing into himself as he talked.
“Cabot,” I said again. He looked at me. “What are you going to do about Cynthia? About Charles? How many more guns do you have?”
“Oh,” he said. “Will you apologize to Cynthia for me? I’d been drinking, and I was desperate, and… and I was worried about Charles-“
I laughed. “So worried that you shot at his sister?”
“Charles is sick,” he said resentfully.
“How sick?”
“He’s got a tumor or something. He’s lost a ton of weight-have you seen him recently?”
I thought about the tall, slender, dark-haired guy I’d seen at the Hammer Bay Toy office. I nodded.
“Well, he used to be fat. Big, porky fat, like a Samoan or something. But he’s just melted away. And he’s been having seizures.”
“What? Like epilepsy?” I pretended not to know anything. I wanted to see what he would tell me.
“Don’t know. He hasn’t been to a doctor as far as I can tell. We have the same doctor-the whole family does- and I know Charles hasn’t been to him. And he hasn’t left town, either, so he hasn’t been to see anyone else.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“About two years, I guess. It started right around the same time as…”
“As what?”
Cabot rubbed his nose. “As, um, the play-offs. We were watching the NBA finals, and he fell down in the bathroom. He wouldn’t let us take him to County. I think that was the first time. He looked surprised and kind of shocked, like it hadn’t happened before.”
“Is that why you tried to have him declared incompetent?”
“If he’s seriously sick,” Cabot said, his gaze sullen and his face stubborn, “he needs to see a doctor.”
“And if you get a couple bucks out of the deal, that’s just a happy side effect, right?”
“That’s not how it is.”
“If you say so.”
My needling got a rise out of him. He leaned toward me, his voice getting higher and more petulant. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! You’re not even a part of this family!”
“Thank God for that. I didn’t bring my Kevlar.”
He opened and closed his little fish mouth several times, then the wind went out of him. He sagged against the back of his chair.
“How do they do it?” he said. “My brother always knew just the right thing to do. He always made the right move. It was like he knew just what would happen. I’ve never been able to do that. I just follow my nose and try to do the smart thing, but I have no idea where it will lead.”
“You wouldn’t make much of a chess player,” I said.
“I suck at chess. Is that the secret? Chess?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter now. I’ve been sitting here, trying to decide if I should kill myself. I don’t think I have the guts for it.”
“Good. Prison is bad, but you can survive it.”
“God. At least I wouldn’t have to look at this anymore.” He shifted some papers on his desk and pulled out a slender newspaper. It was a copy of
