I didn’t say anything.
“I will kill that bastard with my own bare hands,” she said.
“I wouldn’t try that.”
“Get away from me! Don’t you dare try to stop me.”
“I will stop you if you take another step.”
“Don’t you threaten me…”
“I’m trying to reason with you. Do you want to listen or do you want to fly off half-cocked and screw everything up?”
She sat and folded her hands primly. She made no effort to blot her spilled drink, which was seeping into the carpet at her feet.
“First of all,” I said, “we still don’t know for a fact that it happened that way. Two, I still don’t know if it was him: it could be you. Three, whoever it is has killed three people. I’m not talking metaphorically here, Ms. Davis. Have you ever seen anyone who’s been shot in the face?”
She looked at her hands, which were trembling uncontrollably.
“It’s one thing to say you’re gonna kill somebody. This boy, whoever he is, is the one with the track record. He bashed the bookscout’s brains out and shot two people in the head not two days ago. Do you think you want to get involved in something like that?”
She spoke through clenched teeth. “What do you want?”
“I want you to do nothing… understand? Don’t make any phone calls, don’t go ripping over there. Just sit tight and wait for me.”
“God!” she cried. “How can I sit back and let that flaming asshole get away with this!”
“Nobody’s getting away with anything. You can’t hide eight thousand books in your hip pocket. I’m gonna find them, if I can get you to stay out of the way.”
She didn’t say anything. I said, “Can I get a couple of straight answers out of you?”
“About what?”
“You and him.”
“There is no me and him. Never was. He has nothing to do with me.”
“You were raised together.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“Come on, Ms. Davis, what happened between you two?”
“Nothing. It was just a case of hate at first sight.”
“Were you jealous of each other?”
“He always was.” She lit another smoke; didn’t realize that she had one going in the ashtray. “He was an adopted child. He always hated that. Hated me. I never had a chance with him, not from the first.”
“Did he ever show any signs of violence, either as a child or later?”
“He never had the guts. He was always sneaky.”
“Sneaky how?”
“I caught him looking in the window once…I was thirteen… that kinda stuff.”
“Do you think he’s capable of murder?”
She seemed to melt suddenly, and for a long, strange moment, I thought she might cry. She pulled herself out of it just as quickly.
“No,” she said.
“That took a lot of effort.”
“Damn right. I’d like to say yes, but I just don’t think he could ever find the nerve to shoot someone. No, he’d be more the type to hire it done.”
I thought of Neff’s turtle-faced man.
“A hit man,” I said.
“Sure. He’d do that, all right. I wouldn’t put that past him at all.”
42
I drove south, into the coming snowstorm. I thought about the U-Haul truck and the mileage that Bobby Westfall had racked up. I thought about Greenwald and the screwed-up Ballards and the turtle-faced man. Snow began to crust around the edges of my windshield. The road was getting slick. I had an odd feeling of some omniscient demon riding with me, a malignant force waiting to spring. The strange thing was, I couldn’t remember Val Ballard’s face: I could hear his voice and see his hands working as he sifted through his uncle’s stuff; I could see his red tongue flicking as he licked and stuck labels on this item and that, but his face remained a blank. 1 could see Bobby Westfall easily enough, and we had only met a few times, months ago. I could see Peter and Pinky: silent passengers with the demon curled up between them. C’mon, people, talk to me. “Talk,” I said out loud. Tell me something I don’t already know. Who’s the turtle-faced man, and where are the books, and how-oh-how had Rita McKinley’s appraisal been so far off the mark?
In the old days, Littleton was a prime horse racing town. Centennial was never a big-time track, but it wasn’t the bush league either. Carol and I used to come down two or three times a summer to watch the horses run and lose a little of our hard-earned dough. Now when 1 come, all I feel is loneliness, and an aching sense of my own mortality. They’re tearing everything down, and someday soon they’ll come up behind me and tear me down too. Something as big as a racetrack ought to have a little bit of immortality attached to it But they tore old Centennial down and plowed her under. Right out there where the grandstand stood are high-rise offices and apartment buildings. Oh, sacrilege. All that’s left of the old days is the ever-flowing Platte: it snakes its way down from the mountains and winds past expensive subdivisions and subdivided farms and modern shopping centers built on the land of old ranches. In one of those houses, just south of the racetrack, Val Ballard lived.
I checked the address. The house sat back from the street in a grove of trees. It was very dark: the trees blotted out all light from the road. A wind had risen and the snow had blown in drifts over the driveway. I came in boldly, with my lights on, and sat for a moment with my lights playing across the front of the house. Nobody home, it looked to me. I turned off the lights, then the motor. The darkness was oppressive. I got out and followed my penlight up the walk to the front door. I rang the bell, then knocked. Nothing. I walked around the house, into the teeth of the gale, and fought my way across the yard to the garage. He had gone somewhere and he had gone in a hurry. He had left the door up and there were rubber marks on the cement. I could still see the ruts he had left in the yard, only half buried under the snow.
I went back to the car and got my tools. I knew I was a sitting duck for anyone who drove up—my car was there in the open yard, so there’d be no running away from it. When I decide to commit suicide, I don’t brood over it. I did think once of consequences. I could get three to five for this. Then I held the penlight in my teeth and picked open the front door lock.
The first thing to do was find an escape hatch. The back door. I crossed the main room and went through a dark corridor and found it. I checked it to make sure it could be opened easily. Fine. Well, not fine, but it wouldn’t get any finer. This was it. I had come looking for Ballard, I would tell my executioners. The house was dark but I had noticed the garage door up and had gone around to check. That’s how they happened to catch me walking around from the back yard. I would slip out the back way and walk nonchalantly around the house, and this was what I would tell them. I had stopped behind the house to take a leak, a nice touch, I thought, that gave some credibility to a shaggy-dog tale like that.
With that settled, I went through the house, looking for… what? I had a half-baked hunch I might even find Stan Ballard’s books. The place to start was in the basement. I found it with no trouble, a set of dark stairs that led down from the kitchen. If he came home now, I was sunk. Forget the back door, I’d never make it. I took a long breath and started down. The little light led me to a finished room. There were no books: just a water bed, a chest of drawers, a big-screen TV, a VCR, and a wall of pornographic tapes. I could see at a glance the kind of entertainment he liked, with titles like Love in Chains and Ginger’s Fantasy throbbing on the shelf. It didn’t mean anything. There was a room off the main room and I went there and opened the door. No books: not much of anything. The room was unfinished, and there were a few boxes inside, but a peek in them revealed nothing but junk.