“… You know it? I figured you were a real serious type, but I see you got a sense of humor.”
Clement appeared, coming out of the front hall with a bottle of beer in each hand and walked over to the desk. “It might be a little weird, your sense of humor, but then each person’s got their own style, way of doing things.”
Raymond watched him place the bottle in his right hand on the desk, then, maybe twelve inches from the Walther. The hand remained there.
“I brought you a beer just in case,” Clement said.
The hand came slowly, carefully, away from the desk to the front of his denim jacket.
“I got a opener here someplace, stuck it in my jeans. Okay, partner? I’m just going in here to get the opener.” He glanced down.
The hand moved inside the denim jacket.
Raymond raised the Colt 9-mm, extended.
As Clement looked up, Raymond shot him three times. He fired seeing Clement’s eyes and fired again in the roomful of sound, still seeing the man’s eyes, and fired again as Clement was slammed against the couch and almost went over it with the momentum but collapsed into cushions and lay there, denim legs stretching to the beer bottle on the floor with foam oozing out of it, his hands holding his chest and stomach now as though he were holding his life in, not wanting it to escape, his eyes open in stunned surprise.
He said, “You shot me… Jesus Christ, you shot me…”
Raymond approached him. He reached down, gently moving Clement’s hands aside, felt a handle and drew it from Clement’s belt. Raymond looked at it in his hand as he straightened. A curved handle that was fashioned from bone or the horn of an animal, attached to a stainless steel bottle opener.
Raymond went to the desk. He placed the opener next to the Walther, picked up the phone and dialed a number he had known for fifteen years. As he waited he reholstered the Colt. When a voice came on Raymond identified himself, gave the address and hung up.
Clement was staring at him, eyes glazed, clouding over. “You call EMS?”
“I called the Wayne County Morgue.”
Clement continued to stare, dazed, eyes unblinking.
Raymond could hear street sounds very faintly, far away.
Clement said, “I don’t believe it… what did you kill me for?”
Raymond didn’t answer. Maybe tomorrow he’d think of something he might have said. After a little while Raymond picked up the opener from the desk and began paring the nail of his right index finger with the sharply pointed hooked edge.