Outside, something else fell over and coyotes howled in unison like a doowop group from hell. David jumped, then glanced over his shoulder to make sure Entragian wasn’t sneaking up on him. He wasn’t. David looked back at the Town Safety Officer. He knew what he had to do, and he thought if he could touch Pie, he could probably touch this stranger.
First, however, he picked up the p—Ione. He expected it to be dead and it was. He hit the cut-off buttons a time or two anyway, saying “Hello. Hello.”
Room service, send me up a room, he thought, and shiv-ered as he put the handset back in the cradle. He went around the desk and stood next to the cop with the pens in his eyes. The dead man’s name-plaque-JAMES REED, TOWN SAFETY OFFICER-was still on his desk, so the one in his mouth was something else. OPS HERE was printed on the part sticking out between his teeth.
David could smell something familiar-not aftershave or cologne. He looked at the dead man’s folded hands, saw the deep cracks in the skin, and understood. It was hand lotion he smelled, either the same stuff his mother used or something similar. Jim Reed must have finished rubbing some into his hands not long before he was killed.
David tried to look into Reed’s lap and couldn’t. The man was too fat and pulled in too close to his desk for David to be able to see what he needed to see. There was a small black hole in the center of the chairback-that he could see just fine. Reed had been shot; the thing with the pens had been done (David hoped) after he was already dead.
Get going. Hurry.
He started to pull the chair back, then shouted with surpiise and jumped out of the way when it over-balanced almost at his touch and spilled Jim Reed’s dead weight onto the floor. The corpse uttered a great dead belch when it hit. The plaque in its mouth flew out like a—missile leaving its silo. It landed upside down, but David could read it with no trouble just the same: THE BUCK—STOPS HERE.
Heart pounding harder than ever, he dropped to one knee beside the body. Reed’s uniform pants were unbut-toned and unzipped, exposing some decidedly non-reg underdrawers (vast, silk, peach-colored), but David barely noticed these. He was looking for something else, and he sighed with relief when he saw it. On one well-padded hip was Reed’s service revolver. On the other was a keychain clipped to a belt-loop. Biting his lower lip, somehow sure that the dead cop was going to reach out (oh shit the mummy’s after us) and grab him, David struggled to free the keys from the belt-loop. At first the clip wouldn’t open for him, but he was finally able to get it loose. He picked through the keys quickly, praying to find what he needed… and did. A square one that almost didn’t rook like a key at all. A black magnetic strip ran down its length. The key to the holding cells upstairs.
He hoped. — David put the keyring in his pocket, glanced curiously 21 at Reed’s open pants again, then unsnapped the strap over the cop’s gun. He pulled it out, holding it in both hands, feeling its extraordinary weight and sense of inheld vio-lence. A revolver, not an automatic with the bullets buried away in the handle. David turned the muzzle toward him-self, careful to keep his fingers outside the trigger-guard, so he could look at the cylinder. There were bullet-heads in every hole he could see, so that was probably all right. The first chamber might be empty-in the movies cops sometimes did that to keep from shooting themselves by accident-but he reckoned that wouldn’t matter if he pulled the trigger at least twice, and fast.
He turned the gun around again and inspected it from the butt forward, looking for a safety-catch. He didn’t see one, and very gingerly pulled back on the trigger a little.
When he saw the hammer start to rise out of its hood, he let off the pressure in a hurry.
He didn’t want to fire the gun down here. He didn’t know how smart coyotes were, but he guessed that if they were smart about anything, it would probably be about guns.
He went back out into the main office. The wind howled, throwing sand against the window. The panes were bruise-purple now. Soon they’d be black. He looked over at the ugly green curtain, and the shape which lay beneath it. Love you, Pie, he thought, then went back out into the hall. He stood there a moment, taking deep breaths, eyes closed, gun held at his side with. the muzzle pointed at the floor.
“God, I never shot a gun in my life,” he said. “Please help me be able to shoot this one. Jesus’ sake, amen.”
That taken care of, David started up the stairs.
Mary Jackson was sitting on her bunk, looking—down at her folded hands and thinking arsenic thoughts about her sister-in-law. Deirdre Finney, with her pretty—pale face and sweet, stoned smile and pre-Raphaehte curls. Deirdre who didn’t eat meat (“It’s like, cruel, you know.”) but smoked the smoke, oh yes, Deirdre had been going steady with that rascal Panama Red for years now Deirdre with her Mr. Smiley-Smile stickers. Deirdre who had gotten her brother killed and her sister-in-law slammed into a hicksville jail cell that was really Death Row, and all because she was too fucking fried to remember that she’d left her extra pot under the spare tire That’s not fair, a more rational part of her mind replied It was the license plate, not the pot. That’s why Entragian stopped you. In a way it was like the Angel of Death seeing a doorway without the right mark on it. If the dope hadn’t been there, he would’ve found something else. Once you caught his eye, you were cooked, that’s all. And you know it.
But she didn’t want to know it; thinking of it that way, as some sort of weird natural disaster, was just too awful. 21 It was better to blame it on Peter’s idiot sister, to imagine punishing Deirdre in a number of nonlethal but painful ways. Caning-the sort they administered to thieves in Hong Kong-was the most satisfying, but she also saw herself hiking the tip of a pointed high-heeled shoe into Deirdre’s flat little fashionplate ass.
Anything to get that room-for-rent look out of her eyes long enough for Mary to scream “you GOT YouR BROTHER KILLED, you STUPID TWAT, ARE YOU READING ME.” into Deirdre’s face and to see the understanding there.
“Violence breeds violence,” she told her hands in a calm, teacherly tone. Talking to herself under these cir-cumstances seemed perfectly normal. “I know it, every-body knows it, but thinking about it is so pleasant, sometimes.”
“What.” Ralph Carver asked. He sounded dazed. In fact-gruesome idea-he sounded quite a bit like the walking short-circuit that was her sister-in-law.
“Nothing. Never mind.”
She got up. Two steps took her to the front of the cell. She wrapped her hands around the bars and looked out. The coyote was sitting on the floor with the remains of Johnny Marinville’s leather jacket in front of its fore-paws, looking up at the writer as if mesmerized.
“Do you think he got away.” Ralph asked her. “Do you think my boy got away, ma’am.”
“It’s not ma’am, it’s Mary, and I don’t know. I want to believe it, I can tell you that. I think there’s a pretty good chance that he did, actually.” As long as he didn’t run into the cop, she added to herself.
“Yeah, I guess so. I had no idea he was so serious about the praying stuff,” Ralph said.
He sounded almost apolo-getic, which Mary found weird, under the circumstances. “I thought it was probably… I don’t know… a passing fad. Sure didn’t look that way, did it.”
“No,” Mary agreed. “It didn’t.”
“Why do you keep staring at me, Bosco.” Marinville asked the coyote. “You got my fucking jacket, what else do you want. As if I didn’t have a pretty good idea.” He looked up at Mary. “You know, if one of us could get out of here, I think that mangebasket might actually turn tail and-”