There was one man Joe would have liked to be able to consult before he had to discuss this subject any more, but that man didn’t happen to be available. Somewhat to Joe’s surprise, he found himself wishing that there’d been a vampire in the hospital last night, to give him a nocturnal briefing.
But he was going to have to answer on his own. “Suppose,” he said carefully, “I say I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about?”
“Then,” said Charley, “we would have to hypothesize.” He brought the word out in carefully polished tones, but nonchalantly, as if he thought that coming from him it might have a certain surprise value. “And what we hypothesize is something like this: some unknown friend of yours was in that alley too, and carrying a piece, and his just happened to be loaded in that silvery and unorthodox style. And after your friend had departed, taking with him all his spent cartridge cases, we found some of his bullets but none of yours. This theory, however, however attractive it may be, fails when we hear from the lab that the silver bullets were all fired from your gun, don’t bullshit me, man.”
And all the time Charley, unperturbed, drove on quietly and safely through spattering rain. Not looking at Joe, he waited for an answer.
For years now Joe had been expecting the arrival of some moment like this one, when he would have to try to make such things as vampires and magic a part of some official record. He’d even had bad dreams about it a few times. He wasn’t ready to face the moment yet, if there was any way at all in which it could be avoided.
He said: “No regulation that I know of against loading silver.”
“And your old lady can afford it, if you can’t. Oh shit, man, don’t come on to me now with regulations.” At last Charley was irritated. “Off the record, now. Nobody in the Department really gives a damn if you fired diamonds or moneymarket certificates at that cat, long as you wasted him. I don’t think any reporters gonna get their hands on any of that silver. But—well, I didn’t figure you for going to fortune tellers, any of that jazz.”
“No,” Joe sighed. So far the reporters had been put off effectively, but sooner or later they’d have to talk to the hero who’d shot Carados. That would be another thing to face. “I didn’t figure myself that way either. Can we talk about all this later?”
“Sure. But you’re gonna have to talk about it pretty soon, with some people a lot higher up in the Department than me.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
Their arranged rendezvous with the other lawmen was at a state police station in a western suburb. They reached the place a little after three o’clock, and Joe was introduced to FBI, State’s Attorney, State Police; they all gave him looks of large respect, somewhat tinged with envy. He was the wounded waster of Carados.
And they had Falcon with them, and were of course watching the old man continuously if casually. It was the first glimpse Joe had had of the old man since they’d both been carried out of the alley the night before. The old guy was unhurt, dressed now in a fresh issue of jail clothes, though not officially under arrest, and appeared to be much wrapped up in his own thoughts. When the large all-male party had been reshuffled and dealt out into four cars for the long drive, Joe found himself in the back seat of a CPD vehicle. Falcon sat at his left side, with Charley on the other side of Falcon. Christoffel, another Homicide detective, was doing the driving, with a man from Intelligence, whose name Joe hadn’t really caught, beside him.
When they had got under way, Joe asked conversationally: “How’s it going, Mr. Falcon?”
The old man hardly turned his head, and didn’t really answer. With a worried expression he appeared to be contemplating his own right thumbnail, which stuck up from his hand clasped in his lap. The car was heading now for an entrance to the westbound/northwestbound interstate, the three other cars of the convoy with it, two ahead and one behind.
Joe’s wounded arm hurt. He eased it out of the sling, and tried to arrange support for it by crossing his legs. “Or have you decided to change your name again?” It wasn’t a jeer, but a respectful request for information.
“Wish I could, sometimes.” The old man’s voice was surprisingly clear, reasonable, thoughtful. If they could put him on the stand like this they’d have a good chance in court, provided of course that they could catch someone for him to be a witness against. Wherever his voice was coming from now, it was a great distance from Skid Row. The old gray-blue eyes looked at Joe from behind their hoods, took note of him, and gazed on through.
“We’re going to look at some buildings, big houses, ask you to look at them. I guess they’ve told you about that.”
“Yeah.” A sigh. “I’ll look at ‘em. I’ll tell you what I can.”
“That’s good.”
The old man went back to his thumbnail. Joe stared out the window at passing suburbia. For some reason he found himself wondering what his life would have been like if he’d been born on a farm.
Time passed silently in the car. The old man had already been questioned on every subject where it was thought he might know something. There were other topics the men might have talked about but didn’t want to bring up in front of him. They were probably all tired, wishing they could be spending their Sunday on something else. The caravan kept moving at a good clip along the highway, keeping up with all but the fastest traffic. A half hour had gone by with no conversation of consequence, and suburbia was being replaced by farmlands, when suddenly the old man sighed. There was that in the sound which got attention.
“I’m gonna have to take a hand,” he announced. His hands were still clasped together, but he was staring straight ahead, no longer at his thumbnails.
The Intelligence man had hitched himself around in his seat, and was looking back at the potential witness with a psychologist’s estimating eye. “Take a hand in what matter, sir?” he inquired.
“Once a man realizes who his real enemies are, then he’s got to do something about it.”
Joe felt a chill.
“Like his kidnappers,” said the Intelligence man.
The old man stared at him blankly for a while. Then at last he said “Right,” as if his thoughts had been racing a long way ahead and had had to come back to answer belatedly.
Satisfied, the Intelligence man nodded, smiled, turned to face front again, letting well enough alone. Joe still felt a chill.
“And a man has to help his friends,” murmured the old man, very low. “His allies; even if he doesn’t like ‘em.” He fell back into a near-trance, staring at his hands.
Charley Snider had seen a lot of psychos in his day, and probably thought he knew the harmless ones. He glanced at the old man once now, then out at cornfields. Then, as if something the glance had shown him had caught belatedly at his instincts, he looked back again. “Mr. Falcon?”
“Don’t bug me now,” said the old man in a voice of fierce concentration. “Gimme ten minutes to—think.” And something in the way he said it made Intelligence turn his head again, open his mouth, and then decide not to interfere. Christoffel looked back in the mirror, and then just kept on driving.
Five minutes later the driver commented: “Looks like some heavy weather up ahead. Damn. Some of those back roads’ll be…” He let it go. No one bothered to take it up.
A good seven minutes more passed, before the old man relaxed, with a sigh that seemed to come out of some vault of the dark past. He let himself sink back in the seat, suddenly looking worn and almost frail. “That’s it,” he breathed. “Talisman’s out, just in time.”