“It was nothing personal, Sam,” she said reprovingly. “It was the letters from Eddie, just like I said. He knew I was seeing somebody, though he didn’t know who, and Dwayne and I were afraid he was going to make trouble while we were trying to pull this thing off—”
“Shut up,” Patterson interrupted curtly. “I got to figure this out.”
“Figure out how you’re going to murder me and explain it to Tom Martelli when he shows up?” Sam said a little shakily. “That’s some mighty heavy figurin’... fact is, it can’t be done!”
Unmoved, Patterson eyed him speculatively. Deciding where to put the bullet, probably; he would dispatch him as coolly as he would a sickly calf. Glenda was his only chance; out of some glimmer of genuine affection for him — or, barring that, a desire to save her own skin — she might listen.
He took a deep breath and said, “Give it up, Glenda. Quit while you can. There’s a big difference between insurance fraud and murder. You want to be in prison for the rest of your life?”
Glenda looked troubled. “Honey...” she began uncertainly.
“Sugar, I can still make this work!” Patterson said fiercely. Without moving his eyes from Sam, he shifted his arm down to Glenda’s ribcage, just below her breasts, and gathered her against him. “We can’t stop now! You got to believe in me!” Despairingly, Sam felt the power of his personality, saw Glenda’s face harden again.
“All right. But how...?”
“Okay, we can’t have him and Peggy shoot each other, like we figured first. But listen to this. Last night in the tack room—”
“Nothing happened last night, I told you,” she said impatiently.
“Listen to me!” he said. “Something did happen. He came here and tried to force himself on you, and you... you finally let him, because you felt sorry for him and you figured it was the easiest way to get rid of him. That’s believable; you told me he’s had the hots for you since high school.”
Sam flushed. “And then he came back tonight,” Patterson continued, “and found me here, and came after me in... in a fit of jealous rage—” He laughed, jazzed by his own invention.
“But why would he have called the police?”
“Because of the letters!” he finished triumphantly. “He convinced himself I had sent the anonymous letters and that I was here to threaten you — and when he realized it wasn’t that way at all, and that I was your lover, and that you didn’t have any feeling for him, well, he went berserk and attacked me, and we struggled for the gun...”
Where did he get this stuff? It was like a bad episode of a rotten TV show — and yet, in Sam’s panicked state, it sounded terrifyingly plausible.
“What about her?” Glenda was saying, indicating Peggy.
Patterson considered her for a moment. “Stray bullet,” he replied briefly, and then turned back to Sam. “Now move over here.” He motioned with the gun.
Oh, sure, move into close range so the “struggle for the gun” would be credible. “Not a chance,” he replied, and then suddenly, overcome by sheer frustration, he exclaimed, “Dwayne, this is crazy! Killing two people over a couple of horses?”
“It ain’t just a couple of horses. I’m in deeper’n that. I got nothing to lose.”
Nothing to lose. Sam thought of how much he himself had to lose; he felt the weight of it, the pull of his life, as he looked at Patterson’s hard eyes. He was afraid.
And out of fear came inspiration. Glenda was indifferent to his fate, she was too much in love with Patterson to protect herself; okay. But there was one thing she did care about.
“Glenda,” he said feverishly, “did you say it was just the two horses? You weren’t going to kill any more?”
“That’s right,” she replied, puzzled.
“Then what was Dwayne doing with the hypodermic?”
She pulled away from Patterson and looked at him questioningly. Evidently she found some kind of answer, because she struck her fist sharply against her thigh.
“No! No more! You promised, Dwayne!” Then her eyes widened in horror. “Not the stallion,” she whispered. “Not Barney’s Pride.”
“We need the money, Glenda,” Dwayne said coldly. “You said yourself he was past his prime.”
“You BASTARD!” she shouted, twisting away from his grip and rushing towards the door.
“Glenda, I didn’t touch him!” Patterson yelled — and Sam dropped on all fours below the big oak desk.
Immediately a shot splintered the wall behind him, followed by another, whining like a dentist’s drill as it careened off a brass table lamp. Then an interminable silence, while Sam wondered desperately what would be next: himself, crouched heroically in fetal position, plugged right between the eyes? Peggy, falling prey to the “stray bullet”? Should he fish for the gun on top of the de—
The next instant there was a mind-shattering explosion of simultaneous noises: the sharp crack of a pistol, the crash of glass high overhead, the door slamming against the wall, shouts, more gunshots, a scream of pain. Then it was quiet.
Sam opened his eyes to see Tom Martelli, Enrique Santiago, and two other uniformed men, feet planted wide, guns trained on a target across the room. Glenda was standing in the doorway with both hands pressed against her mouth. He struggled to his feet and stood swaying slightly, looking at Dwayne Patterson crumpled against the wall.
10.
“Thank God for answering machines,” Sam said. The paramedics had labored over Patterson, who was seriously but not fatally injured, and had moved on to Peggy, who had a concussion. His turn would come, but in the meantime he’d discovered part of a bottle of tequila in the back of a drawer and was feeling a whole lot better. “When’d you get my message?”
“What message?” asked Tom distractedly; he was reading over Sam’s statement.
“The one I left on your machine about an hour ago,” replied Sam, bewildered.
“Never got it. What did it say?”
“Wait a minute. Why are you here if you didn’t hear the message?”
Tom finally looked up. “To question Dwayne Patterson regarding the murder of a loan shark in Houston.”
Sam stared at him, dumbfounded. “Patterson killed a loan shark in Houston?”
“Actually, I don’t think so. They’re just investigatin’ everybody who was in pretty deep to this fella, and Dwayne’s name came up. People who owed this guy had an unfortunate tendency to disappear.”
Windfall in Texas... I’m in deeper’n that...
“He wasn’t at his ranch,” Tom was saying, “but his wife told us to try here. Guess she knew about him and Glenda.”
They were both silent for a moment. “Jesus,” Sam said suddenly, shaking his head.
“What?”
“I was just thinking — I never would have come back to the bam, knowing what I now know about Dwayne Patterson. Peggy or no Peggy!”
Tom looked at him sceptically. “Sure you would have,” he said flatly. “You’re a smart guy, Sam, but you’re a born sucker.”
Sucker to the last. Not a bad epitaph.
Claire forced herself to gaze with simulated interest at the brown and blue relief map below. An experienced and usually nerveless flyer, she was in a frenzy of impatience for the flight to end, and obsessed by visions of flaming doom. They would crash, this random collection of crying babies and businessmen and students and smiling flight attendants and microbiologists; strangers united in death, they would be obliterated to charred body parts strewn for miles across the desert; they would crash, and her final contact with Sam would have been last night’s brusque telephone conversation: “Flight four forty-five.” “I’ll be there.”