Because, he thought, he didn’t have a niece. He had a daughter, and was more comfortable leaving her out of it. And he could picture Julia’s face if he’d tried hanging the kitten print in Jenny’s room. She’d be happier with a dead alligator.
It occurred to him that the discarded picture wire would have been easy to fashion into a garrote. But that would have been the last thing he’d want for the scenario he had in mind. A garrote, simple enough to prepare, nevertheless required preparation. You didn’t have a sudden flare-up of fury and reach for a piece of picture wire. You needed time, and you probably needed a certain degree of professionalism in the bargain — to make it, in the first place, and then to employ it effectively. The garrote was not the weapon of an amateur.
At a stoplight, he reached over and rested a hand on the hammer.
His only tool, he thought. Now to go find himself a nail.
Something made him drive by the Overmont house. He didn’t park, and barely slowed down, and all he saw was the house itself. The garage door was closed, as it always seemed to be unless someone was on the way in or out, and there were no cars parked in the driveway or on the street nearby.
He drove off, wondering what he had hoped to see. “I told him what he ought to do was get out of town,” Dot had reported earlier. “Take his wife, fly off for a few fun-filled days in Las Vegas or Cancún or, hell, I don’t know. Where do people like that go?”
“People like what?”
“Nymphomaniacs,” she said, “and the morons who love them. I’d love to get them both out of town, but I’m not counting on it.”
“Just so he quits playing detective.”
“Oh, there’ll be no more of that,” she said. “No more leaving the office early, no more surprise visits.”
That was something.
There were two white vans parked at the Wet Spot, and his first thought was that they were both here, Cowboy Hat and Tom Cruise. The vans weren’t parked side by side, and he saw right away that both were parked much nearer to the building than the original group of three had been, but it took a closer look than that to establish that these weren’t the vehicles he was looking for.
Both bore lettering on their doors, one proclaiming itself the property of a boiler repair firm, the other showing a pink pig wearing a top hat and carrying a cane. It might have been interesting to speculate as to what the Pig About Town was selling, and there was a phone number under the logo that he could have called, but they weren’t the vans he was looking for, and that was really as much as he needed to know.
What was the other place?
The Spotted Tiger, and he couldn’t remember what street it was on. He could go into the Wet Spot and ask, and somebody would be sure to know, but maybe the GPS would tell him.
He tried, and it did. Spotted Tiger Restaurant, 3304 Quincy Avenue. The sounded right, Quincy, and anyway, how right did it have to sound? I mean, how many Spotted Tigers were there likely to be?
From the outside, the Spotted Tiger looked a lot like the Wet Spot. No white vans, though, which surprised Keller. You’d think they’d have one or two parked there, even if they weren’t the one he was looking for.
He went inside, just to make sure, and it was the right kind of crowd, too, a roomful of rednecks raising their voices to make themselves heard over a jukebox on which Marty Robbins was singing about the West Texas town of El Paso. Keller ordered a beer and looked around the room, while his mind tried to think of words to rhyme with El Paso. He right away came up with lasso, and that was as far as he got.
He saw a lot of men wearing boots, and even a Stetson or two, but he didn’t see Tom Cruise’s stunt double, and neither did he see the Marlboro Man’s near-twin.
He had a sip of beer. Well, he’d confirmed it. Their vans weren’t here and neither were they, and one sip was as much beer as he wanted to put in his system. He’d put a twenty on the bar, and now he scooped up enough of his change to leave an appropriate tip, and realized that he was thinking about eels, and how he’d read somewhere that all the eels in the world were born in the same spot, and they then went their separate ways, returning to wherever their parents had come from, and then when their lives had run their natural course, they somehow knew to swim back halfway across the world to where they’d been hatched. Where they would spawn and, with what Keller imagined was a great sense of relief, expire.
Was that even true? Never mind how he knew it, because he didn’t really know it, he’d just heard it or read it somewhere. Was it really every eel, or just a particular species? And how could anyone know for sure? Even if they tagged the mama and papa eels, so they knew they’d all gone to the same place, how would they know which little elvers had which parents?
But that, he realized, was the least of it. What was baffling was why this particular thought came to his mind just now, when he had no reason to think of eels or elvers or their ancestral home in the Sargasso Sea.
Oh.
El Paso, lasso, and Sargasso.
He’d thought he’d forgotten all about Marty Robbins and the damn song, but evidently he hadn’t, and there it was, running around in his mind even when his mind was turned off. The song had long since ended, he’d only heard the last half-minute of it, and a couple of songs had played since to which he’d paid no attention. Well, no conscious attention, because God knows what his mind was capable of when he wasn’t tuned in. A couple of songs, and he didn’t even know what they were, and right now Johnny Cash was telling everybody how he walked the line, and all of a sudden it seemed important to find out what the songwriter had rhymed with El Paso. It couldn’t be Sargasso, could it? Lasso was possible, in that kind of Old West song, but—
Oh, hell. He’d left his coins on the bar, along with a couple of singles, but he picked up a couple of quarters and found his way over to the jukebox. There it was, B-17, Marty Robbins, “El Paso.” He paid fifty cents to play it, which struck him as silly, considering that YouTube would happily let him hear it for free in the privacy of his own home.
And then he went back to his bar stool and waited while other people’s selections got played ahead of his. Loretta Lynn and Bobby Bare and Crystal Gayle, and a few he didn’t recognize, and he was beginning to understand how every once in a while you read about somebody in a place like this who took out a gun and started blasting away at the juke box. He’d always figured it was because they couldn’t stand the song that was playing, but maybe they couldn’t stand the song that wasn’t playing.
Ah, finally! Down in the West Texas town of El Paso...
Without thinking, he’d picked up his beer and taken an unintended sip of it.
Not that a sip of beer would hurt him any. Still, it was bothersome that he’d done it after deciding not to. And he couldn’t afford to think about it, not now, because his song was playing, and he had to listen closely to find out what rhymed with El Paso.
Nothing, as it turned out.
The name of the song was El Paso, and it turned up in the lyrics a couple of times, and always at the end of a line. So you couldn’t think of the song without thinking of the town, but that didn’t mean that there was anything in there to rhyme with it. It came at the end of the first line in a stanza, and the rhymes were the words at the ends of lines two and four. So what rhymed with El Paso?
“Not a goddamned thing,” he said.
“Pardner,” a voice said at his elbow, “I have to say you got that right.”
And, of course, the man standing just to his right, the man who’d agreed with him without knowing what it was he was agreeing with, was big and tall and broad in the shoulders. And, no surprise, he was wearing boots. And, duh, a cowboy hat.