“Have you seen Kettering since?” Hawes asked.
“Since the day he left the lodge?” Miller asked.
“Yes,” Hawes said.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Do you own a gun, Mr. Miller?”
“No.”
“You don’t?”
“No, sir.”
“Didn’t you hunt on that—”
“I rented that gun, Mr. Hawes. I’m not a real hunter, you see. Peg was visiting her mother in California. We don’t get along, Peg’s mother and me. She didn’t want Peg to marry me, but we got married, anyway.”
“She didn’t think Joaquim would amount to anything. But he’s amounted to a lot.”
“Please, Peg,” Miller said.
“Well, you have. He earns a very good salary, Mr. Hawes. We’ve been able to save quite a bit between his salary and the land.”
“Peg, can’t you—?”
“What land?” Hawes asked. “What do you mean?”
Miller sighed. “I speculate,” he explained. “I buy and sell land. With all these housing developments springing up all over the place, it’s been pretty profitable.”
“How do you work it?”
“Sheer speculation. I pick a spot I think the developers will eventually get to. I buy it fairly cheap, and then sell it high when they decide to build on it. It won’t last much longer, though. They’ve pretty much built everywhere they can build and still stay within reasonable commuting distance of the city.”
“How much have you made with such speculation?” Hawes asked.
“That’s our business,” Miller said.
“I’m sorry,” Hawes said. “I didn’t mean to get personal, but I would like to know.”
“We’ve made about thirty thousand,” Miller’s wife said.
“Peg—”
“Well, why shouldn’t we tell?”
“Peg, shut—”
“We’re saving it,” Mrs. Miller said. “We’re going to build a big house some—”
“Shut up, Peg!” Miller snapped.
Mrs. Miller fell into a resentful silence. Hawes cleared his throat.
“What kind of work do you do with Byrd, Mr. Miller?”
“I’m an electronics engineer.”
“I know. But what are you working on?”
Miller smiled as if his team had scored a point. “I couldn’t answer that one if I wanted to.”
“Why not?”
“Classified,” Miller said.
“I see. Just to reiterate—you do not own a gun, is that correct?”
“That’s absolutely correct.”
“What kind of a gun did you rent when you went away?”
“A twenty-two.”
“Would you remember what kind of a gun Kettering was using?”
“I’m not good on guns,” Miller said. “It was a big-game rifle—a powerful name. A name that sounded like a big-game gun.”
“A Savage?” Hawes asked.
“Yes,” Miller said. “Kettering was using a Savage.”
In the street again, Hawes glanced up at the apartment building. He saw Miller standing at the window, watching him. He ducked away from the window quickly when he realized Hawes had seen him. Hawes sighed and started for his car. It was then that he saw the man. The man moved behind a tree quickly, but not quickly enough. Hawes had caught a glimpse of him, and he walked to his car slowly now, opened the door, started the engine, and waited. The man did not move from behind the tree. Hawes set the car in motion. From the corner of his eye, he saw the man run for an automobile and enter it. The car was a Chevrolet, but Hawes could not distinguish the license-plate number in the darkness. Behind him, he heard the car starting.
He drove slowly. His pursuer did not know that Hawes knew he was being pursued. Hawes did not want the pursuer to lose him, nor did he wish to lose the pursuer. There was, of course, the added possibility that the man was not following him at all. Hawes would test this possibility in a moment.
He waited until he’d picked up the man’s headlights in the rear-view mirror. Up to that point, he had been driving slowly, as if unsure of which turn to take. Now he sped up, turned left, and watched the car behind him execute the same turn. He turned right. The Chevy turned right. He went straight for two blocks, and then made a left. The Chevy was still behind him. He executed a series of lefts and rights that eliminated all possibility of chance. The man in the Chevy was certainly following Hawes, and Hawes wondered why. He also wondered who. He could not see the front license plate in his rear-view mirror. He wanted to know who the hell was in that car.
He put on a sudden burst of speed, outdistancing the Chevy by a block, and then pulled over to the curb. He got out of the car and ducked into the nearest alley. Up the street, the Chevy braked suddenly and then pulled to the curb a distance behind Hawes’s car. The man got out of the car, looked up and down the street, and then began walking toward the alley.
The luxuriant summer growth on the trees shielded the street lamps so that the sidewalks were in almost total darkness. Hawes could hear the man’s footsteps as he approached, but he could not see the man’s face. The man had undoubtedly assumed that Hawes had gone into one of the apartment buildings. He stopped at each entrance and looked into the building, moving closer to the alleyway all the time.
The footsteps echoed in the hollow bowl of night.
Hawes waited.
They were closer now, very close, almost, almost…
Hawes reached out, swinging the man around.
The man moved with a reflexive action that caught Hawes completely by surprise. Hawes was no midget, and certainly bigger than the man who hit him. But he had reached out with one hand, grasping the man by the shoulder, and the man had swung around, partially pulled by Hawes, partially under his own power, so that the force of his blow was doubled.
He swung around with his fist clenched, and he threw the fist at Hawes’s midsection, catching him below the belt. The pain was excruciating. Hawes released the man’s shoulder instantly and dropped to the concrete. The man ran out of the alley mouth. Hawes had still not seen his face. Lying on the concrete, raw pain triggering through his groin, he could only think of a stupid joke he had once heard. He did not want to think of the joke. He wanted to get up off the concrete and chase his assailant, but the pain persisted in agonizing waves, and the joke ran over and over again in his mind, the joke about a man overhearing two women describing childbirth to each other. “Such pain,” one said. “Nobody ever had such pain as when I gave birth.”
“Pain? Don’t talk about pain,” the other woman said. “When my Lewis was born, it was unbearable. Such pain no one in the world has ever known.”
And the man walked over to them and said, “Excuse me, ladies, but did either of you ever get kicked in the balls?”
There didn’t seem to be anything funny about the joke now. Lying on the concrete, Hawes knew only pain, and the joke was not funny at all. Lying on the concrete, he could hear the Chevy’s motor starting. He dragged himself to the alley mouth, hoping to catch a glimpse of the license plate as the car went by.