Have we lost control of the town? Klinger asked himself. Is it all coming down on our heads: the field test, the plan, the project, the future? Sure as hell looks that way. Sure does. So… Is it time to get out of Black River, out of the country with a big bundle of cash and the phony identity Leonard provided?
Don’t panic, another part of him thought. Don’t be rash. Wait. See what happens. Give it a few minutes.
He looked at his watch. 11:03.
Thunder rumbled in the mountains.
It was going to rain again.
11:04.
He had been hunkered down for so long that his legs ached. He longed to stand up and stretch.
What are you waiting here for? he asked himself. You can’t plan your strategy without information. You’ve got to reconnoiter. They’re probably in Thorp’s office. Get under those windows. Maybe you can hear what they’re up to.
At five minutes past the hour, he hurried across the alley. He dodged from car to car in the parking lot, and then to the thick trunk of a pine tree.
Just like in Korea, he thought almost happily. Or Laos in the late fifties. Just like it must have been for the younger guys in Nam. Commando work in an enemy town. Except this time the enemy town is American.
Sam stood in the doorway and studied Ogden Salsbury, who was still in the spring-backed office chair. To Paul, Sam said, “You’re sure he told you everything?”
“Yes.”
“And that everything he’s told you is true?”
“Yes.”
“This is important, Paul.”
“He didn’t withhold anything,” Paul said. “And he didn’t lie to me. I’m sure of it.”
Stinking of sweat and blood, crying quietly, Salsbury looked from one to the other of them.
Does he understand what we’re saying? Paul wondered. Or is he broken, shattered, unable to think clearly, unable to think at all?
Paul felt unclean, sick to his soul. In dealing with Salsbury, he had descended to the man’s own level. He told himself that these were after all the 1970s, the very first years of a brave new world, a time when individual survival was difficult and when it counted for more than all else, the age of the machine and of the machine’s morality, perhaps the only era in the entire span of history when the ends truly did justify the means — but he still felt unclean.
“Then the time has come,” Sam said quietly. “One of us has to — do it.”
“A man named Parker apparently raped him when he was eleven years old,” Paul said. He was speaking to Sam, but he was watching Ogden Salsbury.
“Does that make any difference?” Sam asked.
“It should.”
“Does it make any difference that Hitler might have been born of a syphilitic parent? Does it make any difference that he was mad? Does that bring back the six million dead?” Sam was talking softly but with tremendous force. He was trembling. “Does what happened to him when he was eleven justify what he did to Mark? If Salsbury wins, if he takes control of everyone, does it matter what happened to him when he was eleven?”
“There’s no other way to stop him?” Paul asked, although he knew the answer.
“We’ve already discussed that.”
“I guess we have.”
“I’ll do it,” Sam said.
“No. If I can’t get up the courage here, I won’t be any help to you later, with Dawson and Klinger. We may be in a tight spot with one of those. You’ll have to know that you can count on me in the clinches.”
Salsbury licked his lips. He glanced down at the blood-soaked front of his shirt, then up at Paul. “You aren’t going to — kill me. You aren’t… Are you?”
Paul raised the Smith & Wesson Combat Magnum.
Letting go of his left shoulder, reaching out as if to shake with one bloody hand, Salsbury said, “Wait. I’ll make you a partner. Both of you. Partners.”
Paul aimed at the center of the man’s chest.
“If you’re partners, you’ll have everything. Everything you could want. All the money you could ever spend. All the money in the world. Think of that!”
Paul thought of Lolah Tayback.
“Partners. That doesn’t mean just money. Women. You can have all of the women you want, any women you want, no matter who they are. They’ll crawl to you. Or men, if that’s what you like. You can even have children. Little girls. Nine or ten years old. Little boys. Anything you want. ”
Paul thought of Mark: a lump of frosted meat jammed into a food freezer.
And he thought of Rya: traumatized perhaps, but with a chance to live a halfway normal life.
He squeezed the trigger.
The.357 Magnum bucked in his hand.
Because of his revolver’s impressive kick — which jolted Paul from hand to shoulder in spite of the fact that he was using.38 Special ammunition rather than Magnums — the bullet was high. It tore through Salsbury’s throat.
Blood and bits of flesh spattered the metal firearms cabinet.
The roar of the shot was deafening. It bounced back and forth between the walls, echoed inside Paul’s skull, reverberated as it would forever in his memory.
He squeezed off another round.
That one took Salsbury in the chest, nearly rocked him and the chair backward onto the floor.
He turned away from the dead man.
“Are you going to be sick?” Sam asked.
“I’m all right.” He was numb.
“There’s a toilet at the end of the hall, to your left.”
“I’m okay, Sam.”
“You look—”
“I killed men in the war. Killed men over in Asia. Remember?”
“This is different. I understand that. In the war it’s always with rifles or grenades or mortars. It’s never from three feet with a handgun.”
“I’m fine. Believe me. Just fine.” He went to the door, pushed past Sam, stumbled into the corridor as if he had tripped, turned left, ran to the washroom, and threw up.
Scuttling sideways like a hermit crab, the Webley ready in his right hand, Klinger reached the western flank of the municipal building and found that the lawn there was littered with glass. He hadn’t made a sound on his run from the shrubbery. Now, pieces of glass snapped and crunched under his shoes, and he cursed silently. One of the windows in the police chief’s office was broken, and a few of the slats in the Venetian blind were bent out of shape, providing a convenient peephole for his reconnaissance work.
As he was rising up to have a look inside — cautious as a suspicious mouse sniffing the cheese in the trap — two shots exploded virtually in front of his face. He froze — then realized that he hadn’t been seen, that no one was firing at him.
Through the twisted slats of the blind, he could see two-thirds of Thorp’s starkly furnished and somewhat sterile office: gray-blue walls, a pair of three-drawer filing cabinets, an oak work table, a bulletin board with an aluminum frame, bookshelves, most of a massive metal desk—
And Salsbury.
Dead. Very dead.
Where was Sam Edison? And the other one, Annendale? And the woman, the little girl?
There appeared to be no one in the room except Salsbury. Salsbury’s corpse.
Suddenly afraid of losing track of Edison and Annendale, afraid that they might somehow get away or sneak around behind him, afraid of being outmaneuvered, Klinger turned from the windows. He loped to the end of the lawn, then across the parking lot and the alleyway. He hid behind the hedge again, where he commanded a good view of the back door of the municipal building.
When he came out of the washroom, Sam was waiting in the corridor for him.
“Feeling better?”
“Yeah,” Paul said.
“It’s rough.”
“It’ll get worse.”
“That it will. ”