“You understand what I’m saying?”
I tried to look serious and said, “Sure. You’re thinking you can talk me out of killing you. Which I’m not inclined to do anyway. Kill you, I mean.”
And there was that weird little smile again.
I said, “You think you can talk me out of it. You’ve got reasons?”
“Oh, I’ve got reasons, you bet. One in particular. One that you can’t argue with.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“I’ll get to it in a minute. Let me tell you some of the practical reasons you should let me go. First, you think you’ve got to kill me because I know who you are, right? Well, how long you think your identity’s going to be a secret? Your buddy shot a cop back there. I don’t know police stuff except what I see in the movies. But they’re going to be looking at tire tracks and witnesses who saw plates and makes of cars and gas stations you might’ve slopped at on the way here.”
He was just blowing smoke. The Buick was stolen. I mean. I’m not stupid.
But he went on, looking at me real coy, “Even if your car was stolen, they’re going to check down every lead. Every shoeprint around where you or your friend found it, talk to everybody in the area around the time it vanished.”
I kept smiling like it was nuts what he was saying. But this was true, shooting the cop part. You do that and you’re in big trouble. Trouble that sticks with you. They don’t stop looking till they find you.
“And when they identify your buddy,” he nodded toward the couch where Toth’s body was lying. “They’re going to make some connection to you.”
“I don’t know him that good. We just hung around together the past few months.”
Weller jumped on this. “Where? A bar? A restaurant? Anybody ever see you in public?”
I got mad, and I shouted, “So? What’re you saying? They gonna bust me anyway, then I’ll just take you out with me. How’s that for an argument?”
Calm as could be he said. “I’m simply telling you that one of the reasons you want to kill me doesn’t make sense. And think about this — the shooting at the drugstore? It wasn’t premeditated. It was, what do they call it? Heat of passion. But you kill me, that’ll be first degree. You’ll get the death penalty when they find you.”
When they find you. Right. I laughed to myself. Oh, what he said made sense, but the fact is, killing isn’t a making-sense kind of thing. Hell, it never makes sense, but sometimes you just have to do it. But I was kind of having fun now. I wanted to argue back. “Yeah, well, I killed Toth. That wasn’t heat of passion. I’m going to get the needle anyway for that.”
“But nobody gives a damn about him,” he came right back. “They don’t care if he killed himself or got hit by a car accidentally. You can take that piece of garbage out of the equation altogether. They care if you kill me. I’m the ‘Innocent Bystander’ in the headlines. I’m the Father of Two.’ Yon kill me, you’re as good as dead.”
I started to say something, but he kept going.
“Now, here’s another reason I’m not going to say anything about you. Because you know my name, and you know where I live. You know I have a family, and you know how important they are to me. If I turn you in, you could come after us. I’d never jeopardize my family that way. Now let me ask you something. What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?”
“Keep listening to you spout on and on.”
Weller laughed hard at that. I could see he was surprised I had a sense of humor. After a minute he said, “Seriously. The worst thing.”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
“Lose a leg? Go deaf? Lose all your money? Go blind... Hey, that looked like it hit a nerve. Going blind?”
“Yeah, I guess. That’d be the worst thing I could think of.”
That was pretty damn scary thing, and I’d thought on it before. ’Cause that was what happened to my old man. And it wasn’t not seeing anymore that got to me. No, it was that I’d have to depend on somebody else for, Christ, for everything, I guess.
“Okay, think about this,” he said. “The way you feel about going blind’s the way my family’d feel if they lost me. It’d be that bad for them. You don’t want to cause them that kind of pain, do you?”
I didn’t want to, no. But I knew I had to. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I asked him. “So what’s this last reason you’re telling me about?”
“The last reason,” he said, kind of whispering. But he didn’t go on. He looked around the room, you know, like his mind was wandering.
“Yeah?” I asked. I was pretty curious. “Tell me.”
But he just asked. “You think these people, they have a bar?”
And I’d just been thinking I could use a drink, too. I went into the kitchen, and of course they didn’t have any beer in the fridge on account of the house being all closed up and the power off. But they did have scotch, and that’d be my first choice anyway.
I got a couple of glasses and took the bottle back to the living room. Thinking this was a good idea. When it came time to do it, it’d be easier for him and for me both if we were kinda tanked. I shoved my Smitty into his neck and cut the tape his hands were tied with, then taped them in front of him. I sat back and kept my knife near, ready to go, in case he tried something. But it didn’t look like he was going to be a hero or anything. He read over the scotch bottle, kind of disappointed it was cheap. And I agreed with him there. One thing I learned a long time ago, you going to rob, rob rich.
I sat back where I could keep an eye on him.
“The last reason. Okay, I’ll tell you. I’m going to prove to you that you should let me go.”
“You are?”
“All those other reasons — the practical ones, the humanitarian ones... I’ll concede you don’t care much about those — you don’t look very convinced. All right? Then let’s look at the one reason you should let me go.”
I figured this was going to be more crap. But what he said was something I never would’ve expected, and it made me laugh.
“For your own sake.”
“For me? What’re you talking about?”
“See, Jack, I don’t think you’re lost.”
“Whatta you mean, lost?”
“I don’t think your soul’s beyond redemption.”
I laughed at this, laughed out loud, because I just had to. I expected a hell of a lot better from a hotshot vice president salesman like him. “Soul? You think I got a soul?”
“Well, everybody has a soul,” he said, and what was crazy was, he said it like he was surprised that I didn’t think so. It was like I’d said, Wait a minute you mean the earth ain’t flat? or something.
“Well, if I got a soul it’s taken the fast lane to hell.” Which was this line I heard in this movie and I tried to laugh, but it sounded flat. Like Weller was saying something deep and I was just kidding around. It made me feel cheap. I stopped smiling and looked down at Toth, lying there in the corner, those dead eyes of his just staring, staring, and I wanted to stab him again I was so mad.
“We’re talking about your soul.”
I snickered and sipped the liquor. “Oh yeah. I’ll bet you you’re the sort that reads those angel books they got all over the place now.”
“I go to church, but no. I’m not talking about all that silly stuff. I don’t mean magic. I mean your conscience. What Jack Prescot’s all about.”
I could tell him about social workers and youth counselors and all those guys who don’t know nothing about the way life works. They think they do. But it’s the words they use. You can tell they don’t know a thing. Some counselors or somebody’ll talk to me and they say, Oh, you’re maladjusted, you’re denying your anger, things like that. When I hear that, I know they don’t know nothing about souls or spirits.