"Only me," I said. "Dewey put the letter in a magazine. Every month he holds certain magazines aside for me and to make sure I got it he put it inside my copy of Cavalier. It will be there when I go back to the city. I'll pick it up and it will tell me where Velda is."
I finished dressing, put on the empty gun and slid painfully into the jacket. The blood was crusty on my clothes, but it really didn't matter anymore.
I said, "It's all speculation. I might be wrong. I just can't take any chances. I've loved other women. I loved Velda. I've loved you and like you said, it's either you or her. I have to go for her, you know that. If she's alive I have to find her. The key is right there inside my copy of that magazine. It will have my name on it and Duck-Duck will hand it over and I'll know where she is."
She stopped humming and I knew she was listening. I heard her make a curious woman-sound like a sob.
"I may be wrong, Laura. I may see her and not want her. I may be wrongs about you, and if I am I'll be back, but I have to find out." The slanting beam of the sun struck the other side of the bathhouse leaving me in the shadow then. I knew what I had to do. It had to be a test. They either passed it or failed it. No in-betweens. I didn't want it on my head again.
I reached for the shotgun in the corner, turned it upside down and shoved the barrels deep into the blue clay and twisted them until I was sure both barrels were plugged just like a cookie cutter and I left it lying there and opened the door.
The mountains were in deep shadow, the sun out of sight and only its light flickering off the trees. It was a hundred miles into the city, but I'd take the car again and it wouldn't really be very long at all. I'd see Pat and we'd be friends again and Hy would get his story and Velda--Velda? What would it be like now?
I started up the still wet concrete walk away from the bathhouse and she called out, "Mike--_Mike!"_
I turned at the sound of her voice and there she stood in the naked, glossy, shimmering beauty of womanhood, the lovely tan of her skin blossoming and swelling in all the vast hillocks and curves that make a woman, the glinting blond hair throwing tiny lights back into the sunset and over it all those incredible gray eyes.
Incredible.
They watched me over the elongated barrels of the shotgun and seemed to twinkle and swirl in the fanatical delight of murder they come up with at the moment of the kill, the moment of truth.
But for whom? Truth will out, but for whom?
The muzzle of the gun was a pair of yawning chasms but there was no depth to their mouths. Down the length of the blued steel the blood crimson of her nails made a startling and symbolic contrast.
Death red, I thought. The fingers behind them should have been tan but weren't. They were a tense, drawing white and with another fraction of an inch the machinery of the gun would go into motion.
She said, "Mike--" and in that one word there was hate and desire, revenge and regret, but above all the timbre of duty long ago instilled into a truly mechanical mind.
I said, "So long, baby."
Then I turned and walked toward the outside and Velda and behind me I heard the unearthly roar as she pulled both triggers at once.