Colin went to him and squatted beside him.
“Ants,” Roy said.
At the edge of the concrete lay a teacup-size mound of powdery earth. Tiny red ants were scurrying around and over it.
Grinning broadly, Roy mashed the insects into the concrete. A dozen. Two dozen. As he killed them other ants came out of the hill and raced into his shadow, as if they had abruptly realized that their destiny was not mindless labor in the hive but sacrificial death under the hands of a monster god a million times their size.
Roy paused now and then to look at the greasy, rust-colored remains that stained his fingers. “No bones,” he said. “They squash into nothing, into just a little drop of juice, ‘cause they don’t have any bones.”
Colin watched.
17
After Roy had smashed a great many ants and had kicked apart their hill, he and Colin played water polo with a blue-and-green beach ball. Roy won.
By three o‘clock they were tired of the pool. They changed out of their swimsuits and sat in the kitchen, eating chocolate-chip cookies and drinking lemonade.
Colin drained his glass, chewed on a sliver of ice, and said, “Do you trust me?”
“Sure.”
“Did I pass the test?”
“We’re blood brothers, aren’t we?”
“Then tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“You know. The big secret.”
“I already told you,” Roy said.
“You did?”
“I told you Friday night, after we left the Pit, before we went out to the Fairmont to see that porno flick.”
Colin shook his head. “If you told me, I didn’t hear.”
“You heard, but you didn’t want to.”
“What kind of double-talk is that?”
Roy shrugged. He rattled the ice in his glass.
“Tell me again,” Colin said. “This time I want to hear.”
“I kill people.”
“Jeez. That’s really your big secret?”
“Seemed like a hell of a secret to me.”
“But it’s not true.”
“Am I your blood brother?”
“Yeah.”
“Do blood brothers lie to each other?”
“They’re not supposed to,” Colin admitted. “Okay. If you killed people, they must have had names. What were their names?”
“Stephen Rose and Philip Pacino.”
“Who were they?”
“Just two kids.”
“Friends?”
“They could have been if they’d wanted.”
“Why’d you kill ‘em?”
“They refused to be blood brothers with me. After that I couldn’t trust them.”
“You mean you’d have killed me if I hadn’t wanted to be blood brothers?”
“Maybe.”
“Bullshit.”
“If it makes you happy to think so.”
“Where’d you kill them?”
“Right here in Santa Leona.”
“When?”
“I got Phil last summer, the first day of August, the day after his birthday, and I nailed Steve Rose the summer before that.”
“How?”
Roy smiled dreamily and closed his eyes, as if he were reliving it in his mind. “I pushed Steve off the cliff at Sandman’s Cove. He hit the rocks at the bottom. You should have seen him bounce. When they brought him up the next day, he was such a mess that even his old man couldn’t make a positive ID.”
“What about the other one-Phil Pacino?”
“We were at his house, building a model airplane,” Roy said. “His parents weren’t home. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Nobody knew I’d gone there. It was a perfect opportunity, so I squirted lighter fluid on his head and lit him.”
“Jeez.”
“As soon as I could see for sure that he was dead, I got the hell out of there. The whole house burned down. It was a real popper. A couple of days later, the fire marshal decided that Phil had started it by playing with matches.”
“You sure tell a good story,” Colin said.
Roy opened his eyes but didn’t speak.
Colin took their plates and glasses to the sink, washed them, and stacked them in the rack. As he worked he said, “You know, Roy, with your imagination, maybe you ought to write horror stories when you grow up. You’d make a bundle at it.”
Roy made no move to help with the clean-up. “You mean you still think I’m playing some sort of game with you?”
“Well, you make up a couple of names-”
“Steve Rose and Phil Pacino were real people. You can check on that easy enough. Just go to the library and look through the back issues of the News Register. You can read all about how they died.”
“Maybe I’ll do that.”
“Maybe you should.”
“But even if this Steve Rose did fall off the cliff at Sandman’s Cove, and even if Phil Pacino burned to death in his own home-it wouldn’t prove anything. Not a thing. Both of them could have been accidents.”
“Then why would I try to take credit for them?”
“To make your story about being a killer seem more realistic. To make me believe it. To set me up for some kind of joke.”
“You sure can be stubborn,” Roy said.
“So can you.”
“What will it take to make you face the truth?”
“I already know the truth,” Colin said. He finished the dishes and dried his hands on a red-and-white-checked dish towel.
Roy got up and went to the window. He stared at the sun-dappled swimming pool. “I guess the only way I’m ever going to convince you is to kill someone.”
“Yeah,” Colin said. “Why don’t you do that?”
“You think I won’t.”
“I know you won’t.”
Roy turned to him. Sunlight streamed through the window, painted one side of Roy’s face, left one side in shadow, and made one of his eyes even more fiercely blue than the other. “Are you daring me to kill someone?”
“Yeah.”
“Then if I do it,” Roy said, “half the responsibility will be yours.”
“Okay.”
“Just like that?”
“just like that.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that you might wind up in jail?” Roy asked.
“No. Because you won’t do it.”
“Is there anyone special you’d like me to take care of, anyone you’d like to see dead?”
Colin grinned because he was now certain that it was just a game. “Nobody particular. Anyone you want. Why don’t you pick a name out of the phone book?”
Roy turned to the window again.
Colin leaned against the counter and waited. After a while Roy looked at his watch and said, “I’ve got to be getting home. My parents are going to dinner at my Uncle Marlon’s place. He’s a genuine asshole. But I have to go with them.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Colin said. “You can’t change the subject that easily. You can’t slip out of it. We were talking about who you’re going to kill.”
“I wasn’t trying to slip out of it.”
“Well?”
“I’ve got to think about it for a while.”
“Yeah,” Colin said. “Like for fifty years.”
“No. By tomorrow I’ll tell you who it’ll be.”
“I won’t let you forget.”
Roy nodded somberly. “And once I’m rolling, I won’t let you stop me.”
18
Weezy Jacobs had an important dinner engagement Sunday evening. She gave Colin money to eat at Charlie’s Cafe, and she also gave him a short lecture about the importance of ordering something more nutritious than a greasy cheeseburger and french fries.
On his way to dinner, Colin stopped at Rhine-hart‘s, a big drugstore one block from the cafe. Rhine-hart’s had a large paperback-book section. Colin browsed through the titles in the wire pockets, searching for interesting science fiction and novels about the supernatural.