He swallowed hard.
“Move,” I said.
He looked around the room again, like he was waiting for somebody else to do something. It didn’t happen, so he finally leaned the cue stick against the table and moved toward the bathroom. I followed. As we passed the biggest of his teammates, I looked up just long enough to give him a little smile. “Good to see you again,” I said.
When we were in the bathroom, I shut the door behind us. There was one stall, one urinal, and one sink. Whoever’s job it was to keep the room clean was clearly not an overachiever. I opened the stall door. “Have a seat,” I said. I pulled the service revolver out of my coat.
“I’m keeping my pants on,” he said.
“Good for you,” I said. “Just sit down.”
He flipped down the lid and sat on it. In the cheap light he looked tired and thin and used up.
“You don’t look so hot,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. He just sat there staring into some sort of middle distance only he could see.
“Let’s see,” I said. “If the bullet goes in this way, it should come out like so.” I looked past his head at the wall. “Unless it stays in the skull.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s gonna make a hell of a racket in here,” I said. I reached down and gave the toilet paper roll a quick spin. I tore off a couple feet, wadded it into a ball, and stuck it in my left ear. Then I made another ball and stuck it in my right ear.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m getting ready to shoot you,” I said. “It’s gonna surprise the hell out of everybody, I know. Nobody out there really thinks I’m gonna do it. But I am.” I looked over at the sink and the window above it. “I should probably go out that window. What do you think?”
“What…”
I made a show of checking the gun and then I held it in both hands. “You ever see a bullet go through somebody’s head?” I said. I closed my left eye and looked down the barrel with my right. “It’s quite a sight. God, this place is going to be a mess.”
“You can’t shoot me,” he said.
“Sure I can,” I said.
“What do you want from me?” he said. He started to rock on the seat.
“I want you to stay still,” I said. “So I can get a clean shot.”
“You’re crazy,” he said. “You’re fucking crazy.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I said. “I guess you should have killed me when you had the chance.”
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t going to…”
“Stop talking,” I said. “You’re ruining my concentration.”
“What do I have to do?” he said. “Just tell me.”
I opened up both my eyes and looked at him over the gun. “I suppose you could entertain me,” I said. “That might buy you a couple minutes, at least.”
“What?” he said. “How?”
“Start talking to me,” I said. “What’s in that bag?”
“What bag?”
I raised the gun again. “You’re not very good at this,” I said. “The bag you were looking for when you jumped me in my cabin.”
“Drugs,” he said.
“What kind?”
“I’m not exactly sure. Some kind of speed. Real intense shit, like it had to be mixed with something. Probably some crack. Maybe something else.”
“Where did you get it?”
He hesitated until I closed my left eye again. “A guy in New Jersey,” he said. “We stole it off him a couple weeks ago.”
“How does Dorothy figure into this?”
“She was with me,” he said. “Not when we stole it, I mean. Just that… she was with me. We came here together.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To sell the stuff,” he said. “What else?”
“Why here?”
“We had to get away. Someplace out in the middle of nowhere. Dorothy knows this place because she grew up here.”
“It doesn’t hurt that Canada is right next door, right? You don’t even have to go through customs, just drive your snowmobiles across the river.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“And what else, Bruckman?”
“What else what?”
“What else makes this such a great place to sell those drugs?”
He didn’t say anything.
“The Indians,” I said. “Right?”
“They got the money now,” he said. “With those casinos.”
“You know about the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, don’t you? All the problems they’re having with drugs. You figured you could make a big score up here.”
“It’s not my problem they got no will power.”
“Yeah, not like you,” I said. “You never touch the stuff.”
He looked away from me.
“You were dipping into that bag, weren’t you?”
“Little bit,” he said.
“What did Dorothy think of your plan to sell that stuff up here?”
“She didn’t know about it,” he said.
“Ah, now this is starting to make sense,” I said. “Let me guess. When she did find out, she took that bag and ran.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said.
“How did you know she came to me?” I said.
“Gobi, one of the guys on the team, he was back at that bar with all the deer heads and shit on the walls. There was this waitress there he was working on. He saw her come in and ask about you. She had the bag with her, he thought. He wasn’t sure. Nobody else had ever seen it. I had it hidden. I didn’t trust anybody. So instead of stopping her and asking her what she’s doing, this fucking moron just calls me and leaves me a message on my machine, tells me she was asking about you and I should check it out. You know, on account of he didn’t want to leave the bar because he thought he was finally getting somewhere with this waitress. That’s the kind of guy Gobi is. Can’t play hockey for shit, either.”
“You didn’t take her from my cabin?” I said.
“No, I didn’t even know she was there until a couple of days later. When I went home that night, there was a police car there, so I got the hell out of there, came over here to Canada. I figured I was fucked. Like maybe she turned me in or something. So I’m waiting here and then finally I call Gobi, and I go, Hey, what the fuck is going on over there? Are they looking for me or what? And he goes, No man, didn’t you get my message? And I go, What message? And he tells me what happened. Turns out somebody trashed the place that night and Mrs. Hudson called the cops. That’s why the police car was there.”
“You didn’t trash the place?”
“Nah, fuck no,” he said. “Why would I do that?”
“And you didn’t trash my place?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t fucking trash anything.”
“So who did?” I said.
He gave me a little smirk. It was almost enough to make me go ahead and shoot him. “You don’t know, do you?” he said.
“No, but I’m hoping you’re gonna tell me,” I said.
“I don’t know for sure,” he said. “But I’m guessing it was a couple guys named Pearl and Roman.”
“Who are they?”
“Just a couple guys who work for Molinov.”
“Who’s Molinov?”
“He’s the guy we stole the drugs off of,” he said. “Believe me, you don’t want to know about Molinov.”
“Is he Russian?” I said.
“I didn’t stop to ask him.”
“And what about these two guys, Pearl and Roman? What do they look like? Do they wear hunting caps?”
“I’ve never seen them,” he said. “I’ve only heard of them.”
“There’s been a couple guys following me around,” I said. “You think that’s them?”
“From what I hear, they’d probably just kill you instead of following you around, but who the fuck knows?”
“How would they know about me in the first place?” I said.
He rubbed his eyes. His head was probably hurting from all the thinking I was making him do. “The message,” he said. “When they trashed my place, they might have played the machine. If they did, you got a big problem.”
“Your concern is touching,” I said. I put the gun back in my coat pocket.
Bruckman sat there looking at me.
“Here’s your chance,” I said. “No gun.”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.
“You’re pretty tough when you’ve got four other guys helping you beat up somebody,” I said. “Let’s see what you can do all by yourself.”