“Boss!” Pall yelled, overlapping the young chemist. “Get down—”
But Harrow stayed on his feet — his calling card was his face, the proof of his words his famous appearance. He stepped back up onto the grassy slope — the place was not fenced off, despite the gated gravel drive — and gave Gershon a good look and a clean shot... if that was what he was looking for.
“Be a son of a bitch! You are him!”
Harrow just shrugged elaborately with open arms.
“Come on up!”
“What about my crew? And the sheriff?”
“No. Just you!”
Harrow took a few steps up the slope — the grass was cut, not shaggy with weeds.
Pall whispered: “What do you want us to do, boss?”
Without turning or even halting his climb, Harrow said, “Stay out of range of that Remington. Probably ought to keep low and ease back to the bus.”
Anderson said, “What about you, sir?”
Moving upward but not quickly, looking up at the skinny figure with the rifle, Harrow said softly, “I’ll be fine. Sheriff, can I tell Mr. Gershon if he cooperates, there’ll be no charges for the gunplay?”
Tomasa said, “If you come back with your head attached, Mr. Harrow? We’ll let it slide.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
Harrow went on up the hillside, cutting over and stopping in a circle of gravel in front of the well-tended, unpretentious, if weathered, house. A ’98 Chevy Silverado pickup in the turnaround was showroom clean. Still, everything about the place said stay away. Bushes with long thorns scratched at windows and crowded the narrow stoop. The front screen was closed, the inside door open, a mangy hound visible at the screen, his nose working, his growl barely audible.
So he does have a dog for a friend, Harrow thought.
Up on the stoop, Gershon held the rifle easy in his hands. The old boy wore no glasses, his gray eyes bright if suspicious, his skin leathered from life in the sun, the angles in his face suggesting an American Indian in his ancestry, the lank, silver hair lifting a little in the breeze. He was slender but hard and sharp, like boards positioned at angles on an obstacle course.
“Never miss your show,” he said, genial but low-key, rifle lowered now but ready when need be.
“Never miss a shot, either, do you?”
Gershon smiled — his teeth were mildly yellowed but his own; he was sturdy-looking for a guy his age, which was easily seventy. “If you mean, could I have hit if you if I liked? You know I could. I ain’t prone to missing.”
“You’re going to have to make up your mind, Mr. Gershon.”
“How’s that?”
“Are you a crazy old coot out of Li’l Abner, or are you a smart, seasoned veteran of wars unknown who chooses to live apart from the human race?”
“...You know why I like your show, Mr. Harrow?”
“No.”
“You ain’t no... you’re no phony. No wannabe. You and your people have helped put bad guys away, and I can admire that.”
“We try,” Harrow said.
Gershon stepped down the few concrete steps and offered a hand, which Harrow shook. The grip was firm but didn’t show off.
“How pissed off is Roberto?”
“How pissed off do you think? You shot at his vehicle. Blew out a tire, popped his cherry top, and put a hole in the door. That’ll cost the county money, and he’s got to explain it.”
“He knows who’s to blame,” Gershon grumbled. “We’re friendly, you know. No secret to Roberto that I value my privacy.”
Harrow lifted his eyebrows. “I appreciate that desire, Mr. Gershon. Public service was bad enough, but now I’m really in the fishbowl. You mind if I call you ‘Archie’?”
The breeze riffled the long wispy silver hair. “Not if I can call you ‘J.C.’ Where was it you sheriffed? Idaho? Ohio?”
“Iowa. Story County. Just north of Des Moines. Good farmland there. Good people too.”
“Not sure there is such an animal.”
“What?”
“As ‘good people.’”
Harrow shook his head. “Not all people are bad. You said yourself, you like how my show puts bad guys away. That suggests good people getting help.”
His host thought about that momentarily. “I’m going to smoke. You want one?”
“Sure.”
Gershon leaned the rifle against the stoop, fished a pack of smokes and a lighter from a pants pocket, and lit up. Then he passed the lighter and cigarettes to Harrow, who joined in.
“Sheriff Tomasa, for example,” Harrow said. “He’s one of the good people. The good guys. Don’t you think, Archie?”
“Better than most.”
“I like him too. What about your neighbor — George Reid? Was he good people?”
“That’s why you’re here, of course — the killings.”
“You know it is. Reid a good neighbor?”
Gershon grinned. “Why, you suppose if you asked him that he’d’ve said I was? No, we weren’t really neighborly. He was just the stranger who lived over there...” He pointed west. “...and did me the favor of minding his own business.”
Harrow looked toward where the sun was lowering, about to drop behind the hills for the night. “He had kids, Archie.”
“Yes, he did. They were never any trouble to me either.”
“Whoever did this killed Reid’s kids.”
“I know. World’s a shithole, and it can suck a kid down fastest of all.”
For a shithole, the world looked beautiful right now, dusk settling in on the recluse’s perch with gentle tones of blue and gray.
“Archie, you see anything that night? Hear anything?”
“If I had, don’t you think I’d’ve told Roberto?”
“No.”
“Why, because I’m a nasty old hermit? A misanthrope who’s given up on the world and everything in it?”
“No. You love that old hound dog, for instance. And he’s part of the world.”
“You think you got a bead on me, J.C.?”
“I think you’re hiding in plain sight, Archie. I think you’re waiting to see which catches up with you, first — people who come around to kill you, or just the darkness that eventually swallows us all.”
He stared a long time at Harrow, who could see the shadows of approaching night washing over the old man, and they just stood there smoking.
Finally, Archibald Gershon said, “Why don’t you come in for a beer?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
The living room was large and knotty pine, lined with built-in shelves holding volumes of as many varieties as a well-stocked college bookstore — novels, both popular and literary from many decades, non-fiction works on politics and world history, philosophy, poetry, engineering.
Where there weren’t book shelves in the living room, gun racks displayed a collection of firearms a crazy cult might envy. A very comfortable-looking, well-worn brown leather lounger on a braided rug on the bare wood floor faced a big flat-screen television, fifty-something inch easy, as if it were an altar. A table by the chair had beer cans and a fat satellite TV guide, a nine millimeter Browning, and a John D. MacDonald novel cracked open face down.
With the exception of the beer cans, however, the place was tidy, and the kitchen — which opened onto the big library/TV area — had a Formica table dating to I Love Lucy days, where they sat and had Schlitz from the can, very cold. The hound curled up under the table at its master’s feet — when Harrow came in, it hadn’t even growled, sensing Gershon’s approval of their guest.
“Breeze was out of the west that night,” Gershon said, after a particularly deep swig of Schlitz, “and carried the shots over here — it was like they were in my own yard.”