Part 3 (1/2)

The a.s.sa.s.sin studied it briefly. ”I'll keep this, if you don't mind, Lemuel.”

He wanted to take my license. That meant something significant; it portended of terrible things to come, though I couldn't quite shape the ideas in my mind.

”Now, pick up the other gun. Come on. I promise if you cooperate, you're not going to get hurt.”

I didn't want to touch it. I didn't want to go anywhere near it. And what would happen if I did? Would he shoot me, claim self-defense, claim I'd shot b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Karen? Picking up the gun was insanity, but so was not picking it up, so I slowly wrapped my fingers around the handle and lifted. It was both heavier and lighter than I imagined, and it trembled in my hand.

”Aim it at the refrigerator,” the a.s.sa.s.sin said.

Beyond the point of making trouble or arguing, I did as I was told.

”Squeeze the trigger.”

Though I knew he'd taken out the clip, which I understood meant the gun was unloaded, I still winced as I followed the order. I pressed down hard, expecting the rich boom of a TV shot report, but I got nothing except a hollow click. I kept my arm out. The gun continued to shake.

”Good job, Lemuel. Now put the gun down on the table.”

I did.

”So, here's the deal,” the a.s.sa.s.sin said. ”Your fingerprints are now on the murder weapon. Bad for you, good for me, but let me be clear about this. You leave here, you keep quiet about what you saw, and no one will ever find this gun, no one will know you were here, and there will be no problem for either of us. I'm not looking to frame you, just to keep you from reporting to anyone what you saw. So if you decide you want to go to the police, they'll get an anonymous tip about you, Lemuel Altick, and discover the hidden location of this gun, which will mark you as the killer. On the other hand, if you accept that there are bigger things at play here than you can understand-and accordingly keep quiet-the police will never link you to what happened here today. Now, you can see I'm being fair about this, so keep that in mind if you have any moral qualms. Believe me, these were bad, bad people, and they had it coming. So, are we cool here?”

I nodded slowly, thinking for the first time that the a.s.sa.s.sin was probably gay. He wasn't effeminate or anything like that, but there was something about him, about the way he moved and spoke, that seemed full of unarticulated significance. Then a little voice inside me said that it didn't matter if he was gay. It didn't matter if he liked to do three-ways with proboscis monkeys. I had to stay focused if I was going to avoid getting killed. And now I had a new problem: Maybe he really would let me live, but only so he could frame me for murder.

I looked up, and he was shaking his head. ”I really wish you hadn't stumbled into this. What's a clean-cut kid like you doing selling encyclopedias? You going to college?”

I swallowed hard. ”I'm raising money. I got in, but I can't afford it, so I deferred.”

He pointed at me. ”Quick! What's your favorite Shakespeare play?”

I couldn't believe I was even having this conversation. ”I'm not sure. Twelfth Night, Twelfth Night, maybe.” maybe.”

He raised an eyebrow. ”Yeah? Why?”

”I don't know. It's supposed to be a comedy, but it's really kind of cruel and creepy. The play's villain is the guy who's actually just trying to restore order.”

”Interesting.” He nodded thoughtfully. Then he waved a hand in the air. ”Who cares, anyway, right? Shakespeare's overrated. Now Milton. There's a poet.”

The fear, which I had done a reasonable job of pus.h.i.+ng back for a while, was now so intense that it flashed around me like electricity in a Tesla ball. Crazy people ranted like this before they killed you, didn't they? That's what I'd learned from the movies. Even if I was misreading those signals, I had just seen two people killed. Every time my attention s.h.i.+fted to something else, every time I tried to comfort myself with the realization that the a.s.sa.s.sin probably wouldn't strike again, that knowledge came back with a gruesome thump. Two people were dead. Forever. Whatever b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Karen had done, they didn't deserve to be gunned down like animals.

Even so, with the sadness that crept over me at the thought of the indelible cruelty of murder, I felt the beginnings of something-admiration, maybe, though that wasn't quite right-for the man who had done the killing. The a.s.sa.s.sin terrified me, but I also wanted his approval. I knew it made no sense, but I felt I had to earn his trust, which was why I spoke out.

”There's something else,” I said with deliberate slowness, a hopeless effort to control the trembling in my voice. ”Besides Shakespeare, I mean. A guy saw me go in here.”

He arched an eyebrow. ”What sort of guy?”

”Just a guy. A creepy redneck.”

”When?”

”Three hours ago, I guess.”

The a.s.sa.s.sin waved his hand dismissively. ”Forget it. He won't remember who you are, what you were doing here, any of that. He's not going to give you trouble. And if he does bring in the cops, tell them that you tried to sell them some books, it didn't fly, and you took off. There's nothing to link you to these guys, to suggest you had a motive. Nothing like that.”

”I don't know.”

”If the cops come to see you, say you were in and out without luck, saw nothing unusual-except maybe this creepy redneck-and that's all you have to say. They'll be off your case in no time and on that redneck's. Can you trust me on that?”

Could I trust him? He'd barged into my life, murdered a pair of prospects in front of my eyes, and then set me up to take the blame. I nodded.

”Fab,” the a.s.sa.s.sin said. ”Now, I'd say it was time for you to be getting out of here.”

Leaving seemed to be a pretty good idea. More than I could have hoped for. I stood on wobbling legs, held on to the table until I could support myself properly, and began a sideways shuffle toward the front door, careful to keep an eye on the killer at all times.

”Lemuel,” the a.s.sa.s.sin said, ”I hope you'll consider the back way. Secrecy and all.”

Vaguely humiliated, I went into the living room and unlocked the back door. I stepped out into the yard, where the heat and the dank, outhouse-stench humidity startled me out of my fear for a moment. I had seen people killed just feet away from me, I had sat at the table with their killer, and I had made it out alive. I was not going to be killed.

Now I just had to get away from there before the cops showed up.

It would be easy to cut over to the neighbor's property, so I closed the door behind me and stepped out into the dank darkness. The ghost of the moon was glowing behind a heavy blanket of clouds. The crickets chirped their near screeching chorus, and nearby, an unfathomable tropical frog bellowed its equatorial song. A mosquito dive-bombed my ear, but I ignored the explosive buzz. Instead I trudged forward, vaguely aware as I walked that the lights in b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Karen's trailer went metaphorically out.

b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Karen. He irritating and vaguely sinister. She jagged and beaten down. Dead. The two of them dead. Their kids, off somewhere, were now orphans and had no idea. Their young lives, as they had lived them, were finished. And I had been a party to it. I had witnessed the unspeakable horror of their deaths and then sat with their killer and, I realized, found him strangely charming. It wasn't as though I could have saved b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Karen, but I told myself I could do something now. I could go to the police, and go fast, maybe in time for them to catch the a.s.sa.s.sin while he was still in the trailer. And even if they didn't get there in time, no one would believe that I had killed them.

Then again, they might.

The a.s.sa.s.sin, when not a.s.sa.s.sinating, acted like a reasonable guy. It could be that he believed, really believed, that b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Karen deserved it. But did anyone deserve it? Did I live in a world in which bad people were killed by righteous a.s.sa.s.sins? Nothing in my life told me it was so, but then again, this night had been in my life.

The first two trailers I pa.s.sed were dark, though I heard an angry dog's sonorous barking in the middle distance. I came out onto a street, though not the one on which b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Karen lived, which somehow made me feel better. It was a little less than a mile to the Kwick Stop, and only a couple of cars pa.s.sed me, speeding by in automotive oblivion. I told myself over and over again that I just might get away with this, I just might get my life back.

Chapter 5.

THE C CUTTING B BOARD lacked music. It was a large restaurant, with a moderately unfortunate name, composed of a series of interlinked wood-paneled rooms filled out with white-clothed tables and heavy wooden chairs. Yet it lacked music, and that disappointed B.B. He liked music, soft music, trickling in so quietly that he could hardly hear it. Ambient as a distant highway, but still evanescently there, adding texture to the meal, a little heft if the conversation lagged, a touch of the cinematic sound track. Cla.s.sical was fine, the soft sort of cla.s.sical, not the loud stuff with horns and kettledrums, but the truth was that B.B. liked elevator music. He knew everyone got a kick out of tras.h.i.+ng elevator music, and let them have their laugh, but in the end they had to agree there was something rea.s.suring about these songs everyone already knew, maybe in a more raucous form, handed back all soft and powdery, prechewed, going down so smooth that you didn't even know there was something in your throat. lacked music. It was a large restaurant, with a moderately unfortunate name, composed of a series of interlinked wood-paneled rooms filled out with white-clothed tables and heavy wooden chairs. Yet it lacked music, and that disappointed B.B. He liked music, soft music, trickling in so quietly that he could hardly hear it. Ambient as a distant highway, but still evanescently there, adding texture to the meal, a little heft if the conversation lagged, a touch of the cinematic sound track. Cla.s.sical was fine, the soft sort of cla.s.sical, not the loud stuff with horns and kettledrums, but the truth was that B.B. liked elevator music. He knew everyone got a kick out of tras.h.i.+ng elevator music, and let them have their laugh, but in the end they had to agree there was something rea.s.suring about these songs everyone already knew, maybe in a more raucous form, handed back all soft and powdery, prechewed, going down so smooth that you didn't even know there was something in your throat.

This restaurant skipped the music. And no fish tank. He liked a fish tank. B.B. wasn't one of those guys who took cruel pleasure picking which fish gets to die-he had to make cruel decisions enough for work-but he liked to look at fish. He liked to watch them swim, especially the big goldfish with the bulging eyes, and he liked the bubbling in the tank.

The Cutting Board had palm trees, though-a few small groves of plastic palms stuck here and there to give the place a touch of cla.s.s. Palm trees were important for obscuring views. He didn't want to be seen, and he didn't want to see. The glory of a fine restaurant was its semiprivacy. Pillars could work, too, but he liked the palm trees since the fronds added extra cover. The restaurant was also into low, ambient lighting, so in the end, the dark and the plastic trees made it acceptable despite its other drawbacks. B.B. would return at some point. It would never be on his A-list, but he would put it on rotation. In any case, he didn't like to visit a place more than once every six months. The last thing you want is for the waiters to start to recognize you, recognizing that the last time you were in it was a different boy, and the time before that, too.

It was a little steak-and-seafood place near the Ft. Lauderdale airport, far enough away from Miami that he wouldn't just happen to b.u.mp into anyone he knew, and catering largely to the old and retired set, so that his sort of people-the nonwithered, the surgically nonwithered, the power-golf players, the Rolex wearers, and the convertible drivers-would never be caught dead in a place like this. B.B. believed firmly in picking places that drew the old and the retired. A man could be a prince in the eyes of a waiter simply by not sending back the drinking water for being the wrong temperature.

On the other side of B.B.'s candlelit table, Chuck Finn sat in concentration as he worked a breadstick with a waxy slab of b.u.t.ter. He'd have it under control for a second or two before it slipped out from under his knife, and Chuck would lurch in sudden and astonis.h.i.+ngly ungraceful motions to regain his grip on it. And each time he would smile at B.B., flash those slightly crooked teeth in sophisticated self-deprecation, and then go back to his business. The third time, B.B. had been forced to reach across the table to keep the boy from knocking his goblet of Saint-Estephe onto the tablecloth. At $45 a bottle, he wasn't about to let any of it tip over, particularly when the boy had taken his first sip, probably his first sip of wine ever, and nodded with knowing appreciation. At a steakhouse, a man drinks a nice Bordeaux. It doesn't get much more complicated than that. Most of the other boys, maybe all of the other boys, had taken a sip, grimaced, and asked for a c.o.ke. Chuck had half closed his eyes in pleasure and let the tip of his very pink tongue tickle his upper lip. Chuck got it, and B.B. began to suspect that he had on his hands not only a boy willing to be mentored, but one ready to be mentored.

He'd taken only one sip, and then somehow the gla.s.s was covered with greasy boy-fingerprints. B.B. understood that's what it was to be a boy. Boys made messes. They almost knocked over wine. Sometimes they did knock over wine, and unless you were eager to keep from drawing attention to yourself, you didn't much care because you didn't keep boys from being boys. That wasn't a mentor's job. A mentor turned a boy in the right direction so that at some future date, when the time was right, he'd become a man. That's how you mentored.

”Be graceful, Chuck,” B.B. said in what he hoped was his most mentorly tone. ”Grace is poise, and poise is power. Look at me. You want to be like me when you grow up.”

B.B. pointed at himself when he spoke, as if he were exhibit A. If you pointed at yourself, people looked, and he had no reason to mind that. He had turned fifty-five this year-a bit on the mature side, though still in his prime-but people mistook him for forty, forty-five max. Partly it was the Grecian Formula, the use of which he had elevated to an art, and partly it was the lifestyle. An hour with the Nautilus machines three times a week wasn't much of an investment for youth. Then there were the clothes.