'And?'
'Spurton was in the car,' Ginelli said. 'Behind the wheel. Dead. Hole in his forehead, just above the right eye. Not much blood. Might have been a forty-five, but I don't think so. No blood on the seat behind him. Whatever killed him didn't go all the way through. A forty-five slug would have gone through and left a hole in back the size of a Campbell's soup can. I think someone shot him with a ball bearing in a slingshot, just like the girl shot you. Maybe it was even her that did it.'
Ginelli paused, ruminating.
'There was a dead chicken in his lap. Cut open. One word written on Spurton's forehead, in blood. Chicken blood is my guess, but I didn't exactly have time to give it the full crime-lab analysis, if you can dig that.'
'What word?' Billy asked, but he knew it before Ginelli said it.
"' NEVER."'
'Christ,' Billy said, and groped for the laced coffee. He got the cup to his mouth and then set it back down again.
If he drank any of that, he was going to vomit. He couldn't afford to vomit. In his mind's eye he could see Spurton sitting behind the Ford's wheel, head tilted back, a dark hole over one eye, a ball of white feathers in his lap. This vision was clear enough so he could even see the bird's yellow beak, frozen half-open, its glazed black eyes ...
The world swam in tones of gray ... and then there was a flat hard smacking sound and dull heat in his cheek. He opened his eyes and saw Ginelli settling back into his seat.
'Sorry, William, but it's like that commercial for aftershave says - you needed that. I think you are getting the guilts, over this fellow Spurton, and I want you to just quit it, you hear?' Ginelli's tone was mild, but his eyes were angry. 'You keep getting things all twisted around, like these bleeding-heart judges who want to blame everybody right up to the President of the United States for how some junkie knifed an old woman and stole her Social Security check - everyone, that is, but the junkie ass**le who did it and is right now standing in front of him and waiting for a suspended sentence so he can go out and do it again.'
'That doesn't make any sense at all!' Billy began, but Ginelli cut him off.
'Fuck it doesn't,' he said. 'You didn't kill Spurton, William. Some Gypsy did, and whichever one it was, it was the old man at the bottom of it and we both know it. No one twisted Spurton's arm, either. He was doing a job for pay, that's all. A simple job. He got too far back and they boxed him. Now, tell me, William - do you want it taken off or not.'
Billy sighed heavily. His cheek still tingled warmly where Ginelli had slapped him. 'Yes,' he said. 'I still want it taken off.'
'All right, then, let's drop it.'
'Okay.' He let Ginelli speak on uninterrupted to the end of his tale. He was, in truth, too amazed by it to think much of interrupting.
Ginelli walked behind the gas station and sat down on a pile of old tires. He wanted to get his mind serene, he said, and so he sat there for the next twenty minutes or so, looking up at the night sky - the last glow of daylight had just faded out of the west - and thinking serene thoughts. When he felt he had his mind right, he went back to the Nova. He backed down to the Texaco station without turning on the lights. Then he dragged Spurton's body out of the rental Ford and put it into the Nova's trunk.
'They wanted to leave me a message, maybe, or maybe just hang me up by the heels when the guy who runs that station found a body in a car with my name on the rental papers in the glove compartment.' But it was stupid, William, because if the guy was shot with a ball bearing instead of a bullet, the cops would take one quick sniff in my direction and then turn on them - the girl does a slingshot target-shooting act, for God's sake.
'Under other circumstances, I'd love to see the people I was after paint themselves into a corner like that, but this is a funny situation - this is something we got to work out by ourselves. Also, I expected the cops to be out talking to the Gypsies the next day about something else entirely, if things went the way I expected, and Spurton would only complicate things. So I took the body. Thank God that station was just sitting there by its lonesome on a country road, or I couldn't have done it.'
With the body of Spurton in the trunk, curled around the smaller trio of boxes the 'business associate' had delivered that afternoon, Ginelli drove on. He found Finson Road less than half a mile farther up. On Route 37-A, a good secondary road leading west from Bar Harbor, the Gypsies had been clearly open for business. Finson Road unpaved, potholed, and overgrown - was clearly a different proposition. They had gone to earth.