“There’s a McDonald’s up the road. We can use the restroom there.” She put the Passat in gear and made a 180 so the car was pointed toward the street.
“Somewhere else,” Dorothy said. She plucked at one ear of her kitten cap. “McDonald’s falls short of my ethical standards. Meat is murder.”
“You want to learn about murder,” Lanternglass said, “kick the back of my seat one more time.”
8:11 P.M.
Rickles took them to his hacienda on Kiwi Boulevard, where Kellaway had left his car. The police chief told Kellaway to swing back by the house tomorrow, just before eleven, and they could go to the mall together.
“I can meet you there,” Kellaway said. “That’d be easier.”
He dropped out of the truck, his shoes crunching on crushed shells.
“We better go together. For the candle-lighting ceremony. The newspeople want to photograph your return to the mall.” There was going to be a candle-lighting ceremony in the food court out in front of the carousel, to honor the fallen. Afterward the mall was celebrating a special Day of Remembrance, with 20 to 40 percent off selected items in every store.
“Who cares what the newspeople want?” Kellaway stood in the courtyard, peering up into Rickles’s truck.
Rickles slung one arm over the steering wheel and leaned across the passenger seat toward Kellaway. He was smiling, but his eyes were cool, almost unfriendly. “You ought to. Lanternglass is a tiresome little race activist, kind of person who believes every cop can’t wait to take a fire hose to a crowd of black people. But she’s nobody’s fool, and you just about begged her to go poking around in your past. I don’t know what kind of embarrassing shit you’ve done, but I’m sure I’ll be reading all about it by the end of the week, if not sooner. You got any sense at all, you’ll give yourself a good shave first thing tomorrow morning, slap on your best cologne, and be ready to light candles with me at eleven A.M. The press is lazy. If you give them a feel-good story on a silver platter, they’ll eat it. And you want to keep them well fed. Otherwise they might turn their forks and knives on you, capisce?”
Kellaway didn’t want to go back to the mall with Rickles. He wanted to get there ahead of him, ahead of everyone, early enough to visit the little employees’ bathroom behind Lids. He wanted to argue, to say—truthfully—that he had never once arrived at work as late as 11:00 A.M. But then he observed again the icy way Rickles was watching him, above a thin, no-longer-friendly smile, and he nodded.
“Sounds good,” he said, and slammed the door of the truck.
He pulled out of the driveway in his Prius, hooked left when he should’ve turned right. He didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to see the TV vans parked out front, didn’t want the TV people to see him. Instead he turned the car out of town, nosing into the smoke and gathering night.
Jim Hirst’s farmhouse was dark, an angular arrangement of black boxes against a sky the color of cinders. The only light in the whole place was the television. It cast a sickly blue glow, visible through the holes where the windows were missing on the western side of the house. The big sheets of plastic draped over that end of the building rippled in the gusting wind, making slow, heavy, ominous slapping sounds.
Kellaway got out of his car and stood beside it and listened to the tidal shush of the wind. He couldn’t hear the TV. Sound had to be off.
He started toward the house, his feet crunching in the gravel—and then stopped moving, froze to listen. He had heard footsteps, he was almost sure of it. It seemed to him there was a man on the other side of his car. He could see him in his peripheral vision. Kellaway found he was afraid to look at him directly, couldn’t will himself to turn his head.
It was Jim Hirst—Jim, who had not walked for more than a decade. Jim walking easy in the night, ten feet away, on the other side of the car. He would know Jim anywhere, knew him by the way his arms hung at his sides. He recognized the curve of his bare skull against the smoky night.
“Jim!” Kellaway cried, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. “Jim, that you?”
Jim took a slow, heavy step toward him, and Kellaway had to shut his eyes, could not bear to see the man in the darkness at the edge of the road. His fear drove the breath out of him. He had not been half as scared when he’d crawled into Devotion Diamonds toward a woman with a gun.
He heard Jim take another step toward him and forced himself to open his eyes.
His eyes had adjusted to the dark by then, and he saw in a moment that what he’d taken for a man was a stunted black mangrove. The curve he’d imagined to be Jim Hirst’s bare skull was nothing more than a smooth knob where a branch had broken away long ago.
The plastic hanging off the house flapped heavily again, sounding like a man taking slow, heavy steps.
Kellaway exhaled. A crazy thing to think, that Jim was walking with him in the dark. And yet even as he continued toward the house, he could not quite escape the feeling of having company. The night was in restless motion, branches flinging themselves frantically back and forth. The grass hissed. The wind was rising.
He rapped at the doorframe and called for Jim, called for Mary, but he was not surprised when no one answered him. For some reason he had not expected a reply. He let himself in.
Beneath the campfire smell that was on everything, Kellaway caught the odor of stale, flat beer and urine. He flicked on the light in the foyer.
“Hello?”
He looked into the living room. Monster trucks were racing on the TV, lunging over great muddy hills. No one there.
“Jim?” he called again. He peeked into the kitchen. Empty.
By then he knew what he was going to find before he found it. He could not have said why. Maybe he’d even known out in the driveway, when he sensed Jim close to him in the darkness. He did not want to look into the master bedroom but couldn’t help himself.
The lights were off. Jim was lying on the bed, his wheelchair parked beside it. Kellaway clicked on the light, but only for a moment. He didn’t want to look. He flipped the switch, and it was dark again.
After a moment Kellaway walked over to the bed and sat down in the wheelchair. The room was fragrant with the sharp copper reek of blood. It was a filthy place to die: diapers stuffed into a plastic trash pail, beer cans on the floor, orange pill bottles and pornographic magazines on the bedside table. Just a few feet from the bed was a closet. Kellaway switched on the closet light. That made it possible for him to see, while casting a more merciful glow on the man under the sheet.
Jim Hirst with a .44 in his mouth and his brains sprayed all over the headboard.