Rickles laughed, a fine web of wrinkles appearing at the corners of his eyes, and for a moment he was his old self. “I like you, Rand. I always have, from the first instant I clapped eyes on you. I hope you know that.” He shook his head, barely clamping down on his mirth, then squeezed the mic. “No, the son of a bitch hasn’t turned up yet. What’s the story?”
They were cruising along the highway, through a fog of pale blue smoke, maybe ten minutes from the mall. The wind caught the high pickup and rocked it on its springs.
“Phew,” Martin said. “Good. Listen, we’ve got a real fucking problem down here. A maintenance guy was fixing a toilet out in back of Lids, the shop next to Devotion Diamonds, and you aren’t going to believe what he found in the tank. A lead slug. Looks like the one we couldn’t locate, the one that took out Mrs. Haswar and her baby, over?”
“How the hell did it get in a toilet, over?”
“Well, didn’t someone have to put it there? Gets worse, Chief. That reporter, Lanternglass, she was right there, she heard all about it. What’s the bet it’s all over TV by lunch, over?”
While Martin was blabbing, Kellaway reached across the seat and unbuttoned the chief’s holster. Rickles glanced down as Kellaway pulled out the Glock and stuck the barrel in his ribs.
“Tell him to head to my house and that you’ll meet him there, then hang up,” Kellaway said.
Rickles held the mic in his hand, staring down with clear, surprised blue eyes at the gun in his side.
“And watch the road,” Kellaway added as Rickles looked up and braked hard to keep from rear-ending a Caprice dawdling along through the smoke.
Rickles squeezed the mic. “Jesus. Okay. What a fucking mess. We better . . . we better convene at Kellaway’s house. He hasn’t turned up at my place, so he’s probably still there. First officers on the scene should hold him. I’m putting on my party lights and heading that way now. Out.” He released the mic and hung it on the scanner.
“Pull over in that gas station,” Kellaway said. “The Shell up on the right. I’m going to let you out and drop you off—because I like you, too, Jay. You’ve never been nothing but generous to me.”
Rickles touched his blinker and began to slow. His face was stiff, impassive. “Yasmin Haswar? And the boy, Ibrahim? That was you?” he asked.
“It was the last thing in the world I ever meant to happen,” Kellaway said. “They say that guns don’t kill people, that people kill people. But I feel like the gun wanted the both of them. I really do. Yasmin Haswar leapt up out of nowhere, like she knew there was a bullet waiting for her, and the gun went off. Sometimes guns do kill people.”
The truck pulled in to a parking lot containing eight rows of pumps and a small central convenience store. At that time of the morning, most of the pumps were empty. A film of blue smoke rippled steadily across the lot, coursing over the roof of the tiny mini-mart. The truck’s blinker was still click-click-clicking.
“What a pile of shit,” Rickles said. “You asshole. You careless asshole. Guns don’t just go off.”
“Don’t they?” Kellaway asked, and shot him.
10:41 A.M.
He unbuckled Rickles’s seat belt and pulled him sideways, so the stout little man dropped across the front seat. Then Kellaway got out and went around to the driver’s side and hauled himself up behind the wheel. The driver’s-side window was mucked with blood and tissue, as if someone had thrown a great fistful of pink slime against the glass.
He pushed Rickles over to make more room, and the older man slipped and fell into the passenger-side footwell. Only his feet remained tangled up on the seat.
A guy had come out of the convenience store, a fifty-something dude with long, graying hair and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tee beneath an unbuttoned flannel shirt. Kellaway lifted a hand in a casual wave, and the guy nodded back and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. Maybe he’d heard the shot and come out for a look. Maybe he just wanted a smoke. No one else gave the pickup a second look. It wasn’t like on TV. People didn’t register what they heard, didn’t process what they saw. Busy pedestrians might walk by a dead homeless man for hours, assuming he was asleep.
Kellaway steered back toward Jay’s house and away from the life he’d lived for the last fifteen years. He thought his chances of escape were very slim, although he had a few things working in his favor. Those things were in his Prius. One of them was loaded with a banana clip.
He pulled into the courtyard of Rickles’s hacienda and parked the truck. As he climbed down, the front door opened and the towheaded boy named Merritt stood there gazing blankly out at him. Kellaway nodded—How ya doin’—and walked swiftly to his Prius with Chief Rickles’s Glock in his hand. He tossed it onto the passenger seat of his car and got out of there. When he looked in the rearview mirror, the kid had turned his head to stare at his grandfather’s pickup. Maybe he was wondering why there was crap all over the inside of the driver’s-side window.
A gust of wind tried to shove the Prius out of its lane and onto the dirt embankment, and Kellaway had to struggle with the wheel to stay on the blacktop. Smoke churned around him as he drove west.
If he moved quickly and didn’t hesitate, he thought there might be time to get George away from Holly and the sister-in-law. He had a boat, a little eighteen-footer with an outboard; in happier days he’d sometimes taken George fishing in it. He had a notion to get the boy and make a run for the Bahamas. They could hide out in the rocks off Little Abaco, maybe eventually work their way south to Cuba. It was two hundred miles or more to Freeport on Grand Bahama Island, and he doubted he’d ever been more than three miles out in the boat. But he wasn’t afraid of the deep swell, or of drifting off course and slow-roasting to death under the equatorial sun, or of capsizing and drowning with his child. It seemed to him far, far more likely that the Coast Guard would find him offshore and a sniper in a helicopter would blow his brains out while little George watched.
If they could hit him in the chop. If he didn’t hit them first.
Besides. They might stay back if they weren’t sure what he’d do to the kid. He’d never point a loaded gun at his child, but from a helicopter how could you tell if a gun was loaded or not?