“Colfax committed suicide,” Cooper says flatly. He doesn’t like this. He knows Rigo’s playing him.
Rigo adopts a face of dramatic disappointment. “Here we are, in the sun, and it’s a new day, and we’re still going to tell the same old stories? How about a little truth-telling instead?” He looks back at his folder. Flips through some pages. “Here we go,” he says. He looks up at the crowd. “Is there a Laurence Barkley here?” He looks around. “Laurence? Barkley?” No one stirs. No one answers. Rigo sighs to himself and returns to his list. “Hmmm. Must be dead. Okeydokey. How about a Lyndon Lancaster? Is there a Lyndon Lancaster living here?”
Cooper knows Lyndon Lancaster by sight, and knows he’s standing a few yards away at the edge of the street, in a bathrobe. Cooper’s eyes flick involuntarily in Lancaster’s direction. Don’t move, he thinks. Don’t answer. Don’t do it. Cooper sees now what Rigo intends. He’ll call out and expose the whole town, what’s left of it, every resident, every secret, one by one. Destroy all of them. All of us, Cooper thinks.
“I’d call you by your real name, but I know that you don’t know it,” Rigo says. “But if you’d like to know, show yourself.”
There’s a long, tremulous moment as Rigo waits, and then Lyndon Lancaster steps forward.
He’s tall, thin, mid-fifties, unshaven, graying hair hanging loose over his eyes, with a terry-cloth robe wrapped around him, even in the heat. He looks like someone’s once-dashing dad who’s let himself go since the divorce.
“That’s me. I’m Lyndon Lancaster,” he says.
“Are you sure?” says Rigo. “Just kidding. Nice to meet you. Why don’t you come on over here? There’s a lot you can learn about yourself in this file.” Rigo waves him over. Lancaster approaches, reluctantly. Soon he’s standing in the middle of the street, next to Rigo, like an awkward volunteer at a magic show.
“Lyndon Lancaster,” says Rigo. “Sounds like a soap star, to be honest.” Then he reads from the file. “But your real name is Sam ‘The Wolverine’ Lemme. Am I pronouncing that right? L-E-M-ME—rhymes with ‘phlegmy’? Look at me—why am I asking you? Like you’d know.”
Lancaster says nothing. He just stands nervously. Cooper watches Santayana, a few yards behind the two men, reclining in her lawn chair, regarding the proceedings calmly, an AR Bushmaster rifle held flat across her knees. At her feet, Cooper notices, is a large black rectangular legal-file box. Stuffed with files, from the looks of it. All their files, Cooper imagines. The blind files.
Rigo reads from the file: “Twelve confirmed murders. Most of it routine button-man stuff, for the most part. Rhode Island mafia, lower rung, actually. Some real boring penny ante midlevel shit, to be honest. Cool nickname, though. The Wolverine!” Rigo says this like a ringmaster hyping the big top’s most remarkable freak. “I wonder how you got that name?” He continues to read the file. “You did kill this one woman, named Sandra Antonia Francesca, because she happened to be married to a guy who owed you money. That guy, they found later in twelve different garbage bags. Never linked that one to you, though. As for the woman, they had you dead to rights on her, due to the fact that you pissed on her dead body after you raped her.” Rigo mock scrutinizes the page before his eyes, as though in disbelief. “See, now, that’s just dumb, Sammy. Piss has DNA in it, you know. Then again, it says here it was a pretty messy rape, so DNA was likely not an issue.” Rigo closes the file, then looks up straight at Lancaster. “Apparently, that was your thing. The pissing part? That’s why they called you the Wolverine. You used to piss on the people you killed. As a kind of—what would you call it? Sadistic flourish.” Rigo wiggles his groin comically in a pantomime of pissing. “See, wolverines piss on their food so no one else will eat it. True story!” Rigo looks around at the crowd, then back at Lancaster. “One of your thug playmates must have been an amateur naturalist. Either way, that’s how you got the nickname. Wear it proudly.”
Cooper watches Lancaster, whose face is drained and pale now and who looks perilously close to vomiting. Lancaster tugs the robe around himself despite the relentless morning sun. Then Lancaster looks around at the assembled crowd, which has fallen deadly quiet, and his eyes search each person in the crowd as though one of them might break ranks and step out and save him. As if to say, You know me. I’m Lyndon Lancaster. But no one knows him, not really, he realizes, not even himself. Not until now. And as he scans the crowd, it seems to be recoiling, receding in disgust, or at least that’s how it looks to him. He has no recollection of these crimes. Yet he doesn’t blame these people. Because there’s no part of him that doesn’t believe what Rigo is saying is true.
He looks to Rigo, pleading. “I’m not that man,” he says weakly. “I’m Lyndon Lancaster.”
“Does that even sound like a real name to you?” says Rigo. Then he pulls out an automatic pistol from his waistband. He holds it, grip out, toward Lancaster. “I’m going to give you a choice, Sammy ‘The Wolverine’ Lemme. You can take this gun, and you can shoot me, certainly, that is an option—though my agents might take issue with that, and they’ll not only kill you, but that lovely girl that they’re currently standing with. But, if you like, you can shoot me, maybe piss on my body when you’re done”—Rigo looks around clownishly at the crowd, as though goading them to cheer—“but what’s that old expression? Don’t shoot the messenger!” Rigo laughs. Then he turns back to Lancaster. “Or you can go another route”—Rigo thrusts the gun out toward Lancaster—“and take this pistol and do what the state should have done to you three fucking years ago when they first arrested you, rather than cutting you a deal and wiping your sins away and depositing you here to live in blissful anonymity among this motley crew of murderers and rapists. Your choice.”
Cooper calls out urgently: “Lyndon, just walk away.”
Only his friends call him Lyndon and Cooper hopes that might snap him awake.
Lancaster looks at Cooper blankly, looks back at Rigo, then looks at the gun.
Cooper shouts now: “Lyndon, they don’t want you. This isn’t about you. Just go home.”
Instead, Lancaster reaches out and takes the gun. He examines it, in his hand, like it’s a gift he wasn’t expecting and isn’t quite sure what to make of, but is increasingly delighted to have received.
Cooper: “Lyndon, don’t!”
Lancaster holds the gun to his temple.
Rigo sticks his index finger up under his own chin. “It’s much better right here,” he whispers. “Much higher success—”