He withdrew his hands from his pockets and turned his attention from the sky back to Jenny’s grave.
Like a black hole, its darkness seemed to defy the shimmering day, sucking in the surrounding sunlight. Or perhaps repelling it. He stared hard into the opening, peering into the dimness. He could just make out his wife’s coffin, which gleamed the dull silver of a bullet.
He was seized with a wild urge to throw himself into the hole and grab the coffin; to pound on its cold, unyielding shell and scream his throat raw; to wrap his arms around it and hug it to his chest and wait for the indifferent earth to bury them both.
Because, really, what else mattered now?
Something moved in his peripheral vision.
A man, bald and short and thick, inched forward from a gleaming black Town Car parked on a nearby road. He cleared his throat.
“Mr. Finney?” His voice was reedy yet carried clearly. He and the tall man were the only living souls now remaining in this section of the cemetery.
The tall man lifted his chin and inclined his head to one side.
The thick man coughed. “Mr. Finney. You have that, ah, meeting. In forty-five minutes. At the Salk.” He tapped his wristwatch. “Just wanted to, uh, remind you.”
Finney did not turn around, or speak. He kept his head tilted toward the horizontal, as if he were in the aisle of a supermarket, casually holding up a cereal box to inspect its list of ingredients.
The man reeks of cigarettes, Finney thought. He was specifically instructed that I hate cigarettes.
Finney watched him out of the corner of his eye. The seconds ticked by. Perspiration gathered across the thick man’s bare skull and glinted in the sun. The man cleared his throat, as if to speak again, then seemed to think the better of it. He retreated to the car, wheezing.
Finney straightened his head back to the vertical, so that his chin was once again aligned with his neck. Although he’d never been predisposed to quick anger, or rash thoughts, Jenny’s death had kindled in him an emotional brittleness, worsened by his hopeless incapacity to process the cauldron of feelings that had simmered deep in his psyche since she’d been taken from him. Rage, raw as an open wound, bubbled over from inside him and threatened to consume him.
He drew a deep breath and held it.
Finney was not given to cliché. He, in fact, hated cliché. So he was surprised when the first coherent thought to pop into his mind as the thick man waddled away was I’m going to kill him: a sentiment that was, of course, a cliché.
He forced the air out of his lungs and seized that thought. Flipped it around in his mind. Mentally hefted it, turned it this way and that, considered its substance.
I’m going to kill him.
In an instant, his anger over the thick man’s stupendous idiocy had turned to curiosity.
I’m going to kill him?
People casually uttered that phrase all the time, without thought or conviction. As in, if he shows up late again for work, I’m going to kill him. It was a sitcom catchphrase or a throwaway line for cheap villains in summer movies. It meant nothing. No substance. All cliché.
But was it really, at this moment? For him?
Because Finney knew, with the absolute certainty of a man who had grown rich from being absolutely certain about things, that at this moment he really did want to kill the thick man.
This insight fascinated him. He was a law-abiding citizen, after all. Well, mostly law-abiding. Certainly not given to thoughts of premeditated homicide. From what dark corner of his mind had this urge sprung?
The immediacy of his conviction, its vividness and power, intrigued him. Finney didn’t believe in the existence of God. But if he did, he would at this moment invoke God to witness the fact that he wanted nothing more than to wrap his fingers around the man’s fat throat and squeeze, really squeeze, until his fingers disappeared into the folds of skin, as if they’d slipped beneath fleshy quicksand; and he felt the man’s windpipe crack, and heard the gratifying, high-pitched gasp of his final, foul breath.
It was an odd sensation. Not simply rage, anymore, or indignation over the man’s appalling disrespect, even as Jenny was about to disappear into the ground forever.
No.
It seemed to him something greater, far more consequential: as if the mere existence of this squat, nicotine-addled creature had somehow tipped the universe out of balance, and it was Finney’s mission—no, his burden—to right the order of things.
Finney’s emotions were something that he’d always experienced from a distance, from the outside in, like they were fish in an aquarium, and he was viewing them from the other side of thick-paned glass; so it was rather like he watched, instead of felt, the murderous urge slip away, disappearing beneath the murky surface of his subconscious. It did so slowly, as if reluctant to give up its grasp on him.
He sighed.
Order.