esophagus.
“Rolaids,” I advised him, trying unsuccessfully to cheer myself.
I didn’t see any of the four expended brass cartridges on the front
seat. In spite of the platoons of amateur sleuths waiting to pounce,
and regardless of whether having the brass might help them identify the
murder weapon, I didn’t have the nerve to search the floor, especially
under Stevenson’s legs.
Anyway, even if I found all the cartridges, there was still a bullet
buried in his chest. If it wasn’t too grossly distorted, this wad of
lead would feature score marks that could be matched to the
singularities of the bore of my pistol, but even the prospect of prison
wasn’t sufficient to make me take out my penknife and perform
exploratory surgery to retrieve the incriminating slug.
If I’d been a different man than I am, with the stomach for such an
impromptu autopsy, I wouldn’t have risked it, anyway. Assuming that
Stevenson’s radical personality change-his newfound thirst for
violence-was but one symptom of the weird disease he carried, and
assuming that this illness could be spread by contact with infected
tissues and bodily fluids, this type of grisly wet work was out of the
question, which is also why I had been careful not to get any of his
blood on me.
When the chief had been telling me about his dreams of rape and
mutilation, I’d been sickened by the thought that I was breathing the
same air that he’d used and exhaled. I doubted, however, that the
microbe he carried was airborne. If it were that highly contagious,
Moonlight Bay wouldn’t be on a roller-coaster ride to Hell, as he had
claimed the town was: It would long ago have arrived in the sulfurous
Pit.
Tick, tick, tick.
According to the gauge on the instrument panel, the fuel tank was
nearly full. Good. Perfect. Earlier in the night, at Angela’s, the
troop had taught me how to destroy evidence and possibly conceal a
murder.
The fire should be so intense that the four brass cartridges, the
sheet-metal body of the car, and even portions of the heavier frame
would melt. Of the late Lewis Stevenson, little more than charred
bones would remain, and the soft lead slug would effectively vanish.
Certainly, none of my fingerprints, hairs, or clothes fibers would
survive.
Another slug had passed through the chief’s neck, pulverizing the
window in the driver’s door. It was now lying somewhere out in the
parking lot or, with luck, was at rest deep in the ivycovered slope
that rose from the far end of the lot to the higher I situated
Embarcadero Way, where it would be all but impossible to find.
Incriminating powder burns marred my jacket. I should have destroyed
it. I couldn’t. I loved that jacket. It was cool. The bullet hole
in the pocket made it even cooler.
“Gotta give the spinster schoolteachers some chance,” I inuttered as I
closed the front and back doors of the car.
The brief laugh that escaped was so humorless and bleak that it scared
me almost as inuch as the possibility of imprisonment.
I ejected the magazine from the Glock, took one cartridge from it,
which left six, and then slapped it back into the pistol.
Orson whined fuse in his mouth.
and picked up one end of the gauze
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said-and then gave him the double take that he
deserved.
The mutt might have picked it up solely because he was curious about
it, as dogs tend to be curious about everything.
Funny white coil. Like a snake, snake, snake . . . hut not a snake.
Interesting. Interesting. Master Snow’s scent on it. Might be good
to eat.
Almost anything might be good to eat.
just because Orson picked up the fuse and whined impatiently didn’t
necessarily mean that he understood the purpose of it or the nature of
the entire scheme I’d concocted. His interest-and uncanny timing-might
be purely coincidental.
Yeah. Sure. Like the purely coincidental eruption of fireworks every
Independence Day.
Heart pounding, expecting to be discovered at any moment, I took the
twisted gauze fuse from Orson and carefully knotted the cartridge to
one end of it.
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