and catch some sun, work up a really bitchin’ tan.”
I couldn’t believe he was going to let me go.
Then he said, “The dog stays with me.”
‘No.
He gestured with his pistol. “Out.”
“He’s my dog.”
“He’s nobody’s dog. And this isn’t a debate.”
“What do You want with him?”
“An object lesson.”
“What?”
“Gonna take him down to the municipal garage. There’s a wood-chipping
machine parked there, to grind up tree limbs.”
“No way.
“I’ll put a bullet in the mutts head-”
‘No.
toss him in the chipper-” “Let him out of the car now.” -bag the slush
that comes out the other end, and drop it by your house as a
reminder.”
Staring at Stevenson, I knew that he was not merely a changed man. He
was not the same man at all. He was someone new. Someone who had been
born out of the old Lewis Stevenson, like a butterfly from a chrysalis,
except that this time the process was hideously reversed: the butterfly
had gone into the chrysalis, and a worm had emerged. This nightmarish
metamorphosis had been underway for some time but had culminated before
my eyes. The last of the former chief was gone forever, and the person
whom I now challenged eye to eye was driven entirely by need and
desire, uninhibited by a conscience, no longer capable of sobbing as he
had sobbed only minutes ago, and as deadly as anyone or anything on the
face of the earth.
If he carried a laboratory-engineered infection that could induce such
a change, would it pass now to me?
My heart fought itself, throwing hard punch after hard punch.
Although I had never imagined myself capable of killing another human
being, I thought I was capable of wasting this man, because I’d be
saving not only Orson but also untold girls and women whom he intended
to welcome into his nightmare.
With more steel in my voice than I had expected, I said, “Let the dog
out of the car now.”
Incredulous, his face splitting with that familiar rattlesnake smile,
he said, “Are You forgetting who’s the cop? Huh, freak? You
forgetting who’s got the gun?”
If I fired the Glock, I might not kill the bastard instantly, even at
such close range. Even if the first round stopped his heart in an
instant, he might reflexively squeeze off a round that, from a distance
of less than two feet, couldn’t miss me.
He broke the impasse: “All right, okay, You want to watch while I do
it?”
Incredibly, he half turned in his seat, thrust the barrel of his pistol
through one of the inch-square gaps in the steel security grille, and
fired at the dog.
The blast rocked the car, and Orson squealed.
“No!” I shouted.
As Stevenson jerked his gun out of the grille, I shot him. The slug
punched a hole through my leather jacket and tore open his chest. He
fired wildly into the ceiling. I shot him again, in the throat this
time, and the window behind him shattered when the bullet passed out of
the back of his neck.
I sat stunned, as if spellbound by a sorcerer, unable to move, unable
even to blink, my heart hanging like an iron plumb bob in my chest,
numb to emotion, unable to feel the pistol in my hand, unable to see
anything whatsoever, not even the dead man whom I knew to be at the
other end of the car seat, briefly blinded by shock, baffled and bound
by blackness, temporarily deafened either by the gunfire or perhaps by
a desperate desire not to hear even the inner voice of my conscience
chattering about consequences.
The only sense that I still possessed was the sense of smell. The
sulfurous-carbon stink of gunfire, the metallic aroma of blood, the
acidic fumes of urine because Stevenson had fouled himself in his death
throes, and the fragrance of my mother’s rose-scented shampoo whirled
over me at once, a storm of odor and malodor. All were real except the
attar of roses, which was long forgotten but now summoned from memory
with all its delicate nuances. Extreme terror gives us back the