Letting go of his left shoulder, reaching out as if to shake with one bloody hand, Salsbury said, “Wait. I’ll make you a partner. Both of you. Partners.”
Paul aimed at the center of the man’s chest.
“If you’re partners, you’ll have everything. Everything you could want. All the money you could ever spend. All the money in the world. Think of that!”
Paul thought of Lolah Tayback.
“Partners. That doesn’t mean just money. Women. You can have all of the women you want, any women you want, no matter who they are. They’ll crawl to you. Or men, if that’s what you like. You can even have children. Little girls. Nine or ten years old. Little boys. Anything you want.”
Paul thought of Mark: a lump of frosted meat jammed into a food freezer.
And he thought of Rya: traumatized perhaps, but with a chance to live a halfway normal life.
He squeezed the trigger.
The Magnum bucked in his hand.
Because of his revolver’s impressive kick-which jolted Paul from hand to shoulder in spite of that fact that he was using .38 Special ammunition rather than Magnums-the bullet was high. It tore through Salsbury’s throat.
Blood and bits of flesh spattered the metal firearms cabinet. The roar of the shot was deafening. It bounced back and forth between the walls, echoed inside Paul’s skull, reverberated as it would forever in his memory.
He squeezed off another round.
That one took Salsbury in the chest, nearly rocked him and the chair backward onto the floor.
He turned away from the dead man.
“Are you going to be sick?” Sam asked.
“I’m all right.” He was numb.
“There’s a toilet at the end of the hail, to your left.”
“I’m okay, Sam.”
“You look-”
“I killed men in the war. Killed men over in Asia. Remember?”
“This is different. I understand that. In the war it’s always with rifles or grenades or mortars. It’s never from three feet with a handgun.”
“I’m fine. Believe me. Just fine.” He went to the door, pushed past Sam, stumbled into the corridor as if he had tripped, turned left, ran to the washroom, and threw up.
Scuttling sideways like a hermit crab, the Webley ready in his right hand, Klinger reached the western flank of the municipal building and found that the lawn there was littered with glass. He hadn’t made a sound on his run from the shrubbery. Now, pieces of glass snapped and crunched under his shoes, and he cursed silently. One of the windows in the police chief’s office was broken, and a few of the slats in the Venetian blind were bent out of shape, providing a convenient peephole for his reconnaissance work.
As he was rising up to have a look inside-cautious as a suspicious mouse sniffing the cheese in the trap-two shots exploded virtually in front of his face. He froze-then realized that he hadn’t been seen, that no one was firing at him.
Through the twisted slats of the blind, he could see two-thirds of Thorp’s starkly furnished and somewhat sterile office: gray-blue walls, a pair of three-drawer filing cabinets, an oak work table, a bulletin board with an aluminum frame, bookshelves, most of a massive metal desk- And Salsbury.
Dead. Very dead.
Where was Sam Edison? And the other one, Annendale? And the woman, the little girl?
There appeared to be no one in the room except Salsbury. Salsbury’s corpse.
Suddenly afraid of losing track of Edison and Annendale, afraid that they might somehow get away or sneak around behind him, afraid of being outmaneuvered, Klinger turned from the windows. He loped to the end of the lawn, then across the parking lot and the alleyway. He hid behind the hedge again, where he commanded a good view of the back door of the municipal building.
When he came out of the washroom, Sam was waiting in the corridor for him.
“Feeling better?”
“Yeah,” Paul said.
“It’s rough.”
“It’ll get worse.”
“That it will.”
“Christ.”
“What did you learn from Salsbury? Who were those men in the helicopter?”
Leaning against the wall, Paul said, “His partners. One of them was H. Leonard Dawson.”
“I’ll be damned.”