I won’t think about that. I won’t let myself
He thought instead of all the hours Pie had spent in front of the TV with Melissa Sweetheart in her lap, watching KrayZee Toons. Professor KrayZee had yielded his place of honor in her heart to the MotoKops (espe-cially Cassie Styles and the handsome Colonel Henry) over the last year or so, but the old Prof still seemed like the right answer to David. He only remembered one of Prof. KrayZee’s little songs, and he sang it now as he slipped his arms around the dead girl and lifted her free of the hook:
“This old man.., he played one…
Her head fell against his shoulder. It was amazingly heavy-how had she ever held it up all day long, as little as she was?
“He played knick-knack on my thumb…”
He turned, stepped clumsily down from the chair, staggered but did not fall, and took Pie over to the windows. He smoothed her shirt down in the back as he went. It had torn, but only a little. He laid her down, one hand under her neck to keep from bumping her head on the floor. It was the way Mom had showed him when Pie had been just a baby and he had asked to hold her. Had he sung to her then? He couldn’t remember. He supposed he might have.
“With a knick- knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone…”
Ugly dark-green drapes hung at the sides of the windows, which were narrow nine-foot floor-to-ceiling jobs. David tugged one down.
“Krazy Prof goes rolling home..
He laid the drape out beside his sister’s body, singing the stupid little song over again. He wished he could give her Melissa Sweetheart to keep her company, but ‘Lissa was back by the Wayfarer. He lifted Pie onto the drape and folded the bottom half over her. It came all the way up to her neck and she looked better to him now, a lot. As if she were at home, sleeping in bed.
“With a knick-knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone,” he sang again, “Krazy Prof went rolling home.”
He kissed – her forehead. “I love you, Pie,” he said, and he drew the top of the drape over her.
He remained beside her for a moment with his hands clasped tightly between his thighs, trying to get control of his emotions again. When he felt steadier, he got to his feet. The wind was howling, daylight was almost gone, and the sound of the dust against the windowpanes was like the light tapping of many fingers. He could hear a harsh, monotonous squeaking sound-reek- reek-reek-as something turned in the wind, and he jumped when some- thing else out there in the growing darkness fell over with a bang.
He turned from the window and went hesitantly around the counter. There were no more bodies, but papers had been spilled behind the window marked TAX CLERK, and there were spots of dried blood on some of them. The Tax Clerk’s high-backed, long-legged chair had been knocked over.
Behind the counter area was an open safe (David saw more stacks of paper but no money, and nothing that looked disturbed). To the right was a small cluster of desks. To the left were two closed doors, both with gold lettering on them. The one marked FIRE CHIEF didn’t interest him, but the other one, the office of the Town Safety Officer, did. Jim Reed, that was his name.
“Town Safety Officer. What you’d call Chief of Police in a bigger burg,” David murmured, and went over to the door. It was unlocked. He felt along the wall again, located the light-switch~ and flicked it.
The first thing he saw when the lights came on was the huge caribou’s head on the wall to the left of the desk. The second was the man behind the desk. He was tilted back in his office chair. Except for the ballpoint pens sticking out of his eyes and the desk-plaque protruding from his mouth, he might have been sleeping there, that was how relaxed his posture was. His hands had been laced together across his ample belly. He was wearing a khaki shirt and an across- the-chest belt like Entragian’s.
Outside, something else fell over and coyotes howled in unison like a doowop group from hell. David jumped, then glanced over his shoulder to make sure Entragian wasn’t sneaking up on him. He wasn’t.
David looked back at the Town Safety Officer. He knew what he had to do, and he thought if he could touch Pie, he could probably touch this stranger.
First, however, he picked up the phone. He expected it to be dead and it was. He hit the cut-off buttons a time or two anyway, saying “Hello? Hello?”
Room service, send me up a room, he thought, and shivered as he put the handset back in the cradle.
He went around the desk and stood next to the cop with the pens in his eyes. The dead man’s name-plaque-JAMES REED, TOWN SAFETY OFFICER-was still on his desk, so the one in his mouth was something else. OPS HERE was printed on the part sticking out between his teeth.
David could smell something familiar-not aftershave or cologne. He looked at the dead man’s folded hands, saw the deep cracks in the skin, and understood. It was hand lotion he smelled, either the same stuff his mother used or something similar. Jim Reed must have finished rubbing some into his hands not long before he was killed.
David tried to look into Reed’s lap and couldn’t. The man was too fat and pulled in too close to his desk for David to be able to see what he needed to see. There was a small black hole in the center of the chairback-that he could see just fine. Reed had been shot; the thing with the pens had been done (David hoped) after he was already dead.
Get going. Hurry.
He started to pull the chair back, then shouted with surprise and jumped out of the way when it over- –
balanced almost at his touch and spilled Jim Reed’s dead weight onto the floor. The corpse uttered a great dead belch when it hit. The plaque in its mouth flew out like a – missile leaving its silo. It landed upside down, but David could read it with no trouble just the same: THE BUCK – STOPS HERE.
Heart pounding harder than ever, he dropped to one knee beside the body. Reed’s uniform pants were unbuttoned and unzipped, exposing some decidedly non-reg underdrawers (vast, silk, peach-colored), but David barely noticed these. He was looking for something else, and he sighed with relief when he saw it. On one well-padded hip was Reed’s service revolver. On the other was a keychain clipped to a belt-loop. Biting his lower lip, somehow sure that the dead cop was going to reach out (oh shit the mummy’s after us) and grab him, David struggled to free the keys from the belt-loop. At first the clip wouldn’t open for him, but he was finally able to get it loose. He picked through the keys quickly, praying to find what he needed.. . and did. A square one that almost didn’t rook like a key at all. A black magnetic strip ran down its length. The key to the holding cells upstairs.
He hoped. –
David put the keyring in his pocket, glanced curiously 21 at Reed’s open pants again, then unsnapped the strap over the cop’s gun. He pulled it out, holding it in both hands, feeling its extraordinary weight and sense of inheld violence. A revolver, not an automatic with the bullets buried away in the handle. David turned the muzzle toward him-self, careful to keep his fingers outside the trigger-guard, so he could look at the cylinder. There were bullet-heads in every hole he could see, so that was probably all right. The first chamber might be empty-in the movies cops sometimes did that to keep from shooting themselves by accident-but he reckoned that wouldn’t matter if he pulled the trigger at least twice, and fast.
He turned the gun around again and inspected it from the butt forward, looking for a safety-catch. He didn’t see one, and very gingerly pulled back on the trigger a little.
When he saw the hammer start to rise out of its hood, he let off the pressure in a hurry.
He didn’t want to fire the gun down here. He didn’t know how smart coyotes were, but he guessed that if they were smart about anything, it would probably be about guns.
He went back out into the main office. The wind howled, throwing sand against the window. The panes were bruise-purple now. Soon they’d be black. He looked over at the ugly green curtain, and the shape which lay beneath it. Love you, Pie, he thought, then went back out into the hall. He stood there a moment, taking deep breaths, eyes closed, gun held at his side with. the muzzle pointed at the floor.