seize the gun before it could be fired.
Except Clint was not present. And the woman’s body had been removed
from the table. Only the blood remained as proof that she perished
there.
Candy could not have been gone more than a minute-time he had spent in
his mother’s room, plus a couple of seconds in transit each way. He
expected to return to find Clint bent over the corpse, either grieving
or checking desperately for a pulse. But as soon as he realized Candy
was gone, the man must have taken the body in his arms and… And who
He must have fled the house, of course, hoping against hope that a faint
thread of life remained unbroken in the worn getting her out of the way
in case Candy returned.
Cursing softly-then immediately begging his mother’s and God’s
forgiveness for his foul language-Candy tried the door into the garage.
It was locked. If he had left by that exit, Clint wouldn’t have paused
to lock up behind himself.
He hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room,ward the foyer of
the living room, to check out the front lawn and the street. But he
heard a noise from deeper in the house and halted before he reached the
front door. He changed direction, cautiously following the hallway back
to the bedroom A light was on in one of those rooms. He eased to the
door and risked a glance inside.
Clint had just put the woman on the queen-size bed. Candy watched, the
man pulled her skirt down over her legs. He still had the revolver in
one hand.
For the Second time in less than an hour, Candy heard faint away sirens
swelling in the night. The neighbors probably had heard the gunfire and
called the police.
Clint saw him in the doorway but did not bring up the question. He did
not say anything, either, and the expression on his stone face remained
unchanged. He seemed like a deaf-mute. the strangeness of the man’s
demeanor made Candy nervous and uncertain.
He thought there was a pretty good chance that Clint had emptied the gun
at him in the kitchen, even though he had telaPorted out of there with
the impact of the second slug. Most likely, he had fired every round
reflexively, his trigger finger ruled by rage or fear or whatever he was
feeling. He could not have carried the woman into the bedroom and
reloaded the gun, too, in the minute or so that Candy had been gone,
which meant Candy might be in no danger if he just walked up to the guy
and took the weapon away from him.
But he stayed in the doorway. Either of those two shots could have been
dead-center in his heart. The power within him was great, but he could
not exercise it quickly enough to vaporize an oncoming bullet.
instead of dealing with Candy in any fashion, the man turned away from
him, walked around the foot of the bed to the other side, and stretched
out beside the woman.
“What the hell?” Candy said aloud.
Clint took hold of her dead hand. His other hand held the.38 revolver.
He turned his head on the pillow to look toward her, and his eyes
glistened with what might have been unshed tears. He put the muzzle of
the gun under his chin, and annihilated himself.
Candy was so stunned that he was unable to move for a moment or think
what to do next. He was jolted out of his paralysis by the ululant
sirens, and realized that the trail from Thomas to Bobby and Julie,
whoever they were, might end here if he did not discover what link the
dead man on the bed shared with them. If he ever hoped to learn who
Thomas had been, how Clint had known his name, or how many others knew
of him, if he wanted to learn how much danger he was in and how he might
slide out of it, he couldn’t waste this opportunity.
He hurried to the bed, rolled the dead man onto his side, and withdrew
the wallet from his pants pocket. He flipped it open and saw the