“No, I didn’t know.” He glanced into the mirror again. “Did you know him?”
“I met him-after you left this last time. Kinsky told me Julia’d been seeing him, and I looked the guy up to see what he could tell me about her. You see-well, Julia’s dead.”
“How’d it happen? I just saw her last week.”
“In a very bizarre fashion. She was killed by a strange animal.”
“Lord!” He braked suddenly and pulled off the road onto a wide shoulder to the left. It looked upon a steep, tree-filled drop. Above the trees I could see the tiny lights of the city across a great distance.
He killed the engine and the headlights . He took a Durham’s bag from his pocket and began rolling a cigarette. I caught him glancing upward and ahead.
“You’ve been checking that mirror a lot.”
“Yes,” he replied. “I was just about sure a car had been following us all the way from the parking lot down at the Hilton. It was a few turns behind us for the longest while. Now it seems to have disappeared.”
He lit his cigarette and opened the door. “Let’s get some air.”
I followed him and we stood for a few moments staring out across the big spaces, the moonlight strong enough to cast the shadows of some trees near to us. He threw down the cigarette and stamped on it.
“Shit!” he said. “’This is getting too involved! I knew Julia was seeing Melman, okay? I went to see her the night after I’d seen him, okay? I even delivered a small parcel he’d asked me to take her, okay?”
“Cards,” I said. He nodded.
I withdrew them from my pocket and held them toward him. He barely glanced at them there in the dim light, but he nodded again.
“Those cards,” he said. Then: “You still liked her, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I guess I did.”
“Oh, hell,” he sighed. “All right. There are some things I’m going to have to tell you, old buddy. Not all of them nice. Give me just a minute to sort it all out. You’ve just given me one big problem-or I’ve given it to myself, because I’ve just decided something.”
He kicked a patch of gravel and the stones rattled down the hillside.
“Okay,” he said. “First, give me those cards.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to tear them into confetti.”
“The hell you are. Why?”
“They’re dangerous.”
“I already know that. I’ll hang onto them.”
“You don’t understand.”
“So explain.”
“It’s not that easy. I have to decide what to tell you and what not to.”
“Why not just tell me everything?”
“I can’t. Believe me-“
I hit the ground as soon as I heard the first shot, which ricocheted off a boulder to our right. Luke didn’t. He began running in a zigzag pattern toward a cluster of trees off to our left, from which two more shots were fired. He had something in his hand and he raised it.
Luke fired three times. Our assailant got off one more round. After Luke’s second shot I heard someone gasp. I was on my feet by then and running toward him, a rock in my hand. After his third shot I heard a body fall.
I reached him just as he was turning the body over, in time to see what seemed a faint cloud of blue or gray mist emerge from the man’s mouth past his chipped tooth and drift away.
“What the hell was that?” Luke asked as it blew away.
“You saw it, too? I don’t know.”
He looked down at the limp form with the dark spot growing larger on its shirtfront, a 38’ revolver still clutched in the right hand.
“I didn’t know you carried a gun,” I said.
“When you’re on the road as much as I am, you go heeled,” he answered.
“I pick up a new one in each city I hit and sell it when I leave. Airline security. Guess I won’t be selling this one. I never saw this guy, Merle. You?”
I nodded.
“That’s Dan Martinez, the man I was telling you about.”
“Oh, boy,” he said. “Another damn complication. Maybe I should just join a Zen monastery someplace and persuade myself it doesn’t matter. I-“