Finally, pleadingly, it said, “Kill me.”
Travis did not know if he was acting more out of rage or out of pity when he
squeezed the trigger and emptied the Uzi’s magazine into The Outsider. What man
had begun, man now ended.
When he was done, he felt drained.
He dropped the carbine and walked outside. He could not find the strength to
return to the house. He sat down on the lawn, huddled in the rain, and wept.
He was still weeping when Jim Keene drove up the muddy lane from the Coast
Highway.
ELEVEN
1
On Thursday afternoon, January 13, Lem Johnson left Cliff Soames and three other
men at the foot of the dirt lane, where it met the Pacific Coast Highway. Their
instructions were to allow no one past them but to remain on station until—and
if—Lem called for them.
Cliff Soames seemed to think this was a strange way to handle things, but he did
not voice his objections.
Lem explained that, since Travis Cornell was an ex-Delta man with considerable
combat skills, he ought to be handled with care. “If we go storming in there,
he’ll know who we are as soon as he sees us coming, and he might react
violently. If I go in alone, I’ll be able to get him to talk to me, and maybe I
can persuade him to just give it up.”
That was a flimsy explanation for his unorthodox procedure, and it did not wipe
the frown off Cliff’s face.
Lem didn’t care about Cliff’s frown. He went in alone, driving one of the
sedans, and parked in front of the bleached-wood house.
Birds were singing in the trees. Winter had temporarily relaxed its hold on the
northern California coast, and the day was warm.
Lem climbed the steps and knocked on the front door.
Travis Cornell answered the knock and stared at him through the screen door
before saying, “Mr. Johnson, I suppose.”
“How did you. . . oh yes, of course, Garrison Dilworth would have told you about
me that night he got his call through.”
To Lem’s surprise, Cornell opened the screen door. “You might as well come in.”
Cornell was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, apparently because of a sizable
bandage encasing most of his right shoulder. He led Lem through the front room
and into a kitchen, where his wife sat at the table, peeling apples for a pie.
“Mr. Johnson,” she said.
Lem smiled and said, “I’m widely known, I see.”
Cornell sat at the table and lifted a cup of coffee. He offered no coffee to
Lem.
Standing awkwardly for a moment, Lem eventually sat with them. He said, “Welt,
it was inevitable, you know. We had to catch up with you sooner or later.”
She peeled apples and said nothing. Her husband stared into his coffee.
What’s wrong with them? Lem wondered.
This was not remotely like any scenario he had imagined. He was prepared for
panic, anger, despondency, and many other things, but not for this strange
apathy. They did not seem to care that he had at last tracked them down.
He said, “Aren’t you interested in how we located you?”
The woman shook her head.
Cornell said, “If you really want to tell us, go ahead and have your fun.”
Frowning, puzzled, Lem said, “Well, it was simple. We knew that Mr. Dilworth had
to’ve called you from some house or business within a few blocks of that park
north of the harbor. So we tied our own computers into the telephone company’s
records—with their permission, of course—and put men to work examining all the
long-distance calls charged to all the numbers within three blocks of that park,
on that one night. Nothing led us to you. But then we realized that, when
charges are reversed, the call isn’t billed to the number from which the call is
placed; it appears on the records of the person who accepts the reversed
charges—which was you. But it also appears in a special phone-company file so
they’ll be able to document the call if the person who accepted the charges
later refuses to pay. We went through that special file, which is very small,