‘I’ll pay top dollar,’ Kelly promised with an uneasy smile.
Lamarck grinned, like the man of the world he was, to put this chicken farmer at ease. ‘With my ladies, you have to. Anything else you might need?’
Kelly coughed and took a few steps, willing Lamarck to follow, which he did. ‘Maybe some, well, something to help us party, like?’
‘I can handle that, too,’ Lamarck said as they approached an alley.
‘I think I met you before, couple years back. I remember the girl, really, her name was … Pam? Yeah, Pam. Thin, tawny hair.’
‘Oh, yeah, she was fun. She’s not with me anymore,’ Lamarck said lightly. ‘But I have lots more. I cater to the men who like ’em young and fresh.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ Kelly said, reaching behind his back. ‘They’re all on – I mean they all use things that make it – ‘
‘Happy stuff, man. So they’re always in the mood to party. A lady has to have the proper attitude.’ Lamarck stopped at the entrance to the alley, looking outward, maybe worried about cops, which suited Kelly just fine. Behind him, he had not troubled to see, was a dark, scarcely lit corridor of blank brick walls, inhabited by nothing more than trash cans and stray cats, and open at the far end. ‘Let’s see. Four girls, rest of the evening, shall we say, and something to help get the party started … five hundred should do it. My girls aren’t cheap, but you will get your money’s -‘
‘Both hands in the open,’ Kelly said, the Colt automatic leveled twelve inches from the man’s chest.
Lamarck’s first response was a disbelieving bluster:
‘My man, that is a very foolish -‘
Kelly’s voice was all business. ‘Arguing with a gun is even more foolish, my man. Turn, walk down the alley, and you might even make it back to the bar for a nightcap.’
‘You must need money real bad to try something this dumb,’ the pimp said, trying an implied threat.
‘Your roll worth dying for?’ Kelly asked reasonably. Lamarck measured the odds and turned, moving into the shadows.
‘Stop,’ Kelly told him after fifty yards, still behind the blank wall of the bar, or perhaps another just like it. His left arm grabbed the man’s neck and pushed him against the bricks. His eyes looked up and down the alley three times. His ears searched for sounds separate from traffic noise and distorted music. For the moment it was a safe and quiet place. ‘Hand me your gun – real careful.’
‘I don’t -‘ The sound of a hammer being cocked sounded awfully loud, that close to his ear.
‘Do I look stupid?’
‘Okay, okay,’ Lamarck said, his voice losing its smooth edge now. ‘Let’s be real cool. It’s only money.’
‘That’s smart,’ Kelly said approvingly. A small automatic appeared. Kelly put his right index finger into the trigger guard. There was no sense in putting fingerprints on the weapon. He was taking enough chances, and as careful as he’d been to this point, the dangers of his action were suddenly very real and very large. The pistol fit nicely into his coat pocket.
‘Let’s see the roll next.’
‘Right here, man.’ Lamarck was starting to lose it. That was both good and bad, Kelly thought. Good because it was pleasing to see. Bad because a panicked man might do something foolish. Instead of relaxing, Kelly actually became more tense.
‘Thank you, Mr Lamarck,’ Kelly said politely, to calm the man.
Just then he wavered, and his head turned a few inches or so, as his consciousness asserted itself through the six drinks he’d had this evening. ‘Wait a minute – you said you knew Pam.’
‘I did,’ Kelly said.
‘But why-‘ He turned farther to see a face that was bathed in darkness, only eyes showing with light glistening off their moisture, and the rest of the face a shadow white.
‘You’re one of the guys who ruined her life.’
Outrage: ‘Hey, man she came to me!’
‘And you got her on pills so she could party real good, right?’ the disembodied voice asked. Lamarck could hardly remember what the man looked like now.
‘That was business, so you met her, so she was a good fuck, right?’
‘She certainly was.’
‘I shoulda trained her better an’ you coulda had her again insteada – was, you say?’
‘She’s dead,’ Kelly told him, reaching in his pocket. ‘Somebody killed her.’
‘So? I didn’t do it!’ It seemed to Lamarck that he was facing a final exam, a test he didn’t understand, based on rules he didn’t know.
‘Yes, I know that,’ Kelly said, screwing the silencer onto the pistol. Lamarck saw that somehow, his eyes making the adjustment to the darkness. His voice became a shrill rasp.
‘Then what are you doing this for?’ the man said, too puzzled even to scream, too paralyzed by the incongruity of the past few minutes, by the passage of his life from the normality of his hangout bar to its end only forty feet away in front of a windowless brick wall, and he had to have an answer. Somehow it was more important than the escape, whose attempt he knew to be futile.
Kelly thought about that for a second or two. He could have said many things, but it was only fair, he decided, to tell the man the truth as the gun came up quickly and finally.
‘Practice.’
CHAPTER 14
Lessons Learned
The early flight back from New Orleans to Washington National was too short for a movie, and Kelly had already eaten breakfast. He settled on a glass of juice at his window seat and was thankful that the flight was only about a third full as, after every combat action of his life, he went over every detail. It was a habit that had begun in the SEALs. Following every training exercise there had been an event called various things by his various commanders. ‘Performance Critique’ seemed most appropriate at the moment.
His first mistake had been the product of something desired and something forgotten. In wanting to see Lamarck die in the darkness, he’d stood too close, simultaneously forgetting that head wounds often bleed explosively. He’d jumped out of the way of the spouting blood like a child avoiding a wasp in his backyard, but had still not escaped it entirely. The good news was that he’d made only that one mistake; and his selection of dark clothing had mitigated the danger there. Lamarck’s wounds had been immediately and definitively fatal. The pimp had fallen to the ground as limp as a rag doll. The two screws that Kelly had drilled in the top of his pistol held a small cloth bag he’d sewn himself, and the bag had caught the two ejected cartridge cases, leaving the police who’d investigate the scene without that valuable bit of evidence. His stalk had been effectively carried out, just one more anonymous face in a large and anonymous bar.
His hastily selected site for the elimination had also worked well enough. He remembered walking down the alley and blending back into the sidewalk traffic, walking the distance to his car and driving back to the motel. There, he’d changed clothes, bundling the blood-splattered slacks, shirt, and, just to be sure, the underwear as well, into a plastic cleaner bag, which he’d walked across the street and deposited in a supermarket Dumpster. If the clothing was discovered, it might well be taken as something soiled by a sloppy meatcutter. He hadn’t met with Lamarck in the open. The only lighted place to which they’d spoken was the bar’s men’s room, and there fortune – and planning – had smiled on him. The sidewalk they’d walked on was too dark and too anonymous. Perhaps a casual observer who might have known Lamarck could give an investigator a rough idea of Kelly’s size, but little else, and that was a reasonable gamble to have taken, Kelly judged, looking down at the wooded hills of northern Alabama. It had been an apparent robbery, the pimp’s one thousand, four hundred seventy dollars of flash money tucked away in his bag. Cash was cash, after all, and not to have taken it would have shown the police that there had been a real motive in the elimination aside from something easily understandable and agreeably random. The physical side of the event – he could not think of it as a crime – was, he thought, as clean as he could have done it.
Psychological? Kelly asked himself. More than anything else Kelly had tested his nerve, the elimination of Pierre Lamarck having been a kind of field experiment, and in that he’d surprised himself. It had been some years since Kelly had entered combat, and he’d halfway expected a case of the shakes after the event. Such things had happened to him more than once before, but though his stride away from Lamarck’s body had been slightly uneasy, he’d handled the escape with the sort of tense aplomb that had marked many of his operations in Vietnam. So much had come back to him. He could catalog the familiar sensations that had returned as though he’d been watching a training film of his own production: the increased sensory awareness, as though his skin had been sandblasted, exposing every nerve; hearing, sight, smell all amplified. I was so fucking alive at that moment, he thought. It was vaguely sad that such a thing had happened due to the ending of a human life, but Lamarck had long since forfeited his right to life. In any just universe, a person – Kelly simply could not think of him as a man – who exploited helpless girls simply did not deserve the privilege of breathing the same air used by other human beings. Perhaps he’d taken the wrong turn, been unloved by his mother or beaten by his father. Perhaps he’d been socially deprived, raised in poverty, or exposed to inadequate schooling. But those were matters for psychiatrists or social workers. Lamarck had acted normally enough to function as a person in his community, and the only question that mattered to Kelly was whether or not he had lived his life in accordance with his own free will. That had clearly been the case, and those who took improper actions, he had long since decided, ought to have considered the possible consequences of those actions. Every girl they exploited might have had a father or mother or sister or brother or lover to be outraged at her victimization. In knowing that and in taking the risk, Lamarck had knowingly gambled his life to some greater or lesser degree. And gambling means that sometimes you lose, Kelly told himself. If he hadn’t weighed the hazards accurately enough, that was not Kelly’s problem, was it?