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“Get her name from the cops.” He’s becoming less hospitable by the minute. I go for it.
“Did you molest your girls?”
He looks at me, smoldering eyes that say the next time he runs into me on the streets he’s going to try and be armed. This guy here was hardened by stir.
“I had forty bucks in my wallet and she took it.” Scrawny. All rib bones and sandblasted skin. Wife beater stained by spilt beer, falling cigarette ash and fresh blood. The knuckles in his clenched fists bulge and protrude; the tendons in the backs on his hands flex and become taut like piano strings.
Some humans were birthed as barely tame animals. Later they might become feral. Whatever was decent in Ben Boothe, caused him to fall in love, court, marry, produce children, buy a house, make an attempt at a decent life, it was raped and tossed off to the side by whatever lives behind his eyes now.
And whatever that is, I have broken its mouth and marked its territory as my own.
Our eyes meet. He reads me as I read him. He tries to be aggressive—and he probably is—but any good human animal knows when to fight and when to tuck tail. Call it before the fire gets too hot. Live.
He turns his back on me and walks back into the house.
“You know she’s pregnant, don’t you?”
Stops. Doesn’t turn around. “Naw, she never said nothin’.”
“Is it yours?”
“I don’t want any more kids.” He begins to shuffle off again. “Never wanted the two I had.”
“That much is obvious. Where’d she run off to next, then?” I ask, not following.
“Said an old boyfriend would take care of her.”
“Name.”
“Old boyfriend was his name.” He turns around. Stands there, sunlight from the west coming in through a picture window behind him glowing through his emaciated frame as if it were an X-ray.
“In this next room I have a revolver a friend lets me keep. I’m coming back out to shoot you with it.”
“What is a felon doing with a firearm?”
“Come back here and find out.”
“I don’t think your parole officer will like that.”
He says nothing. He simply walks around a corner. Maybe a kitchen. Maybe a dining room. I stand there; make sure there is no door behind me he can sneak through.
Seconds are molasses. Infinite. Dragging ass. Let’s see what he’s made of.
Nothing.
Time ticks. What is probably thirty seconds finds a way to stretch itself out into half a day. The stale cheap smell of his house permeates me. I light a smoke, finish it. Crush it out on the carpet. Grind it out.
Ben doesn’t come back out. I step out the front door. Leave.
51
Riggens is on the phone.
“Mr. Buckner?” he asks. I’m accelerating on the highway on-ramp. Time to eat.
“Go ahead.”
“Look, I know you don’t want to hear this but I think I’ve got Blane Tapolski dead to rights on the arson.”
