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"He goes into surgery again tomorrow. We'll know a lot more then."
"I'm real sorry about Jimmie. He's a fine guy."
"I appreciate it, Clete."
"Excuse the mess out here. Just throw those magazines on the floor and sit down. You want a Coke or coffee or something?"
"No, thanks."
He had built the sun porch himself three years ago. It looked like a cracker box hammered onto the back of the house. Vases of unwatered brown ferns and wilted spider plants hung in the windows, and the throw rugs he used to cover the concrete pad looked like discarded colored towels. He had set up a card table in the center of the room, and on it was a fly-tying vise, spools of thread, different types of bird feathers, and a tangle of tiny hooks. An unfinished, ragged fly was clamped in the vise.
He sat down in a canvas chair and took another beer from an ice-filled cooler.
"I'm going to take two weeks' vacation time, and we're going to head out to Colorado," he said. "Lois is going to visit her Buddhist priest, maybe get him out of her system, then we're going to camp on the Gunnison River, fish, backpack, live in a tent, do all that health stuff. I can get off cigarettes, lose some weight, maybe cut down on the booze. It's a chance for us to get a fresh start. I'm really looking forward to it."
"I've got your nine-millimeter."
"What?"
"I followed you to the bus depot."
The stiff skin around his mouth tried to wrinkle into a smile.
"What are we talking about?" he said.
"I followed you there this morning and again this afternoon. Then I got Bobo Getz to open your locker for me. You remember him. He used to buy room keys off the hookers at the Ramada."
His face became wooden. He lowered his eyes and slid a cigarette in and out of the pack.
"What are you trying to do to me, Dave?" he asked.
"Nobody has done anything to you. You jumped into the pig flop by yourself."
"So I'm ashamed of leaving my weapon in a bus locker. But this isn't a home. It's a goddamn lunatic asylum. Who the hell set you up as my judge?"
"Run that game on somebody else. Ballistics will match your weapon to the bullet that came out of Bobby Joe Starkweather. You should have lost it somewhere."
"Yeah? Maybe I didn't expect my partner to boost it from me." He took the cigarette out of the pack, lighted it with a Zippo, dropped the lighter loudly on the tabletop, and rubbed his hand over his face while he blew out the smoke. "So you gonna put me in the wringer?"
"Why'd you do it?"
"Ten thousand bucks."
I didn't say anything. I looked at his big hands, the way a cigarette looked so small in them, his scarred, poached face, and wondered what had happened to the good-humored and intelligent man I used to work with.
"Come on, he was garbage and you know it," he said. "The credit union wouldn't give me another loan, I'm still paying alimony to my first wife, I owe the finance company, and I was paying fifty a week to a shylock. I could have handled it, but I had some complications with a girl. She said she was a month late, and she stiffed me for a grand to get lost without having a talk with Lois. That's about all it would have taken to put her in a hospital."
"Who paid you, Clete?"
"Murphy."
"Why did he want him killed? Why did he want a cop to do it?"
"What difference does it make?"
"You're going to have to explain it sometime."
"He said the guy was an asshole, he was out of control or something."
