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“I really need to explain some things,” he said.
“Where’s—” she began.
“Robert is not here. That’s what I need to talk to you about. I need to clear my conscience, Alafair.”
There was a bar across the street, one with neon beer signs in the windows and a termite-eaten colonnade and a squat roof that looked like a frowning man. Her gaze returned to the gas pump and the digital indicators that showed the number of gallons. “If I drink anything, I won’t eat supper.”
“There’s a sno’ball stand on the next block. Pull in to the lot. It’ll only take five minutes.”
“Let me call home,” she said.
“Sure,” he said. He walked out of earshot, showing deference for her privacy, showing her once again the gentleman he’d been raised to be.
After she had called and left the second message of the afternoon on the machine, she restarted her engine and drove down the block to the corner, where she turned in to a gravel lot behind the sno’ball stand. The board flap on the serving window had been lowered and latched; the stand was closed. Kermit pulled his Saab up next to her car. But something was bothering her, a detail that caught in the eye the way a lash catches under the eyelid. Back at the filling station, she had been talking, or Kermit had, and she hadn’t been able to concentrate. What was the detail that didn’t fit inside the summer evening, the gold light high in the sky, the dull red solidity of the gas pump, the smell of dust and distant rain?
Kermit got out of the Saab and walked to her window. He carried a brown paper bag in his hand. It was folded neatly across the top, in the way a workingman might fold down the top of his lunch sack before heading out for his job.
“You bought less than two gallons of gas,” she said.
“Right,” he said.
“Why would you stop just to buy two gallons of gas?”
“I needed to use the restroom, so I thought I should buy something,” he replied, his expression bemused.
“Why not just buy some mints? That’s what most people would do.”
“Actually, that’s what I did.” His eyes seemed to flatten, as though he were reviewing what he had just said. “When I was inside. I bought some mints.”
“Could I have one?” she asked.
“A mint?” He touched his shirt pocket. “They must be on the seat. We need to talk. Slide over.”
He opened the driver’s door and turned off the engine and pulled the keys from the ignition. In the rearview mirror, she saw a white Mustang come from the side street and angle across the lot and jar to a stop on the opposite side of her vehicle, dust rising off the wheels, drifting in an acrid cloud through her windows. There was no one else on the street. The wind had dropped, and the leaves on the oak trees looked like the brushstrokes in an expressionist painting—glowing unnaturally, smudged, unreal, trying to disguise in the cheapest fashion the painful realities of death.
The driver of the white Mustang wore shades and a yellow felt hat, the kind a hiker might wear on the banks of Lake Louise. He was eating a hamburger with one hand. A second man, someone she didn’t recognize, sat in the passenger seat. There were three deep lines in the man’s forehead that reminded her of knotted string. The driver got out of his vehicle, glancing over his shoulder and down the sidewalks. When he sat down heavily next to her, she thought she could see the crumpled lines around his jaw and ears where a plastic surgeon’s knife had created the mask that had become the face of Robert Weingart.
Kermit Abelard shook a pair of steel handcuffs from the paper bag he had been holding, just as Weingart thrust a hypodermic needle into her thigh. In seconds, she saw the light go out of the sky and the trees dissolve into smoke. Then she heard Weingart whisper close to her cheek, his breath heavy with mustard and onions, “Welcome to hell, Alafair.”
AT SUNSET, FROM the front of his cottage at the motor court, Clete Purcel witnessed a change in the weather that was audible, a sucking of air that drew the leaves off the ground and out of the trees and sent them soaring into the sky, flickering like hundreds of yellow and green butterflies above the bayou. Then a curtain of rain marched across the wetlands, dissolving
the western horizon into plumes of gray and blue smoke that resembled emissions from an ironworks.
The barometer and temperature dropped precipitously. Clete went inside the cottage and heard lightning pop on the water. A half hour later, through his front window, he saw headlights in the rain, then heard a door slam and feet running, followed by a loud banging on his door. When he opened it, Emma Poche was staring up into his face, an Australian flop hat wilted on her head, the leather cord swinging under her chin like the bail on an inverted bucket, her breath smelling of beer. Over her shoulder, he could see the backseat of her car piled to the windows with her possessions.
“Let me in,” she said.
“What for?”
“You have to ask?”
“Yeah, I don’t have a clue.”
Her eyes searched the room and came back on his. “I set you up.”
“On the Stanga deal?”
“I fucked you in your bed, then I fucked you behind your back.”
