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“I don’t have one. You do. The federal witness you killed was a friend of mine. You got your drop with you?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Maybe I can make use of it.”
“I’m not carrying.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re in the shitter.” Wooster parted his coat and lifted a semi-auto into the light. He grinned. “We can do it standing up. Or you can kneel down.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I don’t like you. I put down seven people nobody knows about. What do you say to that?”
“Give your bullshit to somebody else.”
“Look into the barrel and tell me it’s bullshit.”
“What do you get out of it?”
“Kicks.”
“A guy like you does nothing for kicks. Except maybe standing in line to fuck your mother.”
“Later tonight, after you’re dead, I’m going to get laid. Think about that.”
“Since I’m about to go out, tell me something. Who put the drill to Kevin Penny?”
“Maybe you’re looking at him. Who cares? Bye-bye, asshole.”
So this is how it comes, Clete thought. Not the Jolly Green caving in half when an RPG came through the bay, the frag he took in the carotid, the two rounds in the back while carrying his best friend down a fire escape, the burning roof that crashed on him when he ran through the flames with a little girl wrapped in a blanket.
“Fuck you, Wooster,” he said.
Then he saw a flash at the entrance to the alley across the street, like a downed power line that had dropped onto a car roof, and heard a sound like phifth or someone spitting. Wooster heard and saw it also. He widened his eyes and stared into the darkness, his gun still pointed at Clete’s chest. His jaw was hooked, his profile like a barracuda’s.
Clete heard the sound twice again. The first round punched through Wooster’s throat. Still holding the gun, he clenched one hand over the wound, blood congealing immediately between his fingers. He made a choking sound, as if he’d swallowed a fish bone. The second round made a hole less than the diameter of a pencil above his eyebrow, as though a bug had settled on it, and exited the back of his head cleanly and knocked out a window in a garage. He fell into a greasy pool of water, curled in an embryonic position, the rain falling in his eyes.
A cat meowed by a garbage can. The wind gusted, and a strip of tin on the roof of the deserted house swung on a nail. Clete slid behind the wheel of the Caddy and drove around the body into the street, hitting his brights, lighting up the alleyway where the shots had come from. His wipers were beating wildly, the windshield fogging. At the end of the alley, he saw a man in rubber boots running, a rifle cupped in his right hand, his skin as white as a slug’s.
Clete picked up his cell phone from the seat and dialed a number with his thumb.
* * *
SHERRY PICARD AND I were inside the casino when I got his call. The casino was packed, the roar of noise deafening. “I can’t hear you, Clete. You’re not making sense.”
“I went to get my car,” he said. “Wooster, the gunbull, was waiting for me. He was going to kill me. He almost did.”
“How would he know where your c
ar was?”
“He was walking behind me, then got ahead of me and saw the Caddy,” he replied. “I asked him if he did Kevin Penny. He said maybe. Then Smiley put two bullets in him.”
“You’re talking about the security guy?”
“Who do you think?”
“He killed Penny?”
