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edges of a baseball cap on which an embroidered Homer Simpson held up a mug of
beer. The man was reading a magazine, and Keller would have bet anything it
wasn t Soap Opera Digest. Nor did he seem to find his magazine as gripping as
the girl had found hers, because he looked up from it before Keller could open
his mouth or put the money on the counter.
 Help you?
 Twenty dollars worth of regular, Keller said, and handed him the bill.
 Hang on a second, the man said, catching Keller just as he was turning
around. He turned back, and the man was taking a good look at the twenty.
Jesus, was there anything wrong with it?
 Been some funny twenties around lately, the man said.  This here looks to be
okay.
Keller would have said he d just made it himself, but couldn t count on the
man recognizing it for a joke.  It came straight out of an ATM, he said
instead.
 Is that a fact.
Suspicious old bastard. Keller said,  Well, if everything s okay, and started
for the door again, but the voice stopped him in his tracks.
 No, hold it right there, son. And turn around slow, you hear?
Keller turned, and was not surprised to see the gun in the man s hand. It was
an automatic, and looked like a cannon to Keller.
 I m not too good with names, the man said,  but it seems like you ve got a
few of them, and who s to say any of  em s the right one? Keep your hands
where I can see  em, you understand?
 You re making a mistake, Keller said.
 Your damn picture s all over the place, son. And if I m not much on names I m
pretty good on faces. Bet there s a pretty decent reward on you.
 By God, Keller said.  You think I m the son of a bitch who shot that man in
Iowa.
 Shot that high-stepping coon, the man said.  Well, if you had to gun
somebody down, I got no problem with the choice you made. But that don t mean
God gave you the right to do it.
 I know I look like him, Keller said,  and you re not the first person to
notice the resemblance, but I m not him and I can prove it.
 You just save your story for the law, why don t you? And the hand that
wasn t holding the gun reached for the phone.
 I m not him, I swear it, Keller said.
 What did I just say? You got an explanation, there s men with badges ll be
happy to listen to everything you got to say.
 The law s after me, Keller said,  but for something else.
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 How s that?
 Alimony and child support. Long story short, she s a cheating bitch and the
kid s not mine, and we even proved that with DNA tests and the courts still
say I gotta support him.
 You must have had some lawyer.
 Look, let me prove it, okay? I m just going to get something from my pocket,
okay?
And without waiting for permission he drew the gun and put two bullets in the
guy s chest before he could get off a shot.
13
The impact had knocked the man backward, and he d tipped his chair over and
gone to the floor with it, losing his Homer Simpson cap on the way down.
Keller went around the counter and checked him, but it was just a formality.
Both bullets had entered the left side of his chest, and at least one of them
had found his heart, and that was that.
Keller s ears were ringing from the gunshots, and his hand ached a little from
the revolver s recoil. He straightened up, glanced through the window. There
was a car parked at one of the pumps, and that was disconcerting for the
second or two it took him to realize that it was his car, right where he d
parked it.
The dead man was still holding the gun, his finger on the trigger, and Keller
had heard stories of men firing guns long after their own death, their trigger
fingers curling at the onset of rigor mortis. He wasn t sure it ever happened,
and it might even have been a plot element in a comic book he d read as a
child, but in any event he wanted the gun. It was a SIG Sauer automatic with a
fully loaded fifteen-shot clip, and his own revolver was down to two bullets,
and had just been used in a homicide. The SIG wasn t as huge as it had looked,
there was nothing like having a gun pointed at you to make it increase
dramatically in size, though it was in fact a little larger and heavier than
the revolver. He tried it where he d been carrying the revolver, and it rode
there just fine, and he figured that closed the deal.
He wiped his prints from the revolver and put it in the dead man s hand,
shaping the still-warm hand to the butt and slipping the forefinger inside the
trigger guard. No one was terribly likely to buy the idea that the old guy had
shot himself twice in the heart, but it seemed as good a place as any to stow
the revolver, and at the very least it would give somebody something to think
about.
He looked for a cash register and didn t see one. There was an old wooden
Garcia y Vega cigar box on the counter, and that turned out to be where the
fellow kept cash and credit card slips. The cash was all fives and singles,
with a couple of tens in the mix. No wonder he d looked long and hard at the
twenty, Keller thought. It was probably the first one he d seen all month.
He didn t particularly want to touch the dead man, but he wasn t squeamish,
either, and from the right-hand hip pocket of the man s camo jeans he drew a
leather wallet with a design embossed on it, a design so worn and weathered
that Keller could barely make out what it was. He could see it was a crest of
some sort, and it looked familiar, but he couldn t place it.
Inside the wallet, he found the very same crest on the card that identified
its owner, Miller L. Remsen, as a member in good standing of the National
Rifle Association. Guns don t kill people, Keller thought. Sticking your
broken nose in other people s business, that s what kills people.
Remsen s Indiana driver s license had his middle name as well, which turned
out to be Lewis. It had his date of birth, and Keller worked it out that he
was seventy-three, and would have turned seventy-four in October, if he hadn t
decided to be such a good citizen. There were cards for Social Security and
Medicare, and a couple of very old pictures of children, smiling bravely for
the school photographer. By now those children very likely had children of
their own, but if so Remsen didn t have pictures of them.
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The wallet held cash, including two fifties and a batch of twenties and adding
up to just over three hundred dollars. There were two credit cards as well,
both in the name of Miller L. Remsen, but the Citibank Visa card had expired.
The other was a Master-Card issued by CapitalOne, and it was good for another
year and a half.
He pocketed the bills and the valid credit card, wiped everything else he d
touched and put it back, then returned the wallet to the dead man s pocket. He
opened the cigar box again, hesitated, then scooped up the small bills.
Something registered, something he caught out of the corner of his eye, and he
looked again and saw it  on the ceiling, at the juncture of two walls. A
security camera, and who would expect it in a run-down operation like
Remsen s? But they were everywhere these days, and when the cops found the
body they d check the camera, and he couldn t let that happen.
He stood on a chair, and climbed down a few minutes later shaking his head. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]