“This isn’t about Nemo?” I said.
“Labiche died last night. The head nurse says you were there.”
“I was.”
“And you knew he died?”
“Yes, he died with his hand in mine.”
“And you didn’t bother to call in? Or say what you were doing there? Or what he might have said before he caught the bus?”
“What he told me won’t change anything,” I said. “I didn’t have my recorder.”
“What did he say?”
“Dartez was having an epileptic seizure, and I tried to save him. There was something in his throat. That’s about it.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s why you dragged him out the window,” she said. “He had the plastic filter of a cigar lodged in his throat.”
“That’s it. Then I think Penny came up behind me and hit me with a rock or a chunk of concrete.”
“Labiche mentioned Penny?”
“No.”
“Nothing to suggest who might have sent Penny after you?”
“I believe it was Nemo.”
“You’re probably right. This won’t get you off the hook, though, will it?”
“I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”
She opened her desk drawer and took out my medal and silver chain and set them on the corner of her desk. “A nurse brought this by about fifteen minutes ago. She said you must have left it in Labiche’s hand, because nobody else was in the room with him.”
I picked up the chain and put it around my neck and dropped the medal inside my shirt. “Thanks.”
“You’re a piece of work, Pops.”
* * *
IN A SEEDY motel north of the Four Corners area of Lafayette, Chester Wimple sat on the side of his bed and stared at the window shade. The bottoms of his tennis shoes barely touched the floor. He wore a white painter’s cap with a long bill and a high square top, and brand-new pants that fitted his legs like buckets, and a stiff short-sleeved checked shirt, and a clip-on bow tie. When he tried to rethink the events in the Labiche house, his mouth and jaw contorted as though a puppeteer were playing a joke with his face.
He had never messed up a hit, or left loose ends, or allowed emotion to sully the virtuous nature of his work. Tidiness and cleanliness were his hallmarks. The left hand of God could not be otherwise. The words “creepy little snerd” crawled like worms in his ears.
On the bedspread were his .357, a scoped .223 carbine, a Beretta nine-millimeter—the earlier model with the fourteen-round magazine—and a World War II British commando knife, the blade double-edged, narrow, shining with an oily-blue liquidity, tapering into a dagger point. The steel was cold and hard when he picked it up and closed his palm on the handle, his lips parting, his phallus tingling inside his boxer shorts. This was the only weapon in his possession that had the personal touch, that brought him into eye contact with the target and allowed him a guilty pleasure not unlike the impure thoughts he was not supposed to have.
Yesterday he had received a new set of index cards at the general-delivery window. The drawings on each card and the names of the next targets caused him no difficulty. He did not know them or why they needed to be removed from the landscape, which, for Chester, was an antediluvian world governed by raptors and pterodactyls. The flowing calligraphy on the first card was the issue. The words seemed to contain a trap, the way words were used to trap him when he was a child. They made his eyes jitter and the window shade change from a warm yellow to a dull red that pulsed as though a fire were burning on the other side.
The note read:
My dearest Chester,
You have been a good boy. Don’t ever let anyone say you are not. But I have the feeling you have been spying on me. You mustn’t do this. We cannot be together again until our work is over. Please don’t be offended. You know how much I love and care for you. You are the light of my life. Had we not had each other, we would not have survived.
We’ll be together soon. Just keep being the sweet boy you are and stop these evil people from preying on our friends and children who cannot defend themselves.
She had not signed the note or even used an initial. He wanted to cry. Not out of joy, either. She did not want to see him.