“I admire your objectivity. Too bad the bugger made it.”
“Say that again.”
“The bastard lived. The story says it may have been a robbery. No suspects.” He perched one thigh on the corner of the desk and gazed down at me. “Still water runs the deepest.”
“You’re talking about me?”
“I said you were heck on wheels.”
“Thanks for your time.”
“You know what I dream about every third night? Going down on the deck so I could get my fifth kill.”
“Go out to the navy hospital. Talk to the psychiatrist. Join a church or start a new religion. Why do you have to keep telling me about it?”
“Because you’re a rich man, Weldon. You’re rich because your nightmares are about the deeds of others, not your own. There’re no regrets in your life. How many men can say that?”
Chapter
28
OUR LIVES SEEMED to be unraveling, not unlike a spool of movie film across a floor. I went into Grandfather’s bedroom and closed the door behind me. I could hear Snowball fixing lunch in the kitchen.
“Home a bit early, aren’t you?” Grandfather said. He was in a rocking chair by the window, smoking his pipe, wearing a flannel shirt and his boots and Stetson, the window opened high, even though the weather was cold and the heat was escaping the room. The woman next door, who was young and strong and had large breasts and upper arms the size of hams, was hanging wash.
I pushed the window down. “Have you thought about finding a lady friend your own age?” I said.
“Who wants a ninety-year-old lady friend?” he replied.
I sat on his bed. He made his own bed every morning. The quilt was always pulled tight, the pillow puffed and squared away. Outside, the sun was bright on the trees and lawn and the shoulders and blond hair of the woman shaking out her damp clothes from a basket and fastening them to the clothesline with wooden pins. “I think I went across the wrong Rubicon,” I said.
“In what way?”
“I caught up with Hubert Slakely,” I said.
“Not in his office or on a street? Caught up with him in a more serious fashion?”
“He was in a trailer out by the San Jacinto River. He had a young girl with him. She was a runaway. He’d left his mark on her.”
Grandfather’s gaze was focused out the window but not on the woman. “What’d you use?”
“An Indian trade ax.”
“That sounds like it’d do the trick.”
“It didn’t.”
“Too bad. Did he draw down on you?”
I nodded. Then I said, “How did you know?”
“You wouldn’t have hit him otherwise. It’s not in you. You think it is, but it’s not. Why aren’t the police here now?”
“I had a bandanna over my face. I didn’t speak. I took the girl to the bus depot.”
“I’d say case closed.”
“I flat tore him apart, Grandfather. I tried to kill him.”