I followed Doyle to a large room at the back of the house. It had a highly polished wooden floor and a high ceiling with a row of skylights. A mirror stretched along one wall.
The room was filled with the most complete home gym I have ever seen. I once paid seven hundred bucks a year to belong to a gym that had a lot less.
There was a complete set of Nautilus machines along one end of the room. Something about them looked wrong. It took me a minute to figure it out: they were all specially modified so that the maximum weight on each machine was more than double what you might see in a health club.
I stared at the machines, the racks of free weights, the heavy punching bag and speed bag, the narrow wooden door that must lead into a sauna.
“I was working out,” Doyle said behind me, and I jerked around to face him again. I didn’t have the confidence in his good intentions that he seemed to have in mine. The fact that I’d turned my back on him was just one more instance of his presence; I’d forgotten he was dangerous. I wouldn’t forget again—I hoped.
He seemed to know what I was thinking. He smiled, tilting his head just a little. “You don’t mind if I continue, do you?”
The truth was, his personality was so powerful I would have had a hard time objecting if he had wanted to eat babies. “I don’t mind,” I said.
“Good,” he said, and stepped over to a large free weight bar on the floor by the mirror. I tried to add up the plates on the bar and guessed it weighed around two hundred fifty pounds.
Doyle squatted beside the bar, placing his hands on the grips. He grunted slightly and stood, raising the bar to a position just under his chin. “I think you’ll find this game has been rigged against you,” he said. There was a merry twinkle in his eye. I caught myself smiling and nodding without knowing it.
I was about to say something back when he lifted the weights straight over his head and began to do military presses. A very strong man could do ten at that weight with a lot of effort. Doyle, with no effort at all, began to move the weight up and down in a smooth and quick motion. He was at fourteen reps before I recovered enough to stop gaping.
“What do you mean?” I asked him. The smooth up-and-down of that impossibly heavy bar did not even slow. I couldn’t have taken my eyes away if my life depended on it.
“I mean,” he said with no strain in his voice, “that you’re swimming with sharks, and you’re going to be eaten.” He flashed his teeth at me over the bar, and then smoothly raised it again. “There’s no way you’re ever going to get anything out of this. You should go home.”
“Can I go home?” I asked him.
The teeth again. “Of course you can. What’s stopping you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “If we leave out honor and duty and all the other funny words, how about you?”
He gave a small chuckle. Th
e weight went up and down. “Why would I stop you? More important, how would I stop you?”
“I bet you’d think of something,” I said. Up, down—he had to be near fifty reps.
“I’m a sworn officer of the law,” he said. “I can’t imagine what you think I might do.”
“Only what you’ve already done,” I said.
He paused, holding the weight halfway up, his arms bent. It was hurting my arms just to see him do it, but there was not the slightest trace of a quiver or tremor. If he was trying to impress me, it was working. “What have I already done?” he asked me with amusement in his voice.
“I think you killed Hector McAuley. Then when his father started sniffing too close to your trail, I think you killed him, too.”
He nodded. “What’ve you got?” he said, and it startled me to hear him say it like that, the way one cop would say it to another.
“The brummel hook on the rooftop,” I said. “It’s something you would know about, you might have one. It’s pretty unusual.”
“But not unique.”
“No.”
His eyes were twinkling merrily again. It’s a terrible, strange word, merry, but it’s the only one that fit. This was a happy person, doing what he loved, bringing good cheer. “And what did I do with the brummel hook? Use it to rig a line? Run over from the roof of the bank, shoot Hector McAuley, and then run back up the line again?”
“Yeah,” I said, fighting the stupid feeling he was trying to create. “That’s about right.”
Doyle gave a happy little chuckle. “Okay. What else? What about the weapon?”
I hesitated, and he laughed aloud. “You don’t have the weapon? You don’t even know what it was yet?”