The kid lifted his head and stared at Sam with flat eyes. “He burned up in a forest fire in Montana.”
“Shit,” Sam breathed. “A real damned hero. I’m sorry for your loss, but at least you know he went down doing righteous work. I hope you think about that.”
“Oh, I do, sir. I think about that often. Matter of fact...” He rose, uncapped the whiskey, and refilled Sam’s glass. “Maybe a toast to him, if you don’t mind? Fire season’s done here, but out in California and Arizona, they’ve still got men on the lines.”
Sam lifted his glass. “To heroes,” he said. “To men like your father.”
“To my father,” the kid said, and he clinked his PBR can off Sam’s glass and drank.
The whiskey tasted fine, but, boy, it snuck up on you too. After just two shots of the stuff — well, two pretty stiff pours — Savage Sam Jones was fighting to keep his vision clear and his words from slurring.
“So what can you tell me about this woman who came to get the phone from you?” the kid said.
Sam told him everything there was to tell. He explained his habit of scouring cars for items of potential value and his immediate quest to notify the owner when such a thing was found. He explained how if nobody claimed their shit within thirty days, then you could hardly be expected to imagine they cared about its fate, and so he’d been known to take it down to his brother’s pawnshop a time or two. This kid listened respectfully and didn’t give any of the wry smiles like the blond gal.
As his whiskey glass was refilled and went back down, he decided to give this polite kid with the dead-hero father a little more of the truth.
“It was actually in the glove compartment,” he said. “But like I said, I always give a careful look. Situation like that, where people get hurt, people die? Those sentimental things sometimes really matter to people.” He leaned back and waved his glass at the kid. “Hell, you know all about that, with what your dad did. You got anything like that left from him?”
The kid hesitated, and Sam wondered if it was too fresh, if he’d touched a wound that hadn’t yet healed. But finally the kid nodded. “More than a few things,” he said. “Most of them, I keep here.” He touched his temple, then tapped his heart, and Sam nodded sagely.
“Well, sure. Of course. I just mean some people like to have a tangible...”
He stopped talking when the kid brought the gun out.
It was a revolver, a Ruger maybe, with black grips and a blackened muzzle and bore but chrome cylinders for the bullets. It was a beautiful gun, and a mean one. Any fine-looking weapon was a frightening one. People hadn’t fallen in love with those friggin’ AR-15s because they were ugly guns. They looked the part. Hold one and look in the mirror and you felt the part. Problem was, that got in some people’s heads. Some children’s heads, for that matter.
“You just carry that with you, do you?” Sam said, and he didn’t like how unsteady his voice sounded. He’d been around guns all his life. Why did this one scare him?
“Yeah, I guess.” The kid pocketed it again, and while Sam was glad it was out of sight, he was aware of how natural it fit in the kid’s hand.
“Where are you from?” Sam asked.
“All over. Moved around a lot, growing up.”
“Because of the fires,” Sam said, thinking of the kid’s dead father. “They don’t stay in one place, nice and tidy, do they?”
The kid smiled. “No,” he said. “Fires tend to move around.” He started to pour again, and Sam waved him off, because at this point if he tried to drive even as far as the corner store for pizza, he’d be taking a hell of a chance. His vision was blurring in a way it usually didn’t from whiskey.
“Aw, come on,” the kid said. “Just one more, for my dad. His burned bones are on some mountain out there I’ve never seen. Right now, they’re probably already under a blanket of snow. Have a drink for him, would you, sir?”
How could you say no to that? A kid asking you to toast to his dead father’s bones, burned black by fire and now buried by snow, and the kid was offering his own whiskey, and you were going to say no? That didn’t seem right.
“Pour it,” Sam said.
The kid poured it tall again, but what the hell. If Sam needed to doze off here in the chair for an hour or two until he was ready to get behind the wheel, that was fine. He’d done it before. He saw no reason to be troubled by his heavy eyelids.
“The card?” the kid asked loudly.
“Huh?” Sam jerked upright. He realized he’d actually been on the way to sleep, and he’d let his eyes close.
“You said you couldn’t remember the woman’s name, the one you gave all of the phones to, but that she left a card.”
“Oh, shit. Yes. Yes, she did.” Sam tried to stand, but he was woozy. Damn, that new Jack Daniel’s had a different kind of kick to it. Sneaky as a snake in the grass. He’d stick to the old classic in the future. He fumbled around on the shelf behind the desk and then he turned around, triumphant, the card held high.
“Here ya go.” He tossed it on the desk so the kid could read it. No way Sam could pick the words out of that blur, not now.
“‘Hank Bauer, Coastal Claims and Investigations,’” the kid read. “Hank was a woman?”
“No, but that’s the card she left. She must work for him. She wasn’t as young as you, but not very far from it either. Maybe thirty. Tiny little thing, with blond hair. She was decent, I suppose, but she might be a smart-ass. And like you said, she should’ve left the... the... uh...” Sam couldn’t keep his thoughts steady, and he was beginning to sweat. “It should’ve been the police that came, is what I mean.”
“Sure. Well, Mr. Jones, consider your problems solved. I’ll take care of this whole matter, and I’ll do it discreetly.”
Sam tried to nod. Tried to say thank you. Instead he felt his eyes close, and this time he didn’t fight them.
“That’s some damn strong liquor,” he said, and the words were hard to form and seemed to echo in his own ears.
“It’s a proprietary blend,” the kid said. “I add a little custom touch to it.”
Wish you’d mentioned that earlier, Savage Sam Jones thought but didn’t say, couldn’t say. His eyes were still closed, and he felt his head lolling forward on a suddenly slackening neck.
I need some water, he thought. I need some help.
When Savage Sam Jones slumped forward in his chair, Dax Blackwell didn’t move. He waited a few minutes, calm and patient, before pulling on thin gloves and checking for a pulse.
Nothing. The old man’s flesh was already cooling. His heart had stopped.
Long after he was certain of this, Dax Blackwell kept his hand on the man’s wrist and his gaze on the man’s closed eyes. He studied the tableau of death where life had flourished just minutes ago, until Dax’s arrival on the doorstep of this man now turned corpse.
Finally, reluctantly, he released him.
There was business to do, and time was wasting.
He kept the gloves on while he wiped down the whiskey glass and the PBR can and the desk. Sam’s old chair swiveled under his weight, turning the dead man away from the door. Dax carefully turned the chair back so that his face would greet the next visitor.
When he left, he took the bottle.
18
The neurologist’s last name is Pine, and if he has a first name, he doesn’t offer it to Tara. He is Dr. Pine, period. He has a pleasant smile and smart, penetrating eyes and the kind of self-assured bearing that gives you confidence.
It gives Tara confidence, at least, until he asks her to blink.