“But my instinct was to feel sorry for those frat boys and for the guy I was supposed to shoot.”
“You’re making the mistake of classifying compassion as a human emotion. Really, your natural instincts are to do what’s best for yourself and to eliminate anything that challenges your success. You do for you, I do for me, everyone does for themselves, shake it all up and the cream rises to the top. It’s mathematics.”
“How can you tell me what my instincts are?”
“Because human behavior has been completely dissected. The genome is mapped. There are no more secrets.”
My boss is smoothing a terry-cloth headband over his hairline. He looks at the man next to him, who is still chuckling. My boss says, “Take the Gettys, for example.”
The pretty blond anchorwoman looks into the camera and says something, but I can’t hear it because the sound on the television has been muted. Her words appear in a black closed-caption box below her. The black box says, “Now, the day’s headlines.”
I ignore the first two stories, both of which include videotape of rolling tanks. When the third story begins, a graphic appears over the anchorwoman’s shoulder featuring a painting of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel splattered with enormous puddles of blood. Written over this painting in white block letters are the words “Ritz Murder.”
Kelly says, “Normally they don’t make so much fuss over a shine killing.”
My boss says, “Location, location, location.”
The man sitting with him says, “Such a waste.”
Kelly says, “We don’t know if it’s a waste. It’s not like this was some kid on the honor roll. Maybe this was just a big, mean dog who ran into a bigger, meaner dog. These things happen.”
The man turns to look at him.
“Do you know any of the men on the walls?” I say quickly.
“Sure,” he says. “Most of them.”
“That must be hard.”
He turns away from Kelly to look at me. “What must be hard?”
“To lose so many friends.”
“Lose?”
“In the war.”
He shakes his head. “The war dead are in the lobby, kid. These are the trustees.”
“Oh,” I say.
Kelly leans close to me and whispers, “Human beings have come to treat death differently than other animals do. When lions get too old, they lose their place in the pride and are forced to wander, scavenging for food, unable to hunt, until eventually they die of starvation or disease or they become immobilized by starvation or disease and are then eaten alive by hyenas. When sharks are injured, other sharks come from miles around and tear them to pieces. Human beings are the only species that tries to prolong life artificially after the subject has outlived his usefulness. We are the only creatures that mourn our dead.”
“Elephants,” I say.
“Elephants?”
“Elephants mourn their dead.”
“That’s impossible,” he tells me.
We are standing in Dexter’s living room, surrounded by Persian rugs and sliding glass doors and a glass-topped coffee table dusted with cocaine residue. The residue is smeared into white streaks. On the floor beside the table are three long-stemmed champagne glasses and a metal ice bucket.
On the other side of the glass doors are the floodlit patio and the swimming pool and the hot tub, both of which have underwater lights, and past all that are evergreen-covered hills that loom black in the darkness.
Dexter is in the hot tub with one of the girls. The other girl, naked and brown and smooth and gleaming, is standing on the edge of the pool and swaying in time to faint music. They are all laughing. I can’t tell where the music is coming from.
Kelly motions toward the glass doors. He is dressed entirely in black. His face is covered in greasepaint.
“What if they hear?” I whisper.
“They won’t,” he whispers back. “And, even so, if they look back at the house they’ll be looking from the light into the dark.”
“It’s not really dark in here.”
“Dark enough.”
I slide one of the doors open. It hisses on its runner. I freeze. Dexter and the girls keep laughing. I slip through the opening and onto the slate of the patio. Kelly follows me. We move slowly, crouched low, careful to keep our footfalls silent.
The dancing girl sees us first. She stops swaying and opens her mouth. Kelly shows her his gun. She does not speak.
I kneel down behind Dexter and press the barrel of my automatic into the back of his neck. His body shudders and tenses. The girl next to him gasps. She has long hair and skin the color of coffee ice cream.
I say, “Where are the roughnecks?”
“We’re the only ones here,” Dexter says. His voice is very steady.
“Bullshit,” Kelly says.
“I swear to God.”
Kelly says, “If you’re lying, I’m going to slice your eyeballs open with a razor.”
“I’m not lying.”
“After that, I’m going to pour gasoline into your eye sockets and pull off your fingernails one by one. Then I’m going to tie your hand to the side of this pool and mash it with a cinder block. Then I’m going to take a pair of garden shears and cut your tongue in half while it’s still in your mouth.”
The girl in the hot tub starts to cry.
Kelly turns to her. “Is he lying?”
She shakes her head.
Kelly says, “If he is, I’m going to do the same thing to you.”
She sobs more loudly. She keeps shaking her head.
Kelly looks at me. “I believe it.”
I stand and walk around in front of Dexter. “It’s me,” I say.
He squints at my face. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “You almost made me piss myself.”
Kelly says, “Don’t think I didn’t mean what I said.”
Dexter says, “What do you want?”
“We need to talk,” I tell him.
Dexter is sitting on the black leather sofa in his living room and wearing a white robe that pulls very tight across his shoulders. I am seated facing him on a ceramic barstool that I dragged in from the kitchen. Kelly is on the other side of the room, leaning on a mantelpiece. The girls are upstairs in the windowless walk-in closet in Dexter’s bedroom. We slid a heavy bureau in front of the closet door. We balanced a mirror between the bureau and the door. Kelly told the girls that if we heard the mirror break he was going to come upstairs and pull out their teeth with pliers and shove straightened coat hangers into their ear canals to rupture the drums.
“Where’d the hitters go?” I ask Dexter.
He says, “Wilton’s disappeared. They’re trying to find him.”
“They have any ideas?”
He shrugs. “Not that I know of.”
I glance at Kelly. He shakes his head.
“I don’t believe you,” I say to Dexter.
“I can’t help that.”
Kelly says, “The next time you lie, I’m going to shoot you in the hip. Won’t be too many more Pro Bowls after that.”
“Tell us,” I say.
Dexter says, “They think maybe you two clipped him.”
“You try to talk them out of that?”
“I tried. They weren’t sure anyway.”
“They have a theory?”
“They think Wilton’s that thing at the Ritz.”
“I thought that guy couldn’t be identified.”
He looks at me carefully. “Yeah, somebody put some caps in his face. Blew out his teeth and everything. Also, they look his wallet and cut off the tips of his fingers.”