Anyway, the movie was about a guy who thought that he was murdering people by sticking black pins in a map that marked presold cemetery plots. Boone was pretty good in it, worrying that he was some kind of psychic monster or something. It wasn’t Have Gun, Will Travel, but it was okay, until the ending.
Because the ending was a cheat — it turned out that Boone wasn’t a monster, after all. He hadn’t killed anyone. The deaths were only a cheap coincidence, nothing to do with God or the Devil. And while Black had certainly never believed in anything supernatural — or much of anything at all, for that matter — he thought that in the movies there should always be something spooky, something unknown or unknowable —
The wind whistled through the window’s corroded lips.
A dirty yellow halo bloomed on the glass.
Bright light seeped beneath the bottom rail of the door.
The glow of headlights.
Whistler’s limo.
Black reached behind him and straightened the knife that was tucked under his belt, then covered the weapon with his shirttail.
The cold steel felt good against the small of his back.
Black stepped to the window and watched a tall man ease out of a black Cadillac limousine. Even in the flat, uncritical light of the full moon, Black didn’t like the look of Diabolos Whistler, Junior. He didn’t like the man’s accountant eyes, and he didn’t like his spotless snakeskin boots, and he didn’t like the silver-and-turquoise studs that sheathed his collar like a couple of gigantic arrowheads.
Whistler came through the doorway, his distressed-leather duster wind-wrapped around his ankles, and stood poised in the center of the room like a shootist ready to slap leather.
“You’ve come to the wrong place,” Black said.
“Huh?”
“You want to go west on the interstate. Stop when you hit the water.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Beverly Hills. Rodeo Drive, to be precise. Looks like that’s where you belong, in that getup.”
“Okay. You’ve had your little joke.”
Black grinned. “Close the door, Tex.”
Whistler did, his nose wrinkling. “God, it stinks in here… We could have done this in Vegas, you know.”
“Too many tourists,” Black said. “Besides, I didn’t much notice the stink. Maybe because I stink too. Last shower I had was at the hotel, before I climbed aboard a taxi with four sweaty tourists. Then I had a two hour wait at the Baja airport. If you’ve ever been there this time of year you know it’s like a sauna. I flew out on Airo Mexico, which is like flying in a school bus. They fed me a lousy lunch and didn’t even have any coffee. I got mad and tossed the plastic cup on the floor, and the smart-assed stewardess got all huffy — told me that I was breaking up a matched set. Then came Vegas where I had to pay twenty-five bucks to get my Toy -”
“Okay. Okay.” Whistler dabbed his sweaty brow with a silk handkerchief that was supposed to look like a cowboy’s bandana but didn’t.
Black said, “I just wanted you to know that things haven’t been going according to expectations today.”
“Like I said: okay. Let’s drop it.”
Black shrugged.
“Well, did you do it?”
“Of course I did.” Black pointed at the ear. “Let’s do business, Junior.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Okay. No need to get testy.” Black looked away, at the map. God, he hated this guy. He didn’t care if Whistler had made the cover of Newsweek. That wasn’t anything to him. After all, hadn’t Newsweek put Max Headroom on the cover once? Hadn’t they run that silly story, IS GOD DEAD?
Maybe Time had done that one. Black thought about it but couldn’t remember, and he decided that it didn’t much matter.
Junior took a ziplock bag and a pair of tweezers out of his coat pocket and made a big production of bagging the ear. “We’ll run tests on this, you know. My lab people have Father’s complete medical records, and we’ll know if you’re trying to pull anything.”
“I fulfilled our contract,” Black said simply. “I brought the ear to prove that, per your instructions. It was a fairly easy job, except that it took me a week to find your father. He was staying in a beachfront condo at the tip of Baja, all alone, unless you want to count those mummies that were stacked in the bedroom closet. Anyway, I did him and buried his body at the end of a road that no cop will ever bother with. If you want to know the details, he went pretty easy. I came up from behind and stabbed him just above the first vertebra. He gasped a little bit. Then he started mewling… sounded more like a newborn babe than an eighty-five-year-old master of occult sciences. It didn’t last more than a second or two, but — ”
“That’s enough.”
“No, it’s not. It might be for you, but it’s not for me. If you want me to shut up about it, pay me.” Black grinned. “That’ll shut me up.”
“Come out to the limo.”
“No. That thing looks like a hearse.” Black pretended to scratch his back; his fingers closed on the hilt of the knife. “You put the money in my Toy. I trust you, Junior.”
“Have it your way, Mr. Black.” Whistler left the shack.
Black closed his eyes and used his ears, listening through the wind. He believed you could learn a lot by listening, especially if you knew what to listen for. He heard a car door opening. He was sure that it was a door, not the trunk, and that made him happy; Whistler was the kind of guy who would hide a gun in the trunk if he had one.
The door closed easily, smoothly. Junior was nice and relaxed. Then Black heard a long creak as Whistler opened the door of the Toy.
An instant later he heard a rusty slam.
Black chuckled. “Temper, temper.”
Black was surprised when Whistler returned to the shack.
“I’ve been thinking,” Whistler began. “I could use a man like you on a permanent basis. I’m sure you can appreciate that mine is an organization on the move. With my father out of the way and me at the helm, we’ll be more than just another cult. We’ll be an accepted religion.” He slapped a magazine down on the desk. “Just take a look.”
Newsweek. Black glanced at Junior’s picture above the blurb that read, THE NEW HEDONISM.
Black slid the magazine toward Whistler. “Look, I’m not much of a joiner. You bought me once. You can buy me again, should the need arise. I only work when I need the money.” He smiled. “Besides, I want to see how things develop. I wouldn’t want to make too many commitments with the end of the world so close at hand.”
Whistler laughed.
Black said, “You don’t believe any of it, do you?”
“What?”
“All that stuff your old man preached. All that stuff about a new satanic age coming on the heels of his death. Satan rising from the ruin of Diabolos Whistler’s corpse like Jesus born of Mary. The end of the Christian era and the beginning of — ”
“You’ve been doing your homework, Mr. Black.”
“Hanging around airports, you have plenty of time to read. You run into all sorts of interesting folks selling all sorts of interesting pamphlets.”
“Very funny.” Whistler snatched up the magazine and shoved it into his coat pocket. “Look, this is a job to me. Some people put on suits and ties and run corporations. They tell their stockholders what the chumps want to hear. I put on a black leather jacket and run a religion.”