The skin of my face seems to stretch and burn, but I say nothing, unwilling to be drawn into this game. After an interminable wait, he ways, “You here to ask me about Del Payton?”
“I’m here because I heard you had a gun for sale.”
He picks up a remote control and flips through several channels, finally settling on a fishing program. “You heard wrong.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What kind of gun did you hear it was?” His eyes remain on the screen. “This gun you’re talking about, I mean.”
“A featherweight thirty-eight. Smith and Wesson.”
“That’s a damn good piece. Good for close work. How much would you be looking to spend on a gun like that?”
I take a piece of paper from my wallet, write 50,000 on it, then lean forward and pass it to him.
He studies it for a few seconds. “That’s a piece of money.”
“Cash.”
He hands the paper back to me. “Too bad I don’t have what you’re looking for. I could use a piece of money like that.”
“I think you need some air. Why don’t we step outside?”
“I don’t get around so good anymore.”
“I didn’t realize you’d lost so much strength.”
His pride thus goaded, Presley puts down the remote and stands almost as easily as he must have at age twenty. He walks to the double glass doors, slides one open, and steps onto the little square redwood deck.
I follow.
Presley stops at the rail, surveying the modest lot left him in life: a few weed-choked rows of exposed earth where a garden once grew; a small barn stripped of its walls, rotted, and collapsed inward, leaving a modernist sculpture of rafters and tin. The wall boards were probably bought by some itinerant New England artist. Beyond the barn the land falls abruptly into the woods.
“Take your shirt off,” Presley says in a peremptory tone he probably used with prisoners in the days before he was one himself.
Had he not demanded this ritual, I would have, but it irks me that he beat me to it. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
He actually grins at this. We pull off our shirts and turn in a circle. My body is lean but smooth as a lamb’s, the legacy of my generation, which was never shipped overseas to do battle and has done less manual labor than any generation before it. Presley’s torso is marked by multiple knife scars, at least two bullet wounds, and what might be the scar of a central veinous line for chemotherapy.
“Pants too,” I tell him.
We both strip our pants halfway down our thighs. Like me Presley still wears jockey briefs, and my father’s comment about his anatomy is readily borne out. Satisfied that neither of us is wired, we button and zip back up.
“I don’t like bullshit,” I tell him. “So I’ll get right to it. You killed a man named Don Hillman in 1973 in Mobile, Alabama. You did that on your own hook, no matter what you thought. I’m prepared to offer you a substantial price for the pistol used in that crime, but it’s a one-time offer. An outright purchase. You can take what I’m offering, or we can go to Plan B.”
“You fixing to threaten me, sonny?” Presley sounds more amused than angry.
“If we don’t come to terms over this, I’m going to go straight to the district attorney—whom I went to school with—and use every bit of influence at my disposal to have you indicted for capital murder and extortion. That’s a risk for my father, but it’s one he’s prepared to take. He’s been more than generous with you, and he’s tired of living in fear.”
Presley looks off into the trees.
“He deserves better. And you know it.”
“I can’t help the way things turned out,” Presley says bitterly. “Fact is, Doc has money and I don’t. And I need some.”
“My father treated your family free for years, just like he did a lot of others. What he’s got now is patients who think he’s a saint and not much else. He’s in bad health himself. He deserves to retire in peace.”
Presley scratches his ratty pajamas. “The way I figure, that gun’s worth a lot more than fifty thousand.”
“Or nothing. It could simply be evidence sitting in the D.A.’s office.”
“A hundred grand. Cash money.”
Relief trickles through my veins like cool water. “You’ve committed other murders in the past. I suspect you’re blackmailing other people as we speak. Right now I haven’t the slightest bit of interest in those crimes. But that could change. You could spend what little time you have left in jail. And you know what that’s like, Ray.” I spit off the deck. “Sixty-five thousand.”
He doesn’t like me using his first name. And though he hasn’t moved, something changed in him at the mention of prison. “Eighty,” he says in a taut voice.
“Is the gun here?”
“Could be.”
“If you get it now, I’ll go seventy-five. That’s all I brought with me.”
Presley’s facial muscles flex. He’s grinding his teeth. He wants that money. But as badly as he does, he hates to give up the gun. He’s like a miser sitting on his last nickel. His eyes burn beneath the bill of the cap, hating me for who I am, for the life I’ve had. He rolls his tongue around his inner cheek, wanting to tell me to fuck myself. But at last he breaks eye contact and walks toward the glass doors of the trailer. His growl floats back to me on the humid air.
“Get your money, boy.”
I hurry down the dry-rotted stairs of the deck and around the trailer to the Maxima. I parked so that I could open the briefcase in the trunk without being seen from the trailer. Popping the trunk, I move the sack of quick-setting cement behind which I concealed the case and count out twenty-five thousand dollars, which I stuff into the spare tire well. Then I snap the case and shut the trunk.
Before going back to the trailer, I get in the car. Inside the glove box is Dad’s 9mm Beretta. I slip the automatic into my waistband at the small of my back, tuck my shirt over it, and head up the front steps.
Presley is waiting for me on the sofa. The sallow blonde is attaching a plastic saline bag to the IV stand, and her back is to me. Her motions are quick and efficient. Presley points at the TV set. Lying atop it in a Ziploc bag is a small .38-caliber revolver, Smith & Wesson. I take a card from my wallet. On it is written the serial number of the pistol my father has not seen for twenty-five years. I remove the .38 from the Ziploc and compare its serial number to the one on the card.
They match.
Resealing the pistol in the bag, I slide it into my trouser pocket and toss the case containing the money onto the sofa. Presley tugs it onto his lap, unsnaps it, and counts the packets with methodical care. As the blonde waits, she glances over her shoulder at me, her eyes vaguely accusatory. Presley finally snaps the case shut, drops it on the floor, leans back on the sofa, and extends his right wrist toward the blonde woman, dorsal side up.
“Time for my poison,” he says, the corners of his mouth turned up with black humor.
The girl removes a heparin-lock catheter from its packaging, swabs Presley’s wrist with Betadine, and pops it through the skin in the time it would take most lab techs to locate a vein. As she tears off some white tape and fixes the catheter in place, Presley leans up and slaps her on the rump with the familiarity of a lover. The blonde does not complain or make any move to stop him. She doesn’t even look embarrassed.