whimsical quality of his half-smile suggested that he might be remembering a favorite childhood story about fairies. It appeared to be his default expression, as if he were not entirely connected to the moment, perpetually bemused.
“This is not a business transaction,” said the smiling man. “You petitioned me, and I’m the answer to your prayers.”
The vocabulary with which he discussed his work might have been an indication of caution, a technique to avoid incriminating himself. When delivered with a persistent smile, however, his genteel euphemisms were disquieting if not in fact creepy.
As Tim opened the manila envelope, the killer warned, “Not here.”
“Just chill.” Tim removed the photo from the envelope, folded it, and put it in his shirt pocket. “I’ve had a change of heart.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I was counting on you.”
Sliding the envelope in front of the empty stool that stood between them, Tim said, “Half of what we agreed. For doing nothing. Call it a no-kill fee.”
“You’d never be tied to it,” the killer said.
“I know. You’re good. I’m sure you’re good at this. The best. I just don’t want it anymore.”
Smiling, shaking his head, the killer said, “You want it, all right.”
“Not anymore.”
“You wanted it once. You don’t go as far as wanting it and then not want it anymore. A man’s mind doesn’t work that way.”
“Second thoughts,” said Tim.
“In a thing like this, the second thoughts always come after a man gets what he wants. He allows himself some remorse, so he feels better about himself. He got what he wanted and he feels good about himself, and a year from now it’s just a sad thing that happened.”
The brown-eyed stare disturbed, but Tim dared not look away. A lack of directness might inspire in the killer a sudden suspicion.
One reason those eyes were compelling became clear. The pupils were radically dilated. The black pool at the center of each iris appeared to equal the area of surrounding color.
The light at this end of the bar was reduced but not dim. The pupils were as dilated as they might have been in perfect darkness.
The hunger in his eyes, the greed for light, had the gravity of a black hole in space, of a collapsed star.
A blind man’s eyes might be perpetually dilated like this. But the killer was not blind, not blind to light, although perhaps to something else.
“Take the money,” Tim said.
That smile. “It’s half the money.”
“For doing nothing.”
“Oh, I’ve done some work.”
Tim frowned. “What have you done?”
“I’ve shown you what you are.”
“Yeah? What am I?”
“A man with the soul of a murderer but with the heart of a coward.”
The killer picked up the envelope, rose from the stool, and walked away.
Having successfully passed himself off as the man with a dog named Larry, having for the moment spared the life of the woman in the photograph, having avoided the violent confrontation that could have ensued if the killer had realized what had gone wrong, Tim ought to have been relieved. Instead, his throat tightened, and his heart swelled until it seemed to crowd his lungs and crimp his breath.
A brief dizziness made him feel as if he were spinning slowly on the bar stool. Vertigo threatened to revolve into nausea.
He realized that relief eluded him because this incident was not at an end. He didn’t need tea leaves to read his future. He clearly foresaw the prospects for tragedy.
With only a glance at any stone courtyard or driveway, he could name the pattern of the pavement: running bond, offset bond, coursed ashlar, basket weave, Flemish bond…. The pattern of the road before him was chaos. He could not know where it would lead.
The killer walked with a light step that could be achieved only by someone not weighed down with a conscience, and went out into the night’s embrace.
Tim hurried across the tavern, cautiously cracked the door, and peered outside.
Behind the steering wheel of a white sedan parked at an angle to the curb, half veiled by a windshield that reflected the tavern’s blue-neon sign, sat the smiling man. He riffled the packet of hundred-dollar bills.
Tim withdrew his slim cell phone from his shirt pocket.
In the car, the killer rolled down a window. He hung an object on the glass and cranked up the window to hold it in place.
Blindly feeling his way across the cell-phone keypad without looking at it, Tim began to dial 911.
The object pinched between the window frame and the glass was a detachable emergency beacon, which began to flash as the car reversed away from the curb.
“Cop,” Tim whispered, and hesitated to dial the second 1.
He risked stepping outside as the sedan pulled away from the tavern, and he read the license-plate number on the back of the dwindling vehicle.
The concrete underfoot seemed to have no more surface tension than the skin of water on a pond. Sometimes a skating mayfly, eluding birds and bats, is taken by a hungry bass rising from below.
In the downfall of golden light from the dragon lamp, a simple iron railing guarded the rising concrete steps. The concrete had been worked with a screed when it was bleeding, and as a consequence, some edges had scaled badly; some treads were as crazed as crackle-glazed pottery.
Like a lot of things in life, concrete is unforgiving.
Through four framed panels, the copper dragon, still bright but greening at the edges, serpentined against a luminous backdrop of lacquered mica lenses.
In the wash of ruddy light, the aluminum screen door appeared to be copper, too. Behind it, the inner door stood open to a kitchen rich with the aromas of cinnamon and strong coffee.
Sitting at the table, Michelle Rooney looked up as Tim arrived. “You’re so quiet that I felt you coming.”
He eased the screen door shut behind him. “I almost know what that means.”
“The night outside quieted around you, the way a jungle does when a man passes through.”
“Didn’t see any crocodiles,” he said, but then thought of the man to whom he had given the ten thousand dollars.
