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Radford broods at him, absorbing it.
Dr. Trong sees he’s got an opening. He leans forward. “Wars are fought by old men using young men’s bodies. Now somebody’s doing the same thing to you all over again. Somebody’s used you.”
“Shut up.”
“Come on, then. Get mad. It’s all right. Getting mad—it’s the first step in getting even.”
In the kind of shop where you can buy any weapon that’s legal and—if you know the secret word, some that aren’t—three men enter from the parked van out front: Wojack, Gootch and Conrad. A clean-shaven man unlocks the side door to let them in to the shop. The main thing that makes him recognizable is his bad tooth when he smiles: Harry Sinclair. Otherwise he’s changed his appearance again—a regular Lon Chaney.
The gun shop is a motley cluttered arsenal. Harry locks the door. Gootch takes an immediate childlike interest in a tripod-mounted machine gun and plays with it—a kid with a toy. Conrad unlocks a steel drawer, takes out an envelope and hands it to Wojack, who leafs through the money inside it, rapidly counting. He says to Harry, “Let me have forty 308s with one-ten-grain soft-points.”
Conrad asks, “Forty cartridges?”
It makes Gootch look up. “You fixin’ to start a war or something?”
Wojack says, mock-gentle, “I’d like to burn up a few sighting it in—if you don’t mind.”
Harry digs out two boxes of rifle shells and hands them to Wojack. Conrad turns on a TV set, but gets only snow.
Harry says, “These’ll give you a minus nine-point-three trajectory at three hundred yards. Or I can give you a boat-tail soft-point that’ll give you eight-point-four …”
“These’ll do.” Wojack yawns. “They’ll kill the man—dead enough.”
Radford holds the revolver. He looks up through the smashed window at the dawn sky. Dr. Trong watches, unafraid. Radford rubs his arm, trying to think.
The doctor says, “Call the police. You haven’t got a chance on your own.”
“They’d put me in a hole. I can’t take that any more.” Radford examines the revolver.
Dr. Trong says mildly, “I don’t think killing yourself is a sensible alternative.”
“Not right away anyhow. It’s not me I want to blow away.”
“I see. But you do want to go after someone? That’s progress, for you.”
“Now you think it’s progress to want to kill people?”
“It’s progress for you to want something.” Then Dr. Trong picks up a phone. Radford moves, as if to stop him—then stops, and after a long beat decides to trust him; he nods permission. Dr. Trong reacts—a profound moment—and then dials.
The doctor says into the phone, “Hi. Me … Any danger of us getting a bite of breakfast?”
On an outdoor shooting range at dawn, with a scrubby hillside for a backstop. Wojack sits at a bench-rest table and sights in his rifle on a long-range target. Conrad smokes. He and Gootch watch from nearby while Wojack fiddles with the weapon—the same kind of .308 rifle as before, with a ’scope mounted on it. He fires a shot and then studies the target through the ’scope. Through its lenses he can see one hole a bit wide of center. He adjusts a set-screw and aims again. When he squeezes it off he can see the image jerk a bit with recoil; it settles down—and the second bullet hole is dead-center in the bull’s eye.
On the indoor shooting range—the target range where Radford first met Harry. Several men and women are shooting at targets. An elderly supervisor looks up as Clay and Dickinson enter. They show him their IDs. And ask him a question or two.
He’s puzzled. “Sunday? Wasn’t anybody here Sunday. I’ve been closed Sundays for eighteen years.”
Dickinson asks, “How many people have keys?”
“Well gosh, I don’t know for sure. Too many, I guess, after all these years. I keep meaning to change the locks, you know, but—” He gives them an apologetic look.
Dr. Trong and Radford sit at the dinette table, having toast and coffee. In the middle of the table is that same morphine vial, and a packet of disposable syringes. Mrs. Trong, in houserobe and slippers, absently kisses her husband’s cheek and turns to go. Her husband touches her sleeve. “See if I’ve got any clothes big enough for C.W.”
She flaps a hand in acknowledgement and exits.
Dr. Trong says, “She’s used to my patients dropping in at weird hours … That injection still hurt your arm?”
“Stings like holy hell.”
“Good.” He indicates the vial and syringes. “Take ’em. I don’t want you busting into any pharmacies. Your burglary technique, you’d getting caught for breaking-and-entering.”
“Right. You got a cellular phone I can borrow?”
Trong looks at him. “You want to call her on the phone?”
Radford just watches until the doctor shrugs and hands him a flip-phone. It slides into Radford’s pocket. Then he winces. “You put something in there. To make it hurt.”
Dr. Trong gathers the dishes and begins to wash them. “It’s harmless … Look, C.W., you just think you need drugs for the pain. You healed a long time ago. The headaches are psychosomatic. You don’t need drugs.”
Wojack studies the consulate through his rifle ’scope, sliding the view across the forbidding fences and walls and the imposing building behind them, then down past uniformed guards to a brass plaque on the gatepost—“consulate” but he can’t see which country’s—and he continues to shift his aim up past the wall to an upper-story window. Through it we see a man sitting up in bed with a pad in his lap, writing. Something foreign about him. He looks powerful; important. The man is smoking a cigarette, deep in thought. The ’scope’s reticule centers on his chest. Wojack speaks softly: “Don’t smoke in bed, you twit. Hazardous to your health.” He squeezes it off and the image jerks with recoil; when it settles the man in bed is dead, his chest blown apart in blood, the cigarette falling from his limp hand.
Wojack runs, stooped over, to the back of the rooftop and swings himself out over the back of the building onto something that looks like a miniature window-washers’ scaffold. It’s supported on a system of pulleys and lines. It lowers him, swiftly and smoothly like a high-speed elevator, to an alley floor where Gootch matter-of-factly recovers the lift-lines and tosses the apparatus into the back of the van while Wojack and his rifle climb into the passenger seat; Conrad puts it in Drive as Gootch jumps into the back and pulls the rear door shut, and the van pulls away at a sedate speed, breaking no traffic regulations.
An Army Jeep pulls up opposite the vast lawn of a house that exudes solid establishment wealth, where a very attractive woman in her thirties, wearing shorts and T-shirt but very well groomed, is snipping roses, collecting flowers. This is Dorothy, depicted in the photograph that was in Radford’s room; it was taken when they both were younger.
Dr. Trong, at the wheel of the Jeep, says, “She waited for you. Even after you cracked. When everybody else gave you up for a traitor, Dorothy waited. I think she may still be waiting.”
Beside him Radford wears windbreaker, khakis—newly borrowed clothes. The engine idles and they continue to watch the estate across the street. Dr. Trong says, “She could accept it even when you couldn’t. She had faith.”
Radford says, “She should’ve married some guy.”
Dorothy, cutting roses, is unaware she’s being watched.
Dr. Trong says, “She understands why you ran away—why you dropped out. I think she’s more understanding than I am. You were on your way, C.W. You’d have been a chairman of the board or maybe you’d have taken over her father’s seat in the Senate.”
“What’re we doing here? Come on. Let’s go.”
“Dorothy loves you, you know. She’s waiting, C.W.”
“Yeah. Well your timing’s terrific. I’ve got nothing to offer her but a death watch.”
By a culvert along the edge of a country road Dr. Trong stops the Jeep. Radford gets out. The doctor says, “It may not be just a death watch. We may just get this thing turned around. If we do, what happens after? I don’t want to see you washing dishes again.”