I know I look like him, Keller said, and youre not the first person to notice the resemblance, but Im not him and I can prove it.
You just save your story for the law, why dont you? And the hand that wasnt holding the gun reached for the phone.
Im not him, I swear it, Keller said.
What did I just say? You got an explanation, theres men with badgesll be happy to listen to everything you got to say.
The laws after me, Keller said, but for something else.
Hows that?
Alimony and child support. Long story short, shes a cheating bitch and the kids not mine, and we even proved that with DNA tests and the courts still say I gotta support him.
You must have had some lawyer.
Look, let me prove it, okay? Im just going to get something from my pocket, okay?
And without waiting for permission he drew the gun and put two bullets in the guys chest before he could get off a shot.
13
Kellers ears were ringing from the gunshots, and his hand ached a little from the revolvers recoil. He straightened up, glanced through the window. There was a car parked at one of the pumps, and that was disconcerting for the second or two it took him to realize that it was his car, right where hed parked it.
The dead man was still holding the gun, his finger on the trigger, and Keller had heard stories of men firing guns long after their own death, their trigger fingers curling at the onset of rigor mortis. He wasnt sure it ever happened, and it might even have been a plot element in a comic book hed read as a child, but in any event he wanted the gun. It was a SIG Sauer automatic with a fully loaded fifteen-shot clip, and his own revolver was down to two bullets, and had just been used in a homicide. The SIG wasnt as huge as it had looked, there was nothing like having a gun pointed at you to make it increase dramatically in size, though it was in fact a little larger and heavier than the revolver. He tried it where hed been carrying the revolver, and it rode there just fine, and he figured that closed the deal.
He wiped his prints from the revolver and put it in the dead mans hand, shaping the still-warm hand to the butt and slipping the forefinger inside the trigger guard. No one was terribly likely to buy the idea that the old guy had shot himself twice in the heart, but it seemed as good a place as any to stow the revolver, and at the very least it would give somebody something to think about.
He looked for a cash register and didnt see one. There was an old wooden Garcia y Vega cigar box on the counter, and that turned out to be where the fellow kept cash and credit card slips. The cash was all fives and singles, with a couple of tens in the mix. No wonder hed looked long and hard at the twenty, Keller thought. It was probably the first one hed seen all month.
He didnt particularly want to touch the dead man, but he wasnt squeamish, either, and from the right-hand hip pocket of the mans camo jeans he drew a leather wallet with a design embossed on it, a design so worn and weathered that Keller could
barely make out what it was. He could see it was a crest of some sort, and it looked familiar, but he couldnt place it.
Inside the wallet, he found the very same crest on the card that identified its owner, Miller L. Remsen, as a member in good standing of the National Rifle Association. Guns dont kill people, Keller thought. Sticking your broken nose in other peoples business, thats what kills people.
Remsens Indiana drivers license had his middle name as well, which turned out to be Lewis. It had his date of birth, and Keller worked it out that he was seventy-three, and would have turned seventy-four in October, if he hadnt decided to be such a good citizen. There were cards for Social Security and Medicare, and a couple of very old pictures of children, smiling bravely for the school photographer. By now those children very likely had children of their own, but if so Remsen didnt have pictures of them.
The wallet held cash, including two fifties and a batch of twenties and adding up to just over three hundred dollars. There were two credit cards as well, both in the name of Miller L. Remsen, but the Citibank Visa card had expired. The other was a Master-Card issued by CapitalOne, and it was good for another year and a half.
He pocketed the bills and the valid credit card, wiped everything else hed touched and put it back, then returned the wallet to the dead mans pocket. He opened the cigar box again, hesitated, then scooped up the small bills.
Something registered, something he caught out of the corner of his eye, and he looked again and saw it on the ceiling, at the juncture of two walls. A security camera, and who would expect it in a run-down operation like Remsens? But they were everywhere these days, and when the cops found the body theyd check the camera, and he couldnt let that happen.
He stood on a chair, and climbed down a few minutes later shaking his head. The camera was mounted there, all right, but there was no tape or film or battery in it, and no wires connecting it to a power supply. It was like one of those decals announcing the presence of a burglar alarm system. A scarecrow, thats all it was, and Keller wiped his prints from it and left it there to do its job.