The Triggerman Dance

He looks up at the blue. He wonders how they'll arrive—by land or sky. He pulls the long side of his coat up onto his leg so the .45 rests on his thigh. He unrolls his napkin and scrunches it out of the way between his legs. He feels to make sure the coal pocket slit is up and convenient and the flap is tucked inside.

John watches Baum look up at the figure of Patrick and his books, then to Vann and Carolyn in a wedding-cake pose, then to Valerie with her dog.

"Susan, take off your sunglasses," says Holt.

"It's bright out."

"I want to see your expressions while we talk."

"I choose to leave them on."

Holt leans forward and reaches out to her like an optician, slowly and deliberately, with both hands open. He's smiling. Then he takes her lips between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and sharply yanks her face toward him. She whinnies, raising both hands helplessly beside her face. She wiggles but her face can't move. With his left hand he pulls off the glasses and sets them next to him.

"Better," he says, letting her go.

"Oh, Damn," she hisses. "You ...you___ ."

But she doesn't finish the sentence and for the first time all day John can see the fear rising in Susan Baum's lovely green eyes.

"Pat was twenty-two, just out of college," he says, laying his napkin across his lap. He points to Baum's. "Show some manners, lady."

Baum dumps the silverware and snaps the cloth open. John watches her shaking hands take the napkin beneath the tabletop.

"Religious kid. We started Mormon, but by the time I gave it up, Pat was had. Okay with me. There's worse things than religious convictions. Something to believe in is always better than nothing, long as it lasts. Had a girl he was going to marry after his mission to Africa. Had an A-minus grade average— Economics. Had a nice way with people and animals. Actually, kind of a shy kid. Never really liked to hunt or fish, didn't care for the killing. I respected that about him. Had these real pretty blue eyes, light skin. He was a happy soul. The kind of kid who'd wake up happy, jump into bed with you and smile and say, it's time to get up, Mom. Time to get up, Dad. One of those kind of kids. Rare. Val was always grumpy in the morning. Me, too. Carolyn so-so. But Pat, there he was, first light of day charging in to get you going. This was when he was three."

John watches Holt. Maybe it is the events of the night before, or the cancer inside him, or the memory of his son or the hideousness of the task at hand, but his face—John sees—has lost its usual robust glow and now looks pale and loose. Behind the lenses of his yellow shooting glasses his gray eyes have taken on an ocher, otherworldly cast. He catches John looking at him and John looks away.

"In fact," Holt continues. "One of the reasons it was so easy for you—and those alleged victims of yours—to put Pat down in the barrio was because Pat was down in the barrio a lot—doing his domestic mission work. That's what they do before sending them out into the world to convert souls. And you, Ms. Baum, you and your frightened lady friends turned that into the possibility of a rape spree. It was so preposterous I'd have laughed if it wasn't my own son. But it wasn't very damned funny when I read about it in your columns and there was no Pat left to ever fight for his own good name. I'll tell you, Baum—I've been a lot of places in my life and I've done a lot of things. And nothing ever made me as sick as what you wrote. Nothing made the bile jump into my throat and my face sweat and the sweat smell foul. Nothing ever."

Baum looks at John.

Hang in there, he thinks.

"Then you should have called me," says Baum.

"I did. Several times. And not a single return call. Not one.'

"I was busy."

"—I was busy, too. Trying to find a good motorized wheel chair for Carolyn. Whom you described in one column as 'the kind of subservient wife and child-bearer Mormons cherish, who had probably never disobeyed her husband in all her life.' You implied rather obviously that those characteristics—untrue, by the way—were what made her deserve what had happened to her. 'Perhaps a more independent woman would have refused to accompany her twenty-two year old son that day on a Christian crusade into the dear, near barrio to troll for souls less in need of redemption than either of them could have known. Perhaps she had suspected that in the past his sorties into Santa Ana might have been for quite another purpose altogether.' "

Baum looks down at the silver dome covering her lunch "Overwrought. Maybe."

"Carolyn would have laughed at that if she'd had any sense left to laugh with. I couldn't. Still can't. It's an insult to the finest human being I've run across on earth. You knew nothing about her. You just took the trendy generality and ran with it."

"Then I apologize."

"Too late."

"You want it in print?"

"No. An apology was never the point."

"Then what is it you want me to do?"

"Eat your lunch."