Blue Moon   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

I shrugged. "Why do you want the schoolteacher out of the way bad enough to frame him for rape?"

"We've all got our secrets, Blake. You make sure he leaves town and takes his assassins with him, and we can all keep our secrets."

I looked at my hands spread on the smooth tabletop. I looked back up, met his eyes. "I'll talk to Richard, see what I can do. But I can't promise anything until after I've talked to him."

"Make him listen, Blake. Zeeman is so clean he squeaks, but you and I know the score."

I shook my head. "Yeah, I know the score, and I know what people say about me." I stood up.

He stood up. We looked at each other.

"I don't always pay attention to the letter of the law, that's true. One of the reasons Richard and I aren't dating anymore is that he is so fucking squeaking clean it makes my teeth hurt. But we have one thing in common."

"What's that?" Wilkes asked.

"Push us, and we push back. Richard usually for moral grounds, because it's the right thing to do. Me, because I am just that unpleasant."

"Unpleasant," Wilkes said. "Mel Cooper may never walk right again or have the full use of his left arm."

"He shouldn't have pulled a knife on me," I said.

"If there hadn't been witnesses, would you have killed him?"

I smiled, and even to me, it felt like a strange smile, not humorous, unpleasant maybe. "I'll talk to Richard. Hopefully, we'll be out of your hair before tomorrow night."

"I wasn't always a small-town cop, Blake. Don't let the surroundings fool you. I will not let you and your people fuck with me."

"Funny," I said. "I was thinking the very same thing."

"Well," Wilkes said, "we know where we stand."

"I guess we do," I said.

"I hope come dark tomorrow you and your friends are on your way out of town."

I stared into his brown eyes. I'd looked into scarier eyes, blanker, more dead. He didn't have the eyes of a professional killer. He didn't even have good cop eyes. I could see the fear shiny and almost panicked around the edges. No, I'd seen scarier eyes. But that didn't mean he wouldn't kill me if he got the chance. Make even a good man scared enough, and you never know what he'll do. Make a bad man scared, and you are in trouble. Wilkes probably hadn't killed anybody yet or they wouldn't have framed Richard for rape. They'd have framed him for murder or just killed him. So Wilkes hadn't slid completely down into the abyss. But once you embrace the screaming darkness, eventually, you kill.