They hugged, holding each other tight for as long as felt right. “Go,” he said. “Take Marcus home.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be in touch when I can. You know the drill.”
She pursed her lips once more, warding off more tears. “Yeah. I know. Goodbye, Bob.”
“Until later,” he said.
She turned and hurried out of the room.
Bob watched his battered old Seiko wristwatch until five minutes had passed. He went out and checked the hallway.
She was gone.
He went back inside and closed the door.
“You’re really going to hand me over to the police?” Van Kamp said. “My God, Singleton! What a pathetic, tormented individual you must be now! To have ended so many lives, and yet to care so damned much! So conflicted by things as everyday as living and dying!”
He raised himself to his knees, his eyes darting around the room. Bob watched him without intervening.
“You won’t kill me. You’re the good guy in this silly narrative. Me, I don’t care either way. I never had a bloody thing. Never had family or love or the silly sentiments people like your friend seem to find so important in their silly lives. You won’t kill me, but you know what, Singleton? I wouldn’t care if you did.”
Yeah, Bob thought. You don’t care about dying at all. That’s why you’re frantically searching the room visually right now, looking for any way out of this.
“What? Cat got your tongue, Singleton? Nothing clever to say in your moment of triumph?”
Bob walked over to the desk and picked up the pistol.
“Be serious!” Van Kamp scoffed. “For all your reputation, you are the civilized one now, right? A bleeding heart, helping out those people in New Orleans, then again in Tucson. I killed your paper maker there, you know. He screamed like a stuck pig in hot oil. And I killed your tech friend in DC, as well. He cried even longer.”
Bob walked over and stood behind him. “Nicky?”
“Very dead. I ripped out his fingernails first.” Van Kamp raised his chin, jutting it out haughtily. “He was even weaker than you. And that’s the difference between me and you. You’re weak.”
Bob considered him stoically. What a waste of a person. “I’m weak because I care about others? Then why the fuck are you the one kneeling and nervous?”
His head shook slightly as he searched for justification, a narrative for his narcissism. “Bad luck. You got lucky, Singleton. And I fear nothing, not even death.”
But his eyes continued to flit around, looking for an escape. His rambling held a slight hesitancy, the tone getting shakier. “You’ve killed plenty of men, Singleton, but still you cannot revel in your power, the power those of us who are strong have over others, over life and death itself. When we exercise power over life and death, we are made Gods! We are… we are powerful beyond belief. Beyond all concern.”
Bob raised the pistol and pointed it at the back of Van Kamp’s head. “Or, you know… you could just have chosen to have friends, be a decent person.”
“More weakness! You could kill anyone, take anything you wanted! You… could have been a legend! A legend…” Van Kamp’s eyes darted around, tongue moistening his dry lower lip. “Like me.”
Bob pulled the trigger, the gun’s report blistering. Van Kamp pitched over, face first.
He leaned over the man’s body and shot him through the head once more, then used his left foot to flip the contract killer’s torso. He shot him twice more, through the heart.
Then he stared at the man’s body for a moment, the blood seeping out onto the carpet.
The utter waste of it.
“The difference between us,” Bob said softly, “is that you’d have enjoyed this.”
He pocketed the pistol. A ‘do not disturb’ sign would only buy him a few minutes. The gunshots would likely have prompted calls to the front desk, the possibility of someone looking for the source.
He needed to get moving.
EPILOGUE
Sharmila Singh slammed the driver’s door on her BMW and slung her purse over her shoulder. She headed for the sidewalk, glad to have found a spot less than a block from the rooming house.
She’d had a day to consider everything. Bob had dropped into their lives out of nowhere, basically. Sure, he was helping a friend, but he’d also given her peace, helped her avenge her father, helped put a dangerous man behind bars.
It had curbed her cynicism, the growing sense since her father’s death that there was nobody good left out there, nobody who would be selfless. Not just Bob, but Mr. Feeney, Margaret, even David, who’d found the strength to be better.
Mel Feeney was standing outside the rooming house’s front door, leaning on a crutch. “He’s not here,” he said. “The owner said he packed up and left about an hour ago.”
“Where…?”
Feeney just shook his head gently.
“He… just left?”
“It seems so.”
“But… I don’t have a number for him. He changed phones. I don’t have any way to contact him, to thank him.”
