I frowned slightly. “I suppose I do.”
“Only something happens,” Talesco said, “and he gets himself in a situation where he's got to start living another way pretty soon. It scares him, thinking about it-and all of a sudden he doesn't know what the hell is right or wrong and maybe he does something stupid.”
This was a new tack, and I could not quite tie it up with anything Knox had told me or anything I had surmised from the information. I said, “Like what?”
“Like hurting people he cares about.”
“Knox, you mean?”
“Among others.” Talesco ran fingertips over the bruise on his jaw. “He's a hell of a guy, you know; we been friends and partners for twenty years. That's a long time, twenty years.”
“Too long to let one mistake break it up,” I said.
“I been thinking that all day,” he said.
I decided to prod him a little. “Maybe you ought to think about this change in your life too.”
“I already have, I've done too much goddamn thinking about it. I've got to see it through.”
“At the expense of a friendship?”
“No, because of it. And because I guess I want it that way after all.”
He fell silent again, and I could not think of a way to draw him out short of asking him bluntly for an explanation. So I let it go; there was nothing to be gained in making waves.
When we got into the village and onto the side street I made a U-turn so I could park directly behind the Rambler. Talesco and I stepped out and walked over to look inside. Knox showed no signs of having come around, except for a crust of vomit on his chin and a puddle of it on the floorboards. He was lying on his back, curled up with his knees against his chest.
“Jesus,” Talesco said. He unlocked the driver's door and rolled down the windows to let some of the smell dissipate.
I said, “If you want to follow me back, I'll give you a hand with him at the camp.”
“No. You go ahead, I can handle him.”
“You sure?”
“I can handle him,” he said again.
He seemed a little embarrassed now, as if seeing Knox had made the whole thing too painfully personal to share with an outsider; he dismissed me with a glance, went to the rear and opened the door there and fished out a blanket. I slid back into my car. When I swung out past the Rambler he was leaning inside, doing something with the blanket, and he did not look up.
At Eden Lake, the sun was just settling down behind the trees on the western ridge and the sky in that direction had a smoky brick-colored flush. There was still no sign of a freshening breeze. A jay screamed monotonously somewhere within the camp, and you could hear the sporadic singing of crickets; nothing else disturbed the evening hush.
Harry was no longer working inside the shed; there were lights on inside his cabin, but I did not feel much like company. I took a beer out of the cooler and up to my cabin, and it was stifling inside. Even the mosquitoes and the gnats were better than breathing that thick, stale air; I shed my shirt, turned on the porch light, and sat out there with my beer and one of the pulp magazines I'd brought.
Night shadows had begun to deepen now, and the sky slowly lost its color. Moths fluttered in the orange porch light; a mosquito raised a welt on my left forearm and got itself crushed for the effort. The stillness was so intense that I found myself listening to it-and the more I listened and the darker it got, the more I felt a return of the edginess I had had last night. Unwarranted feeling maybe, but it would not go away.
To occupy my mind, I opened the pulp to the lead novelette and made myself concentrate on the words. The story dealt with a fast-talking, bourbon-guzzling private cop hired by a sexy blonde to get back half a million dollars' worth of stolen jewels, and in the space of five thousand words the Eye committed an act of felonious breaking-and-entering, got slugged, threatened a janitor he believed to be concealing information, withheld evidence in a murder case, insulted two cops, and killed a hired gunman in a shoot-out. I began to get irritated with all of this nonsense, and when the hero left the dead gunman on a city street and went off without reporting the incident, I closed the magazine and put it aside.
I had always gotten a laugh from the antics of pulp detectives, but lately they seemed more silly than engaging. Sexy blondes, withholding evidence, committing felonies, shooting hoods-what did any of that have to do with the verities of a private investigator's life? Verity, for Christ's sake, was a man with his head horribly crushed, and a puddle of vomit on the floorboards of a Rambler wagon, and a thing that might be malignant growing on one of your lungs.
Funny. You grow up reading the pulps, and they fascinate you, you can't get enough of them; the heroes are all larger than life, all champions of the purest form of justice, all invincible. You'd like to emulate them in spirit, you think, and as a result it's only natural that you go into police work and stay with it diligently for twenty years, and then one day you realize for a number of reasons that you can't take it any more and you decide to open up a private practice. So you become, in the end, an Eye just like the fictional Eyes of your youth-a real-life Carmady/Dalmas/Marlowe, a living Spade, a breathing Race Williams, a walking Max Latin and Jim Bennett. You don't have any illusions about living their kind of fantasy lives, of course; you don't expect excitement and thrills and women throwing themselves helter-skelter into your bed. You're aloof from all that. You sit back and smile knowingly. You're superior, because you're dealing with reality, and for the most part reality is pretty dull. The only thing you have in common with your fictional counterparts is a profession and an outlook on life that has turned a little jaded by the things you've been forced to deal with.