Somebody Else's Music(149)

“I doubt if Elizabeth Toliver is very much interested in destroying Stuart Kennedy. I doubt if she’s interested in destroying anybody.”

Peggy turned her head around and smiled. It was the smile of a serial killer, and Gregor had seen dozens of them. It was the smile of someone who had cut her ties with the human race, permanently and irrevocably. Under the hard light of the fluorescents, her face almost seemed to glow, and her eyes did glow, like the pinpoints of a pair of flashlights through the holes in a black nylon curtain. It was, Gregor thought, the first time he had ever seen anybody he could truly describe as insane.

“He’s got a piece of God in him,” she said. “He’s a piece of God himself. It doesn’t matter what happens to the rest of us. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. He won’t want me back, now, but I don’t care. I’ll go on protecting him. He needs somebody to protect him. You’re all trying to get rid of him. You’ve been trying since he was a child. I won’t ever let it happen. They won’t execute me. You know that as well as I do. They don’t execute nice middle-class schoolteachers in Pennsylvania. They can’t touch him if I tell them I committed all the murders by myself. They can’t touch him no matter what Betsy Toliver says. He’s a piece of God. He’s immortal.”

Up on the floor above, Stu Kennedy let out one more shouted stream of obscenities, and was wrestled out the door.