Chapter 9

Carolyn was on time, dressed as warmly as I was, and she didn’t want one for the road. Out in the parking lot I asked which car we should take, and she said to take mine. Once inside the Blazer, she checked every nook and cranny in the rig, then she searched me very carefully. True to my word, I had moved the rifles, the shotgun, and the Ingrams to the trunk of the AMC Eagle. True to my word as best I could be as scared as I was—my grandfather’s .41-caliber derringer nestled inside my right mitten, tossed carelessly on the dashboard. She missed it, as I knew she would, and I felt slightly guilty that it was so easy, but I preferred guilt to death.

“Okay,” she said, “now tell me how you’re going to be sure that we’re not followed.”

“Just trust me, and watch. If there’s a tail, I’ll drop it. But there isn’t any.”

“Do it anyway, whatever it is you do,” she said, “but what about those electronic things they put on cars to track them?”

“Beepers?”

“If you say so.”

I drove across town to the Haliburton offices, bullied the dispatcher into giving me the key to the electronic locker, then went over the Blazer carefully. “See that dial,” I explained to Carolyn. “If there’s a transmitter aboard, it’ll go crazy.” But it didn’t move. “Now the visual tail,” I said when I came back from returning the equipment.

We drove up the dark corridor of Slayton Canyon to the end of the pavement, then I switched the Blazer into four-wheel drive, and headed down the dirt road to Long Mile Creek, bulling through the drifts while Carolyn tried to chew the knuckle out of her wool gloves, down the mountain road until I found the right sort of tree, an eighteen-inch-thick pine that leaned over the road toward the sidehill. I stopped just past it, got out my chain saw, checked the gas and the oil levels, and prayed it would start.

“What are you doing?” she asked, leaning out of her window.

“Roadblock,” I said, tugging on the reluctant starter rope.

“This is national forest,” she said. “You can’t do that.”

“Just shut up, will you,” I said, pulling on the rope again.

The engine coughed and died in a burst of smoke, but the next time I choked it, the Poulan fired again, sputtered, then broke into smooth running. I let it warm up, then cut it off, and stepped off the side of the road into the hip-deep snow, cleared the brush around the trunk, then started it up again. It wasn’t a beautiful cut, or quick, and for a second I thought I was going to drop the sucker on the Blazer, but it fell just where I wanted it blocking the road, and when the pine tree bounced, it didn’t take my head off.

After I had loaded the chain saw into the back of the Blazer, I got back behind the wheel, huffing like a gut-shot bear, and turned the heater all the way up.

“Sometimes, you know,” Carolyn said, then hit her cigarette, “sometimes you people out here don’t seem to know what you’ve got in this beautiful country, because you treat it like shit.”

“When I want some goddamned East Coast tourist to tell me how to live in the place where I was born and raised,” I said, “I’ll let you know. All right? But for now, just shut the fuck up. When you see places like Butte and the coal strip mines in eastern Montana and the goddamned clear-cuts, try to remember that we may be whores, but it’s those pimps playing squash in the Yale Club in New York fucking City who are living fat on their cuts. So shut the fuck up.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, almost as if she meant it.

I didn’t have anything left to say, nothing to do but drive, covered in frozen sweat, trembling as the last of the alcohol and cocaine washed like acid rain out of my system, feeling all the old frost-bitten parts—the tip of my nose, both cheeks, both ear lobes, my left little finger, the outside of my left foot—begin to sting and burn as if somebody held cigarettes to the spots. And I was so tired, I almost didn’t care if I ever saw Cassandra Bogardus.

When we finally got down Long Mile Road to the interstate, Carolyn directed me back to town, where we changed to her Mustang, which had been parked on a side street on the south side of town. She made me climb into the back seat and cover myself with a blanket.

When she let me out, we were parked beside the end door of the new wing of the Riverfront. I was not happy.

“Too goddamned cute,” I said as she unlocked the side door with a room key and led me upstairs. “Just too goddamned cute for words.”

“I am sorry. Truly,” she said. “But Cassie’s afraid, and if she’s afraid, I am scared to death.”

She paused in front of a room door and gave it two taps, three taps, one, and I curled my fingers around the derringer.

“Coded knocks no less,” I grumbled.

“Wait until I’m gone,” she said stiffly, “then knock twice.” She touched my cheek with her fingers. “I’ll be in touch.”

“You ain’t going noplace, lover lady,” I whispered into her ear, tucking the derringer against her throat. “It was a great night, but only one night, and I don’t trust you worth a shit anymore.”

Her eyelids fluttered as the breath rushed out of her in a warm stream against my burning face. I thought she was going to faint, but she took a deep breath, sighed, then knocked on the door twice. When it opened, I held the small pistol to my lips to shush Cassandra Bogardus’ greeting, then shoved Carolyn inside, slammed the door with my back, and motioned the two women to the floor. Then I checked out the room.

Nobody hiding anywhere, not under the bed, not even on the balcony that overlooked the black rush of the river. Wherever Cassandra Bogardus had been staying, it wasn’t in this room. The dresser drawers were empty, the bathroom pristine, and a pair of stylish, dripping snow boots and a ski parka were the only objects in the closet, her large, expensive leather purse the only blot on the smooth, unruffled bedspread.

I nudged the bottoms of their feet, and the two women rose, Carolyn frightened and angry, her shallow breath coming like blasts from a blacksmith’s bellows across a white-hot bed of coke, but the Bogardus woman only arched one perfect eyebrow in amusement, the corner of her perfect mouth slightly curled.

“Outside,” I mouthed silently as I handed her the coat and boots and her purse. Once the three of us were in the hallway, I steered them down toward my room. Halfway there, Carolyn stopped and turned on me. “You son of a bitch,” she hissed, “whose side are you on?”

“I don’t even know what we’re playing,” I whispered.

“I’ll scream my head off,” she said, “then what are you going to do? Shoot me?”

“Knock you out and hope I don’t break your jaw, hope your tongue isn’t between your teeth, because you’ll bite it off, maybe scream myself…”

“Tough guy,” she sneered.

“Take it easy, Carolyn,” the Bogardus woman said softly, her hand reaching for Carolyn’s. “Can’t you tell that he’s as frightened as we are. Let’s just do what he says. It’ll be all right.”

Carolyn took a long moment to decide, and I took the time to look at Cassandra Bogardus. If she had looked beautiful in the spotting scope that morning, up close and in person, she was stunning, the loveliest woman I had ever seen in real life: flawless skin made up so carefully that I couldn’t see it even in the bright hallway, but make-up she could have worn under the harshest camera lights, the whitest and straightest teeth I had ever seen, jade-green eyes with flashing flicks of amber, and glowing blond hair that fell full and soft across her shoulders to curl in ardent dismay at her heavy breasts. She wore an open-weave sweater, which nearly matched her eyes, over a dull-gold turtleneck, designer jeans so tight they made me uncomfortable, and golden high-heeled sandals, which made her taller than me, with straps as delicate as spider webs.

“If you’re through, lover boy,” Carolyn said, “let’s get on with it.”

“Huh? Right, right,” I said. “When we get to my room, ladies, not a sound—”

“He’s afraid of electronic surveillance, darling,” Cassandra said to Carolyn, “and I don’t blame him a bit.”

“Huh? That’s right. Let’s go.”

Inside my room, while the two women sat at the table, I went through their purses looking for bugs and information. As far as I could tell, they were who they said they were, and not bugged, but I went through their coats and snow boots, anyway. The Bogardus woman stood up and slipped the open-weave sweater over her head, draped it over the back of the chair, then her earrings and rings clattered to the table. She slid neatly out of her shoes, tugged the turtleneck out of her jeans, and started to take it off, but she stopped just below her breasts.

I guess my mouth was open because she said, “Don’t you want me to strip? And go into the bathroom with you where we can turn on the water and talk?” Before I could say it wasn’t necessary, she was naked, strolling toward the bathroom, saying over her shoulder to Carolyn, whose jaw had dropped even farther open than mine, “Wait for me, darling. We’ll be a bit.” Then she paused by the bed, picked up a large manila envelope, went into the bathroom, and turned on the water. I took off the parka and the vest, stuffed the derringer into my hip pocket, and followed. Behind me, I heard Carolyn sigh long and hard.

For a motel, it was a large bathroom, but when I walked in, it seemed terribly crowded. She stretched her leg, arched her lovely foot, and shut the door, then she reached for my hand, ran my index finger around the inside of her mouth. “See, nothing there,” she whispered, then drew it into her crotch, “and nothing there,” then farther back, “or there.” I swallowed something in my throat that lodged like a stake in my chest. “See, darling, I’m clean. We can talk here, safe from directional mikes, spike mikes, or those funny lasers that pick up sound vibrations off window-panes.” She reached over to turn on the hot-water faucet, too, bouncing her breast solidly off my arm. “Quite safe,” she said.

“You seem to know a lot about electronic surveillance,” I said lamely, seemingly unable to point out that any wireman worth his fee could filter out the sound of rushing water his first pass on the tape. “Maybe too much.”

“Only what I read in books,” she said. She reached for my hand again, squeezing my limp fingers until I answered her touch, saying, “I’m so glad to finally meet you, Mr. Milodragovitch, and so sorry to have played that awful trick on you at the airport the other day. But I thought you were one of them.”

“Them?”

“The people who have been watching my house and trying to follow me. Mr. Rideout warned me, but I made the mistake of thinking he was just being melodramatic. Poor chap’s dead now, isn’t he?”

“That’s right,” I said, sweating now.

“A crispy critter, poor fellow,” she said sweetly, “as the boys in Nam used to say. A disgusting term, but all too accurate, I suppose.”

“How did you know I knew about him?” I asked dumbly. Since I had gone to a lot of trouble to talk to her, it seemed only right to stop looking at her breasts and ask a question, any question.

“Oh, I was watching you watching him that afternoon,” she said. “I recognized you from the airport, and when I told Rideout that I thought I had been followed, he left like a shot, running back to wherever he had been hiding. I simply assumed that you were able to follow him, even though he knew you were there. He wasn’t exactly the brightest sort of man, you understand. Almost repellent, too, but he didn’t deserve to die that way, not burned to death.” She bit her lower lip, than added, “And I hope you’ll forgive me for thinking you might have something to do with his death.”

“Would you put something on, please?”

“Of course,” she murmured. “Forgive me.” She twisted her hair into a bun and wrapped a towel around it. Almost as an afterthought, it seemed, she wound a towel about her body, then leaned against the counter, her arms crossed under her breasts. She, too, sweated now in the steam coming off the hot water running in the sink. I reached around her, careful not to brush her, and turned off the hot water. “Don’t be so prissy, Mr. Milodragovitch,” she said, then leaned over into the shower stall. “Oh, you’ve got one of those steamers,” she said, turning it on. “It will feel wonderful, don’t you agree, as cold as it is outside.”

“Sure,” I said as she moved close to unbutton my chamois shirt and gently tugged the tails out of my jeans.

“You’re quite well built for an older man,” she said, her long fingernails lightly scratching through the thick gray fur on my chest. Then she patted my belly and stepped back. “I like a bit of gut on men,” she said, “it gives them presence.” Beads of sweat began to glisten on her body, and the perfumed smell of her seemed to fill the cloudy room.

Only a fool wouldn’t have known he was being played for a fool, but knowing it didn’t help. I swallowed something larger, more painful, and asked finally, “What was your connection to Rideout?”

By way of answer, she picked up the limp manila envelope and slid an eight-by-ten photograph out of it. The picture had been taken at a great distance with maximum magnification of the telephoto lens, then the negative had been cropped and enlarged, so the photograph looked ghostly gray, indistinct in the steam-clouded room, I stepped over to the counter, switched on the lights around the mirror, and tried to ignore the soft tug of her fingers on the hairs of my forearm. Blurred as it was, I could make out the faces of the two men huddled over a huge supine silver-tip boar grizzly with its throat gaping open like another, larger, more awesome mouth. A 10-gauge sawed-off shotgun, a guide’s weapon of last resort when leading someone after grizzlies, and a tranquilizer rifle leaned against a log behind them. The men were laughing, clearly, in the shot, John P. Rideout/Rausche and a large Indian with a braid hanging over his shoulder, a curved skinning knife held in his raised hand.

“What the hell is this?” I asked, moving away from her hand.

“Poachers,” she said calmly.

“Poachers? All this shit is about poachers? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not just any poachers,” she said, “but an organized gang of poachers. Do you have any idea what that hide and head are worth back East? Ten thousand dollars is my guess. Taken legally, that’s a Boone and Crockett head. Can’t you just see some fat-cat bastard in Chicago or Cleveland or Pittsburgh showing off that grizzly mounted in his den? Can’t you? I understand that full-curl Rocky Mountain sheep ram heads go for five grand, so think what that bear must be worth.”

“This can’t be about poachers,” I said, thinking about the goods I had lifted out of the trunk of the yellow Toyota, about the dead man’s stubs clutching my arm. “No.”

“Think about it. This is big business,” she said, “and when you threaten their profits, they are always ready to kill.”

“I’ve tampered with evidence, obstructed justice, over a bunch of dumb-ass poachers,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Where’d you get this?”

“A little background,” she said, holding up one long slim finger. “The last time I came back from Beirut, I promised myself to give up all that foolishness, gunfire and all that, dead bodies stacked like cordwood, so I came out here to take pictures of peaceful things—snowfields in the winter sun, glaciers in slow drift, elk calves at play—and I just stumbled onto this.

“I was up in Glacier Park, on the south side of Upper Quartz Lake, back in September, climbing toward the rim to take some sunset shots, when I stopped, looking back at the lake through my telephoto lens, when I saw this. I took a half-dozen shots, but this was the best after I developed and enlarged. But I knew I was on to something. Really, I mean, these two guys weren’t park rangers disposing of a rogue boar or anything.

“So while they were skinning it, I hurried back down to the head of the lake, watched them load the hide and head on a raft, bring it back to the campground, then pack it on a mule they had tethered there. I tried to follow them out, but by the time I got to the trail head at Lower Quartz, the Indian and the hide were long gone, and I only caught Rideout because he was changing a flat. I followed him across the Flathead to Polebridge, then down the North Fork Road, and when he stopped for a beer in Columbia Falls, I went into the bar behind him. The rest, as they say, is history.”

“How did you get him to talk?” I asked, and a warm, lovely flush rose across her chest and flamed up her neck.

“How do you think?” she said, touching herself between her breasts as if it were somebody else’s body.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Listen, will you wait here a bit. I need to think and I can’t—”

“—look at me,” she said sadly, twisting her mouth and cocking her head, her neck bowed, it seemed, by the lovely burden of her face. “Of course.”

When I went out of the warm, damp bathroom, I was surprised to see Carolyn still sitting at the table. I had, shamefully, forgotten she was there. She stubbed out a cigarette into the overflowing ashtray, then sipped at the watery remains of one of the old martinis. I couldn’t say anything, I just nodded as I walked past her, opened the sliding door, and stepped out onto the balcony. “Too hot for you in there, lover boy?” I heard her say as I closed the door.

Outside, the sweat froze quickly on my face, and I knew the frostbite would be with me a long time that night. The storm still raged, cloaking the black waters of the Meriwether with frozen froth. With the first lungful of cold air, a thousand questions formed and dissolved in my mind, but the image of the woman remained clear. Like a moonstruck teen-ager, I sniffed my index finger but only smelled the cold, clear bite of the snow. I felt as if I wouldn’t be able to think clearly anywhere for a long time, so I went back. Carolyn ignored me this time.

“Why Thursdays?” I asked as I barged into the bathroom. “Why that business at the airport? What’s your stake in this?”

“Easy,” she crooned as she finished wiping her body down with the towel, then wrapped herself back inside it. When she faced me, she said, “Shut the door. You’re letting the steam out.”

“How much does Carolyn know about this?” I asked, closing the door.

“Nothing,” she said, mounting the counter around the sink with a single graceful motion, “nothing at all. Just that I’m in trouble, that she’s a friend trying to help. Now, what were those other questions?” I repeated them. “Thursdays, because that was his day off—”

“From what?”

“He never said. And as for the airport…after all his warnings, I began to be careful, a little, and I saw your white van parked three different places in the neighborhood the day before, saw the police take you away, saw you follow Carolyn, called her early the next morning, heard what a wonderful man she had met, a rent-a-cop with a Russian name, so when I saw your van again the next morning I took precautions…the wig and the tweed suit belonged to Don Johnson, a very kinky fellow—”

“I know,” I said, “I went through the house.”

“—and the idea came out of a novel, and my stake in this is exactly nothing. Not after what happened to poor Mr. Rideout, darling. I’m not about to die to protect the wildlife habitat of the northern Rockies. What’s your stake, Mr. Milodragovitch?”

“My life,” I said. “The bastards have tried twice, they’ve been on my ass like warts on a toad, and”—I thought about Sarah and Gail, missing—“and there are some other considerations, but mostly I want to talk to somebody in charge, to let them know that as far as I’m concerned, I don’t know shit…”

“Add my vote to that,” she said, wiping sweat off the wings of her cheeks. “I’ve burned my notes, burned my tapes, and lost my memory. If you find them, tell them that, and that I’ve gone as far away as I can get from all this.” Then she dropped both towels in the puddle at her feet. “This has given me too much pleasure to see it turned into charcoal—don’t you agree?” She moved into my arms, her fingers busy at my belt buckle and the buttons of my jeans. “Just a touch, darling,” she whispered as she pushed down my pants, pulled me to the counter, and into her sweet warm body. “Just a touch, because I don’t have my diaphragm with me, darling.” A touch like dying inside her, then she shoved me gently backward, and knelt before me.

—

Afterward, as she shut off the steam and turned on the shower, I tried to say something, but all my words were jammed in my throat.

“You’d like to see me again?” she said calmly. “Of course. But not here. Not until this—this mess is cleared up. And someplace warm, darling. I find I’ve lost my taste for winter.”

“Me too,” I croaked, “someplace warm. And this rabbit hole is cold but too hot. When you’re someplace warm, and safe, call Goodpasture’s Used Cars in Albuquerque, tell him—tell him that the fat lady called, and leave a number where I can reach you.”

“The fat lady?” she asked, smiling sedately around the shower door.

“Like they say, the opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

“How quaint,” she remarked and closed the door.

—

Locked in a daze as Carolyn and I watched her dress, put on her clothes as if she had been born for nothing else, and dazed through the goodbyes—one bitter, one sweet—I lay back on the bed, holding the photograph of the hunters and the grizzly, but staring at the ceiling, I stayed, unbuttoned, dismayed, for a long time, nearly sleeping, thinking I dreamed, until Simmons knocked lightly on the connecting door and came in when I was unable to raise an answer.

“Boss, I think you better see this,” he said as he walked over to my television, snapped it on, and found a local channel on the cable. Meriwether sometimes thought of itself as a city on the make, and the local stations had joined in the community spirit, had gotten themselves a mobile news van and a remote camera for live news events. And dead ones. In the hazy colors of the motel set, they showed live coverage of a burning house, firemen and hoses, innocent bystanders, the lot—my fucking house. Even at that, I had to have a snort of coke to bring my limp body to life, to button up, grab my parka and race Simmons down to the car. But by the time we got to my house, it was real life, not television, my house.

—

The police had blocked off the only road to my house, and I had sense enough not to argue with them. Simmons turned around, drove back to the apartment complex, where we parked, then plunged into the thickets of the park, heading for the dull red glow in the north, rising and falling on the wind like the northern lights.

By the time we got as close as we could, another fire truck had arrived, but they had already lost. The cedar shake roof had already fallen in on the west side, and the old logs of the walls burned like rubber tires, the thick coats of shellac funneling black smoke into the storm-tossed sky. The two large cottonwoods beside the creek had caught, then toppled under the weight of the water from the fire hoses. A blue spruce in the backyard exploded into flame and burned like a giant torch.

“It’s gone, boss,” Simmons said.

“It’s been gone for a long time,” I said.

The same year my mother donated the land to the city for a park, she had also sold the big house to the country club—they had cut it into four sections and moved it out to the golf course—and donated all the family pictures and artifacts to the county historical society, but she had missed an old safe from my grandfather’s bank and a portrait of my great-grandfather dressed in a Cossack uniform, carrying a knout and wearing his Meriwether County sheriff’s badge. When the trustees evicted me from my office, I donated those two bits of memorabilia to the historical society.

“Are you okay?” Simmons asked.

“Not too bad,” I said. “Why?”

“You seem awfully calm for a man whose house is burning down.”

“I say: Don’t get mad, get even.”

Back at the Eagle, I picked up the M-11 and tucked it under my parka, and Simmons followed me upstairs to the dark apartment. It took two tries to kick the door off its hinges, and even less time to check out the empty apartment. Before anybody bothered to see what the noise had been, we were on our way back to the motel. As we packed, Simmons asked, “Where now?”

“Mr. Haynes’ for a minute,” I said, “then I’ll let you know.”

Abner wasn’t all that glad to see us, until I explained that somebody had just burned down my house, and then he was so angry that I felt guilty for being calm. But it made sense. Abner’s house was his home. What he hadn’t built himself he had worked to pay for. But my little log house had come to me because of my name, not because I had worked for it. Our investments were much different, and I understood the old man’s anger and my calm, even if he didn’t.

“Take it easy, Mr. Haynes,” I said, but the old man kicked his living-room rug so hard that his house shoe flew across the room and crashed into the venetian blinds. “You two wait right here,” I said, “until I get back.”

“Where are you going?” Simmons asked.

“Reconnaissance,” I said, checking the submachine gun one more time before I went out.

Every light in the surveillance house down the street was on, blazing into the storm as if a late-night party still raged. I crept around the house and a silence that seemed louder than drunken conversations and rock-’n’-roll music roared into the night. When I peeked through the living-room shades, the stack of radio equipment still sat in a pile, the black-and-white television on top, Johnny Carson looking wry as the picture rolled. One of the men seemed to be sleeping on the floor beside the equipment. The other sat at the kitchen table, facing the back door, his service revolver on the table in front of him. Occasionally, he spun it idly, as if trying to start some engine inside himself. He didn’t look much like an imitation traveling salesman anymore. He had the gray, rumbled look of death in his face.

I stood on the back porch watching him and I found myself filled with a confusion so intense that it washed the need for revenge right out of me. I was almost willing to think that my house had burned down by accident. The time for gunfire had passed. It was time for talking. I waited until the man at the table had his face in his hands, not touching the revolver, then I covered him through the glass with the Ingram, and tapped the silencer on the window.

“It’s open,” he muttered without looking up, as if he had been waiting for me.

I reached for the doorknob and he went for the .38. I meant to give him every chance, meant to keep my trigger finger still until the last possible moment, but when he lifted the revolver, he put it in his mouth instead of pointing it at me, and blew the back of his head all over the kitchen.

If you have been unlucky enough to see something like that, you don’t want to hear about it, and if you haven’t, I promise you, you don’t want to know what it looks like.

I did what I had to do, numb for now, slipped out of my pacs at the back door, walked in my socks, careful not to disturb the gore. The guy in the living room wasn’t asleep but dead, a dark ugly bruise over his crushed trachea. He must have ducked as he went into my back door, and caught the handball bolt right in the throat. Holding on to numbness as if my life depended on it, careful about fingerprints, I went through his wallet, writing down the information, then did the same with the dead man on the kitchen floor.

They were both retired Seattle cops, both held current Washington State driver’s and PI licenses and Multitechtronics employee cards, and both had the same home addresses on Mercer Island east of Seattle, a neighborhood usually too expensive for retired cops.

Finished, still numb, I let myself out into the blizzard, the soft drumming of the snow that had muffled the sound of the shot. Thinking of any number of things I should do—let the cops know, let Abner and Simmons know, call the FBI and let them hunt for Sarah and Gail—I went back to the Blazer and drove to the nearest bar.

After my second whiskey with a beer chaser, I called Jamison at home. He was sorry about my house, which he had seen on the newsbreak, and he asked if he could help.

“Remember that favor?” I asked.

“Sure. Anything, Milo.”

“Tell the reporters that you have it on good information that Milton Chester Milodragovitch III was in the house at the time it burned down.”

“What?” he said, suddenly excited. “You think somebody torched it?”

“A favor,” I said, then hung up.

I think I meant to go back to Abner’s, but I stayed in the bar until last call. And for last call I ordered two fifths of Seagram’s and a case of Rainier beer. When I checked the glove box to be sure the cocaine was still there, it was, and when I slammed the glove box shut, it sounded hollow, like cheap tin, so I drove out toward the interstate, turned west for Missoula and my pickup. But things got in the way—snowstorms, shitstorms, the dull muffled roar of a .38 or a 12-gauge or a silken noose…

Whatever, at ten o’clock the next morning I was parked in front of the Eastgate Liquor Store and Lounge in Missoula when Janey, the best damned daytime bartender in America, opened the bar, and I went inside like a man on his way to his own funeral.