Larkin knew not what to do, standing in the lantern glow, pale and expensively disheveled, like some king in ancient times, no longer of the flesh, denied entrance through both the front and back doors to the realm of spirits, and yet too proud to haunt this world that he once ruled.
“Sakura Hannafin dies hornet-stung and suffocating as her airway swells shut,” Jane said, “and my Nick like a marionette manipulated, and some schoolteacher out in Minnesota immolates herself and others because a computer model says this is how to build a better world. And you should just fly to the Bahamas and live out your life in sun and splendor?”
She picked up the passport and the wallet and put them in the handbag that stood on the table.
Larkin had nothing, was nothing, and could say nothing but what he had said before. “You promised me a path to a life.”
“And there it is,” she said, pointing to the door through which earlier she had rolled him on a cart. “Learn the streets and how to live on them. Steal a supermarket cart and find your treasures in a hundred dumpsters.”
“I can’t live that way.”
“Many do.”
“There’s no way I can hide from these people, from D.J. They’ll find me in a homeless shelter as easy as in my favorite restaurant.”
“Then go home to your wife.”
“Her? She’ll know what’s happened the moment she sees me, that I’ve sold them out. She’ll be on the phone to D.J. in a minute.”
Jane said nothing.
“I beg you. All right? I beg you. The passport, the wallet.”
Again she pointed to the door.
“You can’t imagine what they’ll do to me. You can’t imagine.”
No pleasure abided in this for her, no warming of the heart by revenge, no sense that she was balancing the scales of justice. She knew only a loneliness as might have been felt by the sole survivor of a shipwreck, adrift on a flotsam of deck boards and fractured cargo crates, under a sky empty of all but the sun, the surrounding sea emptier still.
In a voice shorn not only of hope but also of despair, a voice dead to all emotion except perhaps existential dread, Larkin said, “I’m no good with pain. I won’t let them…do things to me. If I rush you now, you’ll have to shoot me.”
Jane raised the pistol, sans silencer, from her side and took it in a two-hand grip. “Leave this place.”
“You’re not cruel,” he said. “You won’t shoot to wound. You won’t leave me crazy with pain.”
She made no further promises.
He retreated to the essence that defined him, to the role of smug elitist prig, a sneer contouring his face as he said, “You’re dead already, you piece of shit. They’ll all know about you in the whispering room.”
He came at her, and she squeezed the trigger twice, the first round taking him in the throat, staggering him backward, the second a head shot, his features deforming into a grotesque countenance as if to preview the face that he would wear in a deep otherworld ablaze with fire that produced no light. As his head snapped back, his suit coat flared winglike, and he dropped as a bird shotgunned from the sky will drop, collapsing in a graceless splay-legged posture in the cheap aluminum-and-nylon-webbing chair that he would never have allowed to uglify the patio of the house in Beverly Hills, where now his widow waited.