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he was right.
    That silence again. Nobody saying nothing and it was like the room was filling up with cold water. I walked to the window and the floors creaked under my feet and that only made things worse. I remember one time my dad said that a house had a voice of its own and some houses were laughing houses and some were forlorn. Well, this was a forlorn house. Yeah, it was modern and clean and the National Geographics were all in order but it was still forlorn.
    Just when I felt like shouting because of the tension Weller said, “I don’t want you to kill me.”
    “Who said I was going to kill you?”
    He gave me his funny little smile. “I’ve been a salesman for twenty-five years. I’ve sold pets and Cadillacs and typesetters and lately I’ve been selling mainframe computers. I know when I’m being handed a line. You’re going to kill me. It was the first thing you thought of when you heard him”—nodding toward Toth—“say your name.”
    I just laughed at him. “Well, that’s a damn handy thing to be, sorta a walking lie detector,” I said and I was being sarcastic.
    But he just said, “Damn handy,” like he was agreeing with me.
    “I don’t want to kill you.”
    “Oh, I know you don’t want to. You didn’t want your friend to kill anybody back there at the drugstore either. I could see that. But people got killed and that ups the stakes. Right?”
    And those eyes of his, they just dug into me and I couldn’t say anything.
    “But,” he said, “I’m going to talk you out of it.”
    He sounded real certain and that made me feel better. ’Cause I’d rather kill a cocky son of a bitch than a pathetic one. And so I laughed. “Talk me out of it?”
    “I’m going to try.”
    “Yeah? How you gonna do that?”
    Weller cleared his throat a little. “First, let’s get everything on the table. I’ve seen your face and I know your name. Jack Prescot. Right? You’re, what? About five-nine, a hundred fifty pounds, black hair. So you’ve got to assume I can identify you. I’m not going to play any games and say I didn’t see you clearly or hear who you were. Or anything like that. We all squared away on that, Jack?”
    I nodded, rolling my eyes like this was all a load of crap. But I gotta admit I was kinda curious what he had to say.
    “My promise,” he said, “is that I won’t turn you in. Not under any circumstances. The police’ll never learn your name from me. Or your description. I’ll never testify against you.”
    Sounding honest as a priest. Real slick delivery. Well, he was a salesman and I wasn’t going to buy it. But he didn’t know I was on to him. Let him give me his pitch, let him think I was going along. When itcame down to it, after we’d got away and were somewhere in the woods upstate, I’d want him relaxed. No screaming, no hassles. Just a couple fast cuts or shots and that’d be it.
    “You understand what I’m saying?”
    I tried to look serious and said, “Sure. You’re thinking you can talk me out of killing you. You’ve got reasons why I shouldn’t?”
    “Oh, I’ve got reasons, you bet. One in particular. One that you can’t argue with.”
    “Yeah? What’s that?”
    “I’ll get to it in a minute. Let me tell you some of the practical reasons you should let me go. First, you think you’ve got to kill me because I know who you are, right? Well, how long you think your identity’s going to be a secret? Your buddy shot a cop back there. I don’t know police stuff except what I see in the movies. But they’re going to be looking at tire tracks and witnesses who saw plates and makes of cars and gas stations you might’ve stopped at on the way here.”
    He was just blowing smoke. The Buick was stolen. I mean, I’m not stupid.
    But he went on, looking at me real coy. “Even if your car was stolen they’re going to check down every lead. Every shoe print around where you or your friend stole it, talk to everybody in the area around the time it