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vanished.”
    I kept smiling like it was nuts what he was saying. But this was true, the shooting-the-cop part. You do that and you’re in big trouble. Trouble that sticks with you. They don’t stop looking till they find you.
    “And when they identify your buddy,” he nodded toward the couch where Toth’s body was lying, “they’re going to make some connection to you.”
    “I don’t know him that good. We just hung around together the past few months.”
    Weller jumped on this. “Where? A bar? A restaurant? Anybody ever see you in public?”
    I got mad and I shouted, “So? What’re you saying? They gonna bust me anyway then I’ll just take you out with me. How’s that for an argument?”
    Calm as could be he said, “I’m simply telling you that one of the reasons you want to kill me doesn’t make sense. And think about this—the shooting at the drugstore? It wasn’t premeditated. It was, what do they call it? Heat of passion. But you kill me, that’ll be first-degree. You’ll get the death penalty when they find you.”
    When they find you. Right, I laughed to myself. Oh, what he said made sense but the fact is, killing isn’t a making-sense kind of thing. Hell, it never makes sense but sometimes you just have to do it. But I was kind of having fun now. I wanted to argue back. “Yeah, well, I killed Toth. That wasn’t heat of passion. I’m going to get the needle anyway for that.”
    “But nobody gives a damn about him,” he came right back. “They don’t care if he killed himself or got hit by a car. You can take that piece of garbage out of the equation altogether. They care if you kill me. I’m the ‘Innocent Bystander’ in the headlines. I’m the ‘Father of Two.’ You kill me you’re as good as dead.”
    I started to say something but he kept going.
    “Now here’s another reason I’m not going to say anything about you. Because you know my name and you know where I live. You know I have a family and you know how important they are to me. If I turn you in you could come after us. I’d never jeopardize my family that way. Now, let me ask you something. What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?”
    “Keep listening to you spout on and on.”
    Weller laughed at that. I could see he was surprised I had a sense of humor. After a minute he said, “Seriously. The worst thing.”
    “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
    “Lose a leg? Go deaf? Lose all your money? Go blind? . . . Hey, that looked like it hit a nerve. Going blind?”
    “Yeah, I guess. That’d be the worst thing I could think of.”
    That was a pretty damn scary thing and I’d thought on it before. ’Cause that was what happened to my old man. And it wasn’t not seeing anymore that got to me. No, it was that I’d have to depend on somebody else for . . . Christ, for everything, I guess.
    “Okay, think about this,” he said. “The way you feel about going blind’s the way my family’d feel if they lost me. It’d be that bad for them. You don’t want to cause them that kind of pain, do you?”
    I didn’t want to, no. But I knew I had to. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I asked him, “So what’s this last reason you’re telling me about?”
    “The last reason,” he said, kind of whispering. But he didn’t go on. He looked around the room, you know, like his mind was someplace else.
    “Yeah?” I asked. I was pretty curious. “Tell me.”
    But he just asked, “You think these people, they have a bar?”
    And I’d just been thinking I could use a drink too. I went into the kitchen and of course they didn’t have any beer in the fridge on account of the house being all closed up and the power off. But they did have scotch and that’d be my first choice anyway.
    I got a couple glasses and took the bottle back to the living room. Thinking this was a good idea. When it came time to do it it’d be easier for him and for me both if we were kinda tanked. I shoved my