part of it unreeling in his mind like a movie not a particularly pleasant one. Ginelli squatting down, pushing aside the gravel with his hands, finding Spurton's shirt ... his belt ... his pocket. Reaching in. Fumbling through sandy change that would never be spent. And underneath the pocket, chilly flesh that was stiffened into rigor mortis. At last, the keys, and the hasty reinterment.
'Bruh,' Billy said, and shivered.
'It is all a matter of perspective, William,' Ginelli said calmly. 'Believe me, it is.'
I think that's what scared me about it, Billy thought, and then listened with growing amazement as Ginelli finished the tale of his remarkable adventures.
Hertz keys in his pocket, Ginelli returned to the Avis Buick. He opened the Pepsi-Cola, poured it into the Ball jar, then closed the jar with the wire cap. That done, he drove up to the Gypsy camp.
'I knew they'd still be there,' he said. 'Not because they wanted to still be there, but because the State Bears would have damn well told them to stay put until the investigation was over. Here's a bunch of, well, nomads, you might as well call them, strangers in a hick town like Bankerton to be sure, and some other stranger or strangers come along in the middle of the night and shoot up the place. The cops tend to get interested in stuff like that.'
They were interested, all right. There was a Maine State Police cruiser and two unmarked Plymouths parked at the edge of the field. Ginelli parked between the Plymouths, got out of his car, and started down the hill to the camp. The dead station wagon had been hauled away, presumably to a place where the crime-lab people could go over it.
Halfway down the hill, Ginelli met a uniformed State Bear headed back up.
'You don't have any business here, sir,' the Bear said. 'You'll have to move along.'
'I convinced him that I did have a spot of business there,' Ginelli told Billy, grinning.
'How did you do that?'
'Showed him this.'
Ginelli reached into his back pocket and tossed Billy a leather folder. He opened it. He knew what he was looking at immediately; he had seen a couple of these in the course of his career as a lawyer. He supposed he would have seen a lot more of them if he had specialized in criminal cases. It was a laminated FBI identification card with Ginelli's picture on it. In the photo Ginelli looked five years younger. His hair was very short, almost brush-cut. The card identified him as Special Agent Ellis Stoner.
Everything suddenly clicked together in Billy's mind.
He looked up from the ID. 'You wanted the Buick because it looked more like -'
'Like a government car, sure. Big unobtrusive sedan. I didn't want to show up in the rolling tuna-fish can the Avis guy tried to give me, and I surely didn't want to show up in Farmer John's drive-in fuck-machine.'
'This - one of the things your associate brought up on his second trip?'
'Yes.'
Billy tossed it back. 'It looks almost real.'
Ginelli's smile faded. 'Except for the picture,' he said softly, 'it is.'
For a moment there was silence as Billy tried to grope his way around that one without thinking too much about what might have happened to Special Agent Stoner, and if he might have had kids.
Finally he said, 'You parked between two police cars and flipped that ID at a state cop five minutes after you finished digging a set of car keys out of a corpse's pocket in a gravel pit.'
'Nah,' Ginelli said, 'it was more like ten.'
As he made his way into the camp, he could see two guys, casually dressed but obviously cops, on their knees behind the unicorn camper. Each of them had a small garden trowel. A third stood, shining down a powerful flashlight while they dug through the earth.
'Wait, wait, here's another one,' one of them said . He picked a slug out of the dirt on his trowel and dropped it into a nearby bucket. Blonk! Two Gypsy children, obviously brothers, stood nearby watching this operation.
Ginelli was actually glad the cops were there. No one knew what he looked like here, and Samuel Lemke had seen only a dark smear of lampblack. Also, it was entirely plausible that an FBI agent would show up as a result of a shooting incident featuring a Russian automatic weapon. But he had developed a deep respect for Taduz Lemke. It was more than that word written on Spurton's forehead;