He’d not planned to stop anywhere en route to Titus, but during the last few minutes Dunlap’s directions had begun to blur. He needed to get his bearings, make sure he was headed in the right direction.Through the fetid smoke trapped inside the car, he watched as the attendant lumbered forward, rubbing sleep from his eyes.“What’ll it be?” the attendant mumbled.“Fill ‘er up,” Blunt answered.The attendant staggered drowsily to the pump, snatched the nozzle from its metal cradle, and began to pump the gas.His movements were slow, indifferent, and Blunt thought that what this jerk really needed was a swift kick in the ass. But then, wasn’t that what everyone needed?He thought of the meeting he’d had with the Commissioner an hour before, the way the Old Man had edged around what he wanted done, never saying it straight out. Smalls needed a swift kick in the ass, that was what the message had been, but the Commissioner had delivered it at a slant, going on and on about how it was a cop’s job to protect little kids from freaks like the one they’d found in the park, and how this fucking freak was going to have to be let go, and how he’d end up in the park again, and how some little girl would find herself wandering by this shit-hole the freak lived in, and how if the freak saw her, he’d do the same thing to her that he’d done to the little girl a few days before, and how that was terrible, terrible, and something should be done about it, right, Ralph, something should be done, you know what I mean, don’t you?He’d known all right, Blunt thought now, he’d known from the first words the Old Man had said to him, known that he was headed for the cement house on Lake Warren at around dawn, him and the freak, and that maybe the freak wasn’t coming out of it again, at least not in shape to choke the life out of some little girl, not with his hands all fucked up the way they’d be, mangled to hell, thumbs broken.
