How much does the General know?"
"He probably knows everything."
"Norris would tell him?"
"No.
Wilde, the District Attorney, was out to see him.
Did you burn those pictures?"
"Sure.
You worry about your little sister, don't you — from time to time."
"I think she's all I do worry about.
I worry about Dad in a way, to keep things from him."
"He hasn't many illusions," I said, "but I suppose he still has pride."
"We're his blood.
That's the hell of it." She stared at me in the mirror with deep, distant eyes. "I don't want him to die despising his own blood.
It was always wild blood, but it wasn't always rotten blood."
"Is it now?"
"I guess you think so."
"Not yours.
You're just playing the part."
She looked down.
I sipped some more coffee and lit another cigarette for us.
"So you shoot people," she said quietly. "You're a killer."
"Me?
How?"
"The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read."
"Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger — or Brody — or both of them."
She didn't say anything.
"I didn't have to," I said. "I might have, I suppose, and got away with it.
Neither of them would have hesitated to throw lead at me."
"That makes you just a killer at heart, like all cops."
"Oh, nuts."
"One of those dark deadly quiet men who have no more feelings than a butcher has for slaughtered meat.
I knew it the first time I saw you."
"You've got enough shady friends to know different."
"They're all soft compared to you."
"Thanks, lady.
You're no English muffin yourself."
"Let's get out of this rotten little town."
I paid the check, put the bottle of rye in my pocket, and we left.
The clerk still didn't like me.
We drove away from Las Olindas through a series of little dank beach towns with shack-like houses built down on the sand close to the rumble of the surf and larger houses built back on the slopes behind.
A yellow window shone here and there, but most of the houses were dark.
A smell of kelp came in off the water and lay on the fog.
The tires sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard.
The world was a wet emptiness.
We were close to Del Rey before she spoke to me for the first time since we left the drugstore.
Her voice had a muffled sound, as if something was throbbing deep under it.
"Drive down by the Del Rey beach club.
I want to look at the water.
It's the next street on the left."
There was a winking yellow light at the intersection.