فصل 96

Chapter 96

BARNEY, BACK in his apartment in Baltimore, back in the round of working at Misericordia, had the three to eleven shift. He stopped for a bowl of soup at the coffee shop on his way home and it was nearly midnight when he let himself into his apartment and turned on the light.

Ardelia Mapp sat at his kitchen table. She was pointing a black semiautomatic pistol at the center of his face. From the size of the hole in the muzzle, Barney judged it was a .40 caliber.

“Sit down, Nursey,” Mapp said. Her voice was hoarse and around her dark pupils her eyes were orange. “Pull your chair over there and tip back against the wall.”

What scared him more than the big stopper in her hand was the other pistol on the place mat before her. It was a Colt Woodsman .22 with a plastic pop bottle taped to the muzzle as a silencer.

The chair groaned under Barney’s weight. “If the chair legs break don’t shoot me, I can’t help it.”

“Do you know anything about Clarice Starling?”

“No.”

Mapp picked up the small-caliber gun. “I’m not fucking around with you, Barney.

The second I think you’re lying, Nursey, I’m gonna darken your stool, do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

Barney knew it was true.

“I’m going to ask you again. Do you know anything that would help me find Clarice Starling? The post office says you had your mail forwarded to Mason Verger’s place for a month. What the fuck, Barney?”

“I worked up there. I was taking care of Mason Verger, and he asked me all about Lecter. I didn’t like it up there and I quit. Mason was pretty much of a bastard.”

“Starling’s gone away.”

“I know.”

“Maybe Lecter took her, maybe the pigs got her. If he took her what would he do with her?”

“I’m being honest with you - I don’t know. I’d help Starling if I could. Why wouldn’t I? I kind of liked her and she was getting me expunged. Look in her reports or notes or -“

“I have. I want you to understand something, Barney.

This is a one-time-only offer. If you know anything you better tell me now. If I ever find out, no matter how long from now, that you held out something that might have helped, I will come back here and this gun will be the last thing you ever see. I will kill your big ugly ass. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know anything?”

“No.”

The longest silence he could ever remember.

“Just sit still there until I’m gone.”

It took Barney an hour and a half to go to sleep. He lay in his bed looking at the ceiling, his brow, broad as a dolphin’s, now sweaty, now dry. Barney thought about callers to come. Just before he turned out his light, he went into his bathroom and took from his DOP kit a stainless-steel shaving mirror, Marine Corps issue.

He padded into the kitchen, opened an electrical switch box in the wall and taped the mirror inside the switch box door.

It was all he could do. He twitched in his sleep like a dog.

After his next shift, he brought a rape kit home from the hospital.