Free Panic! by Bill Pronzini Page B

figured. But the guy had been shot six times, all right, you could count each one of the scorched holes in the dark-spotted front of Perrins’ shirt.
    Brackeen frowned slightly. Each of the holes was on the upper chest, left side and middle, over and around the heart, with maybe five inches between the two outside wounds. Some nice shooting—or some careful shooting. He replaced the blanket, stood up, and came out from behind the counter.
    Forester was watching him from just inside the screen door. Brackeen looked at him and asked, “You go over the premises?”
    “Naturally.”
    “Find anything?”
    Forester hesitated, and then shrugged, and then said, tightlipped, “I think so.”
    “What?”
    “In the storeroom.”
    Brackeen followed him across and into the storeroom. Near the window, a cot was pressed against the wall; on top of the cot, the handle of a broom wedged through two leather carry loops, was a battered overnight bag, zippered open.
    Forester said, “Found that bag under the cot. Probably prints on it.”
    “Probably,” Brackeen agreed dryly.
    “Clothing and some other stuff inside. Clothes are too small to belong to Perrins.”
    “All right,” Brackeen said. “Let’s hear it.”
    “Hear what?”
    “Your theory.”
    Forester smiled grimly. “I figure the bag belongs to a transient, a guy Perrins put up for the night, maybe had do some work around here. The sign up on the roof is freshly painted.”
    Well, the bright-face was observant, at least. Brackeen said, “And so you think this transient shot Perrins.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Where did he get the gun?”
    “Could have had it with him. Maybe stolen.”
    “And the motive?”
    “Robbery—what else?”
    “Register cleaned out, is it?”
    “Well, no, but that doesn’t have to mean much.”
    The hell it doesn’t, Brackeen thought. But he said only, “Why not?”
    Forester said, “Maybe the transient didn’t intend to kill Perrins. Maybe he only wanted to intimidate him with the gun. But Perrins could have tried to take it away from him, and the transient panicked and emptied all six loads into Perrins’ chest. Then he ran, so damned shook up he forgot his bag and the money. Panic does that to a man.”
    What the hell do you know about panic? Brackeen thought with sudden, vicious anger. You son of a bitching wet-nose, what do you know about anything? Your theory is piss-poor, it’s got holes shot all through it. I was studying law enforcement when you were still crapping your diapers, and even on my first day on the force I could have told you no man in panic ever put six bullets within five inches of each other in another man’s chest. Whoever this transient is, if he exists at all, had nothing much, if anything at all, to do with Perrins’ death. You want to know what this thing looks like? It looks like a professional hit, a contract job, six slugs placed like that is the kind of bull’s-eye shooting hired sluggers go in for—but you’re such a smart-assed one you don’t even see it for your own self-importance.
    Brackeen’s eyes smoldered as he looked at Forester—but then, as abruptly as it had come, the anger drained out of him. The old, comfortable apathy returned at once, and he thought: Oh Christ, what’s the use? As contemptuous as he was of Forester, he remembered that he did not want to antagonize him, not with his job hanging the way it was; and the quickest way to give a bright-face like that a potentially disastrous hard-on for him would be to explode his nice pat little theory.
    But a small perversity made him press it just a little. “How do you explain the place being shut up the way it was? And the phone wires being cut? A guy jammed up with panic doesn’t take the time to do those things.”
    Forester had an answer for that. “He could have done them first, maybe forced Perrins to close up at the point of the gun. He probably figured to tie Perrins up, and leave him here in the closed café.