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Blue didn't want any of it, but I needed bucks to get out of there.

"We split up. I never saw Blue again. I never saw Ollie or Ted, the other two. I think they went to L. A. to make it big. I think Blue probably became a drug crazy. I'm not sure. I went on. I was totally different from the instant it happened. I was never the same again. "

"What made you different?" I asked. "What was the source of the change in you, I mean, what in particular? That you'd enjoyed it?"

"No, not at all. It was no fun. It was a success. But it wasn't fun. I've never found it fun. It's work, killing people, it's messy. It's hard work. It's fun for you to kill people, but then you're not human. No, it wasn't that. It was the fact that it had been possible to do it, to just walk up to that son of a bitch and make the most unexpected gesture, to just take that gun from him like that, because it was the last thing he ever expected could happen, and then to kill them both without hesitation. They must have died with surprise. "

"They thought you were kids. "

"They thought we were dreamers! And I was a dreamer, and all the way to New York I kept thinking, I do have a great destiny, I am going to be great, and this power, this power to simply shoot down two people had been the epiphany of my strength!"

"From God, this epiphany. "

"No, from fate, from destiny. I told you I never really had any feeling for God. You know they say in the Catholic Church that if you don't feel a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, well, they fear for your soul. I never had any devotion to her. I never had any devotion to any real personal deity or saint. I never felt it. That's why Dora's development surprised me in that particular, that Dora is so absolutely sincere. But we'll get to that. By the time I got to New York, I knew my cult was to be of this world, you know, lots of followers and power and lavish comforts and the licentiousness of this world. "

"Yes, I see. "

"That had been Wynken's vision. Wynken had communicated this to his women followers, that there was no point in waiting until the next world. You had to do everything now, every kind of sin . . . this was a common conception of heretics, wasn't it?"

"Yes, of some. Or so their enemies said. "

'The next killing I did purely for money. It was a contract. I was the most ambitious boy in town. I was managing some other band again, a bunch of no-accounts, we weren't making it, though other rock stars were making it overnight. I was into dope again, and was being a hell of a lot smarter about it, and developing a personal distaste for it. This was the real early days, when people flew the grass across the border in little planes, and it was almost like cowboy adventures.

"And the word came down that this particular man was on the shit list of a local power broker who'd pay anyone thirty thousand dollars for the killing. The guy himself was particularly vicious. Everybody was scared of him. He knew they wanted to kill him. He was walking around in broad daylight and everyone was scared to make a move.

"I guess everybody else figured that somebody else would do it. How connected these people were to what and to whom I had no idea. I just knew the guy was game, you know? I made sure.

"I figured a way to do it. I was nineteen by then - I dressed up like a college boy in a crew-neck sweater, a blazer, flannel slacks, had my hair cut Princeton style, and carried a few books with me. I found out where the man lived on Long Island, and walked right up to him in his back driveway as he got out of his car one evening, and shot him dead five feet from where his wife and kids were eating dinner inside. "

He paused again, and then said with perfect gravity, "It takes a special kind of animal to do something so vicious. And not to feel any remorse. "

"You didn't torture him the way I tortured you," I said softly.

"You know everything you've done, don't you? You really understand!

I didn't get the whole picture when I was following you. I imagined you were more intimately perverse, wrapped up in your own romance. An arch self-deceiver. "

"Was that torture, what you did to me?" he asked. "I don't remember pain being involved in it, only fury that I was going to die. Whatever the case, I killed this man in Long Island

for money. It meant nothing to me. I didn't even feel relief afterwards, only a kind of strength, you know, of accomplishment, and I wanted to test it again soon and I did. "

"And you were on your way. "

"Absolutely. And in my style too. The word was out. If the task seems impossible, get Roger. I could get into a hospital dressed like a young doctor, with a name tag on my coat and a clipboard in my hand, and shoot some marked guy dead in his bed before anyone was the wiser. I did that, in fact.

"But understand, I didn't make myself rich as a hit man. It was heroin first, and then cocaine, and with the cocaine it was going back to some of the very same cowboys I'd known in the beginning, who flew the cocaine over the border same fashion, same routes, same planes! You know the history of it. Everyone does today. The early dope dealers were crude in their methods. It was 'cops and robbers' with the government guys. The planes would outrun the government planes, and when the planes landed, sometimes they were so stuffed with cocaine the driver couldn't wriggle out of the cockpit, and we'd run out and get the stuff, and load it up and get the hell out of there. "

"So I've heard. "

"Now there are geniuses in the business, people who know how to use cellular phones and computers and laundering techniques for money which no one can trace. But then? I was the genius of the dopers! Sometimes the whole thing was as cumbersome as moving furniture, I tell you. And I went in there, organizing, picking my confidants and my mules, you know, for crossing the borders, and even before cocaine ever hit the streets, so to speak, I was doing beautifully in New York and L. A. with the rich, you know, the kind of customers to whom you deliver personally. They never have to even leave their palatial homes. You get the call. You show up. Your stuff is pure. They like you. But I had to move out from there. I wasn't going to be dependent upon that.

"I was too clever. I made some real-estate deals that were pure brilliance on my part, and having the cash on hand, and you know those were the days of hellish inflation. I really cleaned up. "

"But how did Terry get involved in it, and Dora?"

"Pure fluke. Or destiny. Who knows? Went home to New Or-leans to see my mother, brushed up against Terry and got her pregnant. Damned fool.

"I was twenty-two, my mother was really dying this time. My mother said, 'Roger, please come home. ' That stupid boyfriend with die cracked face had died. She was all alone. I'd been sending her plenty of money all along.