A killer, Rydell reminded himself, thinking of the weight lifter they'd left behind; Rydell knew that killing was not the explosive handshake exchange of movies, but a terrible dark marriage unto and perhaps (though he hoped not) even beyond the grave, as still his own dreams were sometimes visited by the shade of Kenneth Turvey, the only man he'd ever had to kill. Though he'd never doubted the need of killing Turvey, because Turvey had been demonstrating his seriousness with random shots through the door of a closet in which he'd locked his girlfriend's children. Killing anyone was a terrible and permanent thing to enter into, Rydell believed, and he also knew that violent criminals, in real life, were about as romantic as a lapful of guts. Yet here he was, doing the best he could to keep up with this gray-haired man, who'd just killed someone in a manner Rydell would've been unable to specify, but silently and without raising a sweat; who'd just killed someone the way another man might change his shirt or open a bottle of beer. And something in Rydell yearned so to be that, that, feeling it now, he blushed.