A figure was slumped by one of the cars, its whole left side a singed and blackened mass of ash.
Stan walked over to him. The man coughed and spewed a gout of red over the front of him. "We always wondered what had happened, Stan ... Mom and me. And then Avis found me and told me you had sold out." The low hacking cough again and a spasmodic heaving of the chest. "N ... never believed it. You weren't the type." His eyes closed in brief pain. "Told her that a hundred ... a thousand times, I guess." He paused for a moment and Stan thought he was gone. Then the eyes flickered open.
"I was g-gonna break the whole story in tomorrow's editions. Guess ... your man got wind of it."
Stan couldn't bring himself to look down at the left side where the clothing was burned and where half of the waist was carbonized. He knew Tanner's work with the heater and he knew how well the man liked to see his victims squirm.
The cough started in again and suddenly the man was sitting up, his face twisted with pain and tears. "Y-you don't even remember me! Y-you d-don't even remember your own damned brother!"
And just before he died he said: "I'm s-sorry, Stan. God bless...."
And then he was gone and Stan knew that the man he was holding was nothing more than dead clay. He crouched there, his face wet, and the bits and tiny pieces of personality that had once been Stanley Martin coalesced and recombined into the individual they had been eight years before.
He stood up, the tears streaming down his face, and looked down at his brother Larry. A flood of memories were surging back. The games they had played, the arguments they had had, the way they had stuck up for each other....
And he could remember that morning when he had been slugged and the Thuscans had picked him up. Mr. Malcolm and Mr. Ainsworth and Tanner and the knives and the machines that had broken his spirit.
Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. A policeman had his notebook out and was looking at him curiously.