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with the gun in his hands.”
    “I was told to contact you,” he said, “because of your feelings toward Drury. ”
    “ My feelings? The whole point of it is that I haven’t got any feelings about him. He doesn’t exist. He’s not relevant .”
    “ Some people feel he ties marginal revolutionaries to the Establishment .”
    “ No question. So ?”
    “ So perhaps we might return bullets for his words, as you suggested .”
    “ Hey, don’t turn it around on me, man. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you want to make my words do .”
    “ I’ll be honest with you, Weldon. I was sent here to give Mr. Drury a bullet .”
    “ Oh, wow! ”
    “ I need assistance .”
    “ From me ?”
    “ Yes .”
    “ You’re going to shoot him from here. From the window. Wow. Listen, I don’t really know that this is my kind of thing. I don’t know that I’m ready for it, if you follow me !’
    “ You can see the political value .”
    “ Radicalize more people. Create confrontation. Cut out the phony liberal alternative. It’s obvious. I’m not an idiot .”
    “ And you approve ?’
    “ I don’t know. I guess so .”
    “ And you’ll help ?”
    “ How ?’
    “ Have a car ready for me in back. I would do my own driving, but you could get the car in position for me. Then, when the time comes, you could create a diversion. A minor disruption, some egg throwing, perhaps. Something to confuse them for a moment so they would be less quick to pinpoint the source of the gunfire .”
    “ Oh, wow !”
    “ You could never be connected with me .”
    “ Even so. I could see about the car, maybe. No. No, look you leveled with me. I’ll level with you .”
    “ Yes ?”
    “ I wouldn’t do anything to get in your way. I can see what you’re doing and I can dig it, but I can’t participate. Do you understand ?”
    “ Of course .”
    “ I suppose it’s a cop out on my part, but I would have to do that, to cop out. I wouldn’t get in your way .”
    “ You’d feel no moral imperative to inform anyone in authority ?”
    “ Are you serious? Man, I would never fink. I’m not going to kill Drury, maybe that’s my own personal hang-up, but I wouldn’t run out and save his life, either .”
    “ That’s interesting.” Dorn said. “You are not part of the solution .”
    “ I don’t follow you .”
    “ Oh ?”
    Dorn jabbed at the boy’s solar plexus, fingers extended and rigid. He drew his hand back and chopped gently at the side of the boy’s neck. Gently. He did not kill him .
    “ You must be part of the problem,” he said.
    “It’s going to be a bad summer,” she said. “Not so much because of Drury. You know, that’s the thing about something like this. This assassination. It gets all the attention, and everybody takes a set on it, but there are so many other things going on. Did you hear about what happened in Portland?”
    “No.”
    “In Oregon. Not in Maine. God, isn’t that weird? There’s violence in Portland and you can’t even guess which Portland. It happened yesterday. The pigs just broke into a Panther hangout and everybody started blasting away. Three cops killed and five Panthers.”
    “This was yesterday?”
    “Yes. It’s just obvious, isn’t it? Somebody sent the order down, get the Panthers. And all the cops in the country figure it’s open season. It has to be a conspiracy. The Establishment decided to get rid of the Panthers and that’s how they’re doing it.”
    He looked at her thoughtfully. “It might be less clear-cut,” he suggested.
    “How do you figure that?”
    “Well, just as a hypothesis. Suppose one man acting by himself called the Portland police. Anonymously. To give them some sort of tip. That there was a cache of heroin at a certain address. That there were armed burglars inside. Anything. And suppose the man then called the Panther house and said the police were on their way with orders to shoot everyone dead. Enter police with guns drawn into room filled