Bill Pronzini: Bones

Kerry seemed to have grown as sobersided as I felt. She scowled into her wineglass. “It's not right,” she said. “He's a cold-blooded murderer. He can't get away with it.”

“Can't he? A lot of things aren't right in the world these days, babe. Who says there has to be justice?”

“I'd like to believe there is.”

“So would I,” I said. “But I'm afraid there isn't.”

Well, maybe there is. Sometimes.

Eight days later, at 6:20 in the evening, Thomas J. Yankowski suffered a fatal heart attack while watching the news on TV. He didn't die immediately; he died forty minutes later, in an ambulance on the way to Mission Emergency Hospital. He had a history of heart trouble-he'd had a mild attack a few years ago, as Eberhardt had mentioned to me-but I like to think the seizure was the direct result of the stress and strain of having committed one crime too many. I also like to think he was coherent during the last forty minutes of his life, that he believed the attack was punishment for his sins and perhaps he faced an even greater punishment to come.

Not that any of that matters, of course. What matters is the simple fact that he was dead, just as Kate Bertolucci and Harmon Crane and Angelo Bertolucci and Michael Kiskadon were dead; and now the pathetic little drama they had enacted was over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. A few insignificant bones scattered and lost in the graveyard of time.

It makes you wonder. Sometimes there is justice, yes. But does that matter, either, in the larger scheme of things-whatever that scheme may be?

Maybe it does.

Like love, like compassion and caring and friendship-maybe it does.