a scene :

“He’s quite a mess Jack,” I said, “I don’t think he will last out the year at the rate he is going now.”
“Still on the juice,” it was a statement more than a question, “what about the creeps who got him started?”
“Girl overdosed over a year ago,” I said. I could tell by the “fill in the blanks” look in his eye that he wasn’t buying that simple.
“I was about three weeks out,” I said, my voice sounded noisy at the empty end of the bar. “I had the pat on the head, the gun was on the way, pocket full of six bit bullets is easy, but I was three hundred miles away and couldn’t just drop out of sight for a week. It would have taken three days to get a pattern so I could pick the time and place.
My vacation would have put me close enough not to be obvious in two weeks, so I dropped a dime on her boyfriend so he wouldn’t split before I could reach him; she was really getting nuts. While he was in jail someone tipped him that she was all done and that he was next. The day after he got out on bail she overdosed, he was tagged as a bail jumper three days later. Nobody wanted to take the trouble to track him down or get dirty meesin’ with him, so long as he didn’t come back.”
“Did she OD on heroin?” Jack asked.
“No, Tylenol of all things, feedin’ her must’ve been an all day affair, guess he didn’t want to stick his nose up to make a buy before he left.”
I could tell by the twinkle in his eyes that he was about to straighten me out a bit.
“What?” I asked.
“You didn’t tell your dad you were going to do it yourself Tracy,” he said, “I can understand you wanting to put a nine mil right under her nose just to watch her eyes bug, he is your brother, but we can’t let just anybody run around like an animal gettin the street wet; it would make us all unpopular.
“We figured it out when you called the police. Big shot boyfriend was signed out on bail, but I wouldn’t look any further than the new concrete floor of his cell for him. Peculiar how funny the three little lumps in the floor where his foot floated up while the concrete was drying are. Good homework on the Tylenol, but she actually did that herself, though we can’t figure out how.”
Funny how the word “shit” sounds so much worse when it’s bounced out of the bottom of a half full glass of scotch. I finished what I had and ordered another.
“Sergeant Callahan,” I said.
“I’ll never tell,” Jack murmured in my ear he turned to leave, “nothing messy left on that one Tracy, so stop looking for him, you got folks wondering about the wrong stuff.”
“Aye ,Aye, sir,” I mocked as he left, but he knew I’d heard him.

…
The night was empty as she walked down the sidewalk. The sound of car tires on the wet pavement broke the silence only slightly. A visual image kept intruding into her effort to think, something bundled in a dirty sheet and stuck on a high, shallow shelf against the back of a room. And then a voice, startling in its clarity, whispered in her mind. …“killed the rest,” were the words she heard, spoken as if to ones’ self. A chill ran through her at the feel of clear reality in the words, and the fact that she had stopped dead at the sound of them; standing alone on a street corner listening to the night.
“What was that!” she murmured to herself.