It had an incongruity like the red light that filled the beach. Canoes were summer lakes, frocks, big hats, and music coming across the water.
The initial panic had settled into a reliable flow of adrenaline. It is my fate and my flaw to have learned too long ago that this is what I am about. This is when I am alive and know it most completely. Every sense is honed by the knowledge of the imminence of death. The juices flow. In the back of my mind I tried to tell myself that I had been turned into a murderous machine by the sight of Gretel. But it was rationalization. There was a hard joy in this acceptance of a total risk. I knew that if he got me—whoever he might be—he was going to have to be very damned good at it, and even then I was going to create some astonishment in him. I would live totally on this thin edge until it was over, and then I would either be dead for good or partially dead until the next time.
The copper sea made no sound at all. I eeled slowly upslope, angling to my right knowing that I would be exposed to him, would be in his line of fire before I could reach the crest. I worked it slowly, peering toward the area where the bird had veered. I kept muscles poised and bunched so that in an instant I could hurl myself back and to the left, hoping to fall back into the sanctuary of the concavity near Gretel. As I came closer to the crest, I diminished the chance of regaining the concavity undamaged. On the other hand, it was easier to watch for him. Or her. Or them. Or it. The dune was about fifty feet high, much higher than in front of the shack. Perhaps if someone suddenly appeared to fire at me again, at shorter range, it might be better to plunge over the crest, race and roll down the shaded side, taking a chance of finding some kind of cover.
At last I was close to the crest. The wind had given it a sharp, wandering edge. I was on about a fifty-degree slope. I dug my fingers into the sand just short of the ridge. My chin touched the sand. I was absolutely certain that somebody was waiting, alert, ready for the target to appear above the ridge, silhouetted against the slow-motion bonfire of the sky.
So I worked my legs up under me, adjusted my grip on the piece of paddle, and began to take slow, deep breaths. In the total silence of the world, my best way to get over was to bound over, letting out a yell which would shock the rifleman into a momentary rigidity, or into panicky unaimed shots. There was the hesitation much like that remembered from childhood, standing on the edge of a roof, a reluctance to make the first commitment.
In that great stillness a monstrous breathing sound began. A great snuffling intake, and then a long breathing sign. Snuff-sigh. Snuff-sigh. Snuff-sigh. As though a winded dragon lay beyond the ridge, slightly to my right and far down the landward side of the dune. It was very steady and regular. I tried to identify that sound. It seemed, somehow, very homely and familiar. Suddenly there was a metallic clank at the end of the snuffing sound, a hesitation before the sigh.
I knew then what the sound was. It had been unfamiliar only because it was so incongruous when compared with my state of tension. There could be two of them, of course. It was still a time for caution, but a time to discard the large bad idea of bounding over the rim and down the slope, yelling and waving my paddle.
I dropped back a little and then moved laterally until I was directly above that breathing sound. And then, instinctively holding my breath, I looked over the edge.
It was darker on the landward side of the dune. The red light that bathed the world was all shadows and wine.
There, below me, John Tuckerman shoveled the dry, loose sand. Chuff of the shovel blade into the sand, then the soft sound, like an exhalation, as he swung the sand out in an arc behind him. As he dug, the sand slid down the slope, rivulets filling some of the space he had shoveled. The muscles of his back and shoulders and upper arms slid and bulged under the sun-scorched flab. He worked with the metronomic energy of the demented. He was naked. It was a labor assigned in hell. From the blazing sunburn on his body, and from the look of the piles of sand he had shoveled, he had been at it all day.
He was excavating the yellow jeep. It was aimed south, parallel to the ridge. The wheels and fenders on the right side of the vehicle, in fact the whole right side of it, was still covered by the slide of brown coarse sand. There was a figure behind the steering wheel. It sat, arms in its lap, chin on its chest, looking like a crude sand sculpture made of a slightly darker shade of sand. An imperceptible movement of the air brought the faint, sweet, gassy stink of decay, and I nearly gagged as I realized that the sand was darker because it was clotted by the fluids released by the tissues. In the passenger seat a slight knob had begun to appear, in just the right place and the right size to be the back of a head.
I looked for the rifle, finally saw it about thirty feet beyond the front of the jeep, leaning against a leafless stunted bush.
He stopped shoveling. He spoke at conversational pitch, but in a strange tone of voice, a sweet wheedling tone pitched so much higher than his normal tone that he sounded almost like a woman.
“Now you shouldn’t talk to me like that, Hub! I’ll get you out of here and you can be on your way. Don’t I always do what you want me to? Don’t I?”
He waited, leaning forward, seeming to listen.
“No, it wasn’t like that,” he said. “What she was going to do was take all the money and leave all by herself. But I made her wait, Hub. I made Krissybitch wait, and she’s right there beside you, isn’t she? And that’s proof. You and she can go on off together soon as I get you dug out and get the engine started.”
Again he listened.
Again he answered. “Well, goddarn it, Hub, I forgot. That’s all. I knew I had something to remember and I forgot. When I covered you up so you’d be safe, I just jammed it against the dune, put you in the driver’s seat, climbed on up with the shovel, and spilled enough down to do it in ten minutes, no more. That’s how I didn’t know it would take me this long to get you out. You two will be fine in Mexico. They’ve about stopped hunting you. Now you stop complaining and let me work, will you?”
That high sweet tone of voice made the skin crawl on the back of my neck and the backs of my hands. And it was no longer a person-against-person conflict. He was a mechanical toy, and I had to get to him and turn him off. A mechanical man will walk into a wall and try to keep walking. He will fall down and his legs will still make walking motions, little gears and springs ticking as he winds down.
Nineteen
He was working at the rear of the jeep, and as I tried to decide on my best and safest move, more sand spilled toward him, revealing the head and shoulders of the figure sitting next to the body of Hubbard Lawless. It was as dark and silent as he.
I moved to my right behind the crest, so no movement would catch his eye, and stopped when I was directly opposite the small-caliber rifle.
I timed my lunge so that it came just as he was lifting a full shovel of sand and beginning to pivot to throw it behind him. I came down the slope in giant plunging strides. The whirling shovel caught me just below the knees, whacking a leg out from under me in such a way that I landed facedown on the hardpan at the bottom of the dune, losing my good canoe-paddle club in my effort to break my fall. I got up on what felt like two broken legs just as he whirled with the rifle in hand. I dived for my club, grasping it, rolling over and over toward him, heard the broken-stick sound of the shot, and felt both fire and numbness in the left cheek of my behind just before I rolled against his legs and knocked him down. He sprang up again with a rubbery monstrous agility, with a frightening strength. I’d grasped the gun barrel in my left hand, and I took a swing at him with the club as he was bounding at me, wresting the gun away from me. There was such a slight feeling of impact that I knew I had only grazed him with the club.
He backed away from me and aimed at the middle of my forehead. I could practically see the little round hole it would make where it went in, and the shattered suety ruin it would make where it came out.
“Johnny!” she cried, a long desperate wailing sound, full of an absolutely final despair. I wa
s kneeling, as though in homage to my executioner. I looked back over my shoulder and saw her standing tall, teetering, on the crest of the dune, outlined against the burgundy light. He moved the sight from me to her, aiming up at her, as I threw the club at his face as hard as I could. He fired, and I turned again and saw her tumble toward us. She slid down the slope, creating a small avalanche of sand which almost covered her head when the sliding stopped.
With no thought of the gun, I went stumbling, crawling, floundering to her, and grasped her shoulders and pulled her head out of the brown sand. She made a dry spitting noise, trying to expel the sand caked in her mouth.
John Tuckerman was acting strangely. He seemed to be trying to aim the gun at us, holding it in one hand. With his other hand he was clutching at his own throat. As I leaped toward him to try to take away the rifle, he dropped it and put both hands to his throat. He was making a wet hissing sound. In what light was left I could see the sheen of the bright arterial blood which came out between his fingers and ran in a broad band down through the chest hair, down the belly, into the groin, and down both thighs.
He looked puzzled. Then he seemed to smile at me, one of those small shy smiles people use when they have committed some vulgar social blunder. A girl who had just lost her contact lens in her chicken chow mein once gave me a smile very like that.
He took two slow steps toward the jeep, then lowered himself gently to his hands and knees. He crawled a little farther, blood pumping out of the throat wound. He seemed to dwindle in size as I watched. He collapsed onto his face a yard from the jeep, with a final exhalation that made him smaller yet. There was a strange overlay of sentimentality about it. Faithful hound returns to master. I turned and hobbled back to Gretel. I had rolled her onto her back when I had pulled her face out of the sand. As I looked at her, the last of the red light went, leaving us in a darkening, gray-blue edge of night. Her face was so slack I could see what she had looked like asleep in her crib long ago. She was breathing, her respirations slow and shallow. Her pulse was heavy, steady, reassuring.
I checked my personal damage. The slug had gone at an angle through the right gluteus maximus, and it had been so undamaged in transit the exit wound was as small as the entrance wound. I could not get a very good look, of course. It was bleeding, but not inordinately. More of a seepage. And it had begun to hurt. A lot. That is the big walking muscle back there. Grab yourself a handful of right buttock—your own—and walk a few steps and feel what happens. A lot of clenching and unclenching goes on. I pulled my pants back up and fastened my belt. I looked around for a moment. Stillness. Stench. Hubbard Lawless and Kristin Petersen sat motionless in the jeep, heads bowed.
For a moment the world veered and tipped, and I had the ghastly conviction Hub would lift his head, give me a sandy and horrible smile, start the jeep, and go roaring down the rough track with the remaining sand spilling out.
The reserve gas can was chained and locked to the rear bracket on the jeep. I had the momentary image of myself using the shovel to break the lock, then checking the money and burying it in the sand where only I could find it.
But the lady was breathing, and the rental Dodge was one hundred million miles away. With an enormous effort, I scooped her up. I held her cradled in my arms. I began the long walk back to the car through the increasing blackness of the night, feeling the tickle of blood on the back of my right thigh, feeling the leaden ache of the wound plus the shrill yank of pain with each step. At last I made it and stretched her out on the back seat. I drove slowly to Timber Bay, sitting in a puddle of my own blood. I went directly to the hospital and into the archway reserved for ambulances.
As I clambered slowly out, an old man in uniform was dancing around me in utter fury, slapping the pistol holstered on his belt, telling me I could not park there. I smiled and nodded and started to try to pull Gretel out of the back seat. Then more people came. Helping hands. I did a lot of smiling and nodding, and they paid no attention to me until someone noticed that I was leaving bloody footprints on their shiny gray vinyl floor.…
• • •
They did not have to do much to me. Some suturing, antibiotics, observation. Keep me a few days. Find a tall enough crutch so I could take pressure off the ham muscles. It should have been routine. I had been in so many hospitals. I had been hurt so many times. But they disorient you. Their white lights burn all the time. They come by in the night. They change your habits, your hours, your diet, and the climate inside your head. You are an object, subject to their manipulations.
I wanted to see Gretel. I wanted to be with Gretel. I wanted to hold her hand. Their whole establishment seemed designed to keep me away from her. The red-faced, endlessly weary Dr. Ted Scudder had sutured my butt and had assisted in the emergency surgery on Gretel’s skull. He was perfectly willing to tell me how Gretel was and what they had done.
The injury was consistent with someone’s chasing her along the beach and clubbing her in the back of the skull, perhaps with the flat of the blade of a shovel. It had given her a depressed fracture of the occipital bone on the right side of the back of the skull. It seemed almost inconceivable to them that she could have been able to climb the dune.
“Extraordinary vitality,” Scudder said. “We’ve got a very good man here. Townsend. I assisted. Two and a half hours of very careful work. Freeze those little bleeders. Tiny stitches in the tear in the dura. Fit the pieces where they belonged. Just three. Bit of wire. Considerable traumatic amnesia. Thinks she’s in California. Thinks she’s missing work. No visitors. Not until she gets herself sorted out better. Avoid emotional shocks. Also, it keeps Hack Ames from bugging her. My orders. Includes you, McGee.”
When bluster doesn’t work, when begging is useless, try guile. I lied my way right to her door and put my hand against it to push it open. Didn’t. There was already one perilously deep black hole in the middle of my head. I had seen the flies and thought her dead. Never thought of checking. Made the worst possible assumption merely because that seemed to be the way my luck was running, and would run forever. Just one touch on the neck to find the pulse—that was all it would have taken. So, having made an almost fatal blunder of omission, I paused just before the blunder of commission, took my hand away, crutched myself back to the service stairway, and grunted my way down the stairs. I had thought of her … instead of my own dramas and concerns. Could I possibly be growing up? After so long?
On Friday at noon, with me sitting on my inflated rubber ring, Meyer drove slowly and carefully down to the Cedar Pass Marina. He had checked us out of the North Bay Yacht and Tennis Resort and moved our gear aboard the Busted Flush. Home is a good place to be when you hurt. I was so damned glad to see my old-crock houseboat squatting there that my eyes stung and misted. Van Harder was there, giving me that limp, dry, callused handshake so curiously typical of many men who spend their lives out of doors. We went to the lounge, and I got comfortable on the long yellow couch, rubber ring under my aching tail.
“I took my stuff off this morning,” Harder said. “Had a talk with the Sheriff. Should have my license back middle of next month. Once I’m working again, I’ll start payments on what I owe. Hack apologized for kicking me. He said he never should have done that, never. And I told him he was right, he never should have.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said.
“A bargain is a bargain.”
One long look at him was enough to convince me there was no point in argument. “Okay. Okay. But open a savings account here in your name. And when it gets up to the full amount, let me know.”
He thought that over, nodded, and put some bills and change on the coffee table, along with a piece of yellow paper with figures written on it. “This here is what’s left from the expense money bringing her over here. Forty-two seventy-five. It’s all writ down. Eleanor Ann made sure the figures add up right.”
“Thanks. She looks great. She really does.”
“I had plenty of time to do this and
that. Drains and screens and packing. Some splicing. Stuff like that. I’d rather be busy than setting around.” He coughed. “She needs bottom work, and you got a soft spot on the transom, outboard, port. I chalk-marked it. Could be dry rot. Should be looked at.”
I thanked him again and he said I’d be hearing from him, and off he went. Meyer brought me a cold beer and sat on the other side of the coffee table. “I saved the papers,” he said. “Over there in the corner. Big sensation in the press.”
“They tried to get to me. Hack Ames had the lid on. Walter Olivera was the only one who slipped by. I told him no comment. Hack’s orders.”
He went over and leafed through the stack and brought back a copy of the Timber Bay Journal. “Did you see this front page?”
I hadn’t. It was a night shot, a floodlit picture of the jeep, the two occupants still in it, Tuckerman still on the ground beside the jeep. It had been taken by somebody who had squatted down in front of and to the left of the jeep, with wide-angle lens. Grisly and effective.
I had, of course, read and heard the news and the story of the official reconstruction. Hub Lawless’s autopsy had shown plugged coronary arteries. Miss Petersen had died of suffocation under the sand after having been struck a terrible blow in the face which had fractured her jaw and cheek and most probably rendered her unconscious. In the original conspiracy, Lawless had gone overboard from the Julie at night opposite the shack. The jeep, with the $892,000 jammed into the big auxiliary gas can, was already there. Tuckerman went out the next morning and found Lawless dead of a heart attack brought on by struggling to get to shore. Either Miss Petersen was with Tuckerman or he went and got her. There was a quarrel about the money. Tuckerman killed the woman and put both bodies into the jeep after driving it to where the dune slope was high and steep. Covered it deep by avalanching enough sand down the slope. Two months later his sister came upon him when he was trying to dig the money out. He had struck her on the head, injuring her seriously. A Mr. McGee, a friend of Tuckerman and his sister, had arrived and had struggled with Tuckerman. In the struggle McGee had suffered a bullet wound, and Tuckerman had died of an injury sustained in a fall. McGee, wounded, had brought Mrs. Howard in to the hospital and had informed the Sheriff before undergoing treatment for his wound.
The Empty Copper Sea Page 22
