“No!” Ramon said. “No play. Go hell.”
This rebuff was fine with me. I didn’t really want to play cards with these wild boars; I was just keeping them busy long enough for Amy to slip down the stairs and into my room.
Which, a few seconds later, was exactly where I found her, wearing her weathered wrinkled flying jacket, pacing and holding her stomach; my room seemed darker than hers, perhaps because my window onto the house next door did not overlook its rooftop.
“I feel sick,” she said. “Sick to my stomach, like before going onstage to give a stupid lecture….”
I was digging the nine-millimeter out of my travel bag. “Do you get butterflies before you take off in a plane?”
“Never.”
I checked the chamber; the bolt action made a nasty echoey click. “Well, this is more like takin’ off on a flight than giving a lecture. So tell your stomach to take it easy.”
She sucked in air, nodded.
Now, if only my belly would take that same good advice.
I slipped the extra clip into my suitcoat pocket. I wasn’t taking anything with me but the clothes on my person, the gun in my hand and Amy. That leather flight jacket was apparently the only keepsake she was taking along. Thunder rumbled and cracked, sounding fake, like a radio sound effects guy shaking a thin sheet of steel.
She swept into my arms and I held her tight, and her eyes widened as she looked at my right hand with the automatic held nose upward. “Is there going to be violence?”
“Only if that’s what it takes. Pacifists get off at this stop…. Okay?”
She swallowed. “Okay.”
“If there is…violence…you have to stay calm. If you ran into trouble up in the air, you could stay calm, right?”
“Usually.”
“Well, I need that world-famous nerves-of-steel pilot at my side, right now. Okay? Is she here?”
“She’s here.”
“Now.” And I held her away from me and gave her a goofy little smile. “Sooner or later in the life of a man having an affair with a married woman, the inevitable occurs.”
She couldn’t help it; she smiled back at me. “Which is?”
“Nate Heller goes out the window.”
And I opened the window—no bars on this prison—and went out first, into the downpour, a splattering, insistent rain that was surprising in its power, my feet sinking into grassy, muddy ground several inches. The window was up off the ground a ways and I held my arms for her to slip down into, as if we were eloping, and then she was in my arms and she blinked and blinked as water drummed her face and she grinned reflexively, saying “Oh my goodness!”
And, as if she were my bride just ushered over the threshold, I eased her onto the sodden ground, where her slippered feet sank in almost to the ankle.
“This is going to be slow going!” I said, having to work to be heard over the driving rain and grumbling sky.
We were between the hotel and the house next door—there wasn’t much space, not much more than a hallway’s worth. So I got in front of her, leading her by the hand; my nine-millimeter was stuck in my waistband. We hadn’t taken more than two soggy steps when the voice behind us cried out. “Hey!”
I looked back, past Amy, and saw him: Ramon, coming out of the outdoor toilet, buckling his pants with one hand and coming at us with the raised billy club in the other. His chubby body charged through the curtain of rain as if it were nothing more than moisture, his sandaled feet making rhino craters in the muddy earth, his eyes wide and dark and brightly animal, like a frightened raccoon’s, only a raccoon would have had sense enough to flee and here Ramon was barreling right toward me, moving faster than a fat man had any right to move, and I pulled Amy back behind me, closer to the street, and thrust myself forward and just as Ramon entered the tunnel between hotel and house, my nine-millimeter slug entered the melon of his head, somewhere in his forehead, lifting the top of his skull in fragments, revealing in a spray of red that Ramon did indeed have a brain, before he tumbled backward, careening off the house next door, then splatting against the hotel, where he slid down its cement surface and sank into the mud like an animal carcass on its way to becoming a fossil.
Amy screamed and I rudely covered her mouth with my hand until her wide eyes and nodding told me she wouldn’t scream anymore and she was trembling and crying as I stood there with a fucking monsoon dripping down my head, saying, “Nobody heard that gunshot, not in this shit…but I gotta go in and deal with the other one!”
“Why?!”
“Because Ramon here can’t take a dump forever. The other one’s gonna go checking on him, and I can’t have that!”
“Are you going to kill him?”
“Not if he’s smart.”
And what were the odds of that?
So I left her there, in the passageway between hotel and house, rain pummeling her as she covered her mouth, her back turned to the horror of what had become of Ramon, and I moved out onto the street and inside the hotel where the burly Chamorro looked around at me, and I swung the nine-millimeter barrel across the side of his skull in a fashion that would not only knock out most any man, but probably fucking kill him.
Only this son of a bitch shook it off, and went for the billy club on the table.
I put a bullet in his ear that wound up going through his reaching hand, as well, though I doubt he felt it. He tumbled onto the rattan table, breaking it in a crunch of shattering straw.
Now he knew how to play Chicago.
Just down the hall, out of the first hotel room door, the Chamorro desk clerk stuck out his mustached face. His eyes were huge.
“He didn’t understand that real cops have guns,” I told him. I went over and reached across the check-in counter and yanked his phone out of the wall. “Do I have to kill you or tie you up or anything?”
He shook his head, no, crossed himself, and ducked back into his room.
Then I ran out into the rain, the nine-millimeter back in my waistband, and Amy came flying out from between the house and the hotel. I slipped my arm around her waist and we ran down the boardwalk. No one was around; the unpaved street next to us was a swamp no vehicle could have navigated. From across the way, in a seedy little bar, came the sound of a gramophone playing a Dorsey Brothers record, “Lost in a Fog,” and Chamorro kids were dancing, boys and girls holding each other close, swaying to the record’s rhythm, ignoring the staccato percussion of the downpour.
When we ran out of boardwalk, the grassy ground provided a terrible soggy glue, but we moved along, stumbling, never quite falling, slowed though not quite caught in this just-poured cement. Through the sheeting rain we glimpsed the concrete cellblocks of the prison, impervious to the pounding storm, then ducked out of the way as a tin roof, flung recklessly by the wind, went pitching across our path, carving a resting place in the face of a wood-frame warehouse. Exchanging startled looks, and grabbing gulps of air, we moved on, pushing past our old friend the sugar king in his park as palm trees bowed down to him.
Then, along the waterfront, we had boardwalk under our mud-coated feet again, and the two-story buildings around us lessened the squall’s impact, though we were heading into the wind, and it took effort just to walk, our clothes so drenched they were heavy, our hair soaked flat to our scalps. A block away yawned the expanse of the Garapan harbor’s concrete dock. We were early, maybe five, maybe ten minutes; would the storm have delayed Johnson? Would it have defeated him entirely, and had I blasted my way out of one dead end and into another?
And with these questions barely posed, bad luck rendered their answers moot.
Because just as we were passing through the hana machi section of the waterfront, where men who were men drank awamori and had their manly needs tended to by faded flowers. Chief Mikio Suzuki and Jesus Sablan, drunk as skunks, came stumbling out of the Nangetsu, after an evening of revelry signifying the chief’s gratitude for his top jungkicho’s earlier display of loyalty.
On
ly drunks—particularly drunks who were outfitted in new, fresh clothes (even the Chamorro wore fresh white linens)—would have exited in the midst of this tempest, their finery immediately getting saturated.
But these were dangerous drunks, who looking across the liquefied goo of the unpaved waterfront street, recognized us, Amira and Father O’Leary.
And at first Chief Suzuki smiled.
So I smiled and waved and nodded.
But then Chief Suzuki frowned, even in his inebriated state smelling something fishy, not that difficult to do in this part of town, and he shrieked in Japanese at Lord Jesus, who also frowned, and they ran toward us.
We kept moving, too, toward the dock. We were on the boardwalk and the Chief and Jesus were trying to run across a sucking mucky morass. I drew my gun.
“Nathan!” she cried, and I just pulled her along.
“Amira!” the chief yelled. “Leary!”
I looked back at them and they were making progress but we were almost there, almost to where the cement apron of the waterfront led to the jetty itself.
Then a thundercrack that wasn’t a thundercrack startled me and I looked back to see that Suzuki had pulled his gun, I’d forgotten he had one, his suitcoat had been buttoned over it, and I fired back at him. It caught him in the right shoulder but the drunken little bastard barely winced, just shifted his revolver to his other hand and fired again.
Amy screamed.
“Are you hit?” I yelled, putting myself between her and the chief.
“No! I’m scared!”
I fired again and this one caught him either in the chest or the shoulder, I wasn’t sure which, but the gun fumbled from his fingers and was swallowed into the sludge. The chief just stood there, arms limp, weaving, whether from liquor or pain, who could say?
But what was worse, what was much worse, was Lord Jesus.
He was lumbering toward us, his right arm raised, hand filled with the machete, eyes showing the whites all ’round, teeth bared in a ghastly grimace of a smile. Lightning turned the street white and winked off that wide wicked blade.
I was still moving forward when I fired back at him, fired twice, hitting him once, somewhere in the midsection but it didn’t even slow him down. Behind him I could see the wounded chief waddling like a penguin, heading back toward the Nangetsu, no doubt to call in the alarm signal, goddamnit! Still running, pushing Amy out in front of me, I fired back behind me again and this time caught Jesus in the left shoulder. He felt it, he yowled, but he was still coming.
We were on the cement now, and stretching before us, beyond the concrete jetty, were choppy but not impossible waters, rough wild waters but a sailor like Captain Irving Johnson could maneuver on them….
Only there was no sight of him.
Maniagawa Island beckoned; you could almost reach out and touch it…but no motor launch in sight. Just rolling waves and angry sky.
And Jesus had made it to the cement, and his machete was poised to strike and my muddy feet slipped as I fired, the bullet taking a piece of his ear off but not important enough a piece of anything to stop him from lunging in and swinging that blade, and Amy screamed as I felt that blade carve through my clerical collar and the front of my suitcoat and cut the cloth and cut me, a gaping wide C from my right collarbone to my left hip bone and it was wet and stung but I could tell it wasn’t deep, and I fired a round into the bastard’s stomach and his yelp of agony was the sweetest fucking sound I ever heard. He tumbled face first to the cement, like a huge catch onto the deck of a fisherman’s boat, and I turned with my upper lip peeled back over my teeth in what must have been one frightening demented smile, because Amy drew back from me in alarm.
Then she moved close to me, looking at the front of me. “He cut you! He hurt you!”
“I cut myself shaving worse than this.” Gulping for air but getting mostly rain, unrelenting goddamn rain, I looked out into the restless waters and saw nothing but waves and dark sky; then lightning illuminated those waters, seemingly to the horizon, and showed me nothing new—no rescue craft. Had Johnson double-crossed me, at Miller’s behest?
“Either we’re early,” I said, “or they’re late.”
“Or they’re not coming!”
Out of breath, panting, I said, “That nice chiefy of yours is probably calling out the guard. We have to get out of here. Got any ideas?”
Breathing hard, too, she nodded. Thunder exploded as her arm thrust past me and I followed her pointing finger to the nearby, unguarded seaplane dock. The two flying boats floated there, tied at the ramp.
Right out in the open.
“Can you fly one of those things?” I asked.
She tossed her head; moisture beads flew. She was smiling, proud. “I’m Amelia Earhart,” she reminded me.
“Oh yeah,” I said.
And we ran, leaving the body of Lord Jesus behind, with no resurrection in the plans, ran across the cement, feet splashing, kids playing in the rain, and climbed a ridiculous little waist-high chain-link fence and scooted down the ramp. I untied the moorings, and she was already wading out into where the planes bobbed in the rough water. Then I was doing the same, climbing up onto the pontoon on my rider’s side, as she climbed on her pontoon to get access to the cockpit.
That was when the shots started flying.
The police station was only a few short minutes’ walk from the waterfront, even in the rain, and the chief’s reinforcements were streaking toward us, getting their white uniforms wet, bullets zinging and careening off the flying boat’s green fuselage.
The sound of a motor—and it wasn’t the flying boat’s, she wasn’t in that cockpit yet—drew my attention back out to the water, despite the bullets I was ducking. A glowing light seemed to be coming around Maniagawa Island—a lantern! A kerosene lantern in Hayden’s hand, the skipper riding the motor….
“Forget the plane!” I yelled, looking across at her—her eyes were wild. “Swim for the boat!”
She hesitated, as if hating to miss the opportunity to fly once again, then a bullet whanged into the metal near her head and she swallowed and nodded, and dove in; so did I. I swam with my nine-millimeter clenched in my fist, but I swam.
We swam toward the launch as it moved over the bumpy waters toward us, and bullets made kisses around us in the waters. And then somebody, Hayden, was hauling me into the boat, and I gulped air, air with rain in it but air, and looked toward the water, looking to reach down for Amy, and she was swimming toward us when the bullets caught her, danced across the back of her leather jacket.
And then she seemed to slump forward into the water, and soon the jacket was all we could see of her, several boat lengths away, sort of puffing up, its weathered brown leather blossoming red, hanging there as if it were a floating flower; then it, too, disappeared, sucked down under.
Gone.
I was halfway out of the boat when the kid hauled me back in, yelling, “It’s too late! Too late for her!” Bullets were flying all around us, and we were moving away from where Amy and her jacket had been, away from the little white figures on the jetty who were shooting at us, jabbering at us almost comically, tiny insignificant jumping-up-and-down figures that got lost first in the rain, then in the darkness, until they were gone, just a bizarre bad memory, a coda to an escape that almost happened.
Johnson’s voice said, “How is he?”
Hayden’s voice said, “Nasty cut.”
That was the last voice I heard, except I thought I heard Amy’s voice, one last time, saying the last thing I heard her say, so proudly, right before she ran toward that seaplane, a final plane she never flew.
“I’m Amelia Earhart,” she said.
Rain on my face.
Darkness.
20
Late in June 1940, Captain Irving Johnson reported to Elmer Dimity of the Amelia Earhart Foundation as follows: “It is my opinion that the search be considered finished and that everything humanly possible has been done to find any trace of M
iss Earhart.”
Nevertheless, Elmer and Margot did not give up on their plans and a ship the Foundation had commissioned was waiting in the Honolulu harbor on December 7, 1941. The Foundation’s Pacific expedition, interrupted by World War II, was never resumed, although successful businessman Dimity—and the Foundation—continued on for many years, extolling Amelia Earhart and researching her disappearance.
Captain Johnson was working at Pearl Harbor in the War Plans Office when the Japanese attacked; the Yankee’s last cruise ended in the spring of 1941, Johnson selling the ship and entering the Navy. He spent the war on the survey ship Summer, charting the islands and waters of the South Pacific for the United States government; perhaps this was merely a continuation of what he’d already been doing on the Yankee.
After the war, Johnson—looking for a new sailing ship—was alerted by his old first mate of a German brigantine seized by the British and held in England; called the Duhnen, the ship was purchased, renamed the new Yankee, and Johnson and his wife and family resumed their round-the-world cruises and continued to record their adventures (well, some of them) in bestselling travel books into the 1960s.
Their first mate did not join them, as he had another career to pursue. I would never have guessed that Hayden’s chief interest, other than sailing, would be little theater; he did not seem the artsy type. But he had gone from the deck of the Yankee into a Hollywood career that was prematurely interrupted by the war; like me, Sterling Hayden served in the Marines, only Hayden got assigned to the OSS, through the auspices of Captain Johnson’s good friend “Wild Bill” Donovan. Hayden’s low-key macho and the weary poetry of the peculiar cadence of his speech lent themselves well to such films as The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, and Dr. Strangelove, wherein his General Jack D. Ripper saved the world from the loss of its “precious bodily fluids.”
After Pearl Harbor, Howland Island was the next United States territory attacked by the Japanese; nonetheless, its perfect crushed-coral airstrips, long since overgrown, have never been used.
Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 Page 34
