by Bill Crider
"Your house is on Stewart Road?" I said.
"That's right," Dino said. He shrugged. I didn't know whether the shrug was an apology or whether his bandage was itching.
At Ten Mile Road I turned right. Almost at once I turned left again, this time on Stewart. Now the land on both the left and right was undeveloped. Every now and then we passed a dilapidated corral, and I could see the dark shapes of cattle lying in the scrubby grass.
"You'd better stop here," Dino said.
There weren't any houses nearby, but about a quarter of a mile down the road there was one that looked like a geodesic dome on stilts. If it had started walking toward us, it would have looked like one of the Martian machines in the old War of the Worlds.
"Is that it?" I said, pointing.
"No," Dino said. "It's the one a little farther along."
I looked but I didn't see anything that looked like a beach house. "Where?"
Dino pointed with his good arm. I still didn't see anything except what I took to be a large clump of brush. "I'm not sure I know which one you're talking about," I said.
"Look," Dino said. "I hate those things sticking up twelve feet into the air. I'd get a nosebleed just climbing up to the living room. I bought an old ranch house."
"I guess you can't see the water from it, either."
"You can't see a damn thing from it. It's like covered up with bushes and stuff. It's an old house, and it's been flooded a time or two, but it was something I thought I might be able to live in. But when it came right down to it, I couldn't leave town."
"So that's where Ray is."
"Got to be, if he said I'd know where he was. There's no place else except the whorehouse, and that's long gone."
"OK. So why are we stopped?"
"I thought you might not want to go in cold. You might want to know a little about the layout."
Dino was thinking better than I was, but then I never claimed to be an assault tactician. "You're right," I said.
"I'm getting nervous," Evelyn said. "Is it all right if I smoke?"
I didn't like for people to smoke in my car. You could never get the odor out. But if Ray had his way tonight, it probably wouldn't make a hell of a lot of difference to me anyway. "Go ahead," I said. "Open the window, though." No use in giving up entirely.
There was a brief flare in the back as Evelyn flicked a lighter; then I could smell the cigarette burning. She opened the window of the bay side and the smoke drifted out.
"So what's the house like?" I said.
"You see the roof?" Dino said.
I stared at the clump of trees and bushes and thought I could make out a roof line, though I wasn't certain. "I think so."
"OK. Well, the front of the house is more or less facing us. There's an oyster-shell road leading to the front, but it doesn't stop at the door. It goes on by, down to a little turn-around. No garage. Those bushes cover most of the house, even most of the windows. That's why I liked it, I guess."
Even more of a womb than where he was living now. I was surprised he hadn't moved in.
"There's an opening for the front, though," he said. "It's not on stilts, but the house is up three or so feet off the ground. There's a front porch, concrete, with banisters, and there's steps leading up to it. The steps are all clear of brush and about six feet wide. Then there's the front door, right on the porch."
I looked toward the house. If there were lights on, I couldn't see them. It was about as isolated as you could get on the Island. "How far from the porch to the road?"
Dino thought about it. "I haven't been out here much lately. I guess about fifty feet. There's a sidewalk up to the porch."
Fifty feet. I was accurate with a pistol, and tonight I had been lucky. If killing two men was lucky. But fifty feet was quite a distance for accuracy with a handgun. To hit any of us at that range, Ray would have to be very good, and at sixty feet he'd have to be better than that. Of course if Dino had underestimated the distance, or if Ray had a rifle, or . . . a hundred or so other things.
I looked at the dark shape of the house and bushes again. Somewhere in there was Ray, nursing a grudge created by his own imagining but one that had been building for years. His mind wasn't working normally, and he had Sharon Matthews as a hostage. I hated to start the car and drive down there.
Evelyn tossed her cigarette out the back window. "I'm ready whenever you are," she said.
I started the car.
"How do we play it?" Dino said.
"By ear," I told him.
~ * ~
We turned right onto the shell road and drove very slowly toward the house, which sat well off the road, at least a couple of hundred yards. I still couldn't see any lights.
When we got near the house, I slowed even more, taking us down to about five miles an hour. I wasn't stalling, but I wasn't in any hurry, either.
"I'm going to stop in front," I said, having just made the decision. "That puts me on the side of the house, and I'm the one with the gun. Besides, you're the one he wants. That way you'll have me between you and him."
Dino grunted, which I took to mean that he thought it was a good plan. Or a rotten one. The tires crunched on the shell road, and the dark bulk of the house grew in front of us as we approached. The clouds were breaking up a little now, but there was hardly any moonlight. The darkness was nearly complete.
The road curved slightly to take us in front of the house, and as we rounded the curve the porch light snapped on. It was only a small bulb, maybe a sixty watt, but it looked like the sun.
I assumed that the light was my cue to stop the car, so I did, keeping an eye on the porch. There was a black screen door, which was suddenly pushed open.
Ray came through the door. There was a girl with him. It looked like a scene from a bad movie. Ray had his arm around the girl's throat in a chokehold. In his right hand he held a revolver that he kept pointed toward the girl's head.
"My God. It's Sharon," Evelyn said.
Dino didn't say anything, and I didn't look at him. I was looking at Ray.
Ray didn't look so good. His eyes were wild, and he looked as if he might be sweating despite the breeze that whipped the bushes and jerked their shadows around.
Sharon looked worse, hardly like the girl in the photo that Dino had given me. Her face was drawn and her hair was lank and greasy. She hadn't been giving much attention to her appearance in the past few days. She looked scared. I didn't blame her.
I turned off the car's engine and rolled down my window. "Why don't you let her go, Ray?" I said.
Ray laughed; then his mouth twisted and cut the laugh off. "You been causing me trouble, Tru," he said. "I thought you'd caved in, but you didn't cave far enough."
I'd caved too far, I thought. I'd missed things all around that I should have seen. At first I was too involved in my own misery, and then when I finally began to come out of it, to respond to someone else's trouble for a change, I was still too screwed up to get everything straight in my mind.
I didn't say any of that to Ray, however. I said, "You can have the money. We brought it for you. Just let the girl go."
Ray acted as if I hadn't spoken. "Get out of the car," he said. "All of you. You try anything, and there'll be little pieces of this girl's head all over this porch."
"Me first," I told Dino. "Then you. Then Evelyn. Keep the car between you and him." I got out.
"Turn around and put your hands on the car roof," Ray said.
I did what he said. Dino got out on the other side. He moved a little forward, and Evelyn followed him.
"Now what?" I said.
"Now we see where you've got your gun," Ray said. "I know what happened at the warehouse. Hobbes."
I heard someone step out of the bushes behind me. Ray had been covered all along. Something hard pressed into my back just above the Mauser and Hobbes ran his hand down my legs, inseam and outseam, then up to the front of my stomach.
"He's clean," Hobbes said.
&n
bsp; I sneaked a look at him. He was the one who'd hit my knee, the one I'd fought with at Shelton's. He was good with his hands, but he wasn't much at a body search.
I started to turn around.
"Don't!" Ray said. There was a sharp cry from the girl, as if he had tightened his grip on her throat or mashed the gun barrel into her temple.
"I don't understand, Ray," Dino said.
"Sure you don't," Ray said. "You step around in front of the car. Very slowly."
Dino moved to the front of the Subaru. I was calculating distances. We weren't fifty feet from the porch as I had hoped, but we were about forty. The light hardly reached us. There was a chance that Ray wouldn't hit us, but Hobbes would. And Ray could certainly kill Sharon.
"Let me tell you something, Dino," Ray said. "You owe me, Dino."
"Owe?" Dino said. "I--"
"Owe!" Ray's voice would have carried a mile if it hadn't been whipped away by the wind. "Owe," he repeated, more calmly this time.
"You were always the ones, you and Tru. You let me tag along, but I was just the tame nigger. I was just as good a football player as either one of you, but you were the ones who got your pictures in the paper. You were the ones who got to go to the good schools. You were the ones--"
"Wait a minute," Dino said, putting up a hand. "You got to go to school. You even got a tryout with the pros."
"Check that fucker out, Hobbes," Ray said. "Maybe he's the one with the gun. Put your hands on the car, Dino."
Dino put his hands on the hood. Hobbes gave him the same treatment he'd give me. "Clean," he said.
"Dumb as dirt," Ray said. "But I was the one who had to go to that nigger school."
"Look, Ray, you were good, good enough for the pros," Dino said. "You could've been a big star--"
"--if it wasn't for the accident," Ray finished. "And what about that accident, Dino?"
Dino didn't say anything.
"I believe you said 'Let's celebrate, Ray. You and Tommy and me.' That's right, isn't it Dino? And you had Tommy drive by a 7-11 so you could buy us some beers, and Tommy never could hold his liquor. Isn't that about right, Dino?"
"Yeah," Dino said. "I guess that's about right."
So Dino had been in the car that night, too. I hadn't known about that part of it, had never asked. Dino had ended two football careers, Ray's and mine, inadvertently but effectively. Well, it happens.
Right then, I didn't care. I was more interested in watching Hobbes, who was now in front of the hood of the car and to my left. Only Ray was behind me, but he still had the girl.
". . . So I've been fetching ever since." Ray was talking again, and even though I missed some of it, I got the gist. He really knew how to hold a grudge.
I sneaked a look over my shoulder. Ray didn't seem to mind, so I dropped my arms and started to turn around.
Hobbes saw the movement, though he was watching Dino, and started to swing his pistol in my direction.
"It's all right," Ray said. "Let him get comfortable. He needs to hear this, too."
I leaned back against the car and folded my arms across my chest. "Why me?" I said.
"You were the fair-haired boy," Ray said. "You got all the glory that Dino didn't. Everybody was so busy writing about you in the sports pages that there wasn't any space for the nigger. I should have been at Southern Cal, man, or USC."
"So where does the girl fit in?" Sharon looked even worse than she had earlier. Ray practically had the gun stuck in her ear, and the hold he had on her must have been practically crushing her windpipe.
Ray laughed. "The girl?" he said. "I thought you'd figured that out by now, Tru. Hell, this was all her idea."
18
Sharon struggled against Ray's arm and appeared to be trying to speak, but Ray just clamped a little tighter on her throat and stuck the revolver barrel a little farther into her ear.
Well, it was nice to know that I'd been right about one thing at least. "You told her, didn't you, Ray? About Dino."
"I told her."
"So the kidnapping was all her idea, resentment against the father she'd never known."
"You got it."
"You're a liar, Ray." I thought he might be bothered by the accusation, but it went right by him. "You planted the idea. She might have thought it was hers, but it was yours."
He was unconcerned. "Maybe."
"So why did you kill Shelton and Ferguson?"
"Who says I killed them?"
I was watching Hobbes out of the corner of my eye. "You don't mean you're going to try to lay the murders off on someone else?"
Hobbes wasn't bothered by my remark in the least.
"We've discussed that," Ray said. "We're going to blame them on you."
"Oh," I said.
"I was hoping you'd bring your pistol, but that's all right. We'll find it anyway. You can use this one." He wiggled his pistol. Sharon winced.
"What for?" I said.
"The big shoot-out. The one where Dino and I come to deliver the ransom money and everyone gets killed. Everyone but me, that is. And Hobbes, of course."
"I wouldn't be too sure of that if I were you, Hobbes," I said. "He didn't mind killing Ferguson and Shelton."
"There you go again," Ray said. I wondered if he were a fan of Ronald Reagan. "Who says I killed them? As a matter of fact, it was Hobbes who did those little jobs. He understands the necessity for having as few loose ends as possible."
I could hardly believe this was the Ray I'd known for so long. Of course I had no way of measuring his bitterness, which seemed to be much stronger than I had first thought. I wondered what I would have finally become if I had let my own injury fester in my mind as much as Ray had allowed his to do.
"Is that all they were, loose ends?" I said.
"Shelton was getting antsy. I should never have let him out of my sight in the first place. He would have cracked. Ferguson was greedy. Neither one was helping me any."
I figured that as long as I could keep him talking we were still alive, so I was going to ask him about how he got involved with Ferguson when I noticed that I couldn't see Evelyn any longer. She was so short that her head was barely higher than the car roof anyway. I didn't know where she was, but better that one of us should get away than none. Hobbes was watching Dino, and Ray was watching me. In the darkness, no one had been watching Evelyn.
"And you're going to kill the girl, too."
"Absolutely," Ray said. He was quite happy. "Dino gets to watch. That's the good part. And there's no time like the present." He shoved Sharon in front of him, and she fell from the porch to the sidewalk, catching herself with her hands. Ray took a two-handed grip on his pistol and pointed it at her.
Evelyn hadn't left after all. She came charging from behind the car, screaming. "No!" she said. "No!"
Ray twisted and fired at her.
I dropped into a crouch and pulled out the Parabellum. This was war, all right. A bullet smashed into the door of the Subaru behind me.
I shot at Ray. The slug chipped off a piece of the porch banister and smacked into the wall.
Dino must have jumped Hobbes. I could hear them struggling on the shell road.
Ray fired again. Flame leaped from the end of his pistol muzzle. The bullet hit the drive in front of me and gouged up pieces of shell and a cloud of dust. Something stung my cheek.
Evelyn had managed to reach Sharon where she lay on the walk. Ray fired at them. One of them yelled in pain. Then Ray was off and running.
I wanted to help Dino with Hobbes. I wanted to do something for Sharon and Evelyn.
But most of all, I wanted Ray. I went after him.
Dino and Hobbes were grunting and groaning on the ground. Dino was louder. I didn't know what had happened to Hobbes' gun. I just hoped that Dino could handle him and that his wound wouldn't be too great a handicap. Dino had been a bull once; maybe he still was.
Ray had taken off down the road. I followed it to the turn-around and saw that he was headed for the
Bay. I wondered if he had a boat tied up out there.
My knee was all right for the few yards to the end of the road, but things got markedly worse when I got off the relatively smooth surface. The weeds were thick and pulled at my ankles, but the sand was worse. Much worse.
Even running on a flat, even road takes its toll. The toll is more or less, depending on the bio-mechanics of your body, the way your feet hit, the way your bones twist. Sand makes everything worse. Your feet sink in, and the twisting is all magnified. The fact that there are mounds and holes adds to the misery. After twenty yards, my knee was screaming. Ray was gaining easily.
Then he stopped. He turned, braced his right arm with his left hand, and fired at me.
He didn't come close. He was at least thirty yards away, a long way for a pistol shot under the best conditions, and he had been running. Try running a hundred yards and then firing a pistol someday. You'd be lucky to hit a wall thirty yards away. Besides, it was dark. The wind was chasing black and gray shadows across the sky, and every now and then a thin moon showed through, but certainly not enough to shoot by. It's surprising how well your eyes adapt to the darkness after a while, but few men have the night vision of cats.
In other words, I didn't feel too threatened by Ray's firing at me. I just kept on running.
Ray saw that I was gaining. He lowered his pistol and ran.
I got almost to where he'd been standing when I felt a familiar and terrible feeling, but it was too late to stop. It was as if my left leg were going up a stairway while my right leg was going down. The knee had given way.
I put my hands out to break the fall and felt my palms slide on the sand, scraping the skin. I'd dropped the pistol.
My face hit the sand right after my hands. I'd turned it to the right, so only the left side got the skin rubbed off.
I looked to see where Ray was. He'd realized I wasn't behind him anymore, and he was looking around to see where I'd gone. He was silhouetted against the dark sky and would have made a good target if I'd been a little closer. And if I'd had the pistol. I felt around with my hand to find it. I brushed through the weeds and sand, and then I felt the metal of the pistol barrel. I pulled it to me and tried to brush some of the sand off against my sweatshirt.
