“Because you’re the new boy, and because I say so.”
“Heh-heh-heh,” giggled the Latino man sitting next to him; he wore a Yosemite Sam T-shirt and dirty jeans, his blue-steel Colt automatic in a black shoulder holster.
“You want to laugh, Carlos, you go laugh while you’re moppin’ the kitchen floor,” Gault said. Carlos started to protest, but Gault gave him a deadly stare. “Move now.”
The two men went into the house without another word.
“I wouldn’t let that bitch snow me,” Doc said.
“Shut up about her.” Gault finished his shake. “I wish you two would bury the hatchet.”
“Yeah, she’ll bury a hatchet in me if I don’t bury one in her first.”
“Children, children.” Gault shook his head, then he crossed his swollen arms and stared at the two bounty hunters. “Well,” he said, “I guess we need to take care of business. What would you think if I’d offer to cut your tongues out and chop your hands off? Would you rather be dead, or not?” He looked at Clint’s arm. “In your case, it would be a triple amputation. How does that sound?”
“I think I might faint with excitement,” Flint said. Pelvis was mute, his eyes shiny and unfocused.
“It’s the best offer I can make. See, I told you I was in a lenient mood. Doc’s the one who screwed things up.”
“I’ll be glad to cut his tongue out and chop off his hands,” Flint said.
Gault didn’t smile. “Forbidden-knowledge time: we’ve been having trouble from a competitor. His name is Victor Medina. We were trucking some merchandise in crates when we first moved our base here. He found out the route and took it away from us. So we had to come up with alternative packaging. The stomachs of live alligators do very well.”
“I came up with that idea!” Doc announced.
“When Doc saw you making your phone call,” Gault went on, “he — unfortunately — lost his composure. He thought you might’ve been working with Medina, setting up another hijack. Doc doesn’t always reason things out. He was stupid, he was wrong, and I apologize. But you put a valuable man out of action. A knee injury like that … well, there’s no health insurance in this business. A doctor would get very suspicious, and we would have a money leak. So Virgil, like a good horse, was laid to rest and you are to blame. Now Monty is gone. I have to hire new people, run them through security, train them … it’s a pain. So.” He walked to the coffee table and picked up the Ingram machine gun. “I will make it quick. Stand up.”
“Stand us up yourself,” Flint told him.
“No problem. Doc? Mitch?”
“Shit!” Doc whined. “The Flying Nun’s just started!” But he got out of his chair, pulled his gun, and Mitch likewise stood up with a pistol in his hand. Doc hauled Flint to his feet but Mitch struggled with Pelvis and Gault had to help him.
There was fresh sweat on Gault’s face. “End of the pier,” he said.
2
Too Damn Hot
“THERE, WE GET UP,” Train said as he waded chest-deep toward a walkway at the rear of the prefabricated ranch house. Dan followed, not mired quite so deeply as Train because of their difference in heights, but he was giving out and he envied Train’s rugged strength. Train slid his rifle up on the walkway, then grabbed the timbers and heaved himself out of the water. He took Dan’s Browning and gave him a hand up.
“You all right?” Train had seen the dark circles under Dan’s eyes, and he knew it had been a rough trek but the other man was fading fast.
“I’ll make it.”
“You sick, ain’t you.” Train wasn’t asking a question.
“Leukemia,” Dan said. “I can’t do it like I used to.”
“Hell, who can?” They were standing about eight feet from the rear entrance, which was a solid wooden door behind a screen door. The rear of the house was featureless except for a few small windows. Back here the platform was narrow, but it widened as it continued around the house. Train looked along the walkway they stood on. Behind them was more swamp and a large green metal incinerator on a platform fifty feet from the house. “Okay,” Train said. “Look like this the way we go —”
He stopped abruptly. They heard voices from beyond the doors, getting closer. Someone was coming out. Train pressed his body against the wall ten feet away on the right of the door and Dan stood an equal distance away on the left, their rifles ready. Dan’s heart pounded, all the saliva dried up in his mouth.
The inner door opened. “Yeah, but I’m not stayin’ in the business that long.” A young man wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a madras shirt, and khaki shorts emerged, both arms around a Rubbermaid garbage can. On the side of it were streaks of what looked like blood. “I’m gonna make my cash and get out while I can.” He let the outer screen door slam shut at his back and he started walking toward the incinerator, a pistol in a holster at his waist.
Train was thinking whether to rush him and club at him with the rifle’s butt or push through the screen door when the young man suddenly stopped.
He was looking down at the walkway. At the water and mud on the planks where they’d pulled themselves up. Then he saw the footprints.
And that, as Dan knew Train would’ve said, was all she wrote.
He spun around. Sunlight flared on his glasses for an instant. His mouth was opening, and then he was dropping the garbage can to go for his gun. “Carlos!” he yelled. “There’s somebody out he—”
Train shot him before the pistol could clear leather. The bullet hit him in the center of his chest and he jerked like a marionette and was propelled off the walkway into the water.
A startled Latino face appeared at the screen. The inner door slammed shut. Then: pop pop pop went a pistol from inside, and three bullets punched holes through wood and screen. Train started shooting through the door, burning off four more shells. As Train wrenched the magazine out and pushed another one in, Dan fired twice more through the punctured doors, and then Train rushed in and with a kick knocked them both off their hinges.
“Gault! Gault!” the man named Carlos shouted. He had overthrown a kitchen table and was crouched behind it, his pistol aimed at the intruders. Train saw the table, and then a bullet knocked wood from the doorjamb beside his head and he twisted his body and threw himself against the outside wall again. A second shot cracked, the bullet tearing through the air where Train had stood an instant before. “Gault!” Carlos was screaming it now. “They’re breakin’ in!”
At the sound of the first shot Gault stopped in his snakeskin boots.
He knew what it had been. No doubt.
“Rifle!” Doc said. They were all standing about midway between the awning-shaded area and the alligator corral.
Pop pop pop went a pistol.
“It’s Medina!” Mitch shouted. “The bastard’s found us!”
“Shut up!” Gault heard more rifle shots. Carlos was shouting his name from the house. His face like a dark and wrinkled skull, Gault turned around and put the Ingram gun’s barrel to Flint’s throat.
“Gault!” Carlos screamed. “They’re breakin’ in!”
Two seconds passed. Gault blinked, and Flint saw him deciding to save his ammo for the big boys. “Mitch, stay here with them! Doc, let’s go!” They turned and ran along the pier for the house. Mitch leveled his pistol at Flint’s chest, just above Clint’s arm.
Another pistol bullet thunked into the doorjamb. Train had sweat on his face. Dan shoved his rifle in and fired without aiming, the slug smashing glass. Carlos got off two more rapid-fire shots and then his nerve broke. He stood up and, howling in fear, left the relative safety of his makeshift shield to run for the kitchen door. He was almost there when he slipped on a smear of dog’s blood on the linoleum tiles and at the same time Train shot at him. The bullet smacked into the wall as Carlos fell. Carlos twisted around, his gun coming up. Dan pulled the Browning’s trigger, blood burst from Carlos’s side, and he doubled up and writhed on the floor. As Train ran into the kitchen and kicked
Carlos’s pistol away, Dan pulled the empty magazine from his rifle and popped in another one.
The next room held a dining table and chairs, a jaguar’s skin up as a wall decoration, and a small chandelier hanging from the ceiling over the table’s center. A hallway went off to the left, and another room with a pool table and three pinball machines was on the right. Train and Dan started across the dining room, and suddenly Dan caught a movement and a dark-tanned blond girl wearing cutoffs and a black bra emerged from the hallway. Her icy blue eyes were puffy and furious. She lifted her right hand, and in it was gripped an automatic pistol. She let go an unintelligible, hair-raising screech and Train was swinging his rifle at her when the automatic fired twice, booming between the walls. The first bullet shattered glass in one of the pinball machines, but the second brought a cry from Train.
Train’s rifle went off, the bullet breaking a window beside the blond girl. Dan had his finger on the trigger and the gun leveled at her, but the idea of killing a woman crippled him for the fastest of seconds. Then the girl scurried back into the hallway again, her hair streaming behind her.
Everything was moving in a blur, time jerking and stretching, the smell of burnt rounds and fear like bitter almonds in the smoky air. Train’s cap had fallen off, and he staggered against the wall with his left hand clutched to his right side and blood between his fingers. There was a shout: “Jesus, it’s that damn guy!”
Dan saw that two men had come into the game room through another doorway. One he recognized as the long-haired man named Doc, the other was a tanned bodybuilder who had a walkie-talkie in one hand and an Ingram machine gun in the other. Before the muscle man could aim and fire, Dan sent two bullets at them but Doc had already flung himself flat to the floor and at the sight of the rifle the second man — the “boss,” Dan remembered Train saying — hurtled behind the pool table.
It was getting too damn hot.
“Go back!” Dan shouted to Train, but Train had seen the Ingram gun and he was already retreating. They both scrambled through the kitchen’s entryway two heartbeats before the Ingram gun chattered and the woodwork around the door exploded into flying shards and splinters.
Mitch jumped when he heard the distinctive noise of Gault’s gun. He had moved Flint and Pelvis so they were between him and the house, his back to the swamp and the bounty hunters facing him. Flint had seen Gault snatch the walkie-talkie off the coffee table and yell something into it, and then the man in the watchtower — the same one, Flint realized, who’d half strangled him at St. Nasty and had taken the derringer away — had strapped his rifle around his shoulder and started descending a ladder. Now the man was just reaching the walkway between the tower and the house.
Mitch was scared to death. Beads of sweat trickled down his face, his hand with the revolver in it shaking. He kept glancing back and forth from the bounty hunters to the house, wincing at the sounds of shots.
Pelvis suddenly gasped harshly and put a hand to his chest. Mitch’s pistol trained on him.
Oh my God! Flint thought. He’s havin’ another attack!
But Pelvis was looking at something past Mitch’s shoulder, his eyes widening. He let out a bawling holler: “Don’t shoot us!”
Even as Flint realized that was the oldest trick in the book and it could never work in a million years, the terrified Mitch swung around and fired a shot at brown water and moss-covered trees.
Pelvis slammed his fist into the side of Mitch’s head and was suddenly all over the man like black on tar. Stunned, Flint just stood there, watching Pelvis beat on him with one flailing fist while the other hand trapped Mitch’s gun. Then the revolver went off again, its barrel aimed downward, and Flint got his legs moving and his fists, too. He attacked Mitch with grim fury. Mitch went down on his knees, his facial features somewhat rearranged. Pelvis kept hammering at the man like someone chopping firewood. Mitch’s fingers opened, and Flint took the pistol.
Footsteps on the planks. Someone running toward them.
Flint looked, his pulse racing, and there was the man from the watchtower unslinging his rifle. The man, a wiry little bastard in overalls, stopped thirty feet away and fired his rifle from the hip. Flint heard the sound of an angry hornet zip past him. Then it was Flint’s turn.
The first bullet missed. The second struck the man in the left shoulder, and the third got him a few inches below the heart. The man’s rifle had gotten crooked in his arms, and now his finger spasmed on the trigger and a slug smashed the windshield of one of the cigarette speedboats. Then the man went down on his back on the planks, his legs still moving as if trying to outdistance death. Flint didn’t fire the last bullet in the gun. In his mouth was the sharp, acidic taste of corruption; he’d never killed a man before, and it was an awful thing.
Now, however, was not the time to fall on his knees and beg forgiveness. He saw that Pelvis’s fists had made raw hamburger out of Mitch’s mouth, and Flint seized his arm and said, “That’s enough!”
Pelvis looked at him with a sneer curling his upper lip, but he stepped back from Mitch and the half-dead man fell forward to the pier.
They had to get out, and fast. But going through the swamp meant that Clint would surely drown. Flint wanted the derringer back. He ran to the dead man’s side, knelt down, and started going through his pockets. His fingers found the derringer, and something else.
A small ring with two keys on it.
Keys? Flint thought. To what?
Flint remembered this man had been driving the cigarette boat that had brought them here. Which of the two boats had it been? The one on the right, not the one with the broken windshield. He didn’t know a damn thing about driving a boat, but he was going to have to learn in a hurry. He pushed the derringer into his pocket and stood up. “Cecil!” he yelled. “Come on!”
In the kitchen, the doorway splintered to pieces and blood staining the side of Train’s shirt, Dan knew what had to be done.
“Go!” he said. “I’ll hold ’em off!”
“The hell with that! Runnin’, I ain’t!”
“You’re dead if you don’t. I’m dead anyway. Get out before they come around back.”
An automatic fired, the bullet chewing away more of the door frame. The girl was at work again.
“Don’t let them get to Arden,” Dan said.
Train looked down at his bleeding side. Rib was busted, but he thought his guts were holding tight. It could’ve been a whole lot worse.
The Ingram gun chattered once more, slugs perforating the walls, forcing Dan and Train to crouch down. Dan leaned out, burned the other two shots in that magazine, and then popped his last four bullets into the Browning.
“Okay,” Train said. He put his bloody hand on Dan’s shoulder and squeezed. “Us two dinosaur, we fight the good fight, ay?”
“Yeah. Now get out.”
“I’m gettin’. Bonne chance!” Train ran for the back door, and Dan heard him splash into the swamp.
He was in it for the long haul now. When the automatic fired again, the bullet shattered dishes stacked in a cupboard. Dan heard shots from out front, but surely Train hadn’t had time yet to get around the house. Where the hell were Murtaugh and Eisley?
“Come outta there, man!” Doc shouted. “We’ll tear down the wall to get you!”
Dan figured his voice was meant to hide the noise of someone — the muscle man, probably — either reloading or crawling across the floor. Dan gave Train six or seven more seconds, then he fired a wild shot through the doorway and took off for the rear. He jumped from the platform into water already chopped up by Train’s departure. They’d hear the splash and be after him with a vengeance. He headed directly back into the swamp, through a tangle of vines and floating garbage spilled from the can the young man had dropped. Three steps, and on the fourth his shoe came down on the edge of a root or stump and his ankle twisted, pain knifing up his calf.
Gault had heard the second splash and had gotten up from the floor beside the pool tab
le, ready to storm the kitchen, when there came another noise from out front. The flurry of gunshots had been enough to worry about, but now he heard the rumbling bass notes of one of the cigarette boat’s engines trying to fire up. “Get back there after them!” he yelled to Doc. “Try to take one alive!” Then he sprinted for the living room and the sliding glass door that opened onto the platform.
“Can’t you get it goin?” Pelvis was sitting in the white vinyl seat beside Flint, who felt he could have used two more arms to operate the complicated instrument panel.
“Just hang on and be quiet!” The key was turned in the ignition switch, red lights were blinking on some of the gauges, and the engine growled as if it were about to catch, but then it would rattle and die. They had untied the boat’s lines, and were drifting from the pier.
Pelvis held the revolver they’d taken from Mitch. He’d seen one bullet remaining in the cylinder. His knuckles were scraped and bleeding; he’d been coming out of his stupor for several minutes before he’d attacked Mitch, the immediacy of their situation having cleared his head of despair for Mama, at least for right now. As Flint struggled to decipher the correct sequence of switches and throttles, Pelvis looked back over his shoulder and his stomach lurched with terror. Gault was coming.
The muscle man had just emerged from the house. He stopped, some of the tan draining from his face at the sight of his two downed associates and the bounty hunters trying to escape in a speedboat. “The Flying Nun” was still playing on the television screen. Gault staggered, as if he were beginning to realize his swamp empire was crumbling; then he came running along the pier, a rictus of rage distorting his face and his finger on the Ingram’s trigger.
“Trouble!” Pelvis shouted, and he fired the revolver’s last bullet, but it was a wild shot and Gault didn’t slow down. Then Gault squeezed off a short burst as he ran, the slugs marching across the pier and chewing holes across the speedboat’s stern. “Down!” Flint yelled, frantically trying to start the engine. “Get down!”