Gone Bamboo

  "Jimmy wants to know what's goin' on down here," said Paulie. "He's pissed off, big time. He says you should know you only got a couple a' days to do the job. The guy . . . the guy's only gonna be here a few more days, then he goes up to New York, where nobody can get to him . . . It'll be too late."

  Kevin's heart sank. He'd gotten used to not thinking about the job. He'd half-believed that the whole thing would go away, that he'd be able to keep the half they'd fronted, that, somehow, nobody would come, they'd forget him. Now this.

  "I din't hear nothin'," said Kevin. "One day, Petey was here . . . the next . . . gone. I waited. Nobody came. I was waitin' for somebody to tell me somethin'."

  "Yeah. Well. I'm here," said Paulie, not too thrilled either. His wife was going to give him a whole ration of shit when he got back, for leaving her alone for a week, and he'd taken a big risk coming down here, what with a grand jury subpoena hanging around his neck. Richie had tried to scare him, spouting legalistic mumbo jumbo about the difference between "subject" and "target" of a grand jury inquiry, and he'd made "target" sound like a real bad thing. He wanted this big Irishman to hurry up and get things over with so he could go home.

  "Yeah . . . well . . .," said Kevin, his thoughts wandering up to Violetta, still asleep in his bed. "I'm ready, I guess . . . anytime. The vans are all set. The guns . . . those fuckin' kids . . . they'll be around somewhere. No problem."

  "No problem. Good," said Paulie. "There's somethin' else we got for you. After. After you pop the old man . . . there's another guy, if yer innerested. We'll pay, a' course . . . Somebody else down here that's gotta go."

  "Yeah. Sure," said Kevin, sadly. "Whatever."

  37

  Henry and Frances were taking a bath.

  Leaning back in the tub, water up to his chin, eyes half closed and Frances's ankles up over his ears, Henry picked up an oversize loofah and began to soap her calves. There was, blissfully, nothing on his mind other than how white the soapy lather looked against her brown skin, and the notion, growing more powerful by the moment, that any second now he'd raise himself a few inches out of the water so he could run his tongue along the undersides of her toes.

  The chattering of automatic weapons fire, coming from somewhere across the pond, made Henry sit bolt upright, suddenly chilled.

  "Is it from Charlie's?" said Frances, alarmed.

  "Gotta be," said Henry, pulling himself out of the tub, unsure what to do first. "Clothes, clothes, clothes . . . FUCK! Where're my CLOTHES!"

  The gunfire grew more constant. Henry could hear a shotgun working now. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, a louder, more authoritative roar. Still unable to locate his pants, Henry wrapped a salt-stiffened kaffiyeh around his waist, tied it in front like a sarong, and stuck the H & K next to his kidney before charging barefoot and still dripping out the door.

  "Wait!" yelled Frances, only throwing on her full-length silk kimono, no time to find the belt, and running after him across the parking lot to where they'd tied the dinghy. When she leaped into the boat, Henry had already pulled up the watertight container from the bottom of the pond. Now he was struggling to unwrap the heavier guns.

  "Let's GO!" yelled Henry. "Go! Go!"

  Frances cast off the line and yanked desperately at the starter cord. It took three tries, both of them feeling more helpless and exasperated with each pull, before the engine kicked in. When they were halfway across the pond, the shooting seemed to lessen. The red and green tracer fire became less frantic. Now Henry could see the windows of Charlie Wagons's house lighting up from the inside with the muffled reports of shotgun fire.

  "What do you want?" yelled Henry over the engine noise.

  "Give me the shotgun!" Frances responded.

  He jacked a few last rounds into the Ithaca and tossed it astern. She caught the weapon one-handed, rocking back and forth as if she could make the dinghy move faster.

  "You want this too?" he asked, showing her the Car-15. She just shook her head, her eyes set on the house, growing closer and closer in the dark. He tossed a box of extra number 4 combat loads at her feet, and she opened it and emptied the shells into the pouched sleeve of her kimono.

  Henry taped two clips of ammo together end to end and slapped one into the magazine of his Armalite. He thumbed the selector into position for full auto, a painful lump in his throat as the shotgun blasts grew louder. There was a new exchange from outside the house, a hellacious sequence of explosions.

  Shit! Shit! thought Henry. An automatic shotgun. He listened for the sounds of Kulspruta fire from any surviving marshals and heard only a short burst, followed immediately by the familiar staccato of an M-16, and what sounded like a machine pistol, an Uzi or a TEC-9, he couldn't tell. More shots. More return fire. Then silence. It didn't sound good.

  When the bow of their rubber dinghy bounced noiselessly against Charlie's wooden dock, all was quiet at the house.

  The lead van, just as planned, smashed headlong through the front gate, the heavy hunk of backhoe projecting from the grille slamming the thick iron bars backward so they rebounded off the stone wall, knocking Woody onto his stomach. The van was already past him, screaming up the drive in first gear, automatic weapons fire pouring out in all directions from its crude, X-shaped gunports.

  Woody, on all fours and bleeding from the ankle and head, had turned and was raking the rear of the first van with his Swedish K when the second van came hurtling round the bend and hit him, the front left wheel passing neatly over his neck.

  The strap of his weapon got caught up in the metal plates that Kevin had welded over the tires, and Woody's body was dragged into the rear left wheel well. His legs flailing as he was pulled up the steep drive, he came to rest only when the second van banged into the first, in a dead stop at the head of the drive.

  Kevin was in the passenger seat of the second van. Determined to survive this night, he quickly opened the door and rolled unseen into the bushes, the Dominicans in the vans firing wildly, ejected cartridges flying everywhere in the confined space, ricocheting off the metal plates, filling the vehicles with smoke as a marshal on the roof of the house directed fire down on them.

  One of the marshals emptied a full clip into the driver's seat of the first van. The driver - Kevin remembered him as one of the cousins, Hector, he thought - caught the full force. Kevin saw him bouncing up and down in the seat, glass shattering all around him as bullets tore through the windshield, his head vaporizing into a scattered mess. The side doors of both vans opened, and the Dominicans came tumbling out, anxious to escape what had clearly become the target of choice for the still unseen marshals.

  Alfredo, with an Uzi, took a round in the face, the bullet passing in one cheek and out the other with a soggy, slapping sound. He sat down hard, looking surprised, the Uzi between his legs.

  Kevin, his eyes growing accustomed to the dark, tried to pick out the marshals' positions from their muzzle flashes as Flaco, God bless him, waded straight at the enemy, doing it John Wayne style, the automatic shotgun roaring at his hip, blowing great holes through the foliage with each detonation. The light from the pool showed through, illuminating dark, firing figures in the garden.

  Kevin, his Remington pump still silent, watched from hiding as a marshal was sent spinning away with a grunt into the hibiscus by the edge of the patio. Each time the automatic shotgun went off, it lit up Flaco's face, revealing an eerily ecstatic expression. With his one drifting, milky eye, his mouth half open, a tiny bead of saliva hanging from his lower lip, Flaco looked as if he might, at any moment, begin speaking in tongues. He looked happy, really, really happy, moving ahead to the pool area now, the automatic shotgun scattering patio furniture, sending chairs and tables skittling across the tile. Kevin got up and moved forward in a crouch, his Remington held out in front. Through the trees and bushes, he could see a woman's legs sticking up from the jumble of patio furniture, a sad, keening noise coming from beneath the wreckage. It sounded like a dying rabbit.

  The marshal
on the roof was still a problem. Kevin heard something move behind him and turned just in time to see Papo take a bullet in his spine. He went down without making a sound as Kevin hurried to get clear of him. He ducked by the trunk of a royal palm, drew a bead on the rooftop marshal, popped up, and let go with three blasts from the Remington. A body came tumbling off the overhang, trailing loose shingles, and slapped onto the concrete near the shallow end of the pool, the dead marshal's torso hanging into the water.

  There was Flaco, reloading the drum canister. A dark figure fired from inside the house, hitting him broadside, clipping the bridge of Flaco's nose. It disappeared in a spray of blood and cartilage, but Flaco didn't even turn. He calmly finished reloading, raised the ugly gun, and began working the house, methodically blowing out the windows and shooting through the walls.

  Kevin saw Flaco react to another hit, this one in his calf. Identifying the source of the shot as the gazebo, Kevin opened up with his Remington until another marshal, bristling with splinters like a bleeding porcupine, stood up to take a shot at him. Kevin put him down with his last shotgun shell, taking him full in the chest, then he sat down to reload and take stock of the situation.

  Somebody was still moaning near the pool. Kevin thought the sound was coming from the woman. Her legs were moving slightly as the moaning trailed off into a persistent whimper. He got up and moved closer to the house, Orlando joining him from wherever he'd been lurking in the dark. Kevin wondered where the dogs were. There were supposed to have been dogs. He pointed at a spot where he wanted Orlando to stand guard while he entered the house.

  Just then somebody opened up from inside the kitchen, sending Orlando to the ground, bleeding from the head. Kevin reached for a fragmentation grenade, pulled the pin, and hurled it through an opening in the glass. He waited, but it refused to detonate. The marshal inside the kitchen, however, was not so certain the thing wouldn't explode. He came running out the door firing hard, but Flaco, half blind yet still game, knocked his legs out from under him with a lucky blast, bits of glass and buckshot making pinging sounds as they bounced off the copper pots and pans.

  Then there was no more firing.

  Kevin waited. Flaco saw him and smiled, his teeth smeared with watery blood, before wandering off to hunt the wounded. Kevin stepped over the broken glass, loose shingles, and broken patio furniture and entered the house, the screen door to the kitchen coming off in his hand. It was time to find Charlie Wagons. An hour from now, resolved Kevin, he'd be counting his money. He'd make love to Violetta in a pile of fifties, in a good hotel, not a whorehouse, and drink cocktails with paper umbrellas sticking out of them.

  The iron gates were wide open, one nearly torn off its hinges, and there were no dogs. Henry knew that that was what Frances would be thinking first: what happened to the dogs? The smell of cordite was everywhere, and smoke still drifted through the beam from a lone security light at the head of the drive.

  Somebody was muttering something in Spanish, and Henry held a finger to his lips as they followed Woody's blood trail in the drive, coming up carefully behind the rear van, where the dead marshal's legs stuck out, at impossible angles, from the wheel. There was an atrocious amount of blood. Henry and Frances had to walk through it, their bare feet becoming sticky with the rusty-smelling liquid.

  Peering around the corner of the van, Henry saw a delirious-looking man with a face wound sitting with his legs splayed against the side of the vehicle, his gun resting between them. Henry moved right past him, concentrating on the light from the pool as Frances moved in on the injured man and butt-stroked him with the shotgun. He slumped over on his side and stopped talking.

  There was somebody lying, half in, half out of the pool a marshal. Henry recognized the nylon sweatpants. There was another marshal, facedown and bleeding from legs that looked as if they'd been hit by lightning.

  "Cheryl!" whispered Frances, seeing the legs protruding from the pile of furniture. She ran to her and began to dig through the chairs, heedless of the noise she was making. "I'm comin' baby," she said. Henry nervously covered her from poolside, uncomfortable with their exposed position.

  Disentangled from the chairs, her legs finally down, Cheryl lay, still alive but gravely injured, on the cold patio, a throaty whistling sound coming from the chest wound below her shoulder.

  "Henry!" barked Frances. "What do I do? Do something, for fuck's sake! You're supposed to be good at this." Henry saw she was crying with exasperation, a startling enough occurrence even with Cheryl lying there nearly dead from shock and loss of blood. He had to plug the hole first. So she could breathe. He found an oilcloth table cover nearby and folded it into a compress. Frances put the Ithaca down and wiped bloody foam from Cheryl's lips as Henry pushed the oilcloth square onto her wound.

  "Keep the pressure on," he said to Frances. "That's all you can do. And get her knees up, she's going into shock."

  There was a sudden exchange from inside the house, and Henry leaped forward with his Armalite.

  "Oh, God," said Frances, looking up at him for a brief, terrified second. "Tommy and Charlie." She felt around for the Ithaca, her other hand still pressing down on Cheryl's wound. Henry hesitated, but another glance from Frances sent him on his way. She looked angry. "Go!" she said. He cut his feet on the broken glass slipping, as quietly as he could, into the house.

  Tommy and Charlie were playing pool in the downstairs rec room when the shooting started. A second later Burt was with them, shouting for them to take cover behind the bar while he took up a position at the foot of the spiral stairs behind a green leather easy chair.

  There was more firing and more, sounding like a war through the narrow doorway to the upstairs. Tommy, hyperventilating, nauseated with worry about Cheryl, found himself trying to see up through the pool, craning his neck at the bottom of the Plexiglas window. It was no good.

  "Get your head down, you idiot!" yelled Burt, and then Charlie had him by the belt and dragged him to the floor. Tommy could feel the old man's body trembling as they huddled together on the carpet, the greenish light from the pool playing over them.

  Tommy heard breaking glass, and the sounds of metal on metal, bullets hitting his pots in the kitchen upstairs. Silence. More shooting. Silence again. Then Burt opened up with his Swedish K, firing at a dark shape at the head of the stairs.

  The wood paneling over Burt's head exploded into chips. Burt ducked, then came up and fired again, but it was tough, shooting through the curving iron banister of the spiral staircase. His bullets veered dangerously in all directions, tearing up the pool table as they spun off the metal railing, breaking the fish tank, and sending the PARK YOUR BUTT HERE ashtray skittering across the bar like a hockey puck.

  The man at the head of the stairs had no such trouble with the shotgun. His next round went right through the easy chair, sending stuffing everywhere. Burt never got up. He just sagged to the carpet, a long, pink spume staining Charlie's sand-colored carpet.

  "We're fucked," said Charlie, no longer trembling. He held Tommy's hand tightly in his and kissed him on the cheek, tenderly. "I just hope it's nobody I know," he said. "I always hated that part."

  Tommy, still thinking of Cheryl up on the patio, couldn't speak. His tongue felt frozen in his mouth. He could only blink.

  Henry recognized the big man at the head of the stairs instantly, felt a sickening sense of disappointment with himself for having missed him when he'd seen him on the beach. Hadn't he been at Cha Cha Cha that night too? He should have recognized the man for what he was immediately, when he first saw him frolicking with his whore at the Beach Club.

  In his anger, he made another mistake.

  Having come up on him without being detected, he jammed the muzzle of the Armalite into Kevin's kidney, blowing his advantage completely. Reacting instinctively to the sharp impact, Kevin, as anyone would feeling a blow to the sensitive organ, flinched. The shot from the Armalite only bit a harmless trail through Kevin's love handle, setting his T-shi
rt momentarily on fire.

  Kevin whirled around with the Remington but banged the barrel into the doorframe. Henry fired a second time, panicked by the completely untroubled look on Kevin's face. The barrel of the shotgun exploded where he held it, his fingers bursting open like microwaved sausages. Without pausing for a second, Kevin simply dropped the shotgun and punched Henry full in the face with his bloody stub.

  The punch sent Henry reeling onto his ass, ears ringing, as Kevin stepped forward and attempted a field goal with his heavy work boot. It sent the Armalite bouncing off Henry's brow and into the kitchen. Then Kevin was stomping with both feet, doing a murderous hokeypokey on Henry's abdomen as he tried vainly to crawl away. He managed to sink a bare foot deep into the half-mad Irishman's nuts, but he kept coming. Henry bit him in the thigh as he clubbed the side of his head with both hands, allowing him time only to stand up, gasping for air against the wall, as he tried to find somewhere, anywhere on the big man's body that might hurt if hit.

  Kevin charged him with his whole body, flattening Henry against the wall with his bulk and knocking the wind out of him. Henry remembered the H &c K, reached for it, and realized his kaffiyeh had come loose. It lay on the floor, the pistol under it.

  Henry took a punch in the face, then another, the flesh over his left eye tearing and filling it with blood. He let Kevin hit him in the mouth so he could bite him again, this time sinking his teeth into the injured hand, then attempting a head butt. Kevin just brought his knee up and knocked Henry's head back into the wall. He heard shots from outside.

  There was an explosion. From downstairs. It shook the whole house, and then there was a sound like waves breaking. Kevin turned just long enough for Henry, already sagging, to reach the H &C K, under his kaffiyeh. He got his fingers around it and let go with the full clip, shooting up from the floor. He was not going to let this man get his hands on him again. Round after round went up and into the big man's abdomen, puncturing liver, spleen, pancreas, Kevin's white T-shirt blossoming like a rosebush in a time-lapse nature study. When Henry's last round tore a nice-size hunk out of Kevin's backbone, the big man jerked. His head moved suddenly to the side as the light in his eyes turned off, and he fell over like a building coming down.