"How about you, did you satisfy him?"
"In what way?" she asked, her brow gathering up in a frown.
"I mean, were you happy together?"
She shrugged.
"We had all the happiness money can buy," she said ruefully. "And none of the fun that goes with it."
"I'm sorry," I said, feeling impotent to deal with her grief. "I'm sorry things have turned so bad for you."
She sat down primly, her hands clasped in her lap, and stared at the floor.
"Oh, Jake, what happened to it all?" she said, without looking up. "Why did it shrivel up and die like that? Why were we betrayed so? You, Teddy, Chief, all the things that had meaning for me were ripped out of my life."
"We all took a beating," I said. "Poor old Teddy got the worst of it."
"Teddy," she said. "Dear, sweet Teddy. He didn't give a damn for the Findley tradition. In one of his letters from Vietnam he said that when you two got back, he was going to buy a piece of land out on Oceanby and the two of you were going to become beach bums. He said he was tired of being a Findley. It was all just a big joke to him."
"We talked about that a lot," I said. "Sometimes I think he was halfway serious."
"He was serious," she said, sitting up for a moment. "Can't you just see it? The three of us out there telling the world to drop dead?" She looked up at me and tried to bend the corners of her mouth into a smile. "You see, I always knew you'd come back here, Jake. Sooner or later Teddy would get you back for me. Only what I thought was, it was a glorious fantasy, not a nightmare. Then Teddy died and the nightmare started and it never ended and it keeps getting worse."
She picked at a speck of dust for a moment and then said, "The gods are perverse. They give lollipops to children and take them away after the first lick."
I wanted to disagree with her, but I couldn't. What she said was true. It's called growing up. In her own way, Doe had resisted that. Now it was all catching up to her at once and I felt suddenly burdened by her sadness. Not because of Raines' death-there was nothing to be done about that—but because of what they didn't have when he was alive; because the bright promises of youth had become elusive; because the promises of the heart had been broken. I remembered Mufalatta's story about the two violins. She was playing a sad tune and my violin was answering.
"Harry knew from the start that he was second choice," she went on. "I never deceived him about that. But I tried. In the beginning we both tried real hard. Then Chief got more and more demanding and Titan started talking politics and Harry started changing, day by day by day, and pretty soon I was just part of the territory to him. Just another plaque on the wall. I wanted the commitment, Jake. Oh God, how I wanted that. And now I want him back. I want to tell him I'm sorry, that it was all a . . . a . . . "
She shook her head, trying to find a way to end the sentence, so I ended it for her.
"An error in judgment?" I suggested.
She looked up at me and said, "An error in judgment? What a cheap way to sum up a life."
I was trying to think of a way to tell her about Sam Donleavy, but I didn't have a chance to get around to it.
"I can't stay here, Jake," she said, staring at the pictures on the wall. "Every place I look I see him." She looked at me. "Drive me out to Windsong, will you, please? Get me out of here."
"Let's go," I said. I could tell her on the way out.
She did whatever women do before they leave the house-it seemed like an eternity of puttering around-then we left and walked back to my car. We didn't say anything but she clung to my arm so hard it hurt.
The security guard flagged me down as we drove toward the island.
"You got somebody waiting for you?" he asked.
"Why do you ask?"
"There's this black sedan down to the right. Pulled up just after you went in. He's been down there ever since."
I squinted through the dark and could see the car, half a block away, sitting on our side of the street. It could have been one of Dutch's hooligans, but I didn't recognize the car.
"Can you tell how many there are?"
"Just the one," he said.
"Maybe he's sleeping one off," I said.
"Yeah, well, just thought I'd mention it," the guard said.
"Thanks. "
"My pleasure."
I pulled out of the security drive and turned left, away from the parked car. It pulled away from the curb without showing any lights and fell in behind us. I drifted, letting it pull closer. As usual, my gun was in the trunk.
"Hook up," I told Doe.
"What?" she said.
"Your safety belt. Hook it up, and hang on."
She groped for the belt and snapped it across her lap.
"What's the matter?" she asked, urgency creeping into her voice.
"We've got company," I said, hooking up my own belt. "Just hang on. It'll be like the old days in the dune buggy."
I waited until the car was ten feet behind me, then slammed down the gas pedal and twisted the steering wheel. The car leaped forward, its tires tortured by the asphalt, and then spun around. I hit the brakes, straightened it out, and left rubber all over Palm Drive as I headed in the other direction.
The other driver was faster than I figured. He swerved and hit my left rear fender. I lost control for a moment, spun wheels, hit gas and brakes trying to get it back, leaped over the banquette, missed an alcove of garbage cans and Dempster Dumpsters, and wasted about thirty feet of the fence surrounding the compound. My car came to a halt, its ruined radiator hissing crazily.
I fumbled with the keys, got them out of the ignition, jumped out, and ran back toward the trunk. The other car did a wheely and headed back toward me, stopping ten feet away. I was still struggling with the trunk latch when I heard Turk Nance say from behind me:
"You need driving lessons."
While we were looking for him, Nance had followed me.
Doe was out of the car beside me.
"Get back in the car," I said as quietly as I could.
"What's going on?" she squealed.
Too late. Nance was standing in front of me, his Luger at arm's length, pointed at my face, his reptile eyes dancing gleefully, his tongue searching his lips.
I reacted. Without thinking. Without figuring the odds. Without thinking about Doe.
It was like an orgasm, a great flood of relief. All my frustrations and anger boiled up out of me into a blind, uncontrollable rage. Nance was more than just a psychotic who had killed people I knew and who'd tried to kill me. He was every broken promise, every shattered dream, every pissed-away value in the last twenty years of my life.
I didn't think. I grabbed the gun by the barrel and twisted hard, heard the shot and felt the heat surge through the barrel, burn my hand, and howl off down the street. I hit him, knocked him into the alcove of garbage cans, hit him again, kneed him, thrashed him back and forth, from one wall to the other, and then hit him again and kneed him again. He started to fall and I held him up and kept hitting him. I could hear Doe screaming my name hysterically but I couldn't stop. Every punch felt good, every kick. He started screaming, trying to get away from me. His shirt tore and he fell to his knees and scrambled toward the street like a crab. I slammed my foot down on his ankle to stop him, twisted it, and hit him in the back of the head several times with my fist until my hand was burning with pain. I dragged him up and kicked him in the small of his back and he vaulted in a clean diver's arc into the garbage cans.
It wasn't enough. I snatched up a garbage pail lid and slammed it down on his head, three, four, five times, until it was a mangled wreck, then threw it away, dragged him to his feet, and jammed my knee into his groin again. I grabbed a fistful of his shirt, held him, and hit him half a dozen more times, short, hard shots, straight to the face. I hit him until he was a bloody, limp rag.
Doe was leaning against the wall, her hands stifling her screams, her eyes crazy with fear and shock.
"Stop it, Jake, f
or God's sake, please stop it!" she cried.
I dragged him up and threw him across the hood of the car, picked up his Luger, and jammed it into his throat.
The entire exhibition had taken about thirty seconds.
"You fucking Mongoloid!" I screamed in his ear. "That's three strikes. You're out."
"No, no, no!" Doe screamed.
The security guard was in the street, blowing his whistle, not sure whether to pull his gun or not.
"Call this number," I yelled to him, and barked out the number of the Warehouse. I repeated it.
"You got that?" I demanded.
"Yes, sir!"
"You call it now, tell whoever answers that Jake Kilmer wants company and not to waste time getting here."
"Yes, sir." He dashed back inside the security house.
Nance wasn't alone. Nance was never alone. Nance was a company man; he liked people around.
"Run back inside the compound," I told Doe.
"But—"
"Do it now. This creep isn't alone. Just get inside and stay there until- "
Headlights ended that sentence. The car moved toward us from a block away. I gripped the Luger in two hands and blew out a headlight. The car picked up speed and stopped an inch in front of mine. I aimed at the other light and a voice behind me said: "Drop it, or the girl goes down."
Nance tried to gargle something through swollen, bloody lips. I dragged him off the hood and threw him on the ground, dropped the clip out of his gun, and threw it at him with everything I had, It hit him in the side and clattered harmlessly across the sidewalk.
A moment later something just as hard hit me in the back of the head. The street turned on end. Doe spun around me like a doll on a merry-go-round. The lights went out.
72
FLASHBACK: NAM DIARY, END OF TOUR
The 556th day: We been on the ass of this crazy schoolteacher named Nim who's been raising hell up and down the river and has maybe a hundred slopes tagging after him now. HQ says he'sgetting to be some kind of God to these people and to terminate the cocksucker posthaste. I mean, there's five of us on this CRIP team, right, and we're gonna bust this crazy bastard and a hundred or so nuts that are hanging out with him?
So I tell HQ I need about fifty, sixty first-class hunters, Kit Carsons'll do fine, but I ain't running up against this fuckin' army of Nim's with a five-man team, I don't care how good we are, and I'll tell you this, we're the best they got down here, goddamn it. Between the five of us, I'd say we got probably three hundred fuckin' scalps. Not bad for six months on the line, five guys. Corrigan, French Dip, Squeak, Joe Fineman, and me. Five guys, one head. We're charmed. We got this daily bet, we start off with a bill apiece and each add a twenty every day we're dry. First one gets his kill, takes the pot. It ain't ever gone over eight hundred, that's four days.
So anyway, we go down to meet the riverboat today and pick up this bunch of sharpshooters HQ sent down, and the boat crew says the war's gonna be over any day now and I say, "Sure, I've heard that before," but the team, they all buy it and they get a couple of jugs of Black Jack from the black market guy on board and while I don't put up with drinking out here I figure, what the hell, we got all these wild-eyed slopes from HQ, why not, they deserve it. So the rest of the team, they get juiced up to the eyeballs and I have to sit guard all night to make sure this asshole Nim don't come crawling up on us, blitz us all. The slopes are okay in the daylight, face to face, that kind of fighting. I don't trust them at night when I can't see them, so I sit up.
All night I keep thinking about the cease-fire and about what that lieutenant, what was his name, Harris? said, that night in Dau Tieng, about going back to the World and bowling every night and all. Shit.
Turns out it was a false alarm, about the cease-fire, I mean.
Another day of grace.
The 558th day: It was beautiful. Last night we catch up to Nim just before sunset and we blitz the shit out of his whole fuckin' bunch. We have them boxed in and we have a fuckin' field day. The Carsons are crazy motherfuckers. They cut heads, drink blood, I mean really rubber-room crazy. We get in close enough, the team is having some real sport. We all managed to acquire these Remington pumps from the juice man upriver, and so the deal is, this time we have to use shotguns to win the pot. So anyway we load up with rifle slugs; it's about an inch around and weighs about three ounces and it's rifled so you get a little spin on it and when it hits anything solid it fuckin' blows up. You hit one of those motherfuckers dead center, the body being mostly water, it's like shooting a fuckin' watermelon. We call them splashers.
Anyway, it was like shooting skeet. So I take the pot. We just put it up this morning, six hundred bucks. Nine scalps. A good day's work. The only problem is, this Nim and about twenty of his gooks got away from us.
So this morning we track them into this little valley with a hump in the middle, looks like a tit in a cake pan. Lots of trees, I call in some air and we do a little Macing. It's hotter than a whore's mattress and we spread out around the perimeter and we give the fuckers a little while and that gas starts mixing with their sweat, next thing you know one of these Kit Carsons, he stands up, starts sniffing the air like a hyena, points down in the bush, here comes about fifteen of them, beating the shit out of themselves because of the Mace, crying. The Kit Carson, he up and blows the first one away, just like that if you please, and then he tells the rest of them to get their hands behind their heads like good little gooks. Man, they took a beating, all covered with Mace burns, their eyes all bugged out. Whipped dogs, man, they got as much fight left in them as a guppy. So we figure we're lookin' at, what, five, six of them that are left maybe. Fuckin' Nim ain't in the group.
I got this American 180, a neat little submachine I won in a poker game with some civilian types in Saigon, shoots .22's but, like, thirty rounds a second. You could drill a hole in a brick wall with this motherfucker. That's what it sounds like, a dentist's drill:
Brrrttt, brrttttt.
Like that. Jesus, what a nice piece of work. Two of these, the Alamo would have never fallen. So what it is, you learn to do things quick over here, know what I mean? You move fast, shake 'em up, they'll tell you anything you want to know. The thing is, you don't spend a lot of time thinking, you just do it, see. I call one of these little bastards over, he gets about four feet away, I give him a burst.
Brrttttt.
He hits the dirt, jerks once, it's all over. I call out the second one, ask him where this fucker Nim is, he starts thinking about it...
Brrttttt.
Another one down. The third one I point at tells us all of it. The slopes don't call me Monsieur Morte for nothing. What it is, there's this pool at the foot of the hill and Nim's holed up there in a cave. I call the air back and this time he comes in and lands and the pilot, who is this fuckin' rosy-cheeked bastard about twelve years old, he jumps out, says, "Where's the lieutenant?" and I tell him there ain't any lieutenant, I'm a sergeant and I'm in charge and what's his problem, and he says the cease-fire is tonight and it's official, all that shit, and he wants to call the whole thing off. "What the hell," he says, "it's only a few more hours," and I say, "Listen, you fuckin' wimp, we been following this little bastard for days and we're goin' in there and get the motherfucker, so let's get on with it." He gets the color of a goddamn beet and he says, "I'm putting you on report. What's your name, mister?" and I say, "Just tell them Monsieur Morte insulted you, that a Pall Mall'll get you a kick in the ass and that's all it'll get you," and he says, "Don't give me any of that Wild West shit, what's your name?" and I say, "Parver, P-a-r-v-e-r," and I spell it for him and then I say, "And either you're gonna fly that fuckin' bird or one of us will. We're goin' over that hump and my people ain't wadin' through a lot of fuckin' Mace to get there."
Anyway, before it was over, we were in the chopper and we go over the hump and the pool's down there, like the gook says, and there's little gray wisps of Mace, still hanging in there, like stringy strands of cotton. S
o we drop a string down and three of us drop into the pit there, we beat it over to the cave and we look in and this fuckin' Nim is sitting maybe twenty feet from the cave entrance. What a mess! His legs are crossed at the ankles, he's naked as a fuckin' flounder. His body is covered with these scorched sores, his eyes are swollen shut, and he's foaming at the fuckin' mouth from all the Mace, like a goddamn mad dog. Fuckin forty-five-year-old schoolteacher thinks he's Fidel Castro or something, and the fucker's still breathing but blind as a bridegroom. All of a sudden he starts reaching around for his weapon, which is an M-16 and you know where he got that, the little bastard, so I step in behind him and
Brrttttt.
Lights out, spook. Then, and I don't know why I did it, maybe it was because, you know, it's the last day of the fuckin' war, you want to try to get in as much as you can, I take Fineman's machete and lop that slope's head off, swock, just like that, pretty as you please. Fineman almost pukes, can you believe that? All he's seen, for Christ sake. I throw the trophy in this ammo bag, take it back for the rest of them to see. What the hell, they have a right. Call it spoils of war.
The last day: This time the scuttlebutt's true. We get back to the river and it's all over. Everybody's cheering, singing songs, drinking, and the black market man is giving away booze. I never thought I'd live to see the day. They're settin' off rockets and flares, shooting up shit, like the Fourth of Fuckin' July, and all I'm doin', I'm sittin' there thinkin' about what that lieutenant said, about bowling. Only he didn't talk about what happens when it's over, maybe none of us thought it ever would be. Thing is, we're goin' back to the World, man, whether we like it or not. It's all over. No more grace.
73
ZAPATA SAVES THE DAY
The call came in at 8:04.
The Warehouse was already babbling with activity. Dutch was quizzing Lange, Cowboy Lewis, and Pancho Callahan. Charlie One Ear took the call.
Callahan was doing most of the talking.