“Leave me alone, you son of a bitch! I think I’m bleeding inside. You can’t do anything to me. I bet you can’t even get back through the gate out there.”
I turned and looked at the two slumberers. Chip was still bleeding. Boody had stopped, though his gash looked bigger. I had a sudden idea about him. I went over and put my ear against his chest. When I was still a foot away from him, I realized there wasn’t much point in it. I was aware of the girl moving from the bed to go and bend over Chip. I listened to utter silence. All I could hear was my own blood roaring in my ear, like listening to a sea shell. Boody didn’t live in there any more.
As I slowly got to my feet, there was a sharp brisk sound, like somebody breaking a big dry stick. The sun bunny had backed over toward a dressing table. She had a little automatic in her hand, a little more weapon than my shiny bedroom gun. She held it at arm’s length, aiming it at me. She was biting her lip. She had one eye closed. The small muzzle made a wavering circle. It cracked again and I felt a little warm wind against my ear lobe.
“Cut it out!” I yelled, fumbling for Claude’s gun, tugging it out of my pocket. She fired again, and I knew she was going to keep right on, and I knew she couldn’t keep on missing at that range, particularly if it occurred to her to stop trying to hit me in the face. The third shot tingled the hair directly on top of my head, and Claude’s pistol was double action, and I tried to get her in the shoulder. It made a ringing deafening blam, and the slug took her just below the hairline on the right side of her head, and the recoil of that light frame jumped the gun up so that it was aiming at the ceiling.
The slug slammed a third of the top of her skull away, snapped her neck, catapulted her back into the dressing table, smashing the mirror, soiling the wall, leaving her in a limp, grotesque, motionless backbend across the dressing table bench. The silent room was full of the stink of smokeless powder. I made a sound that was half retching and half hysterical giggle. Hero McGee wins the shootout. He’s death on sun bunnies. Stomach contents rose in an acid column against the back of my throat and slowly subsided. Dear daddy wasn’t going to make out too well after all.
Bits of mirror still in the frame gave fragmented reflections of her. No more the bikinied prance, thigh-swing, hair salt, gamin sun bunny smile-no working hips or droll wink or busting with fun, no loads of love to daddy from your loving Dru, no surfer teeter on the dipping board, or the slow greeny world down by the coral heads with the fins scooting her along. Her bright dreams and visions, stilled into paste, were clotted onto a bedroom wall.
I wondered if she had really known that it was all real. When she had been popping that little gun at me, perhaps she had still been one step removed from the trueness of it, seeing herself as a TV second lead making up the script as she went along, seeing both me and herself as symbol figures in one of the dramas that would always end with everybody sitting around, having coffee before the next take. I hoped she was taken dead so quickly she was given no microsecond of the terrible reality of knowing that she was ended. I stood tense, half on tiptoe, trying not to breathe, listening, listening. I moved to the door, listening. I could not risk opening it. Not yet.
The little gun was under the dressing table bench. I managed not to look at her as I retrieved it. I had assembled a rude script for my own survival, and I went through the motions like a wooden man, with everything but the necessities of the situation blocked out of my mind. I took the little gun over and stood over Claude and fired one slug down into his dead heart. I took the gun back and put it into Chip’s hand and curled his fingers around it. I knelt beside him and gave him a solid blow on the side of the head with the length of pipe, to keep him sleeping. And, in the event he woke up too soon and wanted to rearrange the scene to fit some other pattern, I used the pipe to give him a knee that would keep him still and bother him as long as he lived.
I folded the bigger gun into Claude’s slack hand. I saw where the three times she had missed had put raggedy little holes into the panel meat of the door. I stood and looked at the scene. I knew I was going to wear it for a long long time, right in there on one of my back walls, with studio lighting. I tasted blood and realized I had nibbled a small piece out of the inside of my under lip.
I was still so rattled that I came dangerously close to wiping the door hardware clean. That is like leaving a signal flag. I recovered and smeared it, using the heel of my thumb, bases of my fingers.
I had to leave the room light on. I opened the door an inch. The corridor was silent. I heard steel guitars. I slipped out and pulled the door shut and went to the end of the corridor. The deck was empty. I went out there and closed the corridor door. Somebody had left half a drink on the rail. I picked it up. My right arm ached. There was a very tender area behind my right ear and slightly above it, but the skin was not broken. I fixed my tie and took deep breaths of the night air. I had the length of pipe in a trouser pocket. I ambled back to join the party.
I had the eerie expectation of finding everyone gone, chairs overturned, drinks spilled, signs of hasty exit. But the groups were still there, unsteadier now. Some of the kids were on the stairs, and others were dancing. Dr. Face still brayed disaster at his captive circle. I looked at my watch. It had all happened in about twenty-five minutes. I saw mine host in pewter silk standing in a group, his dull black wig sitting trimly on his naked skull, iced tea in his right hand, his left hand mechanically honking the buttock of a slender woman who stood beside him, like a child playing with an ancient auto horn. No one paid me any attention.
I searched for Connie without haste, and found her down by the sheltered part of the pool, sitting on a bench, talking real estate tax laws with a slight young man with a mild face and fierce mustache. The young man, after the introduction, excused himself to go off and find his wife.
Connie stood up and said, “Now can we go back to my place? My God, darling, this is turning into one of the dullest evenings of my life.”
I hauled her back down onto the bench and she was a little off balance and came down too solidly.
“Hey? Are you tight?”
“Listen one damned minute, Mrs. Melgar. Listen to a suppose. Suppose you got a little foolish and reckless one night, and you got a little drunk, and you went back into that studio or whatever he has beyond that jolly museum of his, and somebody took some very unwholesome pictures of you…”
“That may be his little hobby, dear, and he may have scads of friends who are sick enough to play, but it leaves me absolutely cold. He has made his oily little hints. For God’s sake, you heard him. I may be lusty, dear, but I’m not decadent, not in any exhibitionistic sense.”
“So suppose he sets you up sometime, with something in your drinks, and he picks a couple of choice negatives and sends them to somebody in Caracas who will make a couple of thousand prints and distribute them. What would happen then?”
Her big hand clamped my wrist strongly. “Dear God!”
“Two of your sisters are married to men in the government. What would happen?”
“My grandfather and my dead husband’s grandfather were terrific men. They’re sort of folk heroes now. It didn’t help very much, having me leave for good. A thing like that would… It could be put to terrible frightening use. What are you trying to tell me? That Cal would do a thing like that? But, my dear, it doesn’t make sense! Everybody knows that Cal helps a lot of people fight the sort of people who would put pictures like that to political use. He gives loads of money to people who are fighting Communist influence in Latin America.”