Navigation was easy, with the surf beating at Rockaway on his right and the lights of the great city behind it. He ate a box of Oreos and drank some warm beer he found in a cooler. He entertained the idea of sailing back to China, and it made him laugh. By dawn he was rounding Breezy Point, and then it was just a few more hours to cross Rockaway Inlet and reach Sheepshead Bay. He tied the boat up at a vacant slip where the charter boats docked, and walked east on Shore Boulevard. When he found an open store, he bought a pair of zoris, a pair of khaki pants, a white shirt, sunglasses, and a white terry-cloth hat. Shore Boulevard merged into Neptune Avenue. He was in Coney Island. He had heard a great deal about Coney Island; the American had painted it as a boy’s paradise. It did not look like much in the light of day and without the scrim of happy memory. But there was a subway here, Leung recalled, and he found it without difficulty. He took the F train to Grand Street. By noon he was in Chinatown.
The Karps spent another day at the beach, but by Sunday they (or at least the adults) had had enough, and they decided to drive back to the city and deal with the unfinished pieces occasioned by the recent drama. Karp wanted badly to be in on the kill when they finally got Leung, and to ensure that the legalities were strictly observed. He also wanted to be the one to inform Tommy Colombo of what had been discovered. Karp was not much of a gloater, but he felt that a situation so flamboyantly gloatable should not be allowed to pass unobserved.
In the afternoon Posie returned, a walking advertisement for why you should not, if you have lard white Appalachian-person skin, spend eight hours in the sun of a New York scorcher wearing only a string bikini. They’d given her a lot of codeine at the hospital, and Marlene thought that Posie considered this access to legal downers a fair exchange for having most of her skin fried off. For her own part, things were starting to work again in her brain, slowly, like the first groaning movements of a locomotive setting out from the station, but in a direction she could now see clearly. She knew pretty much why everything that had happened since early June had happened. Two people had the remainder of the answer, of whom only one was available, but Marlene was determined to see her, brace her, and extract the truth.
The ride home was uneventful, punctuated only by an occasional scream from Posie as the dog licked her lobster-colored neck with his rough tongue. The twins slept, the girls talked earnestly in whispers, the radio stayed silent, as did Karp and Marlene. Traffic rather than ethnic gangs barred their way on the Belt Parkway. They dropped Mary off and pulled up in front of the loft just after six. Ed Morris got out of the follow car.
“You want me to stick around, Butch?”
“I don’t think so. Just go up with Lucy and check out the loft. I think we can survive the night.”
Morris, Lucy, and Posie rode up on the elevator, with the dog and the first load of bags. Karp leaned deeply into the Volvo’s backseat to unbuckle the sleeping boys from their car seats. Zik, he saw, had taken his beach rock out of its bag.
Marlene had the rear hatch of the Volvo up. She was gathering all the bits of travel debris into a sailcloth beach bag when she heard the sound of a car stopping suddenly and looked up. A black Trans-Am had parked in the middle of the street. The driver’s-side door was flung open, and out stepped Brenda Nero, dressed in pink bermudas, a sleeveless top, and Mattie Duran’s Colt Peacemaker.44. She walked around the front of her car, staggering slightly. Marlene saw that she was drunk, or high.
“I’m gonna kill you, bitch!” she shouted, and raised the pistol.
Marlene put down her beach bag. “Brenda, give me that damn gun before you hurt yourself!” she said.
Karp had been leaning into the car, fumbling with Zik’s car seat strap, but when he heard the woman yell, he came out and stood up and stared at the scene on the street. The woman was pointing a huge shiny gun at his wife’s head. At the same time he saw an old red pickup truck with a green fender draw up and stop behind the black Trans Am. Its driver, a burly man wearing a baseball hat, reached behind him and took a shotgun down from the gun rack and came out of the car. He jacked a shell into it and started walking toward Marlene.
Brenda Nero pointed the Colt at Marlene’s head and pulled the trigger. A confused look came over her pretty, stupid face. She squeezed harder.
Marlene took two steps forward, grabbed the barrel of the pistol, yanked it out of Brenda’s grasp, and socked her in the jaw. Brenda staggered back, tripped on the curb, and fell down. She started to cry.
“It wasn’t loaded!” she wailed.
“It is loaded, Brenda,” Marlene said. “It’s a single-action gun. You have to cock it first.” She demonstrated the cocking action.
“Marlene!” shouted Karp. Marlene looked up and into the muzzle of a twelve-gauge shotgun. She had no idea who the man pointing it was.
Karp’s arm whipped around almost without volition, and Zik’s smooth round stone, with its tiny passengers aboard, flew through the intervening space and struck the man on his right forearm. The shotgun roared, sending nine 00 pellets winging over Marlene’s head and into the side of the building.
Marlene pointed the big pistol and shot the man from the red pickup, the bullet entering about three inches above the left nipple. The man dropped the shotgun and sat down in the street. In a Western movie, guys shot with a Colt.44 often ride long distances on horseback, punch out the bad guy, and save the girl from the burning ranch house, but in real life they usually want to lie very still in a quiet place, and this man was no exception. Marlene walked over to him and kicked the shotgun away.
“Sir,” she said, “would you mind telling me who the fuck you are?”
“Reginald P. Burford,” the man said.
“Reginald P. Burford, the right-to-life vigilante?”
“Yes, ma’am. Could you please call me an ambulance?”
“I’d be happy to,” said Marlene. “Why were you trying to kill me?”
“It’s the Lord, ma’am. Because of the baby killing. I saw you on the TV protecting those baby killers, and I opened the Bible to see what I should do and it opened up to Jeremiah 16:4. ‘They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried’. . And, you know, I fought it back, but the Lord, He kept after me, like unto Jonah, and made me stretch out my hand against. It ain’t nothing personal, ma’am.”
“Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure,” she said. “It never is.” Then she stood in the middle of the street and howled to the sky, “Anybody else? Let’s go, people! Step right up! Take your shot! Here I am, Marlene the walking fucking death wish! Come on, you fucking crazy bastards! Come on!”
Karp ran to her and wrapped his arms around her. She collapsed against him, sobbing. “It’s over, Marlene,” he said. “It’s all right.”
“It’s not over,” she sobbed. “It’s not all right.”
Later, after Morris had organized the police necessities and Karp the domestic ones, Marlene paced her kitchen floor, smoking as she had not for many years, one after another. Karp sat on a kitchen chair and watched her with growing apprehension, glad that there was for once no gun in the house. There was on her face a look he had not seen for some time, her Medea look, made even more horrible by the absence of a softening coiffure. This was not the same woman who had lately built sand castles with her little boys and sung them gently to sleep.
At last he said, “Marlene, for crying out loud, sit down! Relax!”
She stopped short and stared at him, her eye glittering. “Relax. Good idea, but not quite yet, no. What just happened, Butch, out on the street? A woman I tried to help just tried to kill me. No good deed goes unpunished. And a guy gets a message from God, and what does it say? The envelope, please. Shoot Marlene Ciampi. I don’t get messages from God. God only talks to assholes from Buttzville, New Jersey. Tell me, is this my fate?”