Plumtree’s chin fell forward onto her chest, and for a moment she just panted. Then she looked up, in blank puzzlement; but when her eyes darted to Cochran she looked away again quickly. “Oh, it’s Scant,” she said. “I can’t stay here.” She flexed her arms and legs and then said again, in a voice shrilling with panic, “I can’t stay here! Arky, what’s going on?” She smacked her lips. “Was my father just here?”
“Can I talk to Cody?” said Cochran, standing up from the table. He was aware now that his shirt was clinging to his back with sweat.
“Nobody can talk to anybody, please,” said Plumtree quickly. Her hands were fists. “Arky, get me out of this!”
Mavranos had stood up too, and was opening his lock-back pocket-knife one-handed as he strode around the table to the chair. “Relax, Janis,” he was saying gruffly, “you’re gonna hurt yourself. Here.” He crouched in front of her iron chair to swipe the knife blade through the duct tape on her wrists and ankles, then got up and went around to the back of the chair to cut the strips that bound her waist. “Sorry about this imposition,” he said to her as he helped her struggle to her feet. “Inquistion, even. We can explain it whenever you want to hear about it.”
“I just want to get inside,” she muttered quickly, “away from him.”
Cochran wondered which him she meant as he watched her shakily peel cut flaps of duct tape from her wrists. She was limping past him toward the kitchen door, with one hand on Mavranos’s shoulder and she looked at her wristwatch and then raised her elbow and tilted her head to hold the watch to her ear.
But of course it was a black Casio quartz watch, with a liquid-crystal display. Her gesture reminded Cochran of old black-and-white Timex ads on TV, and in his head he heard the old shampoo-ad song: You can always tell a Halo girl…
When, Cochran wondered, did I last see anybody with a watch that ticked?
Oh, Jesus, she’s still split-screen!
But her mismatched eyes had been watching him, and caught his instant comprehension, and as he opened his mouth now she was snatching the revolver from Mavranos’s belt and lunging, smashing the barrel and butt of the gun like brass knuckles into Cochran’s belly.
Then Plumtree had danced back away as Cochran folded and sat down jarringly hard on the concrete, and she slapped both hands to her face, her left palm covering her eyes and her right hand pointing the gun up at the patio roof.
And she pulled the trigger. The bang was a ringing impact in Cochran’s ears, and Plumtree’s head smacked the stucco wall at her back.
But an instant later the gun barrel was horizontal the muzzle pointed at Mavranos’s chest. Mavranos stepped back, his hands open and out to the sides.
“Mom,” Cochran choked, not able to get air into his lungs. “Janis’s…mom.” Fragments of wood and tar paper spun down from the new hole in the roof.
Angelica understood what he was doing, and called “Janis’s mom! Mother!”—before visibly wilting with the realization that Plumtree was deaf now.
As Mavranos shuffled backward across the patio deck, the gun muzzle swung toward Angelica. To Cochran’s tear-filled eyes it seemed to leave a rippling wake in the air. “Koot Hoomie,” said Salvoy, much too loudly, “pick up the roll of duct tape and come here—or I put a big hole in your mom. Scant-boy—reach slow into your pants pocket and throw me the car keys.” Plumtree wasn’t looking at Kootie directly.
Cochran thought he could feel ruptured organs inside himself ripping further open as he dragged his legs up under his torso and crawled across the concrete to Plumtree; he even had to reach out and brace himself with one hand on Plumtree’s blue-jeaned thigh as he hitchingly got up onto his knees. His lungs were chugging in his rib cage, but he still wasn’t able to draw any breath down his throat, and his vision had narrowed to a tunnel.
Plumtree had her back against the house wall, so she couldn’t retreat; Cochran was looking up at her, and his dizzy focus shifted effort fully outward from the ring of the .38-caliber muzzle to her eyes. Both of her eyes were wide and staring at him, the tiny-pupilled one and the dilated one, and at the bottom of his vision he could still blurrily see down the rifled barrel of the gun.
“Troilus, farewell!” hissed Valorie as Plumtree’s body shook with internal conflict against the stucco wall. The finger lifted out of the trigger-guard ring. “One eye yet looks on thee, but with my heart the other eye doth see.’ Then the Salvoy voice grated, “No,” and the finger wobbled back down onto the trigger, and whitened.
Abruptly a youthful brown right hand sprang into Cochran’s narrow field of vision and closed over the muzzle, and from above him Kootie’s voice said, “You want this to be your right hand one day, don’t you? Will you shoot it off?”
Plumtree couldn’t have heard what the boy had said, but her eyes lifted. And Kootie’s gaze must have caught hers, for she suddenly convulsed sideways across the wall onto the projecting hose faucet as Kootie crouched along with her and violently twisted the gun in her hand.
Cochran threw himself onto her back as she rolled off the faucet and thudded heavily to the concrete, and he too was grabbing for the gun—and when he saw the hammer jump back he got his thumb in under it as it came down.
At last Kootie yanked it away, tearing a gash in the base of Cochran’s thumb. Cochran was breathing at last, in abrading gasps.
With a solid boom Mavranos rebounded off the wall then and fell to his knees on Plumtree’s right arm, and the roll of duct tape shrilled as he tore a long strip free and wrapped it around her wrist; then he had grabbed her other arm and wrapped tape around that wrist too.
Her back was rising and falling as she panted, and after a moment she rolled her head so that she could squint up sideways at Cochran. “How’d it,” she gasped with a bloody rictus of a smile, “go?”
Her nose was bleeding, though Cochran couldn’t guess whether it was from the physical stresses of Salvoy’s visitation or from having collided with the concrete deck. “Can you hear me?” he managed to croak loudly.
Cochran’s heart ached to see how wrinkled her eyelids were as she closed her eyes.
“Yes, Sid, oh, shut up!” She was gasping for breath and her bloody upper lip was twitching away from her teeth. “God, Sid, I hurt! Did I fall off the roof? What the fuck happened?”
“Cut her loose, Arky,” choked Cochran, in horror, as he braced his hands on the concrete deck and carefully climbed off her legs.
“She may still be split-screen,” came Angelica’s voice from behind him.
“Not—Cody.” Cochran reached out his jigging, bleeding hand and gently touched Plumtree’s shoulder. “We can—trust Cody.”
And in fact Mavranos was already knifing the tape off of her wrists.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl.
Between our Ilium and where she resides
Let it be called the wild and wand’ring flood,
Ourself the merchant, and this sailing Pandar
Our doubtful hope, our convoy, and our bark.
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida