You expecting an army? he had asked her.
I want to have plenty of the ghost-killer hollow-points, she had answered in a flat singsong voice, as if talking to herself, hut I want hardball too, full jacket, ‘cause if shoot off the first magazine’s dozen rounds and need more, I’m likely to be shooting at a distance after that, or through car doors, and hardball’s more reliable for that kind of thing-and adrenaline’s likely to make me shaky, loosen my grip, and hollow-points don’t feed through smoothly sometimes if the gun’s not being braced firmly. Hardball in the raincoat hollow-point omieros in the jeans.
You’ve given it thought, Cochran thought now as he watched her pull the raincoat around herself and loosely tie the belt in front.
Plumtree was wearing a cranberry-colored cashmere sweater of Nina’s, and she was huddled against the Granada’s front bumper beside Cochran and blowing into her cupped hands. “I don’t see any of Mavranos’s hippie druids,” she said quietly.
“With luck they don’t get up this early,” said Cochran. I hope nobody does, he added to himself. Mavranos said we’ll be trespassing, going on out to the end of this peninsula.
And what about coming back? Is it really conceivable that Scott Crane will be walking back here with us? Limping, I guess, with the bullet in his thigh now. And—
“My God,” he said; then, speaking more loudly, “Angelica? You’re gonna remember to pull the spear out of his throat, right? It’d be no good if he did come back to life, if—”
He saw two reflections of his own pale face in Angelica’s mirror sunglasses when she smiled at him. “We’ve thought of that, Sid. Thanks, though.” She looked past him. “Arky? How wide is the path to the cemetery temple place? I think you should just back the truck right out to it.”
Mavranos had opened the back of the truck and was kneeling on the tailgate. “Back it out there?” he said, squinting over the Granada’s roof at her. “Well, it would mean we don’t have to carry Scott’s body….”
“Nor the rest of the crap,” Angelica agreed. “And I like the truck’s exhaust—with the muffler all fucked up the way it is, it’s kind of a spontaneous bata drumbeat, and it’s the pulse of the king’s vessel.”
“There’s a chain across the path,” Mavranos went on. “Probably padlocked.”
“What’s another dent? What’s some more scratches in your paint?”
“Quicker exit afterward, too,” allowed Mavranos. “That’s worth a lot. Okay.” He hopped down to the pavement and hoisted the lower half of the tailgate shut, though he left the top half raised. “Pete will walk backward ahead of me, waving directions so I don’t go off into the water; Plumtree and Cochran ahead of Pete, so I can keep an eye on ‘em over Pete’s shoulder; Angelica behind, watching for pursuit.”
“I should have my gun;’ said Cochran.
Mavranos frowned at him. “Actually, I suppose you should. Okay.” He walked around to the open drivers-side door and leaned in, then walked back to the rear of the truck with Cochran’s holstered revolver. “Just keep it away from Miss Plumtree,” he said as he handed it to Cochran. “And put it away for now.”
Cochran reached behind himself with both hands to clip the holster to the back of his belt.
Mavranos pointed to the northeast corner of the parking lot. “The path starts behind that building, as a paved service road. All of you meet me there.”
He got into the driver’s seat and closed the door, started the engine again, and audibly clanked it into reverse; the truck surged backward out of the parking space and began yawing away across the asphalt in a broad circle.
“After you two,” said Angelica to Cochran and Plumtree, punctuating the request by letting the hidden rifle barrel briefly tent the tan fabric of the raincoat in front of her knee.
They all began trudging after the receding red truck. When Plumtree took his hand, Cochran glanced at her in surprise, for Cody had been on a moment before; but then he saw that it was still Cody—by now he could recognize her stronger jaw and the deeper lines around her flinty eyes
Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply. “Kahlua,” she said, “burning.”
Cochran too had caught a whiff of hot-coffee-and-alcohol on the cold sea breeze. “Just like down in Solville.”
She squeezed his hand. “I guess that means something is gonna happen.”
He looked at her again, but the humble and subdued voice had still been Cody’s.
THE BATTERING exhaust of Mavranos’s truck rolling along at idle speed in reverse behind them set the pace of their walk.
“Don’t fall over the chain here, Pete,” called Cochran over his shoulder.
After Plumtree and Cochran stepped over the chain with the rusty no admittance sign hanging from it, their shoes were crunching in sandy red dirt, and they could see a cluster of low, rectangular stone structures and an iron light pole a hundred yards ahead of them at the end of the narrow spit of land; and a few seconds later they heard the chain creak and snap and then thrash into the dry wild-anise bushes that fringed the road.
“What chain?” came Pete Sullivan’s voice from behind them, speaking loudly to be heard over the indomitable drumming of the truck’s exhaust.
Cochran and Plumtree kept walking along the dirt path, their hands in their pockets now because of the chill. Puddles in the road reflected the gray sky, and the red dirt was peppered with fragments of brick and marble.
They were close enough to see the structures ahead now—Cochran and Plumtree were already walking past ornate broad capitals of long-gone Corinthian columns that sat upside-down on the dirt like heroic ashtrays, and spare blocks of carved and routed granite that lay at random among the weeds; but though the low walls and stairs and tomb-like alcoves ahead had been cobbled together out of mismatched scavenged brick and marble, the site had a unified look, as if all these at-odds components had come to this weathered, settled state together, right here, over hundreds of years.
A motorboat had been crossing the choppy water of the yacht harbor to their right, between the peninsula and the distant white house-fronts on Marina Boulevard; it had rounded the tip of the peninsula and was coming back along the north side, several hundred feet out, and now Cochran heard a rapid hollow knocking roll across the waves.
And behind him, much closer, he heard the rattling pop of car-window glass shattering. Brick fragments exploded away from a stairway head in front of them even as he had grabbed Plumtree’s forearm and yanked her forward into a sliding crouch behind a low marble wall.
He looked back—Pete was running back toward Angelica, who had flung open her raincoat and raised the short pistol-grip rifle, and the open back end of the red truck was jumping on its old shock absorbers as it picked up speed.
Angelica fired three fast shots, then quickly unfolded the stock and had it to her shoulder and fired two more even as the ejected brass shells of the first three were bouncing on the red dirt. Out here under the open sky the shots sounded like sharp hammer blows on a wooden picnic table.
The truck ground to a halt with its back bumper rocking only a couple of yards from where Cochran and Plumtree were crouched, and two more hard gunshots impacted the air—Cochran realized that Mavranos was now shooting at the boat through the hole where his passenger-side window had been.