Estelle still looked disapproving — she felt Tommy’s mere existence was a bad influence on the children, whom she had dreams of civilizing some day — so Kirby got to his feet and said, “Okay, okay, I’ll head him off.” While Manny sat shuffling the cards like the scraggliest cardshark in history, grinning faintly to himself, Kirby went out to greet his faithful Indian companion.
Except it wasn’t. Squinting in the outer sunlight, Kirby first saw the gray Land Rover over near Cynthia, and then saw it was Innocent St. Michael who was clambering out of it. And not only that, but he was clambering out of the driver’s seat; he’d come here alone.
Here? Innocent St. Michael, here?
Kirby walked over toward the heavyset man, noticing that Innocent seemed rumpled, troubled, very unlike his usual smooth self-confident self. Innocent saw Kirby approach and reached back into the Land Rover to pick something up off the passenger seat. Kirby was just calling, “What’s happening, Innocent?” when Innocent turned around with the gun, pointed it more or less toward Kirby, and started shooting.
The gun was a British-made revolver, the Webley and Scott Mark VI, weighing two pounds six ounces, length eleven and a quarter inches, six-shot capacity, firing a .455 calibre cartridge, and famous in the British Army and in many police forces around the world for a whole lot of recoil. Wherever Innocent had gotten this monster, the thing clearly had not come with instructions, nor had he taken it around the block for a few practice spins ahead of time. He clenched his jaw, squeezed the trigger, the gun made a sharp explosive sound flattened in the surrounding air, and the bullet went up over Kirby and over the house and headed out on a rising line toward the coast.
“Hey!” said Kirby.
Innocent’s second bullet whizzed up and away southward, climbing into the sky, straining toward a far-off tree just inland from Punta Gorda.
“What the hell!” said Kirby.
Innocent’s third shot went almost straight up into the empyrean. Some time later, in fact, it landed unnoticed between Kirby and the house.
“Jesus Christ!” said Kirby.
Innocent, looking intent, exasperated, determined, flustered, enraged, grieving, and bollixed, grabbed the goddam gun with both hands and wrestled its barrel back down to point at Kirby’s nose.
“Ahhh!” said Kirby.
The fourth bullet whispered in Kirby’s left ear on the way by.
“DON’T!” said Kirby.
Innocent mumbled something and stepped closer, holding the gun out in front of himself with both hands, as though it were an angry cat. The cat spat, and bullet number five made a scratch — but cauterized it immediately — on the skin above Kirby’s left clavicle, or collarbone, which is the top of the pectoral arch, extending from the breastbone to the shoulderblade.
All of this was happening very fast, so it wasn’t until now that Kirby got around to taking appropriate action, which was to scream and hit the dirt, so that bullet number six passed through the air where the middle of Kirby’s head had recently been, then continued on its way to chunk into the door frame just as Manny opened the front door to find out what all that popping was about.
Manny looked at the spot where the bullet had said “thup” going into the wood of the frame. He looked at Innocent with the gun, and Kirby on his face on the ground. He stepped back and closed the door.
Kirby rolled over and looked up. Innocent, closer, stood over him with the expression of a man seating himself for the first time in front of a word processor; he will dope this damn thing out. Both Innocent’s hands clasped the gun, which now looked to Kirby like a round-mouthed gray metal snake with a crest (the front sight). Innocent’s right forefinger squeezed the trigger, and the Mark VI said, “Tsk.”
Neither Innocent nor Kirby could believe it. They both looked at the gun. Innocent aimed it at Kirby and pulled the trigger. “Tsk,” it said.
“Shit,” said Innocent.
“Oh, boy,” said Kirby, and rolled madly away, over and over across the dusty bumpy ground. When he sat up, filthy and dizzy, he was some yards from Innocent and the Land Rover. Shaking his head, trying to focus, he saw Innocent hurry back to the vehicle, saw him reach inside it and come out with a small cardboard box, saw him fumble the box open onto the Land Rover’s hood. A few cartridges rolled away across the hood and plopped onto the ground. “For God’s sake, he’s reloading,” Kirby said.
Somebody, unfortunately, had explained to Innocent how to open the cylinder. As Kirby struggled to his feet, still dizzy, and tottered across the open ground, Innocent pushed bullets business end forward into the cylinder. More cartridges rolled about and fell on the ground.
Innocent saw Kirby coming and backed hurriedly away, stumbling a bit, pushing just one more bullet home, struggling to close the half-full cylinder and scramble backwards at the same time, and all the while watching neither his hands nor the world behind him. Kirby, pursuing, cried, “Innocent, why? Why?”
“You killed her,” Innocent said, and slammed the cylinder shut, pinching one finger nastily in the process. He put that finger in his mouth and pointed the gun at Kirby.
Who had stopped a few paces away, too bewildered to be either scared or smart. “Killed? Who?”
“Wallawa Weeng,” Innocent said.
“Who?”
Innocent took his finger from his mouth. “Valerie Greene,” he said, “and you’re going to die for it!”
“Tsk,” said the Mark VI, as Kirby threw his arms up to protect his head.
“God damned bastard!” Innocent cried.
“I didn’t!” Kirby yelled. “Innocent, I’m innocent!”
“Tsk.”
“Shit! Where are they?”
“I didn’t do it!”
“Boom,” said the shotgun in Manny’s hands in the doorway of the house, and a number of leaf bits and twig mulch pattered down onto the tableau of Innocent and Kirby.
Innocent, wide-eyed, looked over at Manny who, untroubled by recoil, was lowering the shotgun barrel from his aim at the tree branches to a new sighting on Innocent’s torso. This piece of armament was a Ted Williams Over-and-under shotgun with 28-inch barrels, 48 inches overall, weight seven and a quarter pounds, firing either two and three-quarter or three inch standard or magnum shells in 12 gauge, available at Sears stores. Manny’s finger had already moved from the front trigger, which had just fired the modified choke lower barrel, to the rear trigger, which at any instant could unleash the contents of the full choke upper barrel.
Having no idea what Manny planned to do next, hoping against hope he wasn’t running into a blast of shotgun pellets, Kirby dashed forward, grabbed the Mark VI out of Innocent’s slack hands, and ran away holding the gun in both his hands, yelling, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
Innocent stared after him in frustration and aggravation: “How can I shoot? You took my gun!”
“Manny!” Kirby yelled in explanation. “Manny, don’t shoot!”