She humped her purple hips high and smacked them down. The final grind and bump. The falling glass had made an enormous sound. The brick-red hair did not go well with the spreading puddle of bright red blood.
I hitched myself with frantic effort toward the small table by her chair. I hooked my feet around a table leg and yanked it over. I could hear him coming. The gun spun to a stop five feet away. More lumpy hitching spasmodic effort, like a legless bug.
“Fredrika! Fredrika!” he called in a voice of anguish and loss. He was behind me. I could not see him. I got my fingers on the gun. I could barely feel it. My hands were numb. I fumbled at it and my right hand would not pick it up.
Something yanked my chair back. He bent and picked up the gun. He was bare to the waist, oiled with sweat, his chest hairless, his breasts fatty as a woman’s. His mouth worked and he sobbed and he aimed the snub barrel at the center of my face. He was bending over me. There was a strange sudden sound, a damp, smacky little chunking sound. He straightened up and stood very still as if listening to something a long way off. The Airweight slid out of his hand and clanked on the floor. Then he puddled down slowly, with a tired sigh, and stretched out on his back, his head lolling toward me, eyes half-open, only the whites showing, and with a small, very neat, very very round hole punched through the bone of brow an inch above the left eyebrow, and on the curve of forehead into temple. A single blood-drop ran an inch away from the hole and stopped at the end of its pink snailtrail. Belly gas rumbled and then made a little snore sound as it carne out through the flaccid throat.
I had a view of the lawn beyond the broken glass from a vantage point about as high as a rabbit’s eye, and I saw two men come across from the direction of the punk-tree hedge. It was an arty director’s angle at combat technique. They came toward the house, running swiftly, widely separated, constantly varying both direction and speed, weapons held in a familiar readiness. The ultimate and grotesque contrast was in the way they were dressed-neat dark trousers, dress shoes, white shirts, neckties.
“It’s okay!” I shouted. “It’s safe.”
They dived and disappeared. “What is your name?” one of them called. Veddy British.
“McGee. Travis McGee. They’re both dead.” They appeared suddenly, much closer, standing upright, stepping through the great hole where the glass had been, avoiding the blood. Trim-bodied men in their early thirties. Tough and watchful faces, an air of special communication between them. As they quickly checked the bodies of the man and the woman, I said, “The girl needs help. She’s somewhere in the house.”
One gave the other an order in a language I did not understand and then went into the house. The order-taker set his weapon aside and righted the chair with me in it with an effortlessness that shocked me. He took out a pocket knife, inserted the blade near- the aluminum arm, and with one keen stroke sliced the tape open from elbow to wrist. He put the knife down…paused, shrugged, gave me a gold-toothed grin, and said, “No Englitch,” and ripped the tape loose in a single yank that took the hair and felt as if it had taken the skin too.
As he was slicing the other arm free, the other one came out of the house onto the porch and said, “D’you know the lassie quite well, McGee?”
“Yes. How is she?”
“Bit hard to tell. Better see if you can settle her down.”
I winced as the other arm was ripped loose. I massaged my hands and a painful prickling began to penetrate through the numbness. The goldtoothed one squatted to slice my ankles free.
The one standing gave the dead man a casual kick and said, “I suspect the old sod merely scuffed her up a bit. The Captain here had to take the clean shot before he blew your face off with this silly little weapon. Too bad. We wanted a chat with Wilhelm.”
“Captain?”
“On leave. From the Israeli Army. Spot of sightseeing here and there.” He helped me to my feet. I wobbled and then steadied. “Tend the lady while we look about,” he said. “She’s in the bathroom.”
Heidi lay naked on her side in the corner beyond the shower stall, on a floor of yellow and white octagonal tiles. Her knees were pulled up to her chin, fists hugged between her breasts, smudged eyes closed, hair matted with drying sweat. There were two doors into the bathroom. Her clothing was on a hanger on the hook on the closed door, arranged with a deadly Germanic neatness. Damp towels were strewn about. The man’s pillow-ticking shirt was on another hanger.
I squatted beside her, touched her shoulder, and said, “Honey?”
She gave a convulsive start and scrabbled her way into the corner and kept scrabbling as though to push her way through the wall. With wide bluegray eyes focused on me but not seeing me, she said, “Please not any more, please, oh God, please no.” It was a sugary sweet little gamin croak, a humble little voice for begging, and it sounded like the husk of a long-ago movie star whose name I could- not remember.
“You’re all right now, honey. It’s me. It’s Trav.” She looked very dubious. Very skeptical. Her teeth chattered. Incongruously I remembered the fate of the Packard phaeton after my dear old buddy Buzzy borrowed it and didn’t make a curve. He took me out the next morning and showed me. He had missed a tree and a telephone pole by narrow margins, had gone down a forty-degree slope and torn a swath through scrub alder and then hit the almost dry creek bed. It had gone a hundred feet along the creek bed. The water-smooth boulders were the size of peck baskets and bushel baskets. The sturdy old car had rearranged a few dozen of them. Everything that could possibly be shaken loose had flown off the car, including both sides of the foldback hood. Axles, drive shaft, frame, engine block, and all four wheels broken.
“It’s like a miracle all I got was just this one little bump on the head,” said Buzzy.
We salvaged the parts worth salvaging. It squatted there among the stones and during the spring torrents from the snow melting up in the hills, it disappeared completely.
She let me take her by the wrists, and she did not resist very much as I pulled her to her feet. She leaned against me and in her tiny croak said, “He kept… He made me… He put…”
“Easy, honey. It’s all okay.”
“It hurt so,” she said. “It hurt so bad.”
It was like dressing a child who is just learning about buttons and sleeves. She would help a little and then forget. I took her into a bedroom. She walked like a convalescent taking the first trip down the hospital corridor without the wheelchair. I sat her on the edge of a neatly made bed, lifted her feet up onto the spread. She lay back and looked at me out of child-eyes and I said, “Rest a little while, honey. Then we’ll go.”
‘ “All right.”
I found them in the living room, the Captain watching while the Englishman went through each drawer, looking at each piece of paper.
He looked up and said, “How is she?”
“Shaky. I made her lie down and get a little rest. Suppose you start with the beach that night in December. Who hit me and what with?”
“My dear chap, we don’t have to start with anything and go anywhere.”
I stood over him and said, “I have been goddam near choked to death. I have been tricked by two old folks, and I have listened to that girl screaming when I could not do a damned thing about it. With pure courage and brute strength and great skill I managed to kill a fifty-six-year-old woman in purple pants. Now stop the secret-agent act, buddy, and give me the score.”