“Hey!”
“I said hurry.”
She noticed how deliberately he was moving, and it struck her that something was happening. “What is it, Mick?”
“You mean you don’t hear it?”
Christina said no.
“Just listen,” he said, and before she knew it the stilt house was shuttered, and the door closed, and the two of them were alone in the corner of the bedroom, sitting on the wooden floor. At first the only sound Christina Marks heard was the two of them breathing, and then came some scratching noises that Stranahan said were seagulls up on the roof. Finally, when she leaned her head against the plywood wall, she detected a faraway hum. The longer she listened, the more distinct it became.
The pitch of the motor was too weak to be an airplane and too high to be much of a boat.
“Jesus, it’s him,” she said with a tremble.
Stranahan acknowledged the fact with a frown.“You know,” he said, “this used to be a pretty good neighborhood.”
Chemo wondered about the Ingram, about the effects of salt spray on the firing mechanism. He didn’t know much about machine guns, but he suspected that it was best not to get them wet. The ride out to Stiltsville had been wetter than he’d planned.
He parked the jet ski beneath one of the other stilt houses to wait for the shrimp boat to leave Mick Stranahan’s place. He saw a good-looking woman in a white cottony top and tan safari shorts hop off the shrimp boat and go upstairs, so Chemo began to work her into the scenario. He didn’t know if she was a wife or a girlfriend or what, but it didn’t matter. She was there, and she had to die. End of story.
Chemo pried open a toolshed and found a rag for the Ingram. Carefully he wiped off the moisture and salt. The gun looked fine, but there was only one way to be sure. He took an aluminum mop handle from the shed and busted the padlock off the door of the house. Once, inside he quickly found a target: an old convertible sofa, its flowered fabric showing traces of mold and mildew. Chemo shut the door to trap the noise. Then he knelt in front of the sofa, put the Ingram to his shoulder and squeezed off three rounds. Dainty puffs of white fuzz and dust rose with the impact of each bullet. Chemo lowered the gun and carefully examined the.45 caliber holes in the cushions.
Now he was ready. He slung the gun strap over his shoulder and pulled his soggy Jockey shorts up snugly on his waist. He was about to go when he thought of something. Quickly he moved through the house, opening doors until he found a bathroom.
At the sink Chemo took off his sunglasses and put his face to the mirror. With a forefinger he tested the tiny pink patch of flesh that Dr. Rudy Graveline had dermabraded. The patch no longer stung; in fact, it seemed to be coming along nicely.
Chemo was extremely pleased, and ventured forth in bright spirits.
Someplace, maybe it was Reader’s Digest, he had read where salt water actually expedited the healing process.
“Don’t move,” Mick Stranahan whispered.
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Unless Itell you.”
From the hum of the engine, Christina Marks guessed that the jet ski was very close; no more than thirty yards.
Stranahan held the shotgun across his knees. She looked at his hands and noticed they were steady. Hers were shaking like an old drunk’s.
“Do you have a plan?” she asked.
“Basically, my plan is to stay alive.”
“Are you going to shoot him?”
Stranahan looked at her as if she were five years old. “Now what do you think? Of course I’m going to shoot him. I intend to blow the motherfucker’s head off, unless you’ve got some objection.”
“Just asking,” Christina said.
Chemo was thinking: Damn Japanese.
Whoever designed these jet skis must have been a frigging dwarf.
His back was killing nun; he had to hunch over like a washerwoman to reach the handlebars. Every time he hit a wave, the gun strap slipped off his bony shoulder. A couple times he thought for sure he’d lost the Ingram, or at least broken it. Damn Japanese.
As he approached Stranahan’s stilt house, Chemo started thinking something else. He had already factored the girl into the scenario, figured he’d shoot her first and get it over with. But then he realized he had another problem: Surely she had seen him ski past the shrimp boat, probably noticed the machine gun, probably told Stranahan.
Who had probably put it together.
So Chemo anticipated a fight. Screw the element of surprise; the damn jet scooter was as loud as a Harley. Stranahan could hear him coming two miles away.
But where was he?
Chemo circled the stilt house slowly, eventually riding the curl of his own wake. The windows were down, the door shut. No sign of life, except for a pair of ratty looking gulls on the roof.
A thin smile of understanding came to his lips. Of course-the man was waiting inside. A little ambush action.
Chemo coasted the jet ski up to the dock and stepped off lightly. He took the Ingram off his shoulder and held it in front of him as he went up the stairs, thinking: Where’s the logical place for Stranahan to be waiting? In a corner, of course.
He was pleased to find that the wooden deck went around Stranahan’s entire house. Walking cautiously on storklike legs, Chemo approached the southwest corner first. Calmly he fired one shot, waist level, through the wall. He repeated the same procedure at each of the other corners, then sat on the rail of the deck and waited. When nothing happened after three minutes, he walked up to the front door and fired twice more.
Then he went in.
Christina Marks was not aware that Stranahan had been hit until she felt something warm on her bare arm. She opened her mouth to scream but Stranahan covered it with his hand and motioned for her to be quiet. She saw that his eyes were watering from the pain of the bullet wound. He removed his hand from her mouth and pointed at his left shoulder. Christina nodded but didn’t look.
They heard three more gunshots, each hi a different part of the house. Then came a silence that lasted a few agonizing minutes. Finally Stranahan rose to his feet with the shotgun cradled in his right arm. The left side of his body was numb and wet with blood; in the twilight of the shuttered house, he looked two-tone.
From the floor Christina watched him move. He pressed his back to the wall and edged toward the front of the house. The next shots made Christina shut her eyes. When she opened them, she saw two perfect holes through the front door; twin sunbeams, sharp as lasers, perforated the shadows. Beneath the light shafts, Mick Stranahan lay prone on his belly, elbows braced on the wooden floor. He was aiming at the front door when Chemo opened it.
Stranahan’s shotgun was a Remington 1100, a semi-automatic twelve-gauge, an excellent bird gun that holds up to five shells. Later, when Stranahan measured the distance from the door to where he had lain, he would marvel at how any human being with two good eyes could miss a seven-foot target at a distance of only nineteen feet four inches. The feet that Stranahan was bleeding to death at the time was not, in his view, a mitigating excuse.
In truth, it was the shock of the intruder’s appearance that had caused Stranahan to hesitate-the sight of this gaunt, pellucid, frizzle-haired freak with a moonscape face that could stop a freight train.
So Stranahan had stared for a nanosecond when he should have squeezed the trigger. For someone who looked so sickly, Chemo moved deceptively fast. As he dove out of the doorway, the first blast from the Remington sprinkled its rain of birdshot into the bay.
“Shit,” Stranahan said, struggling to his feet. On his way toward the door he slipped on his own blood and went down again, his right cheek slamming hard on the floor; this, just as Chemo craned around the comer and fired a messy burst from the Ingram. Rolling in a sticky mess, Stranahan shot back.