Marvin nodded, sighed, and went back into the bedroom. “What’s this all about?” he asked Leonard.
“Didn’t you hear what he told you, mister? We want to be out of here in five minutes. So let’s hustle, huh?”
“Yeah, but what’s it all about?” Marvin asked.
“Get dressed,” Leonard said, and Marvin shrugged. He walked to the bed where Selma was sitting upright, fully covered by the cotton nightgown she wore — why the hell didn’t she ever wear nylon like other women did, like Marvin supposed other women did?
“We’d better do what they say,” Marvin suggested. He took the blanket from where it was folded at the foot of the bed and held it up in front of his wife, his arms spread. Selma got out of bed and nodded a small thank-you, and then slipped the nightgown up over her shoulders and head and took her undergarments from the chair beside the bed and quickly began dressing.
From across the room, Leonard Crawley, who was thirty-five years old and whose education had not gone further than the twelfth grade in high school, watched Marvin Tannenbaum’s rigid back and outstretched arms, saw Selma’s pale and expressionless face appear above the top edge of the blanket again as she pulled her dress over her head, and immediately sensed something that had managed to elude the older and wiser Dr. Tannenbaum from the moment his children had arrived yesterday afternoon.
Leonard Crawley, with a gun in his hands and more important matters on his mind, knew immediately and intuitively that something was wrong between these two kids.
“There’s two houses on the beach where we won’t have any trouble at all,” Coop had said. He had said this to Jason immediately after he had first scouted Ocho Puertos Key and was making a preliminary report. “One of them is the second house on the beach, the Champlin house, right here” — pointing to an enlarged map of the key — “and the other is the sixth house down, just before the Tannenbaums.” Coop had paused for effect, the way he had often paused for effect in Korea when he was surrounded by boys his own age whose toes were freezing and who kept slapping their hands against their sides and looking to their sergeant for answers he did not have. He had looked up at Jason and grinned and said, “The reason we won’t have any trouble is that there’s kids in both those houses.”
The kids in the Hannigan house were both little girls, six and eight years old respectively, and they were in the living room in their pajamas playing Chinese checkers when the two men came through the lanai. They looked at the men curiously, without fear, and then got just a little frightened when the men picked them up and carried them into the bedroom where their parents were still asleep. The men put the little girls down at the foot of the bed, and one of them went to the bed and shook Jack Hannigan by the shoulder, and when he woke up, the man said, “Those are your kids there, Mr. Hannigan. We don’t expect any trouble from you.”
There was no trouble.
Jason looked first at Willy, who stood opposite the bed with the rifle hanging loosely from the end of his arm. Then he turned to the bed where the man Stem was lying pitched forward halfway on his side, bent awkwardly at the waist, the sheet sticky with blood and clinging to his stomach and thighs and crotch. The half-naked girl was sobbing against Stem’s shoulder and back, covered with blood herself, unaware of Jason’s entrance, seemingly unaware of anything but the man who lay bleeding beside her.
“What happened here?” Jason said. He did not raise his voice, nor was there any indication in his manner that he was angry. He faced Willy calmly, studying him with a careful, interested look on his face.
Willy smoothed his sparse blond mustache with his free left hand and then looked at the floor first and the ceiling next, and then said, “He wouldn’t do what I told him, Jase.”
“Well, now, let me hear it all, okay?” Jason said, and he smiled a pleasant, encouraging smile. Beside him, Flack nodded in sympathetic appreciation of the way Jason was handling this, without getting excited or anything, just peaceful and calm. Across the room the girl was still sobbing.
“You said we shouldn’t take no chances with this one, Jase,” Willy said. “So I warned him to do what I said, and when he didn’t, I shot him.” Willy shrugged. “That’s all.”
“What was it you asked him to do?” Jason asked quietly.
“Just to get dressed,” Willy said, and shrugged again.
“Mmm-huh. And where does the girl fit in?”
“The girl?”
“Right.”
“Gee, she’s got nothing to do with it,” Willy said, and smoothed his mustache again.
“Get her something to put on,” Jason said, and then quickly, “Not you, Willy.”
Willy checked his forward movement and shrugged. Flack picked up Stem’s white shirt from where it was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. He brought it to the bed and held it out to the girl. “Miss?” he said. She did not answer him. She kept her face pressed to Stem’s muscular back, her cheek smeared with blood, sobbing. “Miss, you want this?” Flack asked.
“Take it,” Jason said suddenly and harshly, and the girl looked up for an instant and met Jason’s eyes and then slowly sat up and took the shirt from Flack. There was nothing to hide anymore; there was nothing they had not seen. She pulled the shirt on slowly, and then held it closed over her breasts, not buttoning it, her arms folded across its front. She looked at Jason again, and then sniffed once, and then wiped her nose on the long sleeve of the shirt.
“What’s your name?” Jason asked.
“Lucy.”
“Lucy what?”
The girl did not answer. Jason walked to the bed and lifted Stem’s wrist. He felt for a pulse and then turned to Willy and said, “You goddamn butcher, he’s still alive.”
“I thought he was dead,” Willy said.
“He’s not.”
“I thought sure he was dead,” Willy said again, as though that would make it so.
“No,” Jason said. He kept staring at Stem, still holding his wrist.
“There’s a doctor here in town, ain’t there, Jase?” Flack said.
“Yeah.”
“What do you need a doctor for?” Willy asked.
“The guy’s dying,” Flack said.
“Yeah, but the plan—”
“Shut up,” Jason said.
The girl looked up at him. “Are you... will you get a doctor for him?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. He looked again at Stem, and then suddenly frowned. He kept holding Stern’s wrist silently for what seemed like a very long time. At last he let it drop.
“We don’t need a doctor any more,” he said, and the girl began screaming.
Samantha Watts had awakened at five-twenty to the sound of an engine starting. She had supposed Luke was moving his boats into Pasajero Channel, and she further supposed she should go down to the pier to help him, but she lay in bed wide-awake, searching the ceiling, reluctant to rise, and yet unable to sleep. One of the Siamese leaped onto the bed. Although the room was still dark, she knew at once it was Fong, not Fang. She could tell by the gender sound of his purr and the scratchy feel of his tongue, so unlike Fang’s, across her wrist. She took a playful swat at him, and then said aloud, “Oh hell, I might as well get up,” but remained in bed anyway for the next ten minutes. Her eyes were growing accustomed to the predawn gloom. She wondered where the other cats were. She owned ten cats in all.
At five-thirty she got out of bed and took off her pajamas and looked briefly at her tanned and slender body in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. She quickly pulled on panties and bra, denim trousers, a pair of tattered sneakers, and an old gray sweatshirt. From the dresser top she took a comb which she put into her back pocket, and a lipstick and her house keys, which she put into the right-hand side pocket. At the back of her mind someplace was the half notion that she would meander down to the marina and give Luke a hand with the boats. Her house was the fourth in line on the beach, between Rick Stem’s — she noticed that all his shades were drawn; that meant he’d picked up a girl in Marathon the night before — and Mr. Ambrosini’s, who was a retired tractor salesman from Des Moines. Mr. Ambrosini’s shades were never drawn, but she saw no sign of him this morning. Mr. Ambrosini was a nice little man who was seventy years old if he was a day.