The baby began crying the moment the two men entered the house, working much more effectively than the alarm on the diner had, setting up a fearful fuss that could not be controlled by cutting wires or crossing them. The house was the second one on the beach, just beyond Lester Parch’s house. Lester heard the baby go off next door and woke up to find a rifle pointed at his head. He did not say a word. He simply jabbed his elbow hard into Adrienne’s ribs, and she jumped up cursing and was ready to take a good swat at him when she realized they were not alone in their bedroom.
The two armed men standing at the foot of the bed both seemed to be about thirty years old, though the one with the beard looked older. Adrienne studied them unbelievingly, as though somehow Lester had dreamed them and they had escaped from his goddamn head and materialized at the foot of the bed. She looked at her husband furiously, her eyes demanding an explanation. Lester simply shrugged and said, “Well... what’s the guns for, fellers?”
The one with the beard very softly said, “You’re going to spend the rest of the day in this house, Mr. Parch. Would you and your wife kindly get dressed, please?”
“The rest—” Lester began and then closed his mouth. He thought for a few seconds and then asked, “Who’ll open the diner?”
The man with the beard smiled and said, “It’s already been opened, Mr. Parch.”
Next door the baby was wailing up a storm.
Pete Champlin, who was the baby’s father, rolled over, pulling half the sheet off his wife, and then mumbled, “Rosie, you want to get him?”
“No,” Rosie said, “you get him.”
“Forget it,” a strange voice said, “I’ve got him.”
Pete was used to all kinds of kooky things because he happened to be a real estate salesman in Marathon, and he got crazy nuts in the office every day of the week. The craziest nut of them all had been Frederick Carney, for whom Pete had handled this whole waterfront development after buying one for himself at thirty thousand, ten grand less than the next five sold for. He was used to all kinds of strange and mysterious real estate happenings, but he was not used to a man’s voice just outside his bedroom door at — what was it, six o’clock? — on a Sunday morning.
“Did you hear something?” he asked his wife.
“No,” Rosie said.
He probably would have let it go at that if the voice had not said, very loud and very clear this time, “Your son’s pants are wet, Mr. Champlin, and he’s soaking through my shirt. You want to get up and take care of this?”
He popped up in bed immediately and saw a man standing in the doorway of the room with Pete, Jr., slung over his shoulder and with a rifle in his left hand. Right alongside him was another man, and he was holding a rifle too, and looking very, very serious.
“All right,” the second man said, “nobody gets hurt if we all relax.”
“Who is it, honey?” Rosie mumbled beside him.
The men broke in through the French doors leading from the lanai at the back of the house, both of them wearing dungarees and blue shirts, both carrying rifles, both at least three inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter than Rick Stem. They had been warned that the occupant of this fourth house on the beach was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and twenty pounds bone-dry. They had been further warned not to take any chances with him because he had been an Iwo Jima Marine during World War II. At that time he had stormed a Japanese pillbox carrying nothing but a bayonet and two hand grenades. He had flushed out six enemy soldiers while demolishing two machine guns and, just for good measure, a mortar emplacement alongside the pillbox. Jason’s men had been told to shoot immediately if Rick Stem so much as lifted his pinky. So they broke the glass panel on one of the French doors, and then reached in to twist the knob, and then turned one rifle on him as he sat bolt upright in bed, and the second on the girl who was spilling out of the front of her nightgown and getting ready to scream.
“I’ve got the girl, Willy,” the man on the left said, pointing his rifle at her.
“I’ve got the guy, Flack,” Willy answered, and they both stood motionless across the room while the girl decided whether or not she should scream.
“Go ahead, lady, scream,” Flack said. “There ain’t nobody to hear you.” Whereupon the girl immediately closed her mouth and concentrated instead on pulling the sheet up over her exposed breasts.
It was at this point that Rick Stem burst into laughter.
He could not have explained why he began laughing at that precise moment. There was certainly nothing very comical about two snotnose kids busting your French doors and coming into your bedroom where you were entertaining a lady. Nothing was less funny than a Springfield rifle, either, unless it happened to be two of them, one of which was pointed at your lady friend’s exposed left breast — well, exposed until just a moment ago — with the other pointed at a spot about three inches above your own bellybutton. There was nothing terribly funny about Lucy’s dilemma, either, the dilemma being that she was the daughter of Walter Nelson, who was deacon of the church on Big Pine Key, and who happened to be up in Miami on church business, but who certainly wouldn’t have appreciated his holy little flower being in bed with the rake of the Lower Keys, even if the rake happened to be a World War II hero. Oh, no, there was nothing comical about Lucy’s dilemma. Perhaps, then, perhaps what made Rick burst into laughter at this particular tense juncture of his life was the look worn by the intruder on the right, the one called Willy.
Willy was nineteen years old, and he had a little blond mustache and fierce brown eyes. He kept his mouth curled in a sort of sneer that was supposed to be menacing but only managed to look petulant. That was funny enough in itself, but the look that had flashed over his face when he broke through those French doors was worth the price of admission alone. Lucy had popped up in bed, spilling out of the front of her gown, and Willy had frozen to a spot just inside the French doors, his eyes opening wide, his jaw dropping.
It had taken Lucy approximately thirty seconds to get her mouth ready for the scream, during which time she kept sitting up in bed with her open gown pointed right at Willy’s gaping jaw. It had taken another thirty seconds for Flack to deliver his clever little speech about screaming and there being nobody to hear and all that, during which time Willy kept leaning over farther and farther toward Lucy, though still rooted to that spot just inside the French doors. Then at least ten more seconds went by before Lucy decided not to scream and pulled the sheet up over her breasts instead.
It was then that Rick burst out laughing, because Willy just kept right on staring at Lucy as if fiercely willing her to drop that sheet, and his partner, Flack, kept trying to be tough by waving the rifle at Rick and saying, “Don’t try nothing funny, Stern. Our orders are to shoot to kill.”
“Well, well,” Rick said, and wondered immediately how Flack had known his name, but said nothing further. He was already trying to figure a way out of this, because everything in Rick Stern’s mind usually broke down eventually into a matter of logistics, and the logistics of this situation was simply how to disarm and break into little pieces two nineteen-year-old punks who had invaded his bedroom, how to do this without causing harm to our holy flower of Big Pine Key, God bless her.
“All right, what is this?” he asked. “A gag?”
“This ain’t a gag, Stern,” Flack said. Willy, on his right, kept staring at the sheet that Lucy held clutched to her bosom.
“Then what are you doing here? Would you mind telling me?”
“You better get up out of that bed,” Flack said. “We have to tie you up.”