“Why?”
“Because we’ve got to keep you here until—” Flack began, and suddenly Willy nudged him with the barrel of his rifle and said, “Shut up, Hack.”
“What’s the matter, Willy?” Hack asked.
“Don’t tell the bastard nothing,” Willy said, and Rick looked at Willy’s mouth again, curled into a sneer below the silly blond mustache, and wondered all at once whether the menace there wasn’t true enough after all.
“Keep me here until what?” Rick asked.
“Until we decide to let you go,” Willy answered. “Get out of that bed.” He paused and then said, “The girl, too.”
“Uh-uh, Willy.”
“You better listen to me, Stem,” Willy said. “When I tell you to do something, you do it, and fast. You got me?”
“I got you fine,” Rick said. “The girl stays in that bed until we get her a robe. And then she dresses in the bathroom.”
“She dresses where I say she dresses.”
“Over my dead body,” Rick said.
Willy smiled and said, “Any way you want it, Stem,” and then pulled back the bolt on the rifle.
“Don’t make me laugh,” Rick said.
“I’m counting to three,” Willy answered, his finger moving into position inside the trigger guard. “I want you both out of that bed and starting to dress by the time I hit three, you got me?”
“And if we’re not?”
“If you’re not, you’re dead,” Willy said. “One.”
“Save your breath. I’ll get the girl a robe, and she can—”
“Stay where you are,” Willy shouted. “Two.”
“I thought you wanted us—”
“I’m giving the orders around here, not you. You think I’m gonna let her out of this room?”
“The bathroom’s right in the hallway. Your friend can follow her down and stay right outside the door while she dresses.”
“Suppose she busts a window and gets out?”
“There’s no window in the bathroom,” Rick said. “There’s only an overhead vent.”
“The girl dresses right here,” Willy said. He paused and then said, “Three.”
The room went silent.
“You getting out of that bed? Both of you?”
“No,” Rick said.
The bullet took him completely by surprise, smashing into his abdomen, and lifting his behind from the bed, and slamming him back against the headboard. He felt only instant impact and agonizing pain, and then his vision blurred and he felt himself falling forward on the bed, his body bending from the waist, pulling the sheet out of Lucy’s hands as he fell, Lucy clutching for the sheet wildly, trying to cover her breasts, the sheet suddenly turning a bright pulsing red, and Lucy’s scream bursting from her mouth as red and as strident as the shrieking spreading blood. “You killed him!” she shouted. “You killed him, you killed him!” And then unmindful of her naked breasts, she threw herself headlong onto his body and tried to hold him close while his blood and his life drained out of him and soaked into the mattress.
Across the room Willy watched her wordlessly for several moments, his heart pounding in his chest. Then he turned to Flack and said, “Get Jason.”
3
Dr. Herbert Tannenbaum and his wife Rachel were not in their bed; two other people were. The two other people were a lot younger than the Tannenbaums were supposed to be. The girl seemed to be twenty-five or — six, and the man sleeping beside her seemed to be maybe a few years older than that, but where the hell was old Tannenbaum and his wife?
Virgil Cooper took the surprise well. After his first Mongolian cavalry attack in Korea, he was incapable of being surprised any more; he simply gestured to Leonard Crawley to keep the slumbering pair covered while he went out to check the rest of the house. He was coming through the hallway and heading for the other bedroom when he received the second surprise, and the second surprise was Dr. Tannenbaum himself coming from the bathroom at the opposite end of the corridor, tying the strings on his pajama bottoms. Tannenbaum was sixty-eight years old, a tall spare man with a good tan on his arms and his face and spreading up onto his forehead and the beginnings of his bald pate fringed with white hair that clung to the back of his head and formed a narrow shelf above his ears. He had been the orthopedic specialist at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx before he had retired and come to Ocho Puertos with his wife the year before. He came down the corridor now tying his pajama strings, completely unaware of Coop who stood frozen at the opposite end, holding the .45 loosely in his right hand, waiting for Tannenbaum to discover him.
Tannenbaum sensed Coop’s presence before he actually saw him. His step faltered and he raised his eyes first and then his head, and the first thing he saw was the gun in Coop’s hand. He stopped dead in the hallway, his eyes continuing upward to Coop’s face, settling on Coop’s mouth, which was thin and smiling faintly, moving upward to Coop’s eyes, which were pale and vaguely amused. Tannenbaum wet his lips. As though afraid he would wake the sleepers in the house, he said in a whisper, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“Who’s that in the big bedroom?” Coop whispered back.
“My son and his wife. What do you want? What do you want here?”
“Get dressed, Dr. Tannenbaum,” Coop whispered, and then shouted over his shoulder, “Wake ’em up, Leonard!”
In the master bedroom of the two-bedroom house, Leonard Crawley kept his Springfield trained on the bed and watched the young man and woman in the bed come immediately and unbelievingly awake.
Marvin Tannenbaum sat up and stared at what seemed to be a man holding a rifle. He heard Selma gasp beside him as he fumbled for his glasses on the night table. He put them on, blinked at the man, cleared his throat, and said, “What the hell is it?”
“Mister, get dressed,” Leonard said.
“Who are you?” Marvin said.
“Get dressed,” Leonard answered. His eyes searched the room. He picked a blue robe from the armchair near the bed, threw it to Selma and said, “Here, lady. You can put this on.”
“Thank you,” Selma said.
“Pop!” Marvin shouted suddenly. “Pop, are you all right?”
“He’s all right,” Coop called from the hallway. “Shut up and do what you’re told, and nobody’ll get hurt.”
Marvin got out of bed in his pajamas and walked past Leonard to the doorway of the room. He was five feet ten inches tall, but somehow managed to convey an impression of squatness, despite his height, perhaps because his legs were short in proportion to his torso and arms. He had black hair and brown eyes and a peculiarly sensitive and sensuous mouth in a dark and brooding face. His black-rimmed eyeglasses gave him a scholarly appearance that was contradicted by the squat power of his body, as though an ape had accidentally picked up his trainer’s glasses and perched them on his broad flat nose. He looked into the hallway without fear, somewhat sleepily, a man who had been awakened without any reasonable cause and was now trying to get at the root of the problem. Coop turned partially to face him as he peered out into the corridor.
“What’s this all about?” Marvin asked conversationally.
“We’re taking you over to the marina,” Coop answered, just as conversationally.
“What for?”
“We need this house,” Coop said.
“Why?”
“To watch this end of the road.”
“To watch it for what?”
“For anybody who might come down it,” Coop said, and smiled. “You want to get dressed?”
“I don’t get it,” Marvin said.
“You’re not supposed to. Get back in there and hold up a blanket for your wife while she dresses.” Coop looked at his watch. “I want to be out of here in five minutes.”