Back in the living room, I didn’t take the time to help Shep finish with his wrists, figuring he could finish that up himself and undo his ankles, too. Muffled though that shot had been, it still might have been loud enough to draw the others to us — two at least.
So I said to him, “Take care of Nita,” who was starting to come around.
With my .38 in hand, I stepped over and around Harper’s corpse in the doorway. I bent down and with my left hand took the lighter from his dead fingers, then lifted the pack of Chesterfields from his breast pocket. I shook out a smoke one-handed and fired it up. Did I mention since after the war I only smoked in combat situations?
I sucked some of the cigarette into my lungs and went over to peek out the non-existent kitchen door.
Survival Town had no streets anymore. No sense of organization at all — just a brick building here and a frame two-story there, a few spiny Joshua trees, some scattered yucca, clumps of mesquite, and two assholes digging graves in the middle of it all. One was a dyed-blond Hispanic, tall enough to be Sandy Serrano’s guy in the gold sweater on the steps outside the Ambassador, though right now he was just in a t-shirt and jeans, splotched with occasional dirt and sweat stains from the hard work he was doing. He looked bushed. Poor baby.
The other was the dark-curly-haired fan who’d crashed the party back at the Royal Suite last June, and who in the Pantry had got the last autograph that Robert Kennedy ever gave. He was working on his own hole — one of three right in a row — the other grave in progress having been the late Harper’s responsibility.
They were taking a beer break. They’d brought a cooler along to our murders. Well, why not be comfy no matter what the situation? Good to stay hydrated. Tired, the pair drank their beer and laughed and joked and leaned on the handles of their shovels with one hand and (between chugs) cradled cans of Blatz in the other. Me, I just smoked my confiscated Chesterfield and thought about my next move.
They were a good twenty feet from me and the range of a .38 like my spare piece was only reliable at around six, and I wasn’t somebody who spent his spare time at a firing range, so I played it the best I could.
I burst out and thrust the gun toward them and yelled, “Get those fucking hands up, right now!”
The blond went for a gun in his waistband and the dark curly-haired one did the smart thing and just turned and ran off, putting more space between himself and my .38. The blond fired off a round that didn’t come anywhere near me and I sent one back at him, which he caught in the belly, doubling him over. I would rather have got him in the head but body mass was my friend in this case.
He stumbled and fell and almost wound up in the grave he’d dug, but not quite. Maybe in the movie.
As for the fan, he was heading for shelter, going into a two-story frame house, which looked like something the Big Bad Wolf could have blown down in one huff or anyway puff. Still, there had been a lot of desert wind out here since the founding of Survival Town and well over a decade since an H-bomb had been dropped nearby, so maybe the place was sturdier than you’d think. It was possible he’d assumed a window position to pick me off, so I ran low in serpentine fashion at the structure, which had either been unpainted at the time of the blast or the bomb or the wind had blown off every scrap of paint.
No gunshot came my way.
That didn’t mean anything. I hadn’t seen him pull a pistol and hadn’t noted one in his waistband or in a holster either. He was in a dark blue t-shirt and jeans and it was possible at a distance that a weapon had blended in. It was possible he was unarmed. But probable he was carrying.
When I got to the doorless front door, I plastered myself to one side, my back to the outer wall, and listened. Listened. And listened some more.
No sound of footsteps, no heavy breathing. It was a two-story house and he may have run upstairs to lie in wait. Or he could have been more professional than I took him for and done any one of a number of smart things — he’d been part of a pretty goddamn skillful team to take Bob Kennedy out the way they’d done. A murder in a packed room, a programmed patsy, a security guard accomplice to hold the victim in place for his slaughter!
Not an amateur, then.
I went in low and fast and hit the deck. Found myself in a living room with a family greeting me with blank stares and friendly smiles — more mannequins, Mom and Dad sharing a couch, a boy on the floor with his upended train set, a girl with her legless, one-armed doll. Only the little girl was twisted impossibly at the waist and the little boy’s arms were nowhere to be seen and Mom was on her side with a scorched, tattered lamp shade next to her and Dad’s head was turned toward the window, as if he’d seen the atomic blast coming.
On my feet again, I prowled, room by room, easing into each, pausing to listen for any sign of life, watching the floorboards to seek a path where I wouldn’t make a sound or anyway much of one. Most rooms were empty, the walls bare and distressed and smeared with dirt. The apparent kitchen was just a counter and some cabinets. Ceilings were partially exposed to their wooden framework. A room toward the back had a mannequin man and woman under the covers of a double bed. They looked embarrassed, but none the worse for wear despite an H-bomb.
That left the second floor.
A paint-peeling white wooden staircase, enclosed on the right, rose with the occasional step missing like a sideways grin shy a few teeth. No way to head up there silently. But at least that side wall could be leaned against...
I started up doing just that and the wood beneath my stockinged feet whined as if that little boy had finally noticed his train set wasn’t right. The open passageway at the top of the stairs could be filled at any moment with that curly-haired fan with a gun blasting away like Sirhan Sirhan in the Pantry, only this time it wouldn’t be blanks.
Then finally I got to the top and only a hallway awaited, and it occurred to me that this was a typical American home of the Fifties but built on the cheap and had been turned by an atomic bomb into a kind of tenement. But I didn’t have time to look for irony in the rubble of a mad doctor’s experiment. Somewhere in the back of my combat-addled brain I knew that I shouldn’t kill this curly-haired motherfucker.
No.
I needed him alive, to talk, to tell the whole story, to help me make a joke out of the inherently absurd Lone Gunman theory and expose, finally, finally, fucking finally, the conspiracy that had taken my friend from me and twisted my country’s future into old hawks and young druggies.
He popped out of a doorway, at the far end of the hall, firing — he did have a gun! — and again I hit the deck but he was running right at me, desperate bullets flying just over my head and around me when the floorboard gave and like terrible teeth came up around him and the building swallowed him.
I was on my hands and knees and crept over to the ragged hole the floor had made in itself and there he was, on his back, with one of the floorboards he’d taken with him, sticking up through his chest in jagged bloody judgment like Christopher Lee on a bad day. He wasn’t quite dead yet, and blood was pumping out of him, onto the wooden stake, joining the dripping red that the tip of the thing had taken with it and was now oozing back to him. The face under the dark curly nest of hair was contorting and his hands were reaching toward me, as if for help.
The only thing I could do for him was shoot him in the head, which I did. But to be honest with you, that was more for me than him.
Outside, I tossed my smoke and headed to my little home away from home where Shep was on the floor holding a shivering Nita to him. Hotter than hell though it was, she might have been freezing. I relieved him of her and handed the gun off to him as she folded herself to me and I held her.