“What’s goin’ on?” Flint heard a woman’s irritated voice ask. A young woman, she sounded to be. “Noise woke us the fuck up. Who was hollerin’ so much?”
“Shondra, you best stay put. Monty went in.”
The slide of bare feet stopped, but the boots kept walking.
“Bastard here killed him!” Mitch said. “Doc was fixin’ to blow his brains out!”
“These are the two from the marina.” Doc was talking to whoever wore the boots. “This one got me in the eyes with the spray. One over there shot Virgil.”
The boots approached Flint. They stopped beside him, and Flint lifted his head and saw they were made of bleached beige snakeskin.
“Dig that third arm, man. Got a little baby head growin’ out his ribs, too. Gen-yoo-ine freak from freak city. I ain’t seen nothin’ like him since I ate a bag of magic mushrooms in Yuma, spring of ’sixty-eight. Damn, those were the days!”
Shondra gave an ugly snorting sound. “I wasn’t even born then.”
Doc might have laughed through clenched teeth.
With an effort Flint looked up at the man in the snakeskin boots.
The individual was an exercise junkie. Or a steroid freak. Or maybe he just loved himself a whole lot. Because the muscles of his exposed chest, shoulders, and arms were massive swollen lumps that strained against the tanned flesh, the connecting veins standing out in blood-pumped relief, the visible ligaments as tight as bundles of piano wire. The man wore blue jeans with ripped-out knees, a piece of rope for a belt cinching his narrow waist, and he had a red neckerchief tied loosely around his throat. His face was a hard, chiseled slab of brown rock with a dagger-sharp chin and sunken cheeks, the facial flesh cracked with a hundred deep lines caused by what must have been years of serious sun-worship. The pure ebony of his commanding eyes, his thick black brows, and his curly black hair, the sides swirled with gray, gave him a distinctive Latin appearance. Flint guessed his age at late thirties or early forties, but it was difficult to tell since his body was young but his face was sun-wrinkled.
Standing several yards behind him was a blond girl who couldn’t have been older than twenty. She was barefoot, wearing denim cutoffs and a black bra. She, too, appeared to be a slave to the sun, because she was burned a darker brown than the man. Her golden hair cascaded over her shoulders and she had icy blue eyes. Flint thought she was almost beautiful, as beautiful as any Hollywood starlet, but there was an ugly, twisted set to her collagen-plumped lips, and those eyes could burn a hole through metal.
And right now he felt like a little crumpled piece of tin.
The muscle man stared down at Flint with just a hint of interest, as if he might be viewing a particularly creepy insect, but no more than that. Shondra spoke first. “Damn, Gault! Look how white he is!”
Gault motioned at Doc with a twirling forefinger. Doc understood the command and lowered the automatic, then said, “Turn around!” to Pelvis.
Pelvis did, his eyes deep-socketed and his face and bald head still painted with ghastly mud.
“This is the fucker thought he was Elvis Presley,” Doc said.
Gault’s face remained impassive.
“You know who they are? Bounty hunters. Can you believe it? From Shreveport. They had a guy in cuffs back there at St. Nasty. Said at the marina they were callin’ the man they work for. Anyway, they were takin’ their prisoner in to get a reward. I set the guy loose, figured it was my good deed for the month.”
Gault’s eyes went to Flint and returned to Pelvis.
“I thought you’d want to see ’em, ’specially the freak. Do you want me to kill ’em now, or what?”
Gault’s jaws tensed; muscles that seemed as big as lemons popped up on his face and then receded again. At last his mouth opened. His teeth were unnaturally white. “How much,” he said in a voice that had no discernible accent but perfect diction, “were they planning on earning as their reward?”
“Fifteen thousand.”
Gault’s face settled into stone again. Then, very suddenly, he laughed without smiling. When he did smile, it was a scary thing. He laughed a little louder. “Fifteen thousand!” he said, obviously finding the figure an object of humor. “Fifteen thousand dollars, is that all?” He kept laughing, only it became a low and dangerous sound, like a knife being sharpened. He looked at Shondra and laughed, and she started laughing, then he looked at Doc and laughed and Doc started laughing. Pretty soon it was a real laff riot.
Flint, grasping his wounded forearm and blood still oozing through his fingers, said, “Mind tellin’ us what the hell’s so funny?”
Gault laughed on for a moment longer, then his smile was abruptly eclipsed. He said, “The pitiful amount of cash that a human being will throw his life away in pursuit of.” He reached into a pocket of his jeans with his right hand. Flint heard something click like a trigger being cocked, and he steeled himself for the worst. Then Gault’s hand emerged holding one of those spring-loaded wrist exercisers, which he began to squeeze over and over again. “If a man should die, he should die for riches, not petty change. Or for forbidden knowledge. That might be worth dying for. But fifteen thousand dollars? Ha.” The laugh was very quiet. “I don’t think so.” Click … click … click went the springs.
“I don’t know what’s goin’ on here. I don’t care,” Flint said. “Nobody would’ve gotten hurt if that goon hadn’t tried to drown me in a toilet bowl.”
Gault nodded thoughtfully. “Tell me,” he said. “You were born the way you are, yes? You had no control over the way your chromosomes came together, or how the cells grew. You had no control over your genetics, or what quirk back in your family line caused your situation.” He paused for emphasis. “No control,” he repeated, as if seeing to the heart of Flint’s pain. “You must know, better than anyone could, that God set up tides and winds, and sometimes they take you one way and then blow you the other, and you have no control. I think a tide took you to that marina, and a wind blew you here. What’s your name again?”
“His name’s Murtaugh,” Doc said. “The other one’s Eisley.”
“I didn’t ask you.” Gault stared fixedly at the Harvard man. “I asked him. Didn’t I?”
Doc said nothing, but he looked stung. He pushed the .45 back into his waistband with the air of a petulant child. “My shows are on. You want me, I’ll be watchin’ my shows.” He trudged back along the pier toward the area that was shaded by the blue-and-white-striped awning. As Doc passed her, Shondra wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something bad.
Gault walked to the pier’s edge, where Pelvis still stood. He looked down at what the alligators were whittling to the size of a wallet. His hand worked: click … click … click. Sinews were standing out in the wrist. “All the mysteries, spilled out,” he said. His other hand pressed against Pelvis’s chest. Pelvis flinched; the man’s fingers seemed cold. “Monty always was a glutton. Now look how thin he is. You know, you could stand to lose some weight yourself.”
“All right, that’s enough.” Flint clenched his teeth and tried to stand up. He couldn’t make it the first time. He saw Gault grinning at him. Mitch stepped forward and aimed his pistol at Flint’s head, but Gault said, “No, no! Let him alone!”
Flint stood up. Staggered, almost fell again. Then he had his balance. It was time to face ugly reality. “If you’re gonna kill us — which I guess you are — then how about doin’ it humanely?”
The clicking of the springs had ceased. “Are you begging, Mr. Murtaugh?”
“No. I’m askin’.” He glanced distastefully at the corral. “A bullet in the head for both of us, how about that?”
“You mean you’re not going to stall for time? Try to hold out false hope? Or tell me if I let you go you’ll never, never, never speak of this to any soul on earth?”
“It’s hot,” Flint said. “I’m tired, and I’m about to fall down. I’m not gonna play games with you.”
“Don’t care to gamble that I might be in a lenient m
ood today?” Gault lifted his eyebrows.
Flint didn’t answer. Don’t bite! he told himself. He wants you to bite so he can kick you in the teeth.
“Maybe you’re a New Ager?” Gault asked. “You believe in reincarnation, so your death today would be just another rung on the cosmic ladder?”
“I believe in re’carnation,” Shondra said. “Gault and me were lovers in … you know, that old city that got swallowed up in the sea?”
“Atlantis,” Gault supplied. He winked quickly at Flint. “Works every time.”
Flint licked his parched lips. “How about some water for us?”
“Oh, I’m forgetting my manners. I was raised better than that. Come on, then. Time for my workout anyway. Shondra, go to the kitchen and get them a pitcher of ice water. Bring me a protein shake. Chop chop.” She hurried off obediently, and then Gault motioned for them to follow and started walking toward the awning-shaded area. Flint was weak from his wound and the heat, but he took hold of Pelvis’s elbow. “Hang on, all right?” Pelvis, in a state of shock, allowed Flint to guide him after the clumping snakeskin boots, and the other men, their pistols drawn, followed behind.
“Non,” Train whispered as he lowered the Ruger, “can’t get no clean shot off. Wouldn’t he’p ’em none if I could. We gonna have to move in closer.”
Dan’s heart was slamming, but his mind was calm. He and Train were standing in the chest-deep water seventy yards from the fenced-in alligator corral, at the edge of where the swamp’s vegetation had been hacked away. They had gotten over a barbed-wire fence in the water thirty yards behind them, and their hands were cut up some but they would heal. It had been a difficult slog from the Swift boat. Dan felt his strength ebbing fast, but he had to keep pushing himself onward. His father, the quitter, had not raised a quitter.
They’d come out of the underbrush in time to see Flint and Eisley standing on the pier with men holding guns and the muscular, shirtless “boss” Train had spotted on his last visit there. Dan had seen that both the bounty hunters were covered with mud, Eisley had lost his wig, and an aluminum rowboat floated at the center of the ’gator corral. No telling what they’d been through, but at least they were alive. How long that would be was uncertain. Flint and Eisley had just followed the muscle man toward the house, with the other men — the pistol-bearing “soldiers” — behind them.
“Fella up in that watchtower, leanin’ back in his chair readin’ a … ohhhhh, that naughty fella, him!” Train had aimed the Ruger and was looking through the ’scope. “Got a rifle to his side. Walk’em-talk’em on the floor. Pair of binocs.” He took his eye away from the lens. “We gonna have to cross the open, get us around that ’gator pen.”
“Right.”
“Might try to circle ’round the house. Get up on the platform in back. You with me?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. We go, slow and quiet.”
“Hey, Gault!” Doc called from his lounge chair in front of a large color television set on metal casters. “Look what’s on Oprah today! Talkin’ ’bout crack in the grade schools!”
“Chicago?” Gault didn’t look at the screen. He was busy pumping iron: a thirty-pound barbell in each hand, his biceps swelling up, veins moving under the skin. A light sheen of sweat glistened on his chest and face.
“No, she’s in Atlanta this week.”
“The Samchuk brothers’ll have that market cornered in three years.” Gault kept lifting the barbells up and down with the precision of a machine. “If the Jamaicans don’t kill them first.”
Sitting a few feet away at a wrought-iron table with a blue glass top, a bloody towel pressed to his forearm wound, Flint had a flash of understanding. “Is that what this is about? Drugs?”
“My business,” Gault said. “I supply a demand. It’s no big thing.”
They were on the platform under the striped awning. Pelvis was sitting across the table from Flint, his hands held to his face. In more chairs arranged around Flint and Pelvis sat Mitch and the two other men with pistols. A walkie-talkie and an Ingram machine gun sat on a white coffee table in front of a sand-colored sofa, along with copies of House Beautiful, Vogue, and Soldier of Fortune magazines. Flint had seen on closer inspection Gault’s own house was not so beautiful; it was a prefab job, and the swamp’s humidity had warped the walls like damp cardboard. Some of the joints were splitting apart and had been reinforced with strips of duct tape. Click … click … click: the sound wasn’t coming from Gault’s squeeze-grip, but from the remote control in Doc’s hand. In the five minutes they’d been sitting here, Flint had watched Doc almost incessantly going through what must be hundreds of channels brought in by the satellite dish. Doc would pause to watch quick fragments of things like Mexican game shows, “F Troop,” “The Outer Limits,” professional wrestling, infomercials with a manic little Englishman running around a studio selling cleaning products, “The Flintstones,” MTV videos, ranting, wildeyed preachers, soap operas, and then the remote control would click rapidly again like the noise of a feeding locust. At the most, Doc had a seven-second attention span.
Flint eased the towel away from his wound and winced at the sight. The gash was four inches long, its ragged blue edges in need of fifty or sixty stitches. An inch and a half lower and an artery would have been nicked. Thick blood was still oozing, and he pressed the towel — which Gault had given him from a hamper beside a rack of free weights — back against the wound.
Doc said, “Hey! It’s your man, Flinty! Gault, that’s the killer I let go!”
Flint looked at the television set. Doc had paused at CNN to watch gas bombs dispelling a prison riot, and on the screen was either a mug shot or driver’s license photo of Dan Lambert. “That’s him, right?” He turned the volume up with the remote.
“… bizarre turn in the case of Daniel Lewis Lambert, who is being sought in the slaying of a Shreveport, Louisiana, bank loan manager and had also been wanted in connection with the death of an Alexandria motel owner. Under questioning by Alexandria police last night, the slain man’s wife admitted it was actually she who had beaten her husband to death.” A mug shot of a sullen-looking woman with wild red hair came up on the screen. “Hannah DeCayne told police —”
“Boring!” Doc changed the channel.
“Wait!” Flint said. “Turn it back!”
“Screw you.” “Star Trek” was on now, Kirk and Spock speaking in dubbed Spanish. “Beam me up, Sccccottie!” Doc said excitedly, talking to the television set.
Flint figured the remote control in Doc’s head never stopped clicking. He stared at the blue glass of the tabletop, this news another little ice pick from God in the back of his neck. If Lambert had been telling the truth about the motel owner, then was the murder at the bank an accident or an act of self-defense? If Lambert was such a mad-dog killer, why hadn’t he picked up the pistol and used it at Basile Park? In spite of the situation, in spite of the fact that he knew he and Pelvis were going to die in some excruciating way after Gault finished his workout, Flint had to laugh. He was going to die because he’d gone south hunting a skin who was basically a decent man.
“Something’s funny?” Gault asked, his labor ceasing for the moment.
“Yeah, it is.” Flint laughed again; he felt on the verge of tears, but he laughed anyway. “I think the joke’s on me, too.”
“Who the fuck messed up the kitchen?” Shondra, looking both angry and more than a bit queasy, came through an open sliding glass door, carrying a tray with a plastic pitcher, two paper cups, and frothy brown liquid in a milk-shake glass. She set the tray down between Flint and Pelvis. “There’s all kinda guts and hair in the garbage can, ’bout made me puke! Blood smeared all over the countertop, and somebody left the fryin’ pan dirty! Who the hell did it?”
“Monty,” Mitch said. Evidently Shondra’s wrath was a thing to be feared.
“Well, what’d he fry? A fuckin’ polecat?”
“Fella’s dog there.” Mitch pointed at Pelvis.
“Another one?” Shondra made a disgusted face. “What’s wrong with that fool, he’s gotta be eatin’ dogs and ’coons and polecats?”
“Go ask him, why don’t you?” Doc had torn his eyes away from the television. “I’m tryin’ to watch ‘Dragnet,’ if you’ll keep it down!”
“You’re not watchin’ anything, you’re just burnin’ out that clicker! Gault, why don’t you get rid of him? He makes me so nervous, I’m like to jump outta my skin every time he opens that dumb mouth!”
“Yeah?” Doc sneered. “Well, I know the only thing that has to get stuck in your dumb mouth to shut you up! I was with Gault long before you came along, girlie pearlie, and when he throws you out, I’m gonna kick your little ass back to your white-trash trailer!”
“You … you … you old man!” Shondra hollered, and she picked up the milk-shake glass and reared her arm back, froth flying.
“No,” Gault said quietly, pumping iron again. “Not that.”
She slammed the glass down on the tray, her face a pure image of hell, picked up the plastic pitcher, and flung it at Doc, water splashing everywhere.
“Look what she did!” Doc squalled. “She’s tryin’ to blow the TV out, Gault!”
“And I’m not cleanin’ up that damn mess, neither!” she roared at all of them. “I’m not cartin’ that damn stinkin’ garbage out and gettin’ that mess on me!” Tears of rage and frustration burst from her eyes. “You hear? I’m not doin’ it!” She turned and, sobbing, fled back into the house.
“Your Academy Award’s in the mail, baby!” Doc shouted after her.
Gault stopped lifting the barbells and put them on the floor. He looked at Flint, smiled wanly, and said with a shrug of his thick shoulders, “Trouble in paradise.” Then he drank half of the protein shake, blotted the sweat from his face with the red neckerchief, and said, “Brian, go take the garbage out and clean the kitchen.”
“Why do I have to do it?” Brian had neatly cut light brown hair, wore steel-rimmed glasses, and a chrome-plated revolver sat in a holster at his waist. He looked about as old as a college senior, wearing a sun-faded madras shirt and khaki shorts, black Nikes on his feet.
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