What had happened to Rick? To all of them? Rick wasn’t yellow like Heavy, but tonight he had just sort of flipped. Sat there staring at the dead woman’s note to her husband. Julio checked in his pacing. Rick’s face that morning when he had turned Debbie over to them — maybe that had started it. Or maybe it had started months ago, with Rockwell. Then they had been a group, a unit, a whole bigger and stronger than all its parts. But Rockwell, and then Paula Halstead, and Debbie, and...
It was like being on one of those fun-house things that go around and around, faster and faster, and no matter how you try to hang on to one another in the middle of it, you are finally flung off, sliding and clutching impotently, to the periphery.
He had to get out of here. He stopped in front of Rick.
“You sit there and swing your leg and pretend to yourself that you are not afraid. But you are. You are even afraid to shoot.” He turned and walked unsteadily to the kitchen door, where he paused and looked back. “Even me. Even in the back.”
He turned deliberately, and went across the kitchen toward the back door. Face white, lips bloodless, Rick slowly lowered the gun butt back to his knee again. His left leg began a slight uncontrollable twitching.
Heavy reached for another sandwich.
The moon was lower and the fog banks were building up to engulf it; in the air was a bone-deep chill which helped steady Julio. He had expected a slug in the back, he really had, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself. Funny, he felt almost sad about Rick. For this, they were all destroyed. Now that it was too late, he knew that if they had stopped, before any particular piece of violence, they could have ended it. But they had gone on, and now it was too late. For them. For Debbie. For Paula Halstead and Harold Rockwell. For Champ.
Champ cried again, with a broken gagging note like the sound of some animal or something in those doggy jungle movies on TV. Julio left the shadows of the house, walked out across the open toward the base of the bluffs where he knew he would find poor, dumb, busted-up Champ. But not Halstead. That bastard would be long gone.
But as he came under the bushes he heard a voice speaking a bare five yards away. Halstead! Trapped here, under the cliffs! Julio went into a tense crouch, switchblade suddenly open in his hand, and went on.
“Easy, son,” Curt was saying in the voice of a man gentling a horse. “I had a tough time getting down from that cliff. Now I—”
Julio went in like a ferret from behind, his knife sweeping up in a short vicious loop at Curt’s kidneys. But he was too eager, or he uttered a sound of anticipation, or the failing moonlight was deceptive. Curt rolled forward and up and around, facing him, and Julio’s blade stabbed only air.
But Halstead still was trapped in this small clearing, and Julio’s teeth showed in a grin by the dim, filtered moonlight. He began sliding forward.
Curt spoke in a voice oddly steady. “Your friend is very badly hurt. I think his back is broken. But he may survive if I can get help here in time. Let’s—”
Julio laughed outright. Afraid of the steel, Halstead was; truly, the knife made a giant of him who had it. Champ, on the ground two yards away, moaned fitfully. A ragged wasp of cloud deadened the moonlight even more. Julio heard Champ, had heard Curt’s words, but none of it was even registering. All that registered was that Curt was still backing away from him, and to Julio, that meant fear.
“I am going to kill you,” Julio hissed.
A change took place in the grease-smeared face facing him, but it was not the change he had expected. Tenor did not enter it, but instead a... well, almost a sort of pleasure. Halstead’s right hand went behind him, reappeared with a deadly-looking twin-edged blade, dull black so it caught no moonlight.
“Don’t try it, son. I forgot about it with your friend here, up on the cliff, but I was fighting with this knife before you were born.”
A tiny finger, almost of fear, touched the back of Julio’s neck; but then he leaped forward, slashing up and across and back with the half-clumsy technique of the street fighter who has seldom faced another man’s knife, and who has fought only with others as unskilled as he. Curt whipped his blade at the boy’s knuckles, to cut the tendons and disarm him. But the moonlight was almost extinguished by the fog, and he wasn’t sure where he had connected. Probably just a superficial cut.
Julio fetched up beside Champ, turning back toward Curt with an almost wooden expression on his face. “Hey, what...” he began.
“Look,” said Curt, “I can take you, kid, and I will. Stop...”
Julio took one step toward him and tell face-forward to the ground. Curt waited, milking sure it wasn’t a trick. Actually, it had to be a trick; the most he had done was slash, not stick. But Julio gave no hint of movement. Then the fitful moon emerged for a second, and Curt saw that Julio’s switchblade lay a yard from his curled fingers.
With a muttered exclamation. Curt went in, dropped to a knee, turned the boy over. Dark sightless eyes stared far beyond his — as Paula’s had at the dressing table, as the sentry’s had in his nightmares, as many men’s had during the war. He sighed wearily, and stood up. He wiped his blade on his sweater, and put it away.
He had missed the knuckles but bad gotten the wrist, where the radial artery is a bare quarter-inch below the skin. Julio had been unconscious in thirty seconds, dead in two minutes. But even as Curt felt the shock and revulsion at this senseless death, the thought came through his mind, unbidden: For an old sod, Halstead, you haven’t lost too much of the old speed, have you?
It was gone as soon as it had come, but it left behind it a taste in the mouth like vomit. He looked down at the two victims: the dead and the maimed. Madness. And two more to go? he thought furiously to himself. No. This was the end, the finish. Predators? If only he had arrived a few seconds earlier the night of Rockwell’s blinding, or had been there when they had come for Paula, none of this...
But perhaps, he realized, only on the long tortuous road he had traveled since her death had he learned that threat and force and fear could only be met by similar threat and force and fear. As Curtis Halstead, professor, he would have temporized, appeased, reasoned — and would have been destroyed. Perhaps only as Curtis Halstead whose roots reached back to the violence of the desert campaign was he able to...
He shook off the thoughts. It was over now, finished; leave the other two to Monty Worden’s ministrations, or to whatever private demons they might carry within them. If any. He removed his heavy sweater, laid it over Champ, and felt his pulse. Light and fast from shock, but steady. He might make it, if Curt could get help in time.
Only when he stood beside the VW in the fog, which now swirled thickly and made everything ghostly and dark and wet, did he realize he had lost his car keys. Now what? He didn’t know how to cross ignition wires to start a car, had no way of knowing where or when the keys had gone. Only one thing for it.
He started trudging slowly through the fog toward San Conrado, ten miles distant, his cracked ribs stabbing at every breath, shivering with the cold now that his sweater was gone. And with the fog, there was a good chance, he knew, that he would have to walk the entire distance.
Chapter 31
Sagging the ancient couch beneath his bulk, Heavy wondered how long Julio had been gone. Sure, the screams had stopped, but the silence was even more scary in its way. As long as there were screams, that meant somebody was alive out there. Alive. His moon face puckered; a great racking belch snored up from his belly. “Ah, Rick, how long you figure before Julio comes back?”