Pittler looked back up at the silence at the top of the slope. He stood very still, listening. Then he began to walk carefully, slowly, across the floor of the cenote toward the body and the gun.
I should have put the pellet from the little gun into his right ear. It would have made a lot more sense. I put it into the meat of his right thigh. It made a pitiful snapping sound. He hissed with pain, fired two shots into the cave, and went on a hobbling, skipping run, faster than I would have believed possible, over to the bulwark of boulders and vaulted into the shelter behind them.
He knew he had been ambushed, and he had reacted swiftly and decisively. He had made the right moves. So he was in shelter now, waiting for what might come next, not knowing that Meyer was looking down at him from hiding.
He yelled a question in Spanish. Before I could motion back to her to be still, Barbara answered it in kind.
“For God’s sake!” he cried. “Willy’s damn woman. Barbara, honey, what have you got against old Evan?”
“You killed William!”
“Talk sense, honey. William got sick and tired of you. You were just a little bit too dark-colored for him. What I did, I helped him get back to the States, that’s all. He’s probably dating some little redheaded gal by now. Come on out and we’ll talk it over.”
“And maybe talk over your big house near Playa del Carmen, eh? And the name you have there? The Mr. Roberto Hoffmann who lives so quietly?”
There was a silence. Finally he said, “I’m very sorry you had to say that, Barbara. Very sorry. It means you’re going to stay right here in this hole forever. I can’t let you get away. Did Willy tell you? When he told me he hadn’t told anyone at all, I believed him.”
“What did you do to him?”
“I chunked him on the head, wired him to a lot of lead, and rolled him over the side of the boat. I guess in a way, honey, it was my fault. I went hunting too close to home. I didn’t think until later on that after it was in the paper Evan Lawrence was dead, I’d have to stay nervous about him coming across me some day. Now Evan Lawrence can stay dead. No problem.”
“No problem except me?”
“Except you and Juan.”
“And me,” I called to him.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked, with a small break in his voice.
“I’m here to ask you about Isobelle Garvey, Larry Joe. You recall her. Over near Cotulla, a long time ago. You buried her in the gravel, but floodwaters washed her out. Little bit of a thing. Too young for you. Didn’t matter to you how young.”
“I know that voice,” he said. “Say some more.”
“Sure, Jerry. Did you watch Doris Eagle burn up that night near Ingram?”
There was a long silence. “McGee?” he said, his voice not as audible as before. “Is that you, McGee?”
“I’m McGee. The problem is finding out who you are.”
“I’m not any of those names you said. I’m not Jerry Tobin or Larry Joe Harris.”
“I didn’t mention their last names, pal.”
“I’m not them, and I’m not Bill Mabry in Montana, or Carl Keith in Pasadena, or Max Triplett in Shreveport. I’m not any of those. They’re gone, all of them. You don’t understand. I’m Bob Hoffmann and I live near here. I live a quiet life down here in Yucatan. I don’t have to worry about anything down here. You wouldn’t understand how it is.”
“Just the way Norma didn’t understand.”
“Didn’t we have a good time that night, McGee? That was a great evening aboard your houseboat, it really was. I can remember, because I can still remember being Evan Lawrence. And he really loved that woman. When he first started making love to her she was cold as a fish. She was scared. She couldn’t let herself go. But when Evan finally taught her to let herself go, she was a treasure. She was just about the all-time best. Evan was in hog heaven with that woman. When she was gone, he was gone. Is that so hard to understand?”
And he punctuated his question with a shot that clanged off the side of the old rusty iron kettle and ricocheted into my corner of the cave, smacked the wall near my temple, and stung me with rock dust. It set a few dozen bats to squeaky complaining. He had worked it all out while talking, guessing where I was from my voice. A trick-shot artist. I could see the small shiny groove in the red rust where the bare metal was exposed. Elementary logic told me that were I to move to where I could not see the kettle, the trick wouldn’t work. I had a new load in the toy rifle. I dropped and edged to where an upjut of rock protected my head, but from where I could see, through a narrow chink, most of the rock jumble behind which he was hiding.
With the aid of some spit which I chewed into my dry mouth, I made a delayed bubbling moan. Barbara screamed and came running to me. I pushed her out of harm’s way and whispered, “I just died.”
“You killed him!” she yelled dramatically. “You killed McGee!”
I don’t think it impressed Pittler, but it got to Meyer. “Cody Pittler!” he yelled. “Cody T. W Pittler, look at me! You killed Coralita and you killed your own father who loved you. You killed Bryce Pittler. Look at me!”
There was the chunky little bam of the shotgun, and there were two snappy shots from Cody’s handgun, and I saw the shotgun slide out of the brush at the top of the slope and fall through the sunlight, turning slowly, to clatter onto the rock below. My heart emptied. Poor Meyer. Friendship had brought him to the Busted Flush at just the right time for Dirty Bob to steal his pride and his sense of himself as a man. And now the fates and friendship had brought him to this sinkhole in the Yucatecan woodland to die at the hands of a madman-a very quick and able madman.
Pittler scampered out of hiding, ran to the shotgun and snatched it up, and ran back, limping badly. I tried a shot and knew as I pulled the trigger that I had missed him. I reloaded.
Pittler cursed, and I guessed he had discovered the limited possibilities of the new weapon. No possibilities at all, actually, except as a club. One used shell in the chamber.
Pittler yelled, much louder than was necessary. “My old man lives in Eagle Pass, Texas. Nobody killed him. Hear me? He ain’t dead, God damn it! Don’t try stuff like that.”
“You’ve got your head all messed up, Cody!” I called. “You don’t know who you are. You did that playacting in school and you forgot who you’re supposed to be. You’re crazy. Stick that gun in your mouth and save us the trouble.”
He made an unintelligible howling sound, a ululation of pain and rage. And my eye caught movement above him, way up at ground level. It was Meyer, moving slowly from right to left. It was a blundering walk, and he was grasping small trees to pull himself along. He turned toward me, and he wore the mask of the young people who do pantomime in the streets. One half of his face was white, the other red, in an almost even division. And he smiled a ghastly smile.
I began talking loudly to Pittler to cover the sound Meyer had to be making, up there over his head. I told him he was a sick vulture, living on dead women. I told him lots of good things like that. And slowly, step by step, Meyer came out toward the lip of the overhang. Two small trees grew near the brink: Meyer grasped one in each hand, standing between them. And then, heavily, solemnly, he began to jump up and down. Three times. I ran to the mouth of the cave and aimed at the big boulders that hid Pittler, hoping to get him if he tried to run for it.
Somebody belted me on the outside of my upper left arm, just below the point of the shoulder, with a tack hammer. The arm was suddenly very tired. It sagged and I kept aiming and holding the gun with my right hand. Right after Meyer’s third jump there was a grating sound, and then the whole landscape up there tilted and came down, gaining speed. Tons of rock and dirt and trees and roots and bushes. A vast piece of layer cake. A chunk of eternity. Meyer held to the two trees and rode it down. It filled and obliterated the area where Pittler crouched. When it hit bottom, Meyer was at a forty-five-degree angle, leaning forward. The impact jolted him loose and flung him forward on his face, and the spill of loose earth then covered him to the waist. His face was in the slow creek.