Then the limb gave way beneath the deer blind and Ed began falling. Stone got off a round before the limb struck him, but he had no idea if he’d hit anything. He took the limb across the back of his neck and went down and, for a few seconds, out.
The noise made Primmy look around, and the first thing she saw was a naked man holding a tube of something. “Carly, run!” she shouted.
“Run where?” Carly asked, sitting up. Then she saw the man, too, and a second man joined him. “Where the hell is Ed?”
They heard a great creaking sound as a branch snapped off a tree near the porch. The twins spun around and stared.
Primmy saw her chance and sprang for the door, landing on the floor, within reach of the shotgun. Carly was right behind her, grabbing her handgun. “Freeze!” Primmy yelled, in her best TV-show shout. The twins backed up against the porch railing and stared at them both. Then, as one man, they turned, grabbed the porch railing and vaulted over it into space.
The women ran to the railing, their weapons before them, and looked down. What they saw was a tangle of male bodies, two of them naked and bleeding, Stone looking shaken and dazed. Ed Rawls was struggling to get the twins off of him and to pry his rifle from under them.
“Freeze!” Primmy yelled again. But no one took any notice of her. She and Carly watched.
“We can’t fire,” Carly said. “Who’s who?”
“The twins are naked,” Primmy said, “that’s all I know, but I don’t have a shot.”
Stone was able to sit up now, and was observing the scene as a stream of blood ran from his scalp, down his forehead, and into his eyes. He grappled for his handgun in its shoulder holster and got it out while wiping at his eyes with his free hand. Finally he could see a little. He looked up and saw two naked women standing on the porch, holding weapons. “Shoot somebody!” he shouted.
“Who?” Primmy shouted back.
“Somebody naked. You’ve got the angle!”
Primmy brought up the shotgun, racked the slide, pointed it down, then turned her head away, closed her eyes, and fired. The noise was horrific.
Ed was crawling away from the twins as fast as he could, dragging his rifle.
Stone could see out of one eye now. He raised his handgun to aim at something.
One of the twins stood, his back to a porch piling. He cupped his hands in front of him, making a stirrup, and shouted at his brother, “Up! Get the shotgun!”
Stone raised his gun and snapped off two shots in their general direction, then rubbed at his blocked eye. He had never been a great shot with a handgun, and he was going to need both eyes, if he wanted to hit something.
“Stone!” Rawls shouted. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
Stone leaned against the tree and groped for a handkerchief.
“Don’t shoot any more, anybody. You might hit me!” Ed shouted again. He was on his feet now and was aiming his rifle at the twins, who had collapsed into a heap at the foot of the piling.
Stone could see now. “Ed, don’t finish them off!” he shouted.
“Why the hell not?” Rawls said, walking up to them with the rifle. “One each in the head will do it.”
“Look at them, Ed. They’re dead!”
“Dead my ass,” Rawls replied. “They don’t die that easy.”
Stone walked over to the pile, holding his gun before him. “Then get a pulse.”
Ed bent over and felt at the neck of one, then of the other.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “They’re both dead, but how?”
Stone helped him and they pulled the twins apart. One had a bullet wound in his back at the base of his neck, the other a wound in the chest.
“How many shots did you fire?” Rawls asked.
“Two, I think, but I don’t think one of them hit anything. I couldn’t see very well.”
“Give me a hand,” Rawls said, taking an arm and hoisting. Stone helped, and he and Rawls lifted the body. “There,” Rawls said. “You killed them both with one round.”
Rawls let the body go, took out his hunting knife and walked to the wooden support and dug into it with the blade. A moment later, he had a slug in his hand. “What are you firing?”
“Nine millimeter,” Stone replied.
“See if the one with the slug in his chest has an exit wound.”
Stone rolled him over. “No,” he said.
“Well, at the shooting range, that shot would have won you a big, fuzzy, pink rabbit.”
Then Primmy was standing next to Stone, still naked, dabbing at his scalp with a cloth soaked in vodka. “Here,” she said, taking his empty hand and pressing it to his head, “hold that in place while I get another cloth.”
Rawls shouted up at the porch. “Carly!” he yelled. “Throw me down a couple of blankets.”
“Will beach towels do?”
“Yes!”
She dropped the towels over the railing, and Rawls began the job of wrapping up the bodies and securing them with duct tape from his bag.
“I saw some leaf bags in the barn,” Rawls said to her. “Get me four of them, will you?”
Carly disappeared.
Primmy came back, wearing clothes now, with another towel and some big Band-Aids and cleaned up Stone, while Ed and Carly got the bodies into the double leaf bags.
“There’s not much cleaning up to do,” Rawls said. “They both died instantly, so they didn’t bleed much.” He kicked dirt over what was on the ground.
“Stone, let’s get these into your car and down to my boat,” Rawls said. “The sun will be setting in half an hour. You ladies clean up the inside of the house and the porch. Tomorrow, I’ll come by and patch that bullet hole in the porch support, and we’ll be clear.”
Stone and Rawls got the bagged corpses into the back of the MG and moved them over to Rawls’s dock, where they loaded them into the boat.
“You’re going to need some help dumping them,” Stone said.
“No, I’ve got enough iron and chain around here to handle it. You make sure our crime scene is in order, and then get the girls home. I’ll take care of everything here. Oh, and give me your gun.”
Stone handed it to him. “Nice piece, but it has to go into the bay with the bodies.”
“Thank you, Ed,” Stone said.
“For what? You did all the shooting.”
Back at Stone’s house, everybody had a drink.
“Did everything go as planned?” Dino asked.
“No,” Stone said, “but there was a happy ending. You knew about this, didn’t you?”
“They made me promise not to tell you,” Dino said. “They said if you knew, you wouldn’t let them do it.”
“It wasn’t an entirely unhappy experience,” Primmy said, and Carly laughed a lot.
58
The following morning, while the others were packing the Ford, Stone drove over to Ed Rawls’s house. To his surprise, both gates stood open. Stone paused long enough to be identified on a monitor, then drove in and parked.
Ed and Sally were lazing on the front porch, sharing the Times. “Hey,” Ed said.
“What’s with the open gates?” Stone asked. “I’ve never seen that before.”
“Today there is no threat,” Rawls replied, then took a pencil from behind his ear and wrote something on the crossword.
“Have the packages been disposed of?” Stone asked.
Rawls lifted an eyebrow. “What packages?”
Stone nodded. “We’re off to New York this morning,” he said. “We’re going to drop Carly at the New Haven airport to pick up her car and get packed, then she’s driving to the city. She starts tomorrow morning at Woodman & Weld.”