Hit him in the head, I thought, knock his frigging head off — and I threw the rock with all the force I could muster.
It missed him by ten feet, but he heard it go by and spun around jerkily with the automatic swinging up in front of him. I was moving by then, and he saw me and yelled something and fired. I went down, hugged the ground alongside the shed, but the shot was wild, not even close. On hands and knees I scrambled around to the rear, came up and looked through one of the gaps. Nyland was running toward the shed. Even at a distance I could see the wildness in him, the look of a man out of control.
I stumbled around to the other side, dodged out far enough to let him see me again. He fired on the run, as I’d hoped he would, and that one missed badly too. Three shots at McCone, two at me; most automatics had six-bullet clips: one shot left. Maybe.
Back against the shed wall, I yelled at him, “Nyland! You’ll have to kill me too!”
No answer. But I heard him running; he was close to the shed now. I backpedaled fast, jumped over a jumble of rusted pulleys and cables, and ran in a crouch toward the loading dock. Over my shoulder I saw Nyland come into view alongside the shed, saw him slow when he spotted me and raise the gun. I threw myself sideways onto a patch of barren sand; the gun cracked as I landed bouncing and sliding and banged my chin and hand against more abandoned machinery. Another miss. Then I was scrambling around, coming up, and Nyland was a dozen yards away, still running with the gun out at arm’s length.
If I’d been wrong about the number of bullets in the automatic’s clip I would have been a dead man. But I wasn’t wrong. I heard the empty click of the hammer; heard it twice more. I was up on my feet by then, and I saw him hurl the gun away in frustration. But he was still moving, closing the gap between us — hands out in front of his body now, the fingers wiggling like fat white worms. Except for the way his eyes bulged, there was a kind of terrible blank calm about him.
We were both a couple of old military men, which meant we’d both had training in hand-to-hand self-defense, but for all I knew he had superior strength and skill. I wasn’t about to try slugging it out with him.
I could only think of one other thing to do. I started toward him, brandishing my fists like Muhammad Ali coming out of his corner at the bell, yelling, “I’ll smash your face in, Nyland!” Some ten feet separated us. I moved sideways a couple of steps, and he did the same thing, and now there were five feet between us — and I stumbled, grimaced, grunted as if in sudden pain, and clutched my chest and went down hard to my knees. It wasn’t much of an acting job, but he was half out of his head and not alert to tricks: it froze him for an instant, just long enough for me to catch up the short length of warped strap iron I’d been angling for and swing it sideways in the same motion, down low at his legs.
The piece of metal struck him beside the left knee with enough force to knock him off his feet. He cried out, came down hard on his shoulder, and started to roll over. I swung the strap iron again and this time it connected with the side of his head, made a dull crunching noise and came loose from my grip and flew away to one side. But that didn’t matter; I didn’t need it anymore. Nyland had quit moving and was lying on his back with a bloody gash across one temple, his eyes half open and part of the whites showing.
I crawled closer to him, felt his neck: he was still alive. Not that I gave a good goddamn about that at the moment. The way his eyes looked, I’d hit him hard enough to give him a concussion. He wasn’t going to be any more trouble.
Wobbling a little, I got up on my feet and went to where he’d thrown the gun and picked it up on the move, put it into my pocket. The lowering sun was right in my eyes as I ran out past the shed to where McCone lay; the harsh glare of it half blinded me, so that I couldn’t see her clearly until I was just a few feet from her.
She was moving. Making little groaning noises and clawing at the sandy earth, trying to get up.
My knees went weak with relief; I sank down at her side. There wasn’t as much blood on her as I’d imagined from a distance, and I could make out the wound where she’d been shot. It wasn’t in a vital area. Her jeans and blouse were torn in a dozen other places, her skin was scratched, her face and arms were burned raw by the sun, and her lips were split and blood-caked. A feeling of tenderness moved through me; I took hold of her, to help her sit up.
Her body went rigid at my touch. She made an animal sound in her throat and tried to pull away. I said, “Sharon, it’s me, it’s Wolf,” and her head twisted and her eyes focused on me and she said, “Oh my God, Wolf,” in a cracked voice that had disbelief in it, as if she couldn’t quite assimilate the fact that I was actually beside her. She went limp. I hoisted her up onto her left side, held her clinging against me.
After a few seconds she said, “Nyland...”
“Don’t worry about him. He’s out of it now.”
She pulled back from me a little, wincing. “I think he shot me,” she said. “Part of my right side’s numb.”
“He shot you, all right. But it doesn’t look too bad.”
“Where did he—?” She felt herself, clenching her teeth against the pain, and a look of indignant horror spread over her face. “The dirty son of a bitch!” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“He shot me in the ass!”
I couldn’t help it — I burst out laughing. It was a release of tension more than anything else, and once I got started I couldn’t stop. McCone dug her nails into my arm — and then she started to laugh too, painfully but just as crazily.
It was a good thing nobody but Nyland was around. Hanging on to each other the way we were, yukking it up like a couple of deranged hyenas, we must have been some sight to behold.
43: McCone
I was lying on my parents’ living-room couch wearing a long green caftan — the only garment I had with me that was loose enough to be comfortable and still be what my mother deemed “suitable to be seen by a gentleman caller.” I had to rest on my left side because the bullet wound in my right hip hurt like hell, even though it was superficial. My face was gunked up with burn cream and there was red antiseptic smeared on my cuts and scratches. I must have been a sight.
Wolf didn’t seem to mind, however. He sat across from me in my father’s favorite armchair and smiled. “What’s that smell coming from the kitchen?” he asked.
“Crab cioppino. It’s being made in your honor.”
“That’s nice.”
“Well, it is, isn’t it?” The words came out grumpily, and Wolf looked surprised. I grinned to show I wasn’t annoyed with him — a painful smile because my mouth hurt every time I moved it.
I was annoyed with my mother. She’d already come in twice, foisting beers off on Wolf and fluttering and smiling. I knew what was going through her head. She was sizing him up as prospective-husband material, the way she’d been sizing up practically every man I’d so much as spoken to for years. And I was getting sick of it.
I certainly couldn’t feel any annoyance at Wolf, though. He’d saved my life and then had taken charge — getting me to the emergency hospital in Borrego Springs, dealing with the law both there and in San Diego, and when I’d flatly refused to spend the night in the hospital, he’d got me home with a minimum of hassle. When he’d arrived here today, half an hour ago, he’d brought the news that Henry Nyland had confessed to Karyn Sugarman’s murder.