“Usually.”
“Well, I need that world-famous nerves-of-steel pilot at my side, right now. Okay? Is she here?”
“She’s here.”
“Now.” And I held her away from me and gave her a goofy little smile. “Sooner or later in the life of a man having an affair with a married woman, the inevitable occurs.”
She couldn’t help it; she smiled back at me. “Which is?”
“Nate Heller goes out the window.”
And I opened the window — no bars on this prison — and went out first, into the downpour, a splattering, insistent rain that was surprising in its power, my feet sinking into grassy, muddy ground several inches. The window was up off the ground a ways and I held my arms for her to slip down into, as if we were eloping, and then she was in my arms and she blinked and blinked as water drummed her face and she grinned reflexively, saying “Oh my goodness!”
And, as if she were my bride just ushered over the threshold, I eased her onto the sodden ground, where her slippered feet sank in almost to the ankle.
“This is going to be slow going!” I said, having to work to be heard over the driving rain and grumbling sky.
We were between the hotel and the house next door — there wasn’t much space, not much more than a hallway’s worth. So I got in front of her, leading her by the hand; my nine-millimeter was stuck in my waistband. We hadn’t taken more than two soggy steps when the voice behind us cried out. “Hey!”
I looked back, past Amy, and saw him: Ramon, coming out of the outdoor toilet, buckling his pants with one hand and coming at us with the raised billy club in the other. His chubby body charged through the curtain of rain as if it were nothing more than moisture, his sandaled feet making rhino craters in the muddy earth, his eyes wide and dark and brightly animal, like a frightened raccoon’s, only a raccoon would have had sense enough to flee and here Ramon was barreling right toward me, moving faster than a fat man had any right to move, and I pulled Amy back behind me, closer to the street, and thrust myself forward and just as Ramon entered the tunnel between hotel and house, my nine-millimeter slug entered the melon of his head, somewhere in his forehead, lifting the top of his skull in fragments, revealing in a spray of red that Ramon did indeed have a brain, before he tumbled backward, careening off the house next door, then splatting against the hotel, where he slid down its cement surface and sank into the mud like an animal carcass on its way to becoming a fossil.
Amy screamed and I rudely covered her mouth with my hand until her wide eyes and nodding told me she wouldn’t scream anymore and she was trembling and crying as I stood there with a fucking monsoon dripping down my head, saying, “Nobody heard that gunshot, not in this shit... but I gotta go in and deal with the other one!”
“Why?!”
“Because Ramon here can’t take a dump forever. The other one’s gonna go checking on him, and I can’t have that!”
“Are you going to kill him?”
“Not if he’s smart.”
And what were the odds of that?
So I left her there, in the passageway between hotel and house, rain pummeling her as she covered her mouth, her back turned to the horror of what had become of Ramon, and I moved out onto the street and inside the hotel where the burly Chamorro looked around at me, and I swung the nine-millimeter barrel across the side of his skull in a fashion that would not only knock out most any man, but probably fucking kill him.
Only this son of a bitch shook it off, and went for the billy club on the table.
I put a bullet in his ear that wound up going through his reaching hand, as well, though I doubt he felt it. He tumbled onto the rattan table, breaking it in a crunch of shattering straw.
Now he knew how to play Chicago.
Just down the hall, out of the first hotel room door, the Chamorro desk clerk stuck out his mustached face. His eyes were huge.
“He didn’t understand that real cops have guns,” I told him. I went over and reached across the check-in counter and yanked his phone out of the wall. “Do I have to kill you or tie you up or anything?”
He shook his head, no, crossed himself, and ducked back into his room.
Then I ran out into the rain, the nine-millimeter back in my waistband, and Amy came flying out from between the house and the hotel. I slipped my arm around her waist and we ran down the boardwalk. No one was around; the unpaved street next to us was a swamp no vehicle could have navigated. From across the way, in a seedy little bar, came the sound of a gramophone playing a Dorsey Brothers record, “Lost in a Fog,” and Chamorro kids were dancing, boys and girls holding each other close, swaying to the record’s rhythm, ignoring the staccato percussion of the downpour.
When we ran out of boardwalk, the grassy ground provided a terrible soggy glue, but we moved along, stumbling, never quite falling, slowed though not quite caught in this just-poured cement. Through the sheeting rain we glimpsed the concrete cellblocks of the prison, impervious to the pounding storm, then ducked out of the way as a tin roof, flung recklessly by the wind, went pitching across our path, carving a resting place in the face of a wood-frame warehouse. Exchanging startled looks, and grabbing gulps of air, we moved on, pushing past our old friend the sugar king in his park as palm trees bowed down to him.
Then, along the waterfront, we had boardwalk under our mud-coated feet again, and the two-story buildings around us lessened the squall’s impact, though we were heading into the wind, and it took effort just to walk, our clothes so drenched they were heavy, our hair soaked flat to our scalps. A block away yawned the expanse of the Garapan harbor’s concrete dock. We were early, maybe five, maybe ten minutes; would the storm have delayed Johnson? Would it have defeated him entirely, and had I blasted my way out of one dead end and into another?
And with these questions barely posed, bad luck rendered their answers moot.
Because just as we were passing through the hana machi section of the waterfront, where men who were men drank awamori and had their manly needs tended to by faded flowers. Chief Mikio Suzuki and Jesus Sablan, drunk as skunks, came stumbling out of the Nangetsu, after an evening of revelry signifying the chief’s gratitude for his top jungkicho’s earlier display of loyalty.
Only drunks — particularly drunks who were outfitted in new, fresh clothes (even the Chamorro wore fresh white linens) — would have exited in the midst of this tempest, their finery immediately getting saturated.
But these were dangerous drunks, who looking across the liquefied goo of the unpaved waterfront street, recognized us, Amira and Father O’Leary.
And at first Chief Suzuki smiled.
So I smiled and waved and nodded.
But then Chief Suzuki frowned, even in his inebriated state smelling something fishy, not that difficult to do in this part of town, and he shrieked in Japanese at Lord Jesus, who also frowned, and they ran toward us.
We kept moving, too, toward the dock. We were on the boardwalk and the Chief and Jesus were trying to run across a sucking mucky morass. I drew my gun.
“Nathan!” she cried, and I just pulled her along.
“Amira!” the chief yelled. “Leary!”
I looked back at them and they were making progress but we were almost there, almost to where the cement apron of the waterfront led to the jetty itself.
Then a thundercrack that wasn’t a thundercrack startled me and I looked back to see that Suzuki had pulled his gun, I’d forgotten he had one, his suitcoat had been buttoned over it, and I fired back at him. It caught him in the right shoulder but the drunken little bastard barely winced, just shifted his revolver to his other hand and fired again.