The old man was right behind him, bent over, nodding, muttering to Meyer. A wattled old man with a naked polished skull, a soiled blue longsleeved shirt, dark greasy pants, sneakers.
He urged Meyer in, slammed the door behind them with a flip of his elbow, and then, as he straightened to full height, he pushed Meyer roughly ahead of him. Meyer stumbled and nearly went down. I saw the weapon revealed, the one he had been holding against Meyer’s back, four short ugly barrels of a large-caliber derringer. Grizzel stepped over to me and said, “Pull the front of that pretty yellow shirt up, Ace. Slow and easy.”
With the four barrels aimed at my face, I didn’t feel as if I even dared breathe. He lifted the pistol out of my belt with his left hand, squatted, and placed it on the floor, and with the edge of his foot he scuffed it into a corner without looking at it.
I glanced at Meyer. There was going to be no help there. It happens sometimes. I think it is the deep unwavering conviction that life is about to end. It is an ultimate fear, immobilizing, squalid. It crowds everything else out of the mind. There is no room for hope, no chance of being saved. I have seen it happen to some very good men, and most of them did indeed die badly and soon, and the ones who did not die were seldom the same again. Were a man to awaken from sound sleep to the drygourd rattle of a diamondback coiled on his chest, head big as a fist, forked tongue flickering, he would go into that dreadful numbness of the ultimate fright.
“You’ve changed,” I said in a dry-mouthed voice.
“Sit on the floor!” Grizzel said to Meyer. Meyer sat so quickly and obediently he made a thick thudding sound. Grizzel kept his eyes on me. “Down a hundred pounds. Tried to hold at one ninety, but it wouldn’t stop. Something in here, eating on me, Ace. Like fire and knives, all the time. That old fart trying to buy hash for his misery, I put him out of it, and now I got it myself. We got to find some nice quiet way to do you, Ace. Right in the middle of all these boats and folks. Maybe your best buddy in all the world can give me a little help with you.”
“Why me?” I asked.
His eyes were the same. Nothing else. “Why not you? You and Joya fucked up the world for Peter K and yours truly. With Freaky Jean’s help. All my life you smartass people have been on top. It’s my final sworn duty to bring you down, every one of you I can get to, and I have got to a lot so far.”
“Including the Senator?”
“No time for confession hour. Wish I had time to tell you about the snuff job on that movie-queen pal of yours. Would have made a great tape, Ace.” He motioned toward his crotch with his free hand. “Old King Henry here hasn’t lost an ounce, and he can go as good as he ever did. Should have seen Jeanie’s eyes too, when she saw who the hell it was she was talking to, who this skinny old man all bent over, with the whiny voice and limp, who he really was. Strong kid. Fought nice. That’s when it’s best, when you got a fighter.”
“You get around pretty good, pretty quick.”
“Stall, stall, stall. I don’t think I’m going to get any help from your dearest closest buddy here, which is what everybody calls him. Peed his pants. I travel nice, Ace. Good luggage, good clothes, first class all the way. Money came mostly from country stores, where by the time you bust the second finger on them, they tell you what shelf the money is hid on, and it is more than you can imagine. Tried a bike, but the bones of my ass are too close to the surface. These are my working clothes, Ace. Harmless old saggy fart, shuffling around. Lots of wrinkles from the weight dropping off so fast.”
His glance flicked away from me and back again, over and over, so quickly it gave me no chance at all. He was looking the interior over. “What I want you should do, Ace, is let yourself down very very slow and easy. Thaaaaat’s it. Hitch a little bit more toward me. Now lay back nice and slow. Good boy.”
He sidled into the galley, moving with the speed of an angular bug, and emerged instantly with one of my steak knives in his left hand. “You won’t hardly feel this at all, Ace.”
He moved cautiously toward me. Beyond him I saw the padded cover of the stowage locker lift silently, and I saw Gavin stand up, right hand high, holding the throwing knife. I think Grizzel saw a reflection of the movement out of the corner of his eye in one of the lounge ports. And he was quick. My God, he was quick! He swiveled and fired, and the slam of the shot in that enclosed space was deafening. Gavin’s grunt of effort came simultaneously with the shot. There was a silvery glint in the air, and Grizzel dropped with an eerie bony thud. He dropped loose, agawk, open eyes almost immediately dusty, without further breath or quiver, wearing the braided leather grip of the throwing knife in the crenelated socket of his throat, under the loose jowls. The slug had taken Gavin in the center of the chest, banged him back against the bulkhead, and from there he had rebounded to fall face down, heart shredded, toes still hooked over the edge of the locker.
Donnie squatted beside him and laid his fingers on Gavin’s throat. “Goddamn,” he whispered. “Oh, goddamn, goddamn, goddamn.”
I could hear no running outside, no shouts of query, or noises of excitement. The muffled explosion had passed unnoticed.
Donnie placed my Colt carefully on the coffee table. He said, “Just hold tight, huh. I’ll come back with the word.”
Meyer and I were alone with the bodies. He looked up at me with the querulous expression of a child who cannot understand why it has been so punished. Tears ran down his face.
I helped him up and he looked down at Grizzel’s corpse and walked woodenly to the head and closed the door quietly behind him. I heard the water running.
Donnie returned in a half hour. His eyes looked pink and irritated. In his slow and heavy voice he said, “What will happen, it will be a cleaning truck, maybe in three quarters of an hour, and the security will let them in here for a pickup, right? This carpeting is shot. Better you shouldn’t try to get it cleaned. They will take it up and roll them up in it at the same time and horse them out to the truck, and you can forget it from then on. Any stains came through, they’re your problem. Preach don’t want no contact from you.”
“What will they do with them?”
“Usually it’s construction foundations where they go.” He straightened and sighed. “Me, I got to tell his girl he had to go back home to Sydney, Australia, on a family emergency.”
Epilogue
ON AN August afternoon I worked the Busted Flush,into a bayou ringed with mangrove down near the mouth of the Snake River, below Naples. There, like a mother spider, I began building my web of lines, finding good holding ground for anchors, tying off other lines to the sturdiest mangroves, and making allowance for big tides.
A medium hurricane named Carl was due to bash Cuba by midnight, on a course that would carry its diminished muscle up through the Straits of Yucatan. We would get some of the fringe of it, and if it curved back toward the Florida west coast, we might get a hell of a lot more of it than we wanted.
We had plenty of fresh water, fuel, and provisions, and Annie was excited and stimulated by the idea of sitting it out. The afternoon was hazy white, with high tendrils of unusual-looking clouds and some burly rain clouds over the Gulf.
After she had helped me do everything I felt we could do to assure our safety, we went up onto the sun deck and sat under the canopy at the topside controls in the big captain’s chairs where we could watch the weather.
Out of nowhere she said, “I still feel pretty strange about you getting yourself associated with people like that Preach.”
“Who is associated?”
“How about through that Indian person, that Mits?”