He climbed out, wondering if he might be making a mistake not to get the gun he had hidden in the room.
“All clear,” she whispered. He kept to the deep shadows. When he reached the corner of the house and looked around, he saw that the parking apron was also lighted. The long car glinted in the light. He held the keys tightly to prevent them making any sound. A man was walking slowly across the apron toward the back of the house. When he was silhouetted against the light, Cooper recognized Susler’s battered profile, heavy shoulders.
Susler had the look of a man taking an evening stroll. He stopped and cracked a light from a kitchen match with his thumbnail. The flare lit up his face for a moment. He shook the match out and threw it aside. He stood for a moment, and then walked directly toward the corner where Cooper hid. Cooper pulled his head back and stood up. He knew that as soon as Susler rounded the corner, he’d see his outline against the floodlighted sand of the beach. He stifled an impulse to run and waited, barely breathing.
Susler’s measured step grew closer, his heels audible above the muted crash of the waves a hundred yards away. Cooper moved away from the house to give himself room to swing. He shortened his grip on the weighted nylon. Susler rounded the corner, made a grunt of sudden surprise which mingled with the hard thud of the heavy jar striking the top of his head. Susler staggered, put one hand out against the corner of the house, and straightened like a man with a heavy load on his back.
Cooper struck again, harder than before. Again Susler caught himself by grasping the corner of the house. Cooper had the nightmare feeling that he could not strike hard enough to batter the man down. He took a half step back, held the nylon at the very end and swung it in a whistling arc. Susler went down with all the shocking speed of a window shade pulled loose from the roller.
Cooper knelt and touched the man’s head. He felt the nauseating looseness of shattered bone under the scalp. He wiped his fingers on Susler’s jacket, and noted that Susler’s feet were still out in the light. He got the heavy man by the wrists and pulled him back into deep shadow. He searched the man twice before convincing himself that Susler was unarmed. The fallen man’s breathing grew sharper and more shallow and then faded off into a whistling sigh that was lost in the sound of the waves. Cooper could find no pulse.
Once again he looked around the edge of the building. Three cars stood silent under the light. He ran to the convertible, crouching as he ran. He opened the door and crawled in onto the floor beside the driver’s seat. He dared not shut the door behind him. By sense of touch he located the keyhole and the ignition key. He inserted it and turned it.
His nostrils were filled with the smell of leather upholstery, floor dust and rubber matting. He crouched in the darkness like a wary animal and tried to still his breathing.
He waited in the shadowed darkness until his legs grew cramped. She had failed. She was not coming. He slid up onto the seat and over behind the wheel. The gate man had been prepared by Carla. He would let the car go through. And that was all he had to know.
He put his thumb on the starter button, without pushing it, and measured the turn-around space with his eye. Yes, he could make it in one fast swing. Then, even if the guard didn’t open the gate, the car was big enough to smash through it and sturdy enough to keep running. If the impact stopped it, he could leap out and run across the short causeway and lose himself in the swamps on the other side.
Cooper sat rigidly for a long time. He took his thumb from the starter, and put his hand on the door button. He opened the door and stepped out. The breeze stirred his hair and cooled the sweat on his forehand. He went back the way he had come, stepping over Susler’s invisible body, sliding down along the shadows to the window. Carla hadn’t closed it. He grasped the sill, pulled himself up and slid over onto the floor of the room. The closet was four steps away. He found the grill in the darkness, stuck the fingers of both hands through the holes in the grill and wrenched hard. One screw pulled loose. He bent it down, reached up, found the cold metal of the gun.
Time moved on parallel tracks and at this moment he had reached a point of intersection. In one time he stood in the closet of Carla Hutcheon’s house, and in another time he stood on the jungle floor in the heavy gloom, motionless, a gun cool in his hand while ten feet away on the trail he heard the sucking sound of the boot-steps of the patrol in the yellow clay, the clink and jangle of equipment, the flat song of the commands. In both time tracks the sweat prickled in the stubble of hair on his neck.
When, long ago, the patrol had passed, he had slipped into a mindlessness that cancelled memory until, weeks later, he started to recover in the ward of the general hospital in Calcutta. And now, due to that flaw he could sense in himself, he stood on the edge of the same pit of darkness. He was like a man who concealed from others a mortal wound.
He walked with no attempt at stealth to the door, opened it and went into the corridor. At the end of the corridor he could see the gold-hued lamplight of the main room of the house, hear the murmur of voices.
The corridor seemed without end. He walked down the corridor and came out into the lounge and stopped, the gun held rigidly in front of him with the awkwardness of a child who plays with a cap gun for the first time.
Chapter 5
Bullets Unrationed
His eyes swept across the room. The scene was graven on his mind with frozen clarity. He sensed the unreality of it — as though it were a scene in memory rather than a picture of here and now. Like awakening with the guilt-sense of drunkenness on the previous evening, remembering little, then having one scene leap into vividness in the mind — a scene separate and apart, with no memory of how it came to be and no memory of how it ended.
As he appeared conversation had ceased. All of them stared at him. Schanz sat on a deep windowseat, hands locked around one knee, smoke from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth a grey ceilingward line, eyes calm, dead, unstartled.
Billy Lemp sat with a half deck of cards in his left hand, a single card in his right hand, poised to drop it, face up, onto the cards in front of Rocko. His narrow face was vulpine and white in the light. The card he held was a four of diamonds.
Two of the strangers sat side by side on the deep couch. Hard, competent, watchful, red-brown from sun and sea. Close-cropped hair and wide blocky faces. Another one of the same cut sat at the card table on Rocko’s right, heavy lips spread in a childish uncomprehending grin. The fourth stranger stood behind Rocko. His was not a peasant face like the others. It was a lean, knotted face, whip-twisted with the experience of years of strain, of intrigue. Carla had said there were five. Only four were in the room. Cooper had the feeling that the fifth stood a pace behind him, smiling.
Carla was in a deep armchair, slumped to one side, her cheek pillowed on the arm, one hand hanging limp so that half-curled fingers rested on the rug. Her eyes were closed.
It was Barbara, facing Rocko, her back to the corridor entrance, who was the first to move. She turned stiffly and looked at Cooper. Her face held the stiff dignity of the very drunk. Her eyes were solemn and glassy.
“Enter Mr. Cooper,” she said thickly, “Pride of the Marines, or the FBI, or the Immigration Service or the Narcotics Bureau or something. Sorry, friend. Couldn’t get out of here to go fix up that raid.”
“Put your hands up,” Cooper said. No one moved.
Rocko said, “Cooper? Cooper? What you say, sweet darling? Is not Cooper. Is old friend. Allan Farat. In the morning he digs hole for himself and for dronk blondie.”