Carlos stood frozen.
Sammy shot him three times: once in the leg-he had been aiming for Carlos’s groin and missed by half an inch-once in the stomach, and once in the chest.
The two men left him for dead.
Carlos McDaniel didn’t hear the sliding door close behind the two men. He was concentrating on the ocean of pain that had suddenly invaded his life. He hurt. The pain was deep-a fundamental thing that could not be ignored-and blackness was coming. He was already graying out.
His hand moved, touched the widening pool of blood soaking into the old carpet beside him. He brought it to his stomach and traced five letters.
He pulled his finger away and looked at it. There was a tiny speck of green in all the red.
Duckweed, he thought, because for some reason he couldn’t speak, and then the blackness rolled over him and carried him away.
Carlos McDaniel was either a fortunate or unfortunate man, depending upon one’s point of view.
He was unfortunate to be in the path of the two-man tornado which was composed of a couple of Brooklyn hoodlums named Sammy “The Gootch” Rosario and Victor Cicchese.
Carlos was fortunate in that he initially survived the tornado. The three muffled reports were heard by a man named Charles Lyman, who was walking the power-line cut on the north side of the property that had the idyllic little lake and the cabin. It was the last property on the line, and when he was done he was supposed to turn around and head back. But there was a little glade near the end of the line where it was his custom to stop and have a smoke before returning. Lyman was grinding the spent cigarette butt into the earth near all the others that he’d smoked at the spot over the last twelve years when he heard the reports. He was two hundred yards away and instantly knew what the sounds were.
A person can hear all kinds of things when walking through the east and central Texas woods. A gun going off is not uncommon. It was, however, an uncommonly hot day and the only game in season at the moment was the kind of game that was always in season: rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, and other varmints that weren’t worth shooting in 105-degree weather. Moreover, these shots had come from indoors. A gun being fired indoors has a peculiar and particular sound to it. Most of the noise rattles around inside, crossing and recrossing itself, and consequently has a distinctive muffled, and yet hollow, rattle quality to it.
Charles Lyman ducked through the brush and a barbed-wire fence and was behind the cabin within a minute after the last shot was fired. A pair of ducks had taken to the air and were beating their wings hell for leather to the south, just disappearing over the line of trees past the lake.
Glancing out from around the rear corner of the house, well hidden by brush, he saw two men walking back down the lane toward the main gate and the road beyond. They wore business suits.
It was hot, powerfully so, but the blood in Charles Lyman’s veins felt as though it had been transfused with ice.
He stepped around the side of the house with the lake, away from the two departing men, stepped up onto the porch from the side, peered through the window, and saw a man who was busy dying.
It took thirty minutes for the ambulance to arrive from town. During that time he had resuscitated the dying young man three times.
The EMTs, when they did show up, would have bet against Carlos McDaniel. The odds were too long and the kid had lost an ungodly amount of blood. They went to work in earnest. They were both veterans who had seen their measure of curtain calls.
There was severe internal bleeding, the kid’s pulse was thready, and according to the grisly-looking gas company fellow who had called them, he’d been repeatedly pulled back from the grave.
The representative from the Brazos County Sheriff’s Department arrived as the kid’s gurney was being loaded into the ambulance.
The deputy didn’t have time to say “howdy.” He walked up as the kid was trundled past, took a snapshot picture of him with his eyes, fished a pocket notebook out, and wrote one word on it: Linda. It must have been a hell of an effort making those letters in his own blood on his stomach, he thought.
“Don’t wash that name off his stomach, fellas,” he said. “Take a picture of it. Especially if he… doesn’t make it. Where you fellas takin’ ’im?”
“To meet the life-flight chopper.”
“Oh. Where’s he going to from there?”
“God only knows. Excuse us, officer.” The younger of the two paramedics hopped down from the truck and closed the door behind him. “Gotta go,” he said.
“See ya,” the deputy said.
Charles Lyman was sitting on the porch of the cabin looking out onto the still duck pond. There was a half-ring of floating landscaping timbers out there tied end-to-end. One end of the daisy chain was anchored to the opposite shoreline and the closest end was lodged in the mud on the nearby bank.
“That’s what he was doing,” Lyman said.
The deputy wheeled around.
“What?”
Lyman pointed.
The deputy glanced away, quickly, and then back to the man sitting there. It was difficult to look away from him. He was a craggy-looking fellow, mid-fifties, with sparse, rustcolored hair and large freckles all over him. He wore a dark blue jumpsuit with some kind of logo embroidered on the chest. But none of these things were as notable as the amount of drying blood covering the man. His hands were two dark red gloves. His arms, chest, and face were spattered with it. And he just sat there, looking toward the lake.
“He was skimming the lake when they came along,” the blood-covered man said. “He was in his birthday suit and was still wet. He had duckweed all over him.”
“You’re the fella that saved his life. Lyman, right?”
“Not if he don’t make it, I ain’t. Yeah, I’m Lyman.”
“Okay,” the deputy said. “My name’s Ralph Bigham. We need to talk.”
Charles Lyman looked at the deputy, then back toward the lake. “Have a seat,” he said.
Carlos McDaniel gave up the ghost three days later. When he went, his hand was gripped by that of his new best friend, the craggy-faced angel who was there whenever his eyes opened, swimming into focus when consciousness slowly yet inexorably returned.
“Who’s Linda?” the angel asked him.
Carlos blinked, smiled, and uttered the name in a whisper: “Linda Sneed.”
Two weeks later, when he got the word that the case had been closed on the shooting, Charles Lyman left his job with Central Texas Gas. At ten minutes till five, he stuck his head in the air-conditioned substation office in the little town of Kurten, Texas, and told the foreman he wasn’t coming back. The foreman-a forgettable fellow named Seth Sweet-shrugged at the closed door, lit another cigarette, and turned back to his weekly report.
“Politics, that’s why,” Ralph Bigham told him.
“Politics?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t look good to have open files, so it’s easier to close them.”
“I’ll be damned,” Charles Lyman said.
“Tell me about the two men again,” Ralph Bigham said before the other fellow could start losing his temper.
“One was big,” Lyman replied. “He looked like a big scoop of muscle and a dollop of fat poured into a suit, but he walked sort of like a penguin. The other guy was shorter and slim. Their backs were to me.”
“What do you think all of this is about?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I found something you missed.” Charles dropped the leather binder on the cafe tabletop.
Carlos McDaniel’s Day-Timer business calendar contained the details of his appointments for the six months leading up to the shooting. Bigham leafed through it. There were upcoming real estate showings, open houses, closings, and appointments scattered throughout. There was nothing for the weeks previous to the shooting that seemed to amount to anything, but then, leafing his way back, he saw one entry all by itself: L.S. Littlefield.