I felt jets of acid fire in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if I would ever get used to facing gunpoint, and then I wondered if that was really anything to aspire to. I wanted to tic just for the hell of it, but at the moment I couldn’tlignk of anything.
“I just remembered something Frank once said about you, Lionel.”
“What’s that?” I slowly lowered one hand and offered her the lit cigarette, but she shook her head. I dropped it on the lighthouse deck and ground it under my shoe instead.
“He said the reason you were useful to him was because you were crazy everyone thought you were stupid.”
“I’m familiar with the theory.”
“I think I made the same mistake,” she said. “And so did Tony, and Frank before that. Everywhere you go, somebody who Gerard wants dead is made dead. I don’t want to be next.”
“You think I killed Frank?”
“You said we’re the same age, Lionel. You ever watch Sesame Street?” she said.
“Sure.”
“You remember the Snuffleupagus?”
“Big Bird’s friend.”
“Right, only nobody could see him except Big Bird. I think the giant’s your Snuffleupagus, Lionel.”
“Shockadopalus! Fuckalotofus! The giant is real, Julia. Put the gun away.”
“I don’t think so. Step back, Lionel.”
I stepped back, but I pulled out Tony’s gun as I did it. I saw Julia’s fingers tighten as I raised it to her, but she didn’t fire, and neither did I.
We faced one another on the lighthouse rail, the vast sky dimming everywhere and perfectly useless to us, the ocean’s depths useless, too. The two guns drew us close together and rendered the rest irrelevant-we might as well have been in a dingy motel room, with an image of Maine playing on the television set. My moment had come at last. I had a gun in my hands. That it was trained not on Gerard or the giant or Tony or a doorman but on the girl from Nantucket who’d grown into Frank Minna’s bruise-eyed widow, who’d chopped off her hair and tried to retreat to her waitress past and instead been cornered by that same past, by Gerard and the giant and Tony-I tried not to let it bother me. I’d been wrong, Julia and I had nothing in common. We were just any two people who happened to be pointing guns at one another now. And Tony’s gun had object properties all its own, not a fork nor a toothbrush but something much weightier and more seductive. I slipped off the safety with my thumb.
“I understand your mistake, Julia, but I’m not the killer.”
She had both hands on the gun, and it didn’t waver. “Why should I trust you?”
“TRUST ME BAILEY!” I had to scream it into the sky. I turned my head, bargaining with my Tourette’s that I could let the one phrase fly and then be done. I tasted salt air as I screamed.
“Don’t scare me, Lionel. I might shoot you.”
“We’ve both got that same problem, Julia.” In fact my syndrome had just discovered the prospect of the gun, and I began to obsess on pulling the trigger. I suspected that if I fired a shot out into the sky in the manner of my verbal exclamation, I might not survive the experience. But I didn’t want to shoot Julia. I flicked on the safety, hoped she didn’t notice.
“Where do we go from here?” she said.
“We go home, Julia,” I said. “I’m sorry about Frank and Tony, but the story’s over. You and me, we made it through alive.”
It was only a slight exaggeration. The story would be over at some secret moment in the next few hours or days when something found Gerard Minna, a bullet or blade that had been searching for him for almost twenty years.
Meanwhile, I flicked the safety back and forth, impelled, counting. At five I stopped, temporarily satisfied. That left the safety off, the gun ready to shoot. My fingers were unbearably curious about the trigger’s action, its resistance and weight.
“Where’s your home, Lionel? Upstairs from L and L?”
“Saint Vengeance Home for Bailey,” I ticced.
“Is that what you call it?” said Julia.
Before my finger could pulse on the trigger the way it craved to I flung the gun out toward the ocean with all the force of my overwound-watchspring body. It sailed out past the rocks, but the tiny splash of its disappearance into the sea was lost in the wind and the ambient crash of the surf.
One, I counted.
Before Julia could calculate the meaning of my action I darted as if for an elusive shoulder and grabbed the muzzle of her gun, then twisted it out of her hand and hurled with all the strength in my legs, like a center fielder deep at the wall straining for a distant cutoff man. Julia’s gun went farther than Tony’s, out to where the waves that would reach the rocks were just taking shape, the sea curling, discovering its form.
That made two.
“Don’t hurt me, Lionel.” She backed away, her shocked eyes framed by the bristly halo of her crew cut, her mouth crooked with fear and fury.
“It’s over, Julia. Nobody’s going to hurt you.” I couldn’t concentrate on her fully, needing something more to throw into the sea. I pulled Minna’s beeper out of my pocket. It was a tool of The Clients, evidence of their hold on Frank, and it deserved to be interred with the guns. I threw it as far as I could, but it didn’t have enough heft to keep from being knocked down by the wind, and so trickled down between two wet, mossy boulders.
Three.
Nxt I found the cell phone. The instant it came into my hand, Kimmery’s number begged for dialing. I pushed the impulse aside, substituted the gratification of flinging it off the lighthouse deck, picturing the doormen in the rental car who I’d taken it from. It flew truer than the beeper, made it out to the water.
Four.
“Give me something to throw,” I told Julia.
“What?”
“I need something, one more thing.”
“You’re crazy.”
I considered Frank’s watch. I was sentimental about the watch. It had no taint of doormen or Clients.
“Give me something,” I said again. “Look in your purse.”
“Go to hell, Lionel.”
Julia had always been the hardest-boiled of us all, it struck me now. We who were from Brooklyn, we jerks from nowhere-or from somewhere, in the case of Frank and Gerard. We couldn’t hold a candle to the girl from Nantucket and I thought I might finally understand why. She was the hardest-boiled because she was the unhappiest. She was maybe the unhappiest person I’d ever met.
I suppose losing Frank Minna, hard as it was, was easier for those of us who’d actually had him, actually felt his love. The thing Julia lost she’d never possessed in the first place.
But her pain was no longer my concern.
You choose your battles, Frank Minna used to say, though the term was hardly original to him.
You also distance yourself from cruelty, if you have any brains. I was developing a few.
I took off my right shoe, felt the polished leather that had served me well, the fine stitching and the fraying lace, kissed it good-bye on the top of the tongue, then threw it high and far and watched it splash silently into the waves.
Five, I thought.
But who’s counting?
“Good-bye, Julia,” I said.
“Screw you, you maniac.” She knelt and picked up her lighter, and this time she got her cigarette lit on the first flick. “Barnabaileyscrewjuliaminna.”