The Gaffney brothers ran the other way, making a sprint for the guesthouse. The cover of a brick building seemed much better to them than bamboo. They reached the porch at the same time and hurled themselves against the wooden door, but it didn’t budge. Jimmy turned the handle as Jerry threw his shoulder against it again, and it flew open and swung into the wall as he sprawled on the living room floor. He got to his feet to join Jimmy in his rush to the windows on the far side of the house. As he ran, Jimmy had a moment when the extremities of his body felt icy. The window he was running for was already open.
It was too late to change course now. He reached the low window, sliding along the last three feet of hardwood floor on his knees and then stopping hard, already scanning through the window to see the shooter. He saw nobody. The tall pines on the far side of the yard had no foliage near the ground to hide anyone, and nothing about the low, leafy plants in the tropical garden seemed to hold any menace. He leaned outward and craned his neck.
Blam! It was a roar so loud that it seemed to be a part of a larger reality, like an explosive charge going off. He did not duck back so much as allow the surprise of it to propel him onto his back on the floor. He said quietly, “What the fuck.”
Jerry started firing his pistol out the other window, volleys of three shots each, an insistent staccato pop-pop-pop! Each time he paused, the three brass casings ejected to the right clattered on the hardwood floor.
“Where is he?” Jimmy cautiously peered out his window.
“Out there!” Jerry fired two more volleys, one to the right, and the next to the left.
“Did you even see him?”
“No, but he’s there.”
“Hold it. Stop firing.”
Jerry held his fire, ducked back in to release the magazine of his pistol and slip in a new one, then pull the slide back to let the first round into the chamber. “Why stop? The bastard’s shooting at us.”
“Think, for Christ’s sake. He must have been in here and we startled him, sneaking into the yard with ski masks over our heads. He doesn’t recognize us.”
“That was a shotgun. Know what you’ll look like if he hits you with double-ought?”
“We don’t want to kill him.”
“Did I mention he’s shooting at us?”
“I’m not talking about that. I mean he’s not worth anything to us dead. He can’t pay if he’s dead. Nobody will pay if he’s dead.”
Kapak had heard the gunfire coming from the back of his property. He stood in the small room off the kitchen staring at the security monitor. He had been there since it started, trying to make out the shooters and figure out how to avoid them. He could see there were at least three men wearing masks and windbreakers intended to hide their faces and their gear. They charged into the guesthouse, and then he lost sight of them.
He had not expected Rogoso’s friends to know enough to come after him this quickly, less than a full day after he’d killed Rogoso. He also wondered who was down there fighting them off with a shotgun. He hoped it wasn’t one of the gardeners, some innocent who had simply been cornered and found the gun in the cabinet. He supposed it was possible Spence had not left after he had dropped Kapak off. Maybe he’d just gone down to the guesthouse to watch the rear of the property—to watch Kapak’s back, as he had said. Spence was a real soldier.
Kapak was worried. After the second shotgun blast, he had heard a series of three-shot bursts, one after another, only one gun firing. Had they killed the defender? Blam! The shotgun. He was still alive.
Kapak squinted, trying to make out human shapes in the backyard foliage. Suddenly the guesthouse door flew open and two men dashed out, sprinting across the open lawn into the invisible dim spaces of the bamboo. The shotgun was silent, as though the defender felt he had done all he wanted by making them retreat. He apparently didn’t want any bodies in the yard. That would be like Spence, and he was grateful once again to the man. Killing one of the invaders would have created a new problem.
There were already enough problems. Spence had to plant the bloody relics of Joe Carver to prove he was dead and imply to the people in the club scene that it was Kapak’s people who had done it. There was also the continuing problem of the police. Lieutenant Slosser clearly knew he had killed Rogoso, and by now his detectives were talking to people who had been at the club last night, trying to break his alibi. They would also talk to Rogoso’s people to establish that he had reason to kill Rogoso. When they had enough, they would arrest him.
He hurried to the other end of the house, picked up the pistol from the nightstand by his bed, put it into the inner pouch of his briefcase, threw on a summer-weight jacket, and looked around for anything else he might need to bring with him. He unexpectedly knew several things that he hadn’t before. One was that he had never actually liked the big house, only the gardens that had attracted him to the property in the first place and the guesthouse that he had built. If he had seen clearly before, he would have put an office in the main house, stationed a couple of men there for protection, and lived in the back of the lot in the guesthouse.
Another thing that he now knew was that if today had happened to him when he was thirty, forty, or even fifty, it would have meant little to him. One place was the same as another. He had moved to one country and then another with a few briefer stops in between. Each move had involved a wrenching departure, a great deal of effort, a period of getting used to strangeness and language difficulties. But each, in the end, had left his life improved.
Now he was getting old and feeling reluctant to face the upheaval again. It wasn’t the effort so much as the time. He couldn’t help making rough estimates. Did he have five years to waste while he was getting settled again? He felt his mouth contract into a sad smile. There were already assassination squads sneaking around his house on a sunny summer afternoon. There was little choice.
He filled his briefcase with financial papers from the filing cabinets in his office, locked the door, and hurried to the garage. He got into his Mercedes and drove. As he reached the first turn, he looked in the rearview mirror, but not at his house. He was only looking to see if his death squad was following, or the police.
After he turned the corner, he heard a siren a few blocks away, and looked behind him once more. He saw nothing but clear pavement.
Voinovich made it through the bamboo to the street long before the others. He sat at the wheel of his Sequoia with the motor running, listening to the last sounds of gunfire with his eyes closed, picturing what must be going on by the guesthouse. It didn’t sound good to him. He had confirmed the fatalism that was natural to his temperament through a lifetime of error and disappointment. Whenever he was on the edge of great fortune, he found that something unexpected made all efforts laughably inadequate. Some ideas, some places on the earth, some souls, were simply doomed.
When the gunfire stopped, he heard the sound of feet running down the narrow path through the bamboo grove. He calculated the relative likelihood that the footsteps were the Gaffney brothers and decided it was a one in five chance. Instead it was probably some new security men that Kapak had hired, or some of his regulars, possibly Spence and Corona.
If they had killed the Gaffneys, they’d be coming for him. He reassessed how much faith he had in the Gaffneys, then pulled the mask back over his face, chambered a round, and aimed his gun at the open end of the path.
To his amazement, it was the Gaffneys. He withdrew his gun from the window, tugged off the hot ski mask, and pressed the button to unlock the doors. The first Gaffney swung the back door open and dived onto the back seat. The second scrambled in, slammed the door, and shouted, “Go!”