Dead on the Island (22 page)

Ray laughed; then his mouth twisted and cut
the laugh off. "You been causing me trouble, Tru," he said. "I
thought you'd caved in, but you didn't cave far enough."

I'd caved too far, I thought. I'd missed
things all around that I should have seen. At first I was too
involved in my own misery, and then when I finally began to come
out of it, to respond to someone else's trouble for a change, I was
still too screwed up to get everything straight in my mind.

I didn't say any of that to Ray, however. I
said, "You can have the money. We brought it for you. Just let the
girl go."

Ray acted as if I hadn't spoken. "Get out of
the car," he said. "All of you. You try anything, and there'll be
little pieces of this girl's head all over this porch."

"Me first," I told Dino. "Then you. Then
Evelyn. Keep the car between you and him." I got out.

"Turn around and put your hands on the car
roof," Ray said.

I did what he said. Dino got out on the
other side. He moved a little forward, and Evelyn followed him.

"Now what?" I said.

"Now we see where you've got your gun," Ray
said. "I know what happened at the warehouse. Hobbes."

I heard someone step out of the bushes
behind me. Ray had been covered all along. Something hard pressed
into my back just above the Mauser and Hobbes ran his hand down my
legs, inseam and outseam, then up to the front of my stomach.

"He's clean," Hobbes said.

I sneaked a look at him. He was the one
who'd hit my knee, the one I'd fought with at Shelton's. He was
good with his hands, but he wasn't much at a body search.

I started to turn around.

"Don't!" Ray said. There was a sharp cry
from the girl, as if he had tightened his grip on her throat or
mashed the gun barrel into her temple.

"I don't understand, Ray," Dino said.

"Sure you don't," Ray said. "You step around
in front of the car. Very slowly."

Dino moved to the front of the Subaru. I was
calculating distances. We weren't fifty feet from the porch as I
had hoped, but we were about forty. The light hardly reached us.
There was a chance that Ray wouldn't hit us, but Hobbes would. And
Ray could certainly kill Sharon.

"Let me tell you something, Dino," Ray said.
"You
owe
me, Dino."

"Owe?" Dino said. "I--"

"
Owe
!" Ray's voice would have carried
a mile if it hadn't been whipped away by the wind. "Owe," he
repeated, more calmly this time.

"You were always the ones, you and Tru. You
let me tag along, but I was just the tame nigger. I was just as
good a football player as either one of you, but you were the ones
who got your pictures in the paper. You were the ones who got to go
to the good schools. You were the ones--"

"Wait a minute," Dino said, putting up a
hand. "You got to go to school. You even got a tryout with the
pros."

"Check that fucker out, Hobbes," Ray said.
"Maybe he's the one with the gun. Put your hands on the car,
Dino."

Dino put his hands on the hood. Hobbes gave
him the same treatment he'd give me. "Clean," he said.

"Dumb as dirt," Ray said. "But I was the one
who had to go to that nigger school."

"Look, Ray, you were good, good enough for
the pros," Dino said. "You could've been a big star--"

"--if it wasn't for the accident," Ray
finished. "And what about that accident, Dino?"

Dino didn't say anything.

"I believe you said 'Let's celebrate, Ray.
You and Tommy and me.' That's right, isn't it Dino? And you had
Tommy drive by a 7-11 so you could buy us some beers, and Tommy
never could hold his liquor. Isn't that about right, Dino?"

"Yeah," Dino said. "I guess that's about
right."

So Dino had been in the car that night, too.
I hadn't known about that part of it, had never asked. Dino had
ended two football careers, Ray's and mine, inadvertently but
effectively. Well, it happens.

Right then, I didn't care. I was more
interested in watching Hobbes, who was now in front of the hood of
the car and to my left. Only Ray was behind me, but he still had
the girl.

". . . So I've been fetching ever since."
Ray was talking again, and even though I missed some of it, I got
the gist. He really knew how to hold a grudge.

I sneaked a look over my shoulder. Ray
didn't seem to mind, so I dropped my arms and started to turn
around.

Hobbes saw the movement, though he was
watching Dino, and started to swing his pistol in my direction.

"It's all right," Ray said. "Let him get
comfortable. He needs to hear this, too."

I leaned back against the car and folded my
arms across my chest. "Why me?" I said.

"You were the fair-haired boy," Ray said.
"You got all the glory that Dino didn't. Everybody was so busy
writing about you in the sports pages that there wasn't any space
for the nigger. I should have been at Southern Cal, man, or
USC."

"So where does the girl fit in?" Sharon
looked even worse than she had earlier. Ray practically had the gun
stuck in her ear, and the hold he had on her must have been
practically crushing her windpipe.

Ray laughed. "The girl?" he said. "I thought
you'd figured that out by now, Tru. Hell, this was all her
idea."

Sharon struggled against Ray's arm and
appeared to be trying to speak, but Ray just clamped a little
tighter on her throat and stuck the revolver barrel a little
farther into her ear.

Well, it was nice to know that I'd been
right about one thing at least. "You told her, didn't you, Ray?
About Dino."

"I told her."

"So the kidnapping was all her idea,
resentment against the father she'd never known."

"You got it."

"You're a liar, Ray." I thought he might be
bothered by the accusation, but it went right by him. "You planted
the idea. She might have thought it was hers, but it was
yours."

He was unconcerned. "Maybe."

"So why did you kill Shelton and
Ferguson?"

"Who says I killed them?"

I was watching Hobbes out of the corner of
my eye. "You don't mean you're going to try to lay the murders off
on someone else?"

Hobbes wasn't bothered by my remark in the
least.

"We've discussed that," Ray said. "We're
going to blame them on you."

"Oh," I said.

"I was hoping you'd bring your pistol, but
that's all right. We'll find it anyway. You can use this one." He
wiggled his pistol. Sharon winced.

"What for?" I said.

"The big shoot-out. The one where Dino and I
come to deliver the ransom money and everyone gets killed. Everyone
but me, that is. And Hobbes, of course."

"I wouldn't be too sure of that if I were
you, Hobbes," I said. "He didn't mind killing Ferguson and
Shelton."

"There you go again," Ray said. I wondered
if he were a fan of Ronald Reagan. "Who says I killed them? As a
matter of fact, it was Hobbes who did those little jobs. He
understands the necessity for having as few loose ends as
possible."

I could hardly believe this was the Ray I'd
known for so long. Of course I had no way of measuring his
bitterness, which seemed to be much stronger than I had first
thought. I wondered what I would have finally become if I had let
my own injury fester in my mind as much as Ray had allowed his to
do.

"Is that all they were, loose ends?" I
said.

"Shelton was getting antsy. I should never
have let him out of my sight in the first place. He would have
cracked. Ferguson was greedy. Neither one was helping me any."

I figured that as long as I could keep him
talking we were still alive, so I was going to ask him about how he
got involved with Ferguson when I noticed that I couldn't see
Evelyn any longer. She was so short that her head was barely higher
than the car roof anyway. I didn't know where she was, but better
that one of us should get away than none. Hobbes was watching Dino,
and Ray was watching me. In the darkness, no one had been watching
Evelyn.

"And you're going to kill the girl,
too."

"Absolutely," Ray said. He was quite happy.
"Dino gets to watch. That's the good part. And there's no time like
the present." He shoved Sharon in front of him, and she fell from
the porch to the sidewalk, catching herself with her hands. Ray
took a two-handed grip on his pistol and pointed it at her.

Evelyn hadn't left after all. She came
charging from behind the car, screaming. "No!" she said. "No!"

Ray twisted and fired at her.

I dropped into a crouch and pulled out the
Parabellum. This was war, all right. A bullet smashed into the door
of the Subaru behind me.

I shot at Ray. The slug chipped off a piece
of the porch banister and smacked into the wall.

Dino must have jumped Hobbes. I could hear
them struggling on the shell road.

Ray fired again. Flame leaped from the end
of his pistol muzzle. The bullet hit the drive in front of me and
gouged up pieces of shell and a cloud of dust. Something stung my
cheek.

Evelyn had managed to reach Sharon where she
lay on the walk. Ray fired at them. One of them yelled in pain.
Then Ray was off and running.

I wanted to help Dino with Hobbes. I wanted
to do something for Sharon and Evelyn.

But most of all, I wanted Ray. I went after
him.

Dino and Hobbes were grunting and groaning
on the ground. Dino was louder. I didn't know what had happened to
Hobbes' gun. I just hoped that Dino could handle him and that his
wound wouldn't be too great a handicap. Dino had been a bull once;
maybe he still was.

Ray had taken off down the road. I followed
it to the turn-around and saw that he was headed for the Bay. I
wondered if he had a boat tied up out there.

My knee was all right for the few yards to
the end of the road, but things got markedly worse when I got off
the relatively smooth surface. The weeds were thick and pulled at
my ankles, but the sand was worse. Much worse.

Even running on a flat, even road takes its
toll. The toll is more or less, depending on the bio-mechanics of
your body, the way your feet hit, the way your bones twist. Sand
makes everything worse. Your feet sink in, and the twisting is all
magnified. The fact that there are mounds and holes adds to the
misery. After twenty yards, my knee was screaming. Ray was gaining
easily.

Then he stopped. He turned, braced his right
arm with his left hand, and fired at me.

He didn't come close. He was at least thirty
yards away, a long way for a pistol shot under the best conditions,
and he had been running. Try running a hundred yards and then
firing a pistol someday. You'd be lucky to hit a wall thirty yards
away. Besides, it was dark. The wind was chasing black and gray
shadows across the sky, and every now and then a thin moon showed
through, but certainly not enough to shoot by. It's surprising how
well your eyes adapt to the darkness after a while, but few men
have the night vision of cats.

In other words, I didn't feel too threatened
by Ray's firing at me. I just kept on running.

Ray saw that I was gaining. He lowered his
pistol and ran.

I got almost to where he'd been standing
when I felt a familiar and terrible feeling, but it was too late to
stop. It was as if my left leg were going up a stairway while my
right leg was going down. The knee had given way.

I put my hands out to break the fall and
felt my palms slide on the sand, scraping the skin. I'd dropped the
pistol.

My face hit the sand right after my hands.
I'd turned it to the right, so only the left side got the skin
rubbed off.

I looked to see where Ray was. He'd realized
I wasn't behind him anymore, and he was looking around to see where
I'd gone. He was silhouetted against the dark sky and would have
made a good target if I'd been a little closer. And if I'd had the
pistol. I felt around with my hand to find it. I brushed through
the weeds and sand, and then I felt the metal of the pistol barrel.
I pulled it to me and tried to brush some of the sand off against
my sweatshirt.

Ray had started back toward me. I lay still
and pointed the Mauser at him, trying to breathe slowly and
steadily, bracing my arm on the ground and gripping my wrist with
the opposite hand. I would be pretty hard for him to see since I
was wearing dark clothing. Maybe I could wait until he got close
enough.

He saw me too soon. He stopped and fired,
but the bullet was well to my left. I took a deep breath, let it
out slowly, and squeezed the trigger.

Ray yelled and spun around. I'd hit him
somewhere, maybe in the arm. He was running again.

I tried to get to my feet and finally made
it. There was no question of my running, though. What I did was
hobble, my right leg dragging almost uselessly along.

Ray got down to the edge of the water. He
stopped, pressing his left arm tightly to his side, fumbling in his
pocket with his right hand. The pistol must have been in his left,
but I didn't see it. He was reloading the cylinder.

It didn't take him long, and then he was
moving along parallel to the water. He was going slower now, but he
was still getting farther and farther ahead of me. He kept looking
to his right for something. I thought again about a boat.

There wasn't any boat. The next thing I
knew, Ray was out into the water, headed deeper.

I remembered what a boating friend of mine
had told me once. "Sailing in the Bay is OK," he said. "But you've
got to watch out. It's really shallow. Why, you could walk across
it if you tried." He laughed. "Not really, but if you knew where to
go and when to swim a little, you could make it without too much
trouble."

Ray must have figured it was worth a try. By
the way he had been looking, I thought that he must have had a
marker, some light on the opposite shore, to tell him when to hit
the water.