Gone South (47 page)

“Bo
ring!”
Doc changed the channel.

“Wait!” Flint said. “Turn it back!”

“Screw you.” “Star Trek” was on now, Kirk and Spock speaking in dubbed Spanish. “Beam me up, Sccccottie!” Doc said excitedly, talking to the television set.

Flint figured the remote control in Doc’s head never stopped clicking. He stared at the blue glass of the tabletop, this news another little ice pick from God in the back of his neck. If Lambert had been telling the truth about the motel owner, then was the murder at the bank an accident or an act of self-defense? If Lambert was such a mad-dog killer, why hadn’t he picked up the pistol and used it at Basile Park? In spite of the situation, in spite of the fact that he knew he and Pelvis were going to die in some excruciating way after Gault finished his workout, Flint had to laugh. He was going to die because he’d gone south hunting a skin who was basically a decent man.

“Something’s funny?” Gault asked, his labor ceasing for the moment.

“Yeah, it is.” Flint laughed again; he felt on the verge of tears, but he laughed anyway. “I think the joke’s on me, too.”

“Who the
fuck
messed up the kitchen?” Shondra, looking both angry and more than a bit queasy, came through an open sliding glass door, carrying a tray with a plastic pitcher, two paper cups, and frothy brown liquid in a milk-shake glass. She set the tray down between Flint and Pelvis. “There’s all kinda guts and hair in the garbage can, ’bout made me puke! Blood smeared all over the countertop, and somebody left the fryin’ pan dirty! Who the hell did it?”

“Monty,” Mitch said. Evidently Shondra’s wrath was a thing to be feared.

“Well, what’d he fry? A fuckin’ polecat?”

“Fella’s dog there.” Mitch pointed at Pelvis.

“Another
one?” Shondra made a disgusted face. “What’s wrong with that fool, he’s gotta be eatin’ dogs and ’coons and polecats?”

“Go ask him, why don’t you?” Doc had torn his eyes away from the television. “I’m tryin’ to watch ‘Dragnet,’ if you’ll keep it down!”

“You’re not watchin’ anything, you’re just burnin’ out that clicker! Gault, why don’t you get rid of him? He makes me so nervous, I’m like to jump outta my skin every time he opens that dumb mouth!”

“Yeah?” Doc sneered. “Well, I know the only thing that has to get stuck in your dumb mouth to shut you up! I was with Gault long before you came along, girlie pearlie, and when he throws you out, I’m gonna kick your little ass back to your white-trash trailer!”

“You … you … you
old man!”
Shondra hollered, and she picked up the milk-shake glass and reared her arm back, froth flying.

“No,” Gault said quietly, pumping iron again. “Not that.”

She slammed the glass down on the tray, her face a pure image of hell, picked up the plastic pitcher, and flung it at Doc, water splashing everywhere.

“Look what she did!” Doc squalled. “She’s tryin’ to blow the TV out, Gault!”

“And I’m not cleanin’ up that damn mess, neither!” she roared at all of them. “I’m not cartin’ that damn stinkin’ garbage out and gettin’ that mess on me!” Tears of rage and frustration burst from her eyes. “You hear? I’m not doin’ it!” She turned and, sobbing, fled back into the house.

“Your Academy Award’s in the mail, baby!” Doc shouted after her.

Gault stopped lifting the barbells and put them on the floor. He looked at Flint, smiled wanly, and said with a shrug of his thick shoulders, “Trouble in paradise.” Then he drank half of the protein shake, blotted the sweat from his face with the red neckerchief, and said, “Brian, go take the garbage out and clean the kitchen.”

“Why do I have to do it?” Brian had neatly cut light brown hair, wore steel-rimmed glasses, and a chrome-plated revolver sat in a holster at his waist. He looked about as old as a college senior, wearing a sun-faded madras shirt and khaki shorts, black Nikes on his feet.

“Because you’re the new boy, and because I say so.”

“Heh-heh-heh,” giggled the Latino man sitting next to him; he wore a Yosemite Sam T-shirt and dirty jeans, his blue-steel Colt automatic in a black shoulder holster.

“You want to laugh, Carlos, you go laugh while you’re moppin’ the kitchen floor,” Gault said. Carlos started to protest, but Gault gave him a deadly stare. “Move
now.”

The two men went into the house without another word.

“I wouldn’t let that bitch snow me,” Doc said.

“Shut up about her.” Gault finished his shake. “I wish you two would bury the hatchet.”

“Yeah, she’ll bury a hatchet in me if I don’t bury one in her first.”

“Children, children.” Gault shook his head, then he crossed his swollen arms and stared at the two bounty hunters. “Well,” he said, “I guess we need to take care of business. What would you think if I’d offer to cut your tongues out and chop your hands off? Would you rather be dead, or not?” He looked at Clint’s arm. “In your case, it would be a triple amputation. How does that sound?”

“I think I might faint with excitement,” Flint said. Pelvis was mute, his eyes shiny and unfocused.

“It’s the best offer I can make. See, I told you I was in a lenient mood. Doc’s the one who screwed things up.”

“I’ll be glad to cut his tongue out and chop off his hands,” Flint said.

Gault didn’t smile. “Forbidden-knowledge time: we’ve been having trouble from a competitor. His name is Victor Medina. We were trucking some merchandise in crates when we first moved our base here. He found out the route and took it away from us. So we had to come up with alternative packaging. The stomachs of live alligators do very well.”

“I came up with that idea!” Doc announced.

“When Doc saw you making your phone call,” Gault went on, “he — unfortunately — lost his composure. He thought you might’ve been working with Medina, setting up another hijack. Doc doesn’t always reason things out. He was stupid, he was wrong, and I apologize. But you put a valuable man out of action. A knee injury like that … well, there’s no health insurance in this business. A doctor would get very suspicious, and we would have a money leak. So Virgil, like a good horse, was laid to rest and you are to blame. Now Monty is gone. I have to hire new people, run them through security, train them … it’s a pain. So.” He walked to the coffee table and picked up the Ingram machine gun. “I
will
make it quick. Stand up.”

“Stand us up yourself,” Flint told him.

“No problem. Doc? Mitch?”

“Shit!” Doc whined. “The Flying Nun’s just started!” But he got out of his chair, pulled his gun, and Mitch likewise stood up with a pistol in his hand. Doc hauled Flint to his feet but Mitch struggled with Pelvis and Gault had to help him.   

There was fresh sweat on Gault’s face. “End of the pier,” he said.

“T
HERE, WE GET UP,”
Train said as he waded chest-deep toward a walkway at the rear of the prefabricated ranch house. Dan followed, not mired quite so deeply as Train because of their difference in heights, but he was giving out and he envied Train’s rugged strength. Train slid his rifle up on the walkway, then grabbed the timbers and heaved himself out of the water. He took Dan’s Browning and gave him a hand up.

“You all right?” Train had seen the dark circles under Dan’s eyes, and he knew it had been a rough trek but the other man was fading fast.

“I’ll make it.”

“You sick, ain’t you.” Train wasn’t asking a question.

“Leukemia,” Dan said. “I can’t do it like I used to.”

“Hell, who can?” They were standing about eight feet from the rear entrance, which was a solid wooden door behind a screen door. The rear of the house was featureless except for a few small windows. Back here the platform was narrow, but it widened as it continued around the house. Train looked along the walkway they stood on. Behind them was more swamp and a large green metal incinerator on a platform fifty feet from the house. “Okay,” Train said. “Look like this the way we go  —”

He stopped abruptly. They heard voices from beyond the doors, getting closer. Someone was coming out. Train pressed his body against the wall ten feet away on the right of the door and Dan stood an equal distance away on the left, their rifles ready. Dan’s heart pounded, all the saliva dried up in his mouth.

The inner door opened. “Yeah, but I’m not stayin’ in the business that long.” A young man wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a madras shirt, and khaki shorts emerged, both arms around a Rubbermaid garbage can. On the side of it were streaks of what looked like blood. “I’m gonna make my cash and get out while I can.” He let the outer screen door slam shut at his back and he started walking toward the incinerator, a pistol in a holster at his waist.

Train was thinking whether to rush him and club at him with the rifle’s butt or push through the screen door when the young man suddenly stopped.

He was looking down at the walkway. At the water and mud on the planks where they’d pulled themselves up. Then he saw the footprints.

And that, as Dan knew Train would’ve said, was all she wrote.

He spun around. Sunlight flared on his glasses for an instant. His mouth was opening, and then he was dropping the garbage can to go for his gun. “Carlos!” he yelled. “There’s somebody out he—”

Train shot him before the pistol could clear leather. The bullet hit him in the center of his chest and he jerked like a marionette and was propelled off the walkway into the water.

A startled Latino face appeared at the screen. The inner door slammed shut. Then:
pop pop pop
went a pistol from inside, and three bullets punched holes through wood and screen. Train started shooting through the door, burning off four more shells. As Train wrenched the magazine out and pushed another one in, Dan fired twice more through the punctured doors, and then Train rushed in and with a kick knocked them both off their hinges.

“Gault! Gault!” the man named Carlos shouted. He had overthrown a kitchen table and was crouched behind it, his pistol aimed at the intruders. Train saw the table, and then a bullet knocked wood from the doorjamb beside his head and he twisted his body and threw himself against the outside wall again. A second shot cracked, the bullet tearing through the air where Train had stood an instant before. “Gault!” Carlos was screaming it now. “They’re breakin’ in!”

At the sound of the first shot Gault stopped in his snakeskin boots.

He knew what it had been. No doubt.

“Rifle!” Doc said. They were all standing about midway between the awning-shaded area and the alligator corral.

Pop pop pop
went a pistol.

“It’s Medina!” Mitch shouted. “The bastard’s found us!”

“Shut up!” Gault heard more rifle shots. Carlos was shouting his name from the house. His face like a dark and wrinkled skull, Gault turned around and put the Ingram gun’s barrel to Flint’s throat.

“Gault!” Carlos screamed. “They’re breakin’ in!”

Two seconds passed. Gault blinked, and Flint saw him deciding to save his ammo for the big boys. “Mitch, stay here with them! Doc, let’s go!” They turned and ran along the pier for the house. Mitch leveled his pistol at Flint’s chest, just above Clint’s arm.

Another pistol bullet thunked into the doorjamb. Train had sweat on his face. Dan shoved his rifle in and fired without aiming, the slug smashing glass. Carlos got off two more rapid-fire shots and then his nerve broke. He stood up and, howling in fear, left the relative safety of his makeshift shield to run for the kitchen door. He was almost there when he slipped on a smear of dog’s blood on the linoleum tiles and at the same time Train shot at him. The bullet smacked into the wall as Carlos fell. Carlos twisted around, his gun coming up. Dan pulled the Browning’s trigger, blood burst from Carlos’s side, and he doubled up and writhed on the floor. As Train ran into the kitchen and kicked Carlos’s pistol away, Dan pulled the empty magazine from his rifle and popped in another one.

The next room held a dining table and chairs, a jaguar’s skin up as a wall decoration, and a small chandelier hanging from the ceiling over the table’s center. A hallway went off to the left, and another room with a pool table and three pinball machines was on the right. Train and Dan started across the dining room, and suddenly Dan caught a movement and a dark-tanned blond girl wearing cutoffs and a black bra emerged from the hallway. Her icy blue eyes were puffy and furious. She lifted her right hand, and in it was gripped an automatic pistol. She let go an unintelligible, hair-raising screech and Train was swinging his rifle at her when the automatic fired twice, booming between the walls. The first bullet shattered glass in one of the pinball machines, but the second brought a cry from Train.

Train’s rifle went off, the bullet breaking a window beside the blond girl. Dan had his finger on the trigger and the gun leveled at her, but the idea of killing a woman crippled him for the fastest of seconds. Then the girl scurried back into the hallway again, her hair streaming behind her.

Everything was moving in a blur, time jerking and stretching, the smell of burnt rounds and fear like bitter almonds in the smoky air. Train’s cap had fallen off, and he staggered against the wall with his left hand clutched to his right side and blood between his fingers. There was a shout: “Jesus, it’s that damn guy!”

Dan saw that two men had come into the game room through another doorway. One he recognized as the long-haired man named Doc, the other was a tanned bodybuilder who had a walkie-talkie in one hand and an Ingram machine gun in the other. Before the muscle man could aim and fire, Dan sent two bullets at them but Doc had already flung himself flat to the floor and at the sight of the rifle the second man — the “boss,” Dan remembered Train saying — hurtled behind the pool table.

It was getting too damn hot.

“Go back!” Dan shouted to Train, but Train had seen the Ingram gun and he was already retreating. They both scrambled through the kitchen’s entryway two heartbeats before the Ingram gun chattered and the woodwork around the door exploded into flying shards and splinters.

Mitch jumped when he heard the distinctive noise of Gault’s gun. He had moved Flint and Pelvis so they were between him and the house, his back to the swamp and the bounty hunters facing him. Flint had seen Gault snatch the walkie-talkie off the coffee table and yell something into it, and then the man in the watchtower — the same one, Flint realized, who’d half strangled him at St. Nasty and had taken the derringer away — had strapped his rifle around his shoulder and started descending a ladder. Now the man was just reaching the walkway between the tower and the house.