The only thing Art knew for certain was that he had fired the pistol. He still had the spent brass in his pocket to prove that. The rest was subject to conjecture. His wish fulfillment might have been egged on by the startling effects of Price's party drug.
Also too easy. Almost desirable, as a story.
He held the gun ready and stuck a rubber-gripped baton flashlight into his armpit. He eased up on the kitchen door to the garage, with Blitz providing silent backup.
If he barked again, it'll be silent-but-deadly backup. Art thought, his senses lunatic, his perceptions so acute that he felt as if he were constantly plunging forward, trying to arrest the dark and divest it of any more surprises. He was a fool trying to grab ghosts and tie them in knots, recognizable configurations. Even the air seemed acrid and charged; the smell of burning psyche.
He looked through the peephole in the kitchen door just as the bank of emergency floods in the garage was destroyed in a messy scatter of broken glass. The white pop in the magnified confines of the viewport left Art seeing dancing flashbulb globes, just as Blitz started barking his heart out; forelegs braced, ruff hackled, the compleat Monster Fighter. Art heard more civil unrest within the garage-the tool cart overturned, the autos taking dents, and, under the rollick of the wind and rain, a voice in primordial agony, almost howling, buying each destructive hit with a overdose of pain and effort.
Art's own heart ramped up as he prepared to storm. The next intruder noise nearly launched him out of his shoes: three gunshots, grouped so tight they could have been one. The funnel acoustics made them loud as cannon fire. The howler ceased competing with the weather and the abrupt termination of his noisemaking was somehow scarier than all the portents of his mysterious attack.
"Art! Art! You in there, man?! Oww, buck!" This last epithet was followed by another crash-somebody falling over something in the dark. The voice, familiar. Not "oddly" familiar. A friendly.
Flat-handed pounding now, on the door. "Art! Come on, Art! Open up, chief! I hadda shoot this asshole out here and I'm freezing my tits off! Art! It's Luther, man, right?! You know, Luther!"
The bottom seemed to drop out of Art's gut, leaving a direct tunnel from his mouth to his asshole; as the saying goes, you could see daylight. "Holy shit," he mumbled, his hands quickly depositing his hardware on the counter and moving for the bolts. "Blitz, shut up!
Halt'd Maul! Hor' auti!
"
Blitz backed up half a dog-step. Stop what he was doing?
I thought we were partners
.
Luther practically fell into the kitchen, bringing his own storm with him. He was bundled into a thin three-quarter leather coat as saturated as a bath sponge, collar up. His Eye of Ra earring dangled over the collar and his eyes were so wild they'd gone yellow. He rammed right into Art's embrace, knees sagging, the AMT Hard-baller in his right fist banging Art's shoulder, muzzle indifferently directed at the ceiling, then his ear, then the living room. Art caught him gun-first.
"Jesus buck it's a shitty night!" Luther panted. "Super-hostile; damn!" As soon as he spoke, Blitz cut loose more barks in a cannonade.
Art ordered the dog back to the bedroom: "
Blitz! In's Schlafzim-mer! Sofjort!
"
Luther was shivering, trying to husk out his passwords, his rationale, anything that might buy him a tiny bit of shelter. "I knew you'd be here. Knew it. Christ, it's fuckin unbelievable out there. Trees are flying, boss. The sand is fuckin alive. Driven everybody bugfuck, it's like one muthafuck of a horror movie, like that Living Dead shit. The ocean is hungry, like Moby Dick. Counted on you being here, man. I knew it, figured ole Art's hanging tight against all the bullshit of the outside world, right? Knew it!''
"Whoa, Luther-slow down, stow the piece, okay?"
He gulped air as though it was being rationed by a miser. "Yeah, whatever, right?" He abandoned his beloved pistol on the counter so casually it was almost comedic.
Art was still hanging on to him. "Calm down. You straight?"
"Fuckin’ A. Caught that cocksucker dead center, triple-tap, end of story."
"In the garage? Who?"
"That fucker Bryan, man-all taped up, raving like a crazy person. I think you can smooch your generator bye-bye. He butt-fucked it with a crowbar. I came in through the bust in your door, the one that looks like he drove through it? I sighted him just as he swung at the floodlight. Clearly hostile intent, so I collected him." A bitter little smile divided his face as he made a rubber-stamping motion. "Bam-bam-bam; paid in full. We're even for that favor I owe ya."
"I guess so," Art said.
"Shit, not truly. It was a pleasure to plug that asshole directly, tell ya the truth. Man, I sure am glad you're here. Emergency station. Safe house. Fuck, I woulda been blown out to sea and the minnows would be chomping my butt about now. Damn it's cold out there, like the fuckin Arctic or something; Ice Station My-Ass."
Art felt as though he was in a control tower, talking down an inexperienced pilot. He kept command, put a mug of coffee between Luther's shaking hands, left his coat in a pool on the floor, wrapped him in a blanket, and checked out the garage while Luther sat trying to fight his way back to zero.
Bryan -the Bry-Guy-was spread across the hood of the Jaguar like flung laundry, an amazing amount of blood collecting in the bevels of trim and funneling away to drip across the chrome grille, mirroring itself with a candy-flake shimmer. By flashlight Art could see that when Bryan had freed himself, at considerable cost of his own shredded skin, he had used the duct tape to immobilize his malfunctioning arm and seal the gunshot wound he'd won earlier. It was an expenditure of energy and sheer will that Art would normally credit to a man out of his head on PCP, so many steps requiring stamina and endurance that Art doubted he could achieve the escape, let alone the survival, if he were similarly hobbled. The guy had grit, no lie. Grievously wounded, he had put all his gym time to work and torn himself free only to crab out into the broiling hell of the full-bore hurricane, perhaps holing up like an Inuit in a snow shelter as the storm tried to sandblast his face off. Not dying. Then crawling back and wreaking vengeance upon the garage where Art had held him prisoner, swinging with his good arm.
The Jag's paint job was scored with gouges across the driver's-side flank, its even dust disturbed by runnels of water that lent it a berserk, abstract quality, like marbled paper. One headlight was smashed out. The generator was history, useful now only as scrap or a really big paperweight. The batteries charging the emergency system would fade soon enough. Bryan had come back long enough to run one of Art's own crowbars right through the heart of the house. Then Luther had blown in just in time to go bam-bam-bam. It was too much like good chess.
No,
Art thought,
you were a twitch away from shooting him yourself, you would have, you already had. He'd be just as dead, probably in the same time frame… only you didn't have to do it.
Not that those navy boys would buy any of this for an eye-blink of time; any lie Art could fabricate now would just be lame.
"Anybody else make it?" said Luther, when Art had resecured the sundered garage door and locked up. He was a straggler, a forsaken point man asking for mission stats.
"Suzanne, from the party," said Art. "She's in the bedroom. She's pretty messed up."
"Suzanne, huh. Another chick. Don't know her."
Neither do I
, thought Art. "What happened at Price's?"
Luther stretched his neck back against the sofa and Art heard three audible vertebra pops. "Storm kicked up full and Price kicked most everybody out. Coupla carloads headed for Half Moon Bay. I stayed long enough to watch half the house come down. Windows blew in. Most of that turret thing collapsed with some people on it. Cabana outside completely blew away like it was headed for Oz; when we checked on it, it was just gone, chief. The outside deck peeled up like piano keys. Coupla people took to their cars; they're mostly decorating the roadside now. Not that there's much road left. I took a tumble on the stairs and rolled, you know, but I lost a piece of time there. Hit my head. Woke up and most of the furniture was flying around. You said you was up here and I kinda force-marched it on the road. Saw a fuckin funnel cloud, man, that was scary as shit, close up. Was light when I started; don't know how long that took, but… fuck." He rubbed the tight crop of his skull, imagining a concussion lying in wait to mess him up. "I think I mighta passed out between here and there."
"You feel like you need a hospital?" Art decided to partake of the coffee himself.
"Naw, no hospital. I'm good. Kinda pointless, anyway-who can get to a hospital? I've never depended on them."
"Well, about an hour ago some guys from the navy showed up here in a Hummer that looked like a landing craft. They were going to check on the houses downbeach and then come back, in case anybody needed a lift back to civilization."
Luther's expression darkened. With the rain wiped from his face and head, perspiration beaded in its place as stress voided through his pores. He could not stop continually probing the back of his head. "You mean you stayed here, like, on purpose?"
"I'm an architect. I designed this house to stand up to a hurricane. Here's a hurricane. So this is the acid test. If it passes, I win a lot of contracts."
"Nice shutters," said Luther, observing the corrugated metal that shielded the windows. "Like a fortress. I thought maybe you stayed because of, you know, that woman."
"Suzanne."
"Yeah, right, Suzanne."
"I only met her yesterday."
Luther's eyebrows went up, then down; no big deal. "That ain't right. It's too weird."
Art watched Luther's gaze focus on the intangible, doping through evidence, working it out in his head, seeing if the story held water. He zapped over the topic of Suzanne easy as a speedbump and zeroed-in on the stuff that interested him.
"Navy wouldn't send guys out in this kinda storm for any reason," Luther said. "What'd they say they were here for?"
"There's a huge microwave dish out on the end of the jetty north of here," said Art. "They said their remotes were down and they couldn't adjust the dish, and were nervous about the storm."
"Ahh, bullshit." Luther waved his hand, dismissing that plotline. "No reason to check something like that until the storm goes down. Stupid to check it in the middle of the storm, man, think about it. They anchor those things in pilings that go down fifty feet. You couldn't break into it; I couldn't. It's just a big relay dish. Anything they tell you about having to get in there in the middle of a goddamned storm, somebody's jackin you."
As paranoia, it was tempting. "They had uniforms. They acted like military guys. They were driving a military vehicle." Art leapfrogged to the most important question: "If they're not for real, why did they come here? Why me?"
Luther stared into the depths of his coffee mug. Coffee always provided answers. "O'kay. If they're for real, they're incredibly stupid, reckless, or acting against orders. If they're not for real, then what? Ratpackers, maybe, pretending to be some sort of authority so they can case houses, knock them off using the storm as cover? Unlikely. The score'd have to be small and portable-cash, jewelry, something like that-and it'd have to be worth the risk. The uniforms would be like those bank robbers who wear suits and ties, right? All the witnesses remember is the suit and tie."
"So I'd remember the uniforms and not the faces?" said Art. "If so, that failed miserably. I could sketch both these guys."
"Was that Humvee a military one, or one of the civilian knockoffs?" Luther was racking up angles of attack like any decent strategist.
"Big, dark, you tell me. It was a Hummer, that's all I know."
"Hummers are civilian. Humvees are military. Can't get the civilian ones in military green, or camo, or desert tan, anymore. Military ones don't have amenities like leather seats. Or air-conditioning, except for the ambulances. Best way to check: Sit in the driver's seat. If there's no park setting on the transmission, it's military; don't know why. The military ones have really wimpy horns, like, who needs it, right?"
"A civilian one could be tricked out to fake a military one, though?"
"I guess. Some people have been able to buy decommissioned ones and spruce them up. I know a producer guy in Malibu who leases a couple from the government for a buck a year-you know, because he makes the military look so good in his movies.''
Jesus,
thought Art,
did everybody know somebody in Hollywood
?
Luther bulled ahead. "Anyway, whoever they are, if they're coming back here, we need to clean house, right?"
They just looked at each other.
Art's loaner jacket was ridiculously tight on Luther, where Suzanne had vanished into it, despite what a smartass would call her substantial front porch. Cowled in ponchos, zipped up and weather-snapped secure, the two men leaned against the storm to accomplish their work.
The final resting place of the late Bryan Simonsen, the former Bry-Guy, turned out to be thirty yards up the slope of the hill on the far side of the coast road. His bier was a wheelbarrow; his shroud, the bloodstained plastic tarp from the garage. The two men-judge and executioner, torturer and assassin-discovered an uprooted sycamore tree, roots dangling, ripped free like a rotten molar. It had upended a gouge nearly three feet deep, which the men spaded out to waist depth by the light from a pair of nine-volt lanterns. The wind kept knocking the lanterns over. The focused twin sprays of lamplight made the evening look like a projection of severely damaged nitrate-black film. Blowing rain bowed the two men, both of whom had done violence with gunfire to the stiffening body they had wrestled and cursed all the way up the hill. It sheeted the mud from their plastic cloaks as they interred him without obsequies. It was too noisy outside to make themselves heard, anyway. To keep themselves from cartwheeling down the slope on the return hike, they literally had to hold hands, sealing this compact, this vow of silence between two murderers. Both men knew the circumstances and justifications, yet the entire process seemed, to Art, to be tainted with guilt. They did the best they could.