"God." She stared out the window.
A sunset that crushed my heart with its melancholy filled the veranda doors.
"Linda."
"I don't know what the fuck I'll do if they're dead or anything." She still stared out the window.
"That's why you've got to tell me where the house is."
"I wouldn't want to start hooking. AIDS scares the hell out of me. I know this Indian girl from Denver, she had AIDS and man, I've never seen anything like it."
She was in some kind of coke reverie. I didn't have the time to walk all the way through it with her.
I got up and went over and touched her bare shoulder. It was my afternoon for shoulders. I got a different kind of erotic charge from this one. Pure sex, no grace notes of housewifely remorse or suburban angst as with Evelyn Cook. Pure sex.
"You want to fuck or something?" she said looking up at me.
I was startled to find that she was serious and probably not out of any desire for me but because she didn't know what else to do.
"I'm flattered but no, thanks. Right now all I want is that address."
"What am I going to do if they're dead?"
I gave her an Oprah line. "You're young and bright, you can turn your life around."
"That's the trouble."
"What is?"
"I don't want to turn my life around. I like it just the way it is."
Then she told me how and where I could find the house Perry and Bryce had built for her.
T
he red man knew one truth above all others — that he would never be treated as an equal by the white man. For this reason, between 1900 and 1917, more than twenty-five Indians condemned to be executed took their own lives — a gesture of contempt. They would rather take them than have the white man take them.
Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal
"H
e told me what happened," Anna said to the Chief twenty minutes after leaving the hospital. "Right there on his deathbed."
"It's his word against Shipman's, Anna, and guess who this community would believe?"
"But they're going to execute an innocent man."
The sixth of January was the date.
"He isn't an innocent man, Anna. He's the killer. Everything I've learned as a lawman tells me that."
But she could see his doubts in the sad grave gaze and the whiskey bottle he now took from his desk.
We can't let him be hanged, Chief," Anna said. "We just can't."
B
y the time I picked up Cindy, by the time we reached the marina, full night had fallen.
"Everything's put up for the night, sorry," the angular, bald man in the grease-spotted overalls said. "Even the canoes."
The marina was small and hidden behind a stand of cedars. There was a glassed-in area where customers could look at a few new boats and motors and a repair area that smelled of oil. The lights were on in the garage and engines lay on the floor open and stripped, like wounded soldiers. A radio playing an old rhythm and blues song sounded lonely and isolated.
Cindy couldn't stay still. On the way over I'd told her what I'd learned and now that she knew David hadn't killed the sisters, she wanted vengeance. She wanted the killer.
"Would you give us a boat if I doubled your fee?" she asked the man, and disappeared around the far side of the garage.
"I got 'em all put up tonight." His voice said wife and kids and home and relaxation after a hard day. I didn't blame him.
Cindy came back around the corner. "You want to come here a minute?"
The marine man looked at me and frowned, knowing she'd found some way to ruin his night.
I followed him to the far side of the garage.
On a strip of dusty gravel sat a green rowboat with a two-cylinder engine inside. It needed paint.
"You haven't put this away for the night," she said. "How about letting us take it?"
"I'd still have to wait for you to get back and then put it away."
She knew just what to do. She wore a white shirt, a narrow-cut woman's sport jacket and jeans. From the jacket she produced her wallet and from her wallet her badge. It was too dark for him to get a good look at it — to see that she wasn't a Cedar Rapids cop — so, as a good citizen, he was immediately cowed.
"Oh," he said, "a cop."
"You can go on home," she said reassuringly. "I'll throw a tarpaulin over it when we get back."
But he was beginning to have doubts.
"First problem is," he said, "how come you don't use one of the police boats?"
"We're in kind of a hurry and this is kind of a special assignment."
"All right, second question is, do you know anything about gas hoses or hose clamps?"
"I can handle that."
"Don't be too sure. Hose keeps slippin'."
"We'll be fine," Cindy said.
"You tarp it up when you bring it back — the boat, I mean," he said.
"We'll tarp it up," I said.
"There's a side door, I'll leave it unlocked. You put the motor in there."
"Great."
Five minutes later, we put the rowboat into the water.
Black river surface. Choppy. Touched by starlight. Engine sound harsh and rackety in the gloom. Shouting at each other to be heard. Cold. Goosebump cold. Not dressed for this, either one of us. Black dirty water in small waves and spray all over the boat and our faces and hands. More goosebumps.
Long bend of river. Sandy beaches eastward. Deep forest to the right.
He hadn't been exaggerating about the gasoline hose. It slipped out so badly, the engine shutting down to one cylinder when it did, or shutting off entirely, that we divided up tasks. She steered the boat while I held the hose in place.
Twenty minutes it took for the island to come into view. Perry and Bryce had wanted to build an eyrie and they had succeeded. Behind the scrub pines, in the middle of a grassy island perhaps a half-mile in length, sat a Spanish-style house with a gabled roof. Red tiles and white stucco shone behind a thin shaggy stand of trees. All the windows were dark.
"Maybe they're not here," Cindy shouted above the roar of the engines.
"Maybe not," I shouted back.
As we came up to the beach, I cut the engine. At first, the silence seemed vast and overwhelming. Then small sounds intervened. The river lapping, lapping. Night birds crying. Faint, and far off, a tug of some kind, hooting. Fog had settled on the island and played like ghosts among the scrub pines.
The first shot came just as we were dragging the rowboat up on the sandy beach.
The bullet spanged off the motor.
We both dove for the sand.
Fear and anger; fear and anger. I eased the Ruger from my holster. Cindy's Smith & Wesson was already in her hand. "Bastards," she said.
Suddenly I was covered in cold sweat. My armpits and the soles of my feet were soaked.
"Bastards," she said again.
Two more quick shots kept us flat on the wet sand. From the report, it was easy to tell that the shooter was using a high-powered rifle and that he knew what he was doing. He couldn't pick us off easily in the darkness this way, but he could keep us pinned down until we did something stupid or impulsive.
"Give him a few shots," I whispered.
She lay beside me now, close enough that I could hear her heart pounding through the flesh of her arm and cloth of her sport jacket.
"I'll try to get into the woods over there," I hissed.
"He's a pretty damned good shot."
"I noticed that."
She put four straight shots into the approximate area where the marksman was situated. I took the opportunity to run in zig-zag fashion, almost tripping once in the heavy sand, finally diving for the woods and protection.
By then the shooter had figured out what was going on and was firing at me.
I stayed on the ground until everything was quiet again. Minty-smelling leaves; the odor of summer mud; moonlight dappling the tops of the forest trees. And my own breathing, loud.
I moved in a south-westerly direction, staying on my haunches whenever possible.
Cindy opened up on him again, twice. I heard him swear — I was getting close enough — harsh and masculine. Fear and anger.
I crawled through mud, sand, undergrowth. I snaked through pine, bramble, rasping grasping weed. I crept through shifting shadows of ever-darkening night. Sweat stung and blinded me. But most of the time, thorn and rock and branch tearing my palms and arms and face, I kept moving forward.
I came to the edge of a clearing and saw him on the opposite side, crouched by a large rock at the mouth of a trail leading deep into the forest. From here, he could see the shore, and fire at will. Perry Heston.
I stood up, knees cracking, long thigh muscles and back very sore.
I planned to move around the edge of the small clearing and come up on the other side of him, not give him any chance for a shot at me at all.
I was ready to move when I saw, from the woods directly behind Heston, a lumbering monster of some kind emerging; its facial features were lost in blood and its otherwise white arms glistened with even fresher blood.
"You sonofabitch!" the monster shouted, and it fired twice at Heston.
But Bryce Cook had been injured too badly to shoot straight. His wild shooting gave Heston time to turn around, roll over, and get a good aim of his own.
He put two quick rifle bullets directly into Bryce Cook's chest. Cook didn't so much as teeter, not at first. He stood in the moonlight, white golf shirt and chinos soaked with his own blood, and gazed slowly up at the sky. He looked sad and baffled, a big forlorn animal about to cross over to the
Other Side. He collapsed then, without any fuss at all. "Put the rifle down, Heston," I said.
He hadn't seen me till this moment, but he didn't seem startled or surprised. He simply gave me his best boardroom smirk. "Mr. Payne, I believe."
"You just murdered your best friend."
"Hardly murder. He fired first, you know damned well he did."
"You still didn't have to kill him."
"You're wrong. He tried to shoot me about an hour ago. He was a terrible shot, poor bastard. So I shot him in the shoulder. That's where all the blood came from. The second time he tried to kill me — well, I wasn't so forgiving."
The shot forced Heston to throw himself to the ground. Cindy came out of the woods.
She walked over to him. Before he had a chance to get to his feet, she kicked him viciously in the ribs. I could hear bone crack. Then she kicked him in the face, and more bone cracked.
He cursed her and tried not to cry but it wasn't easy, especially when she caught him in the ribs again.
I went over and took her arm. "C'mon, you've had your fun."
She looked dazed as Bryce Cook had, there at the last, all feeling focused on a single goal — destruction.
Wind came up then, cold and pocked with sprinkles of rain; the fog wound, snake-like, around the shaggy pines. I looked over at the house. A light had come on in a second-floor room. A silhouette moved behind sheer curtains.
His ribs were broken and it wasn't easy for him to get to his feet, yet neither of us helped him. We just watched. He still had an air of command about him, that was the strange thing. Some part of this man could never be broken, as hundreds of business rivals had no doubt learned.
"I want you to know something, Payne."
"Know what?"
"Those two sisters?"
"Yes."
"I killed them."
"Why?
”
"Because they were blackmailing me."
"They'd been blackmailing you for two years. Why kill them now?"
"Because I got tired of it."
"Just all of a sudden?"
"Just all of a sudden."
Cindy said, "You tried to make the police think my husband did it." She took a step forward again. She wanted one more poke at him. Not that I blamed her.
I pointed to the house. "Who's in there?"
"Nobody," Heston said. He was groaning again. His face was filthy with blood. His nose was broken. I took out my handkerchief and tossed it to him. It fell at his feet. He had to bend over to get it and the action made him stifle a scream.