the trigger even after the magazine was empty.
I could see rich, dark blood spreading across the back of his flannel
shirt.
Finally he threw down the Glock, turned toward me, and appeared to
contemplate whether to stomp my face or to tear my eyes from my head,
leaving me blinded and dying. Opting for neither pleasure, he headed
toward the broken-out window through which the last two monkeys had
escaped.
He was just stepping out of the house onto the porch when Sasha
reappeared and, incredibly, pursued him.
I shouted at her to stop, but she looked so wild that I wouldn’t have
been surprised to see that dreadful light in her eyes, too. She was
across the living room and onto the front porch while I was still
getting up from the splintered remains of the coffee table.
Outside, the Chiefs Special cracked, cracked again, and then a third
time.
Although it seemed clear now that Sasha could take care of herself, I
wanted to go after her and drag her back. Even if she finished Scorso,
the night was probably home to more monkeys than even a first-rate disc
jockey could handle-and the night was their domain, not hers.
A fourth shot boomed. A fifth.
I hesitated because Orson lay limp, so still that I couldn’t see his
black flank rising and falling with his breathing. He was either dead
or unconscious. If unconscious, he might need help quickly.
He had been kicked in the head. Even if he was alive, there was the
danger of brain damage.
I realized I was crying. I bit back my grief, blinked back my tears.
As I always do.
Bobby was crossing the living room toward me, one hand clamped to the
stab wound in his shoulder.
“Help Orson,” I said.
I refused to believe that nothing could help him now, because even to
think such a terrible thing might ensure that it be true.
Pia Klick would understand that concept.
Maybe Bobby would understand it now, too.
Dodging furniture and dead monkeys, crunching glass underfoot, I ran to
the window. Silvery whips of cold, windblown rain lashed past the
jagged fragments of glass still prickling from the frame. I crossed
the porch, leaped down the steps, and raced into the heart of the
downpour, toward Sasha, where she stood thirty feet away in the
dunes.
Carl Scorso lay facedown in the sand.
Soaked and shivering, she stood over him, twisting her third and last
speedloader into the revolver. I suspected that she had hit him with
most if not all the rounds that I’d heard, but she seemed to feel she
might need a few more.
Indeed, Scorso twitched and worked both outflung hands in the sand, as
if he were burrowing into cover, like a crab.
With a shudder of horror, she leaned down and fired one last round,
this time into the back of his skull.
When she turned to me, she was crying. Making no attempt to repress
her tears.
I was tearless now. I told myself that one of us had to hold it
together.
“Hey,” I said gently.
She came into my arms.
“Hey,” she whispered against my throat.
I held her.
The rain was coming down in such torrents that I couldn’t see the
lights of town, three-quarters of a mile to the east. Moonlight Bay
might have been dissolved by this flood out of Heaven, washed away as
if it had been only an elaborate sand sculpture of a town.
But it was back there, all right. Waiting for this storm to pass, and
for another storm after this one, and others until the end of all
days.
There was no escaping Moonlight Bay. Not for us. Not ever.
It was, quite literally, in our blood.
“What happens to us now?” she asked, still holding fast to me.
“Life.”
“It’s all screwed up.”
“It always was.”
“They’re still out there.”
“Maybe they’ll leave us alone-for a while.”
“Where do we go from here, Snowman?”
“Back to the house. Get a beer.”
She was still shivering, and not because of the rain. “And after
that?
We can’t drink beer forever.”
“Big surf coming in tomorrow.”