When I was behind the wheel, he closed the door, hitched close to it, rested the Luger barrel on his left thigh, aimed at my middle, his thick finger on the trigger. “Get your keys, buds, and start it up. Keep it at thirty-five. Go out to the highway and turn south.”
I was one docile fellow. I wanted no lead tearing through the irreplaceable parts of wondrous, inimitable, precious me.
“How far?” I asked.
“Keep going.”
After a mile or so I said, “Did they make Terry do it the second time too?”
“He was away. Shut up.”
“You could be making a mistake, Griff.”
“So when I find out, I’ll cry a little.”
The beach clutter thinned out. He told me to slow down. He had me pull over onto the right shoulder until the road was clear of the meager morning traffic. Then, at his direction, I drove diagonally across the highway, up a rutted sandy track and pulled around behind a huge billboard advertising that ocean-front piece, eleven hundred feet of Atlantic Beach, four hundred feet deep from highway to tide line, for sale or lease.
The orange-red rising sun was lifting out of the sea, the gap between it and the steel blue horizon widening. He made no mistakes getting me out of the car. We walked across sandy hummocks, past tall clumps of sea oats. We came to a swale between brown dunes which seemed to satisfy him.
“What you do now, buds, very slow, is you lie down right there flat on your back.”
“Now wait a minute!”
“When you goof a play, the cost comes high. You should know a thing like that. The little ball drops in the wrong hole. Stretch out, boy. They find the Luger in your hand. After I put one in the side of your head, I even let you fire one out to sea in case some clown takes a paraffin test. There’s no history on the Luger, and I put no prints on the car. The surf noise like that, who hears two shots? Nobody sees us here. We’re out of sight. I was sleeping in swim trunks. So I roll the loot in my clothes and walk all the way back down the beach. Maybe I find a pretty shell. Who knows? Just stretch out nice, buds.”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“Don’t use them.”
“I got my own. How about it?”
“Stop stalling and… okay, light one. It’ll look like you thought it all over and decided to take the jump.”
I slapped my shirt pocket, reached into the right hand pocket of my slacks. The spring release jacked the little Bodyguard into my hand, and I fired once, falling to the right, rolling hard, every nerve arched tight waiting for the slug. I ended up in a prone position, braced on my elbows, left hand clamping the gun wrist to steady it. He was down. I saw his right hand on a slope of sand, the fingers opening and closing. The Luger stood upright in the soft sand a foot from his hand, barrel sunk straight down. I walked to him on my knees, holding the gun on him. I circled him, picked up his weapon, tossed it a dozen feet behind me. The upper right side of his chest had a spreading red stain sopping the thin yellow fabric of the sports shirt. He coughed weakly and blood ran from the corner of his mouth down into the coarse sand.
The reddened eyes looked vaguely at me. “Tricky bastard,” he said in a half whisper. “Should have known you were taking it too easy. My play would have been to check you out better. Christ, everything feels as if it was going all loose inside me.”
Where’s Terry?”
“Screw you, buds.”
“You aren’t hit as bad as you think, Griff. The sooner you answer, the sooner I go get an ambulance.”
He turned his head, coughed a heavier gout of blood into the sand. He closed his eyes. “Ans Terry. Him and the Whitney bitch. Monica Day.”
Abruptly he opened his eyes very wide, threw his head back and stared at the sky. His body arched twice, thudding down against the sand, and he kicked his heels against the sand, then slowly softened and dwindled into stillness. The slug had evidently severed one of the big arteries in the right lung. It hadn’t taken long. I stood up slowly, slid the Bodyguard back into the spring catch. I looked around. I could hear traffic sounds merged with the wash of the surf. It numbs, always, even when you keep asking yourself what other choice you had. Somebody watched him pull himself up by the crib bars and stand cooing and drooling, and thought him a damned fine baby. Far down the beach I saw an early-morning family moving slowly my way. Two large shapes, two tiny shapes covering more ground. I reached down, yanked the yellow shirt out of the waistband, recovered the four packets, buttoned them back inside my shirt. I thought of wrapping his hand around the Luger and putting a second slug into the same hole. But who shoots himself high in the right side of the chest?