As he approached Stranahan’s stilt house, Chemo started thinking something else. He had already factored the girl into the scenario, figured he’d shoot her first and get it over with. But then he realized he had another problem: Surely she had seen him ski past the shrimp boat, probably noticed the machine gun, probably told Stranahan.
Who had probably put it together.
So Chemo anticipated a fight. Screw the element of surprise; the damn jet scooter was as loud as a Harley. Stranahan could hear him coming two miles away.
But where was he?
Chemo circled the stilt house slowly, eventually riding the curl of his own wake. The windows were down, the door shut. No sign of life, except for a pair of ratty looking gulls on the roof.
A thin smile of understanding came to his lips. Of course—the man was waiting inside. A little ambush action.
Chemo coasted the jet ski up to the dock and stepped off lightly. He took the Ingram off his shoulder and held it in front of him as he went up the stairs, thinking: Where’s the logical place for Stranahan to be waiting? In a corner, of course.
He was pleased to find that the wooden deck went around Stranahan’s entire house. Walking cautiously on storklike legs, Chemo approached the southwest corner first. Calmly he fired one shot, waist level, through the wall. He repeated the same procedure at each of the other corners, then sat on the rail of the deck and waited. When nothing happened after three minutes, he walked up to the front door and fired twice more.
Then he went in.
Christina Marks was not aware that Stranahan had been hit until she felt something warm on her bare arm. She opened her mouth to scream but Stranahan covered it with his hand and motioned for her to be quiet. She saw that his eyes were watering from the pain of the bullet wound. He removed his hand from her mouth and pointed at his left shoulder. Christina nodded but didn’t look.
They heard three more gunshots, each hi a different part of the house. Then came a silence that lasted a few agonizing minutes. Finally Stranahan rose to his feet with the shotgun cradled in his right arm. The left side of his body was numb and wet with blood; in the twilight of the shuttered house, he looked two-tone.
From the floor Christina watched him move. He pressed his back to the wall and edged toward the front of the house. The next shots made Christina shut her eyes. When she opened them, she saw two perfect holes through the front door; twin sunbeams, sharp as lasers, perforated the shadows. Beneath the light shafts, Mick Stranahan lay prone on his belly, elbows braced on the wooden floor. He was aiming at the front door when Chemo opened it.
Stranahan’s shotgun was a Remington 1100, a semi-automatic twelve-gauge, an excellent bird gun that holds up to five shells. Later, when Stranahan measured the distance from the door to where he had lain, he would marvel at how any human being with two good eyes could miss a seven-foot target at a distance of only nineteen feet four inches. The feet that Stranahan was bleeding to death at the time was not, in his view, a mitigating excuse.
In truth, it was the shock of the intruder’s appearance that had caused Stranahan to hesitate—the sight of this gaunt, pellucid, frizzle-haired freak with a moonscape face that could stop a freight train.
So Stranahan had stared for a nanosecond when he should have squeezed the trigger. For someone who looked so sickly, Chemo moved deceptively fast. As he dove out of the doorway, the first blast from the Remington sprinkled its rain of birdshot into the bay.
“Shit,” Stranahan said, struggling to his feet. On his way toward the door he slipped on his own blood and went down again, his right cheek slamming hard on the floor; this, just as Chemo craned around the comer and fired a messy burst from the Ingram. Rolling in a sticky mess, Stranahan shot back.
Chemo slammed the door from the outside, plunging the house into darkness once more.