gave onto a small confined area that served as crew quarters.
No one.
I went inside the crew's quarters. It smelled of unwashed bedding and expectorated snuff. A color photograph of a nude black woman torn from a magazine was glued against one bulkhead. I went through another open hatch into a passageway that traversed the interior of the ship and led back toward the pilothouse and the bridge. The bulkheads were gray and cold with moisture, the deck patterned with the wet imprints of tennis shoes.
I opened or went through each hatch along the passageway.
Nothing.
The end of the passageway was unlighted, shrouded in gloom, as indistinct as fog. I didn't notice the broken lightbulb glass until the sole of my shoe came down on a piece of filament and cracked it against the deck. By then it was too late.
Buchalter stepped out from behind an open storage locker door, the stock of the AR-15 tight against his shoulder and cheek, one green eye as hard and bulbous as an egg behind the iron sights.
'You lose again, Dave. Throw it away,' he said, and kicked the door shut behind him, allowing me to see Lucinda and Clete on their knees by the ladder that led into the pilothouse, their fingers hooked behind their necks. There was a raw, skinned area above Clete's left eye.
'You want to take a chance and plant one in them?' Buchalter said.
'Don't give up your piece, Streak!' Clete shouted.
I held the.45 out to my side, bent slightly with my knees, and placed it carefully on the deck. Buchalter wore combat boots and khakis, a heavy gray wool shirt, and long underwear buttoned to the throat. His cheeks and chin were gold with the beginnings of a beard, the spray of blackheads fanning from his eyes like powder burns.
I smelled a bright, clean odor in the air, one that travels to the brain as quickly as a slap. Like the smell of white gas.
'Your friend killed my sister, Dave. What do you think of that?' he said. He looked at me with his lopsided grin.
'We tried to save her,' I said.
'Come join us,' he said.
'Maybe I shouldn't.'
'Oh, yes. It won't be complete without you. You and I have a date. All three of you do.' His thick tongue worked itself wetly along his lips.
'He soaked us with gasoline, Dave. Run!' Lucinda said.
'You know you're not going anywhere, Dave. Come closer. That's it, come on. The little boy is always inside the man. Don't be ashamed. You'd be surprised what people are willing to do under the right circumstances.' He held the rifle against his side by the pistol grip and worked a Zippo lighter out of his left pocket with his thumb.
'One's a Negro, the other a gentile who has intercourse with a Jew,' he said. 'They're going to die, anyway. Would you like to watch their performance with me, or be part of it? Nobody'll know, either, Dave.'
He pursed his lips and sucked in his cheeks, as though a mint lay on his tongue.
'The Coast Guard's on the way, Will.'
'I guess we should finish quickly then. Even when they catch my kind, you know what they do with us. Government hospitals. Clean drugs, maybe a horny nurse who needs a few extra dollars. Come on, kneel down with your friends, now.'
The heel of one boot clanked against a gasoline can. But then I heard another sound, too-behind me, at the far end of the passageway, a clumsy thud like an awkward person tripping across the bottom of a hatchway.
Buchalter heard it too, and his eyes shot past me, trying to focus on an image that they couldn't quite accept.
'Duck, Mr. Dave!'
I dropped to the deck, curling in an embryonic ball, waiting for the quick, sharp report of the AR-15. Instead, I heard a sound like a strand of broken piano wire whizzing through the air.
I stared down the passageway at the frozen silhouette of Zoot Bergeron, the discharged speargun held in front of him.
I grabbed the _.45 from the deck just as Will Buchalter stumbled along the bulkhead, through the gloom, toward the ladder, partly obscured by the open door on a locker. Then I saw both his hands clenched on the aluminum shaft that protruded from his mouth. He careened up the ladder, the tendons in his shoulders and neck knotted like the roots in a tree stump, his hands gathered in front of his mouth, his combat boots ringing like hammers on the iron steps.
I fired twice through the hatchway into the pilothouse and heard the hollow points shatter panes of glass out on the deck.
'Sorry, Streak. He came up behind me while I was pulling on that rope,' Clete said.
'Get the rifle,' I said, and went up the ladder after Buchalter.
But the chase was not to be a long one.
I found him out on the deck, his back slumped against the rail, like a lazy man taking a nap, the spearpoint protruding from the back of his neck in a bloody clot, the shaft trembling slightly with the vibrations from the engine room. His eyes were open and empty, staring at nothing, the gold down on his chin slick with the drainage from his wound.
It started to rain, and the spray off the stern was blowing hard in the wind. A cable snapped loose from a side boom and was gone below the water's surface in the wink of an eye.
I heard Clete behind me.
'Did you hit him?' he said.
'Nope.'
'A bad way for the black kid to get started,' he said, and looked at me.
I glanced up at the broken Windows in the pilothouse. Lucinda and Zoot were still below.
'Let's do it,' I said.
We pulled Buchalter away from the rail and laid him flat on the deck, then rolled him over the side. His shirt was puffed with air, and a wave scudded the upper portion of his body along the hull of the ship; his mouth was locked open around the spear shaft as though he were yawning or perhaps considering one final thought before the waves pressed him under in a cascade of dirty foam.
'That storm looks mean. Time to cut loose from the Katzenjammer Kids,' Clete said. He paused. 'Is there some paperwork later that's going to cause a problem for me?'
'What do I know?' I said. I shielded my eyes against the rain and watched as he sliced the line that held the suspended body of the woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux, shut down motors, released winches, chopped cables and ropes in half, his sandy hair blowing in the wind, his Marine Corps utilities flapping and flattening against his legs.
I felt the deck pitch under me when all the cables had snapped free from the submarine's weight. For just a moment I watched the mud and blackened seaweed and oil trapped in sand churn in clouds out of the gulf's bottom, and I knew that down below the U-boat's crew and Buchalter and his sister were setting sail again. But it wasn't a time to muse upon old historical warnings about protean creatures who rise from biblical seas or slouch toward Bethlehem to be born again.
Instead I mounted the steps into the pilothouse, where Lucinda and her son had fixed a blanket under Oswald Flat's head and pulled a second one up to his chin. They stood at one of the shattered windows, Zoot with his arm on his mother's shoulders, looking at a Coast Guard helicopter that was flying toward us from the east, just ahead of the impending storm.
Zoot's eyes searched my face.
'You saved our butts, partner, but you missed Buchalter completely,' I said.
'Then why ain't I seen the spear?'
'Who cares, podna? It's yesterday's box score now,' I said.
Down below, Clete stretched his big arms and shoulders, clenched the deck rail, and spit over the side.
'Good guys
'What's that mean?' Zoot said.
