they had the whole thing figured out. It was entirely possible that were they to retrieve Emmylou with the help of the police, she would be delivered from their custody by warrant to the very people who had snatched her from the Barlows, or their close cousins. So Lorna sat in the rental car a block away from the water with a cell phone in her hands and strict orders to get away and raise the alarm should the two men not return within the hour, or should something untoward take place.
“Untoward?” she asked. “I’m sorry, my standards fortoward are a little bent. What wouldun be at this point?”
Paz regretted his use of the word. “Multiple gunshots, automatic fire, huge fireballs, cars full of gangsters tearing down to the water. Like that. On the assumption that we’ll be in major trouble or dead.”
“Okay, got it, gunshots, fireballs, cars.” They stared at each other. “Don’t get killed, Jimmy.” TheL — word floated in her glottis and strained to push itself out, but he beat her to it, the first time she had heard it from an unrelated male of her species.
“Me too,” she said. “I’d like to spend the rest of my life with you, however short. Would that be cool?”
“Don’t talk that kind of shit, Lorna. We’ll be back before you know it.”
They walk off into the dark. Lorna sits in the driver’s seat, trying not to think about the passage of time, time on this terrifying operation, and the Time Remaining. She feels ashamed that she is so ill prepared for the ultimate things, her long career in hypochondria has not been helpful here. Oya told her that her life was over, perfectly correct, and she notices that she has started to think that it really was the Lord of Death and not a moon-faced nurse’s aide there at thebembe. Perhaps a mercy, that, to accept the reality of an unseen world, maybe cowardice, but what was the point of stoic bravery, after all, whom were we trying to impress? She realizes too that whatever the second opinion says (and she is still Lorna enough to resolve to seek one), her life as it was is indeed over. She recalls now a story told to her by Betsy Newhouse. One of Betsy’s friends had developed breast cancer, and Betsy had dropped her cold. I can’t be friends with her anymore, Betsy said, she did all the right things, diet exercise, the best doctors, or so she said, but she must have done something wrong,something….
Lorna feels a wave of self-disgust, how could she have spent so much time with a woman like that? Her precious moments listening to comments on this one’s body and that one’s sex life. She badly wants to talk to Sheryl Waits. Guilt here too, she hasn’t called her in a week, maybe more. It is late, but Sheryl is famously available twenty-four/seven. She punches the keys.
“I’m sorry, we don’t accept telephone solicitations from strangers,” says Sheryl when Lorna speaks.
“Come on, Sheryl.”
“Come on yo’self. You know how many messages I left on your voice mail? Where have youbeen, girl?”
“With Jimmy.”
“Ofcourse with Jimmy. Tell me how right I was.”
“You were right.”
“Of course I was. So? Give!”
“We went to Grand Cayman,” says Lorna and converts the trip and its sequelae into a romantic idyll, provoking squeals of delight from her friend. She doesn’t say she has had a bad biopsy, that she’s dying, because she knows that Sheryl would want to come right over and hug her and hold her hand and she doesn’t want to get into the B-movie aspects of her present situation, standing lookout for a desperate venture.
“So,” says Sheryl, “this is now officially serious. Do we have theL — word yet? Do we have theM — word?”
“The former, but not the latter.”
“But it’s in the air, yes?”
“It might be. Time will tell.”
“Hey, hon, is something wrong? Your voice sounds all funny.”
There is a loudboom from the direction of the boat that echoes against the walls of the sheds and workshops that line the river here.
“No, I’m fine,” Lorna says with a shaking voice. “Look, I got to go now. I just wanted to say that I love you.”
A pause. “Well thank you, Lorna, I love you too. Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she says and hangs up. She listens, straining her ears, and there is another boom, and then only silence and the normal night sounds of the district. Her phone buzzes. Sheryl again, but she doesn’t answer.
They crawled low on the deck of Emmylou’s old houseboat and looked across the yards of dark water at Packer’s big box-on-a-barge. The windows
were illuminated cheerily by a color television screen, and they could see the shadow of a man moving about against that light.
“What’s that he got in there, a motorcycle?”
“Yeah, a big Harley. I guess he keeps it inside at night.”
“Smart fella. A lot of crime down by the river,” said Barlow.
“He’s got a pistol,” said Paz.
“Well, we’ll just have to take it away from him then.” Barlow reached into his pocket and brought out a pair of number one shells and slipped them into the old 16-gauge double-barrel Ithaca shotgun he was carrying. He also had a big revolver stuck in his belt. The clack of the breech closing seemed unnaturally loud to Paz. He worked the slide of his Glock.
“Now, let’s do this,” said Barlow, and in the dim sky glow Paz could see he was wearing his lynch-mob-leader face. Barlow jumped off the houseboat and started to run. Two steps on the deck of Packer’s barge and he was at the jalousied glass door, which he shattered to pieces with his boot and the stock of his weapon. He had just dodged around the Harley when he saw Packer moving, a flash of white shirt in the dim light of the TV screen. He was heading toward the bow, toward his bedroom.
Packer was just reaching under the mattress of his bed when the butt of Barlow’s shotgun cracked him hard over the ear. Then there was a knee in his back and the twin circles of steel pressing like a cookie cutter into the back of his neck. He went limp.
Barlow turned the man over and jammed the muzzle under his chin. Packer was paper pale and his eyes were rolling.
“What do you want? Money?” His voice squeaked.
“Shut up!” said Barlow. He pulled the pistol out of its hiding place, with his little finger in the muzzle and tossed it into a corner. He backed away, still pointing the shotgun, and said, “Get up!”
Packer rose and walked unsteadily to the living room of the craft. A trickle of blood flowed from the wound above his ear. The TV was still on, playing a car commercial. Barlow lifted the shotgun, pointed it at Packer’s head, and pulled a trigger, twitching the muzzle at the last half second so that the charge fired past Packer’s ear at the television, and scored a direct hit on a cruising Honda. Packer’s face contorted and he lost control of his bladder. A pool formed at his feet. Barlow grabbed a chair from the dining area and threw it at the man.
“Sit down, you goddamn piss-baby!”
Packer sat. Without taking his eyes off him, Barlow drew a six-inch hunting knife from a sheath on his belt. He put the shotgun on the dining table and took a roll of duct tape from his trouser pocket. When Packer was fully trussed, arms, hands, and feet to the chair, Barlow stood in front of him and began to sharpen the hunting knife with a small stone that he took from a pocket in its sheath. He spit on the stone and drew the knife across it again and again. Packer watched the motion as if hypnotized. He cleared his throat. “Who. Who are you?”
“Well, I am the husband of the woman that your boys broke into her home and pistol-whipped this afternoon up by Clewiston. And kidnapped a woman we had as a guest.”Snick, snick, went the knife on the stone.
“I had nothing to do with that,” said Packer. “Clewiston? I don’t know what you’re?”
The knife flashed out, quick as a snake strike. Packer felt a bite on his forehead and yelped. Blood flowed into his eye and he blinked it away.
“I swear to God…,” Packer began, but stopped when Barlow held the tip of the knife an inch away from his eye.
“None of that,” said Barlow, “we don’t hold with taking the Lord’s name in vain.”
Snick snick snick.
“What are you going to do?” asked Packer after several minutes had passed.
“Well, what do you think? What do you think is the right thing to do to a man who would hire hoods to beat a
