daylight.”
“I couldn?t tell you about all that. No frame of reference, y?know.”
“This used to be a wildlife refuge,” I said. “That give you an idea?”
He flipped the cigarette out the window and whistled through his teeth.
“I doubt if you?ll see a sparrow out here now. Rents are too high.”
He swerved into Highland Drive without even making a pass at the brakes and lit another cigarette at
the same time. I started thinking about taking a cab when I saw half a dozen blue and whites blocking
the street ahead, their red and blue lights flashing. We pulled up behind one of them, leaving a mile or
so of hot rubber in the process. Ground never felt better underfoot.
I could smell salt air when we got out of the car.
“Lock up,” the Stick said. “Some fuckhead stole my hat once.”
“So I heard,” I said as we headed toward the house, which sat a hundred yards or so back from the
road against high dunes. An electric fence was the closest thing to a welcome mat.
I began to get the feeling that this whole bunch of hooligans, Stick included, were like Cowboy
Lewis. They definitely believed the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. I also
began to wonder where due process fit into all this, if it fit in at all.
We reached the fence, showed some bronze to the man on the gate, and started up the long drive on
foot. Dutch was right behind us. I could see his enormous hulk silhouetted against the headlights of
the patrol cars. The body lay, uncovered, at the pool?s edge. A breeze blew in off the bay, rattling the
sea oats along the dunes above.
The old man was unrecognizable. Whatever had blown up, had blown up right in his face. One of his
arms had been blown off and either be had been knocked into the pool or was in it when the bomb
went off, The water was the colour of cherry soda.
There were blood and bits of flesh splattered on the wall of the brick house.
All the windows in the back were blown out.
A woman was hysterical somewhere inside.
“What kind of maniac we got here?” Dutch said, as quietly as I?d heard him say anything since I
arrived in Dunetown.
“Right under my fuckin? nose,” Kite Lange said. And quite a nose it was. It looked like it had been
reworked with a flat iron, and he talked through it like a man with a bad cold or a big coke habit. To
make it worse, he was neither. His nose simply had been broken so many times that his mother
probably cried every time she saw him. He had knuckles the size of Bermuda onions.
Ex-fighter, had to be.
