next door did not overlook its rooftop.
“I feel sick,” she said. “Sick to my stomach, like before going onstage to give a stupid lecture….”
I was digging the nine-millimeter out of my travel bag. “Do you get butterflies before you take off in a plane?”
“Never.”
I checked the chamber; the bolt action made a nasty echoey click. “Well, this is more like takin’ off on a flight than giving a lecture. So tell your stomach to take it easy.”
She sucked in air, nodded.
Now, if only my belly would take that same good advice.
I slipped the extra clip into my suitcoat pocket. I wasn’t taking anything with me but the clothes on my person, the gun in my hand and Amy. That leather flight jacket was apparently the only keepsake she was taking along. Thunder rumbled and cracked, sounding fake, like a radio sound effects guy shaking a thin sheet of steel.
She swept into my arms and I held her tight, and her eyes widened as she looked at my right hand with the automatic held nose upward. “Is there going to be violence?”
“Only if that’s what it takes. Pacifists get off at this stop…. Okay?”
She swallowed. “Okay.”
“If there is…violence…you have to stay calm. If you ran into trouble up in the air, you could stay calm, right?”
“Usually.”
“Well, I need that world-famous nerves-of-steel pilot at my side, right now. Okay? Is she here?”
“She’s here.”
“Now.” And I held her away from me and gave her a goofy little smile. “Sooner or later in the life of a man having an affair with a married woman, the inevitable occurs.”
She couldn’t help it; she smiled back at me. “Which is?”
“Nate Heller goes out the window.”
And I opened the window—no bars on this prison—and went out first, into the downpour, a splattering, insistent rain that was surprising in its power, my feet sinking into grassy, muddy ground several inches. The window was up off the ground a ways and I held my arms for her to slip down into, as if we were eloping, and then she was in my arms and she blinked and blinked as water drummed her face and she grinned reflexively, saying “Oh my goodness!”
And, as if she were my bride just ushered over the threshold, I eased her onto the sodden ground, where her slippered feet sank in almost to the ankle.
“This is going to be slow going!” I said, having to work to be heard over the driving rain and grumbling sky.
We were between the hotel and the house next door—there wasn’t much space, not much more than a hallway’s worth. So I got in front of her, leading her by the hand; my nine-millimeter was stuck in my waistband. We hadn’t taken more than two soggy steps when the voice behind us cried out. “Hey!”
I looked back, past Amy, and saw him: Ramon, coming out of the outdoor toilet, buckling his pants with one hand and coming at us with the raised billy club in the other. His chubby body charged through the curtain of rain as if it were nothing more than moisture, his sandaled feet making rhino craters in the muddy earth, his eyes wide and dark and brightly animal, like a frightened raccoon’s, only a raccoon would have had sense enough to flee and here Ramon was barreling right toward me, moving faster than a fat man had any right to move, and I pulled Amy back behind me, closer to the street, and thrust myself forward and just as Ramon entered the tunnel between hotel and house, my nine-millimeter slug entered the melon of his head, somewhere in his forehead, lifting the top of his skull in fragments, revealing in a spray of red that Ramon did indeed have a brain, before he tumbled backward, careening off the house next door, then splatting against the hotel, where he slid down its cement surface and sank into the mud like an animal carcass on its way to becoming a fossil.
Amy screamed and I rudely covered her mouth with my hand until her wide eyes and nodding told me she wouldn’t scream anymore and she was trembling and crying as I stood there with a fucking monsoon dripping down my head, saying, “Nobody heard that gunshot, not in this shit…but I gotta go in and deal with the other one!”
“Why?!”
“Because Ramon here can’t take a dump forever. The other one’s gonna go checking on him, and I can’t have that!”
“Are you going to kill him?”
“Not if he’s smart.”
And what were the odds of that?
So I left her there, in the passageway between hotel and house, rain pummeling her as she covered her mouth, her back turned to the horror of what had become of Ramon, and I moved out onto the street and inside the hotel where the burly Chamorro looked around at me, and I swung the nine-millimeter barrel across the side of his skull in a fashion that would not only knock out most any man, but probably fucking kill him.
Only this son of a bitch shook it off, and went for the billy club on the table.
I put a bullet in his ear that wound up going through his reaching hand, as well, though I doubt he felt it. He tumbled onto the rattan table, breaking it in a crunch of shattering straw.
Now he knew how to play Chicago.
Just down the hall, out of the first hotel room door, the Chamorro desk clerk stuck out his mustached face. His eyes were huge.
