“He didn’t understand that real cops have guns,” I told him. I went over and reached across the check-in counter and yanked his phone out of the wall. “Do I have to kill you or tie you up or anything?”
He shook his head, no, crossed himself, and ducked back into his room.
Then I ran out into the rain, the nine-millimeter back in my waistband, and Amy came flying out from between the house and the hotel. I slipped my arm around her waist and we ran down the boardwalk. No one was around; the unpaved street next to us was a swamp no vehicle could have navigated. From across the way, in a seedy little bar, came the sound of a gramophone playing a Dorsey Brothers record, “Lost in a Fog,” and Chamorro kids were dancing, boys and girls holding each other close, swaying to the record’s rhythm, ignoring the staccato percussion of the downpour.
When we ran out of boardwalk, the grassy ground provided a terrible soggy glue, but we moved along, stumbling, never quite falling, slowed though not quite caught in this just-poured cement. Through the sheeting rain we glimpsed the concrete cellblocks of the prison, impervious to the pounding storm, then ducked out of the way as a tin roof, flung recklessly by the wind, went pitching across our path, carving a resting place in the face of a wood- frame warehouse. Exchanging startled looks, and grabbing gulps of air, we moved on, pushing past our old friend the sugar king in his park as palm trees bowed down to him.
Then, along the waterfront, we had boardwalk under our mud-coated feet again, and the two-story buildings around us lessened the squall’s impact, though we were heading into the wind, and it took effort just to walk, our clothes so drenched they were heavy, our hair soaked flat to our scalps. A block away yawned the expanse of the Garapan harbor’s concrete dock. We were early, maybe five, maybe ten minutes; would the storm have delayed Johnson? Would it have defeated him entirely, and had I blasted my way out of one dead end and into another?
And with these questions barely posed, bad luck rendered their answers moot.
Because just as we were passing through the
Only drunks—particularly drunks who were outfitted in new, fresh clothes (even the Chamorro wore fresh white linens)—would have exited in the midst of this tempest, their finery immediately getting saturated.
But these were dangerous drunks, who looking across the liquefied goo of the unpaved waterfront street, recognized us, Amira and Father O’Leary.
And at first Chief Suzuki smiled.
So I smiled and waved and nodded.
But then Chief Suzuki frowned, even in his inebriated state smelling something fishy, not that difficult to do in this part of town, and he shrieked in Japanese at Lord Jesus, who also frowned, and they ran toward us.
We kept moving, too, toward the dock. We were on the boardwalk and the Chief and Jesus were trying to run across a sucking mucky morass. I drew my gun.
“Nathan!” she cried, and I just pulled her along.
I looked back at them and they were making progress but we were almost there, almost to where the cement apron of the waterfront led to the jetty itself.
Then a thundercrack that wasn’t a thundercrack startled me and I looked back to see that Suzuki had pulled his gun, I’d forgotten he had one, his suitcoat had been buttoned over it, and I fired back at him. It caught him in the right shoulder but the drunken little bastard barely winced, just shifted his revolver to his other hand and fired again.
Amy screamed.
“Are you hit?” I yelled, putting myself between her and the chief.
“No! I’m scared!”
I fired again and this one caught him either in the chest or the shoulder, I wasn’t sure which, but the gun fumbled from his fingers and was swallowed into the sludge. The chief just stood there, arms limp, weaving, whether from liquor or pain, who could say?
But what was worse, what was much worse, was Lord Jesus.
He was lumbering toward us, his right arm raised, hand filled with the machete, eyes showing the whites all ’round, teeth bared in a ghastly grimace of a smile. Lightning turned the street white and winked off that wide wicked blade.
I was still moving forward when I fired back at him, fired twice, hitting him once, somewhere in the midsection but it didn’t even slow him down. Behind him I could see the wounded chief waddling like a penguin, heading back toward the Nangetsu, no doubt to call in the alarm signal, goddamnit! Still running, pushing Amy out in front of me, I fired back behind me again and this time caught Jesus in the left shoulder. He felt it, he yowled, but he was still coming.
We were on the cement now, and stretching before us, beyond the concrete jetty, were choppy but not impossible waters, rough wild waters but a sailor like Captain Irving Johnson could maneuver on them….
Only there was no sight of him.
Maniagawa Island beckoned; you could almost reach out and touch it…but no motor launch in sight. Just rolling waves and angry sky.
And Jesus had made it to the cement, and his machete was poised to strike and my muddy feet slipped as I fired, the bullet taking a piece of his ear off but not important enough a piece of anything to stop him from lunging in and swinging that blade, and Amy screamed as I felt that blade carve through my clerical collar and the front of my suitcoat and cut the cloth and cut me, a gaping wide C from my right collarbone to my left hip bone and it was wet and stung but I could tell it wasn’t deep, and I fired a round into the bastard’s stomach and his yelp of agony was the sweetest fucking sound I ever heard. He tumbled face first to the cement, like a huge catch onto the deck of a