I folded the sheet and wrote his name on the outside. I put in his Osage Street address and put the paper in my shoe. Once the probes and the postmortems were over, the cops would see that he got the message.
If Dante got to me, he’d be killing himself.
“Now it’s real,” I said to nobody.
* * *
I lay in my sleeping bag outside the museum door and stared at that crack in the sky. It was beginning to fuzz over now as the cloud cover fattened and spread. I felt a drop of rain, thought I should move inside, but I only moved deeper into my bag. Sleep was impossible but that didn’t matter. Once we were in the car heading north, Erin could drive and I’d catch up then.
I thought these things and the time was heavy. At some point I fell asleep, but not for long. I am good with time and I opened my eyes knowing it was somewhere near three o’clock. I wiggled out of my bag and sat up straight. Some noise, some fleeting thing out there where the wind blew, had wafted around my head. It had shifted from an easterly blow to southwesterly, and suddenly I felt an alarm go off under my heart. I told myself it was nothing but that hunch; not even the sound I thought I had heard had any true substance or source in this black world. My practical nature said I had been dreaming, that’s all it was, I had come out of the dream thinking of Dante and those guys in the boat, there was no reason to make that connection, it was just a case of nerves. But it wouldn’t go away, and now I got completely out of the bag and stood on my tiptoes looking out toward Morris Island.
Dante. I saw his face swirling through the dark in various shades of clarity. He was certainly insane, and that, combined with his other charms, made him far more dangerous than any thug I had ever faced as a cop. I had humiliated him in front of his men—that was another part of the case against me—and I had done a lot of damage to his face. His bruises would look worse day by day until they began to get better, and by then it wouldn’t matter anymore. After a week of staring at his own black-and-blue face in the mirror, who could tell how crazy he’d be? He would have a score to settle and in his mind there could be none bigger, ever, and the longer it went unresolved the angrier and more dangerous he would be. This was strictly a guess: How reckless could he be? What was he going to do, scale the wall and kill everyone on this island just to get me? That would be the act of a real madman, but it wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. It depended on the depth of his hate versus the degree of his own survival instinct. I fiddled with a mathematical formula—Dead Janeway equals Perp’s Survival over Perp’s Hate squared. Maybe by now his hate would be at the fourth or fifth power, or the fiftieth power, all but obliterating even his instinct for self-preservation. In that case, anything could happen. Madmen have been known to walk into certain death to get at the object of their loathing. Dante would have covered himself as well as possible, and maybe that would be enough. Who else knew of his connection to us? There would be half a dozen cronies back in Baltimore who’d line up and swear that he had never left town, he had been there among them, having dinner in full view of a dozen witnesses, at the very moment when this strange carnage began, six or seven hundred miles away.
I thought of Luke and Libby. It had never occurred to any of us that we might be putting them in danger. This is how different things can be at three o’clock in the morning.
None of this was at all likely. To be out there in a boat now would mean he had known or anticipated our every move: that he had gotten the boat and made his plans, and all this had been done from the time the Fort Sumter tour boat had arrived back at the marina in the late afternoon without us on it. Not likely, but not impossible either. Thugs like Dante know people like themselves in many towns. He may have lined up some local pal two days ago, and in this town a boat was easy to get.
I looked at the sky and saw nothing. If he was coming at all, it would be now.
I felt the uneasiness filling up my soul. I began to pace along the front of the battery, looking for something I couldn’t see and listening for a sound that wasn’t there.
I stood at the top of the stairs and waited.
At some point I started down. I followed my light around the battery and up to the old wall. There was a wooden barrier at the lowest point; they would have to scale it at the higher wall and come into the fort from there. I was beginning to know the way now, and I moved easily out toward the edge, keeping my light down at my feet and shaded by my hand, so it couldn’t be seen from the water. Fifty yards from the gorge, I stopped and turned off the light.
I saw a soft glow out there, at the base of the wall.
Something moved. Some bump in the night. The squeak of an oar, maybe…
Then I heard a voice. They were out there. They had defied the odds.
I shucked my way out of my coat and got out my gun. Got down on my knees and crawled along a rough surface to the edge.
The rain began. I barely felt it.
I peeped over the edge. They were there on the little beachhead below. Four of them, and Dante had been the first to step out on land. There was no mistaking that overgrown palooka: I had his number even in the dark. He stood outlined against a dim light, then he spoke. “Come on, let’s get that ladder out here, we ain’t got all fuckin‘ day.” No mistaking that nasty baritone: it was packed with authority and gave orders like other men breathe. I heard a brief metallic sound, and by the same dim light I saw an aluminum ladder being slipped hand to hand over the bow of the boat.
I could’ve killed them all then; they were like four fat fish in a barrel just waiting to be shot. I had the gun in my hand, why didn’t I just do it? I could still get all four before any of them could clear their own guns; I had been that
