puddles, their dark suits soaked, big men-one taller than the other, but both wide, massive specimens.
The first one wore a toupee which was plastered to him like a dark, many-fingered hand gripping his head; his glowering, battered, boxer’s face, with small, glittering wide-set eyes, flat nose, hairline mustache, was like a parody of those Inca masks.
The shorter one was no less massive and his eyes were slits in a round, slash-scarred face.
Both had big guns in their big fists-automatics, possibly.45s-the kind of gun that makes a small hole going in and on the way out leaves a picture window to your insides.
They were the men I’d seen with Lansky at the Biltmore.
They were, I had no doubt, the men the late Arthur had seen at Lyford Cay on another wind-swept, rain- lashed night.
All of this I gathered in the particle of a second that the lightning gave me before the room settled back into pitch black.
They were moving toward my bed, to their left as they came in; the tangle of sheets and blankets may have looked like a person, in the nonlight-and they hadn’t seen me stretched out on the couch, when they entered in that flash of lightning, looking instead toward the bed where even now they were firing their automatics, the thunder of the guns, the orange fiery muzzle flashes, drowning out the storm as they killed the mattress, sheets and blankets, making scorched smoky holes.
My nine-millimeter, goddamnit, was in my suitcase, over by the bed, over near them; I lifted a lamp off an end table and pitched it at them. The heavy base caught the short one in the forehead, and he yelped and tumbled back into his partner, who saw me charging and fired at me, but was too tangled up with his pal to aim and managed only to shatter a window.
Then I was on them, pushing them to the wall, the groggy round-faced short one waking up as I clutched his balls in one hand and squeezed and yanked and as he cried in agony, screeching like a parrot, his partner behind him did an awkward dance, trying to get around him to me, where he could shoot me or club me or anything, but I had snatched the short one’s.45 from limp fingers and fired it past the screaming smaller man, aiming for the tall one’s face but missing, in the commotion, and succeeding only in shooting off his left ear, which flew off his head and landed in a sodden scarlet lump against the wall, splattering, sticking there like a big squashed bug.
Now they both were hollering, but the one whose nuts I’d squeezed had recovered enough to elbow me in the midsection, and I tumbled back onto the bed, rolled off the other side, onto the floor, but retaining the.45 even as another.45 from a howling one-eared asshole was chewing holes in the wall just over my head behind me.
I leapt up to return fire, but after one round the goddamn thing was empty, and I threw it and caught somebody somewhere, because I heard a scream as I hit the deck again, with more slugs zinging overhead.
The darkness allowed me to crawl on the wood floor toward the couch, which could provide cover till I got to those double glass doors, where I could get the fuck away from these guys. Without a gun, there was only so much damage I could do.
But when the next stroke of lightning lit the room, I found myself exposed, crouched like a dog on the floor, bare ass in the air, with one of them at my right-the tall one, whose little eyes were big as he pointed the.45 with one hand and held on to the bloody place where his left ear used to be with the other-and standing right in front of those glass doors that were my escape route was the shorter one, the slits of his eyes widened into something savage and furious now, his hands held out like claws. He looked like a sumo wrestler in a wet business suit….
I dove into him. He was the unarmed one, after all, and I’m not sure whether we shattered the glass of the doors, or whether the one-eared man behind us did with his barrage of gunfire, but shatter it did as we flew through the disintegrating glass into the rain, and I was nicked by some shards, but the fat human cushion below me was really cut to shit, a bloody punctured unconscious thing, probably dead. I scrambled off him, the rain splattering my bare flesh like hard wet bullets, the cold a shock even under these circumstances, and scurried into the trees.
“You fucker!” the one-eared man screamed, standing over his fallen partner, and he fired the.45 into the darkness where he’d seen me go.
Only I was behind the biggest tree I could find, a tree too big to sway in the still-punishing wind, and when the lightning gave the night a silvery instant of day, I saw my weapon.
Despite the storm, I heard him snap the new clip into the automatic. And I heard his feet crunching on the twigs and leaves and splashing puddles, and when he came lumbering by with his rain-plastered toupee and his red used-to-be ear, I stepped out and hit him in the forehead with the coconut so hard I heard a crack; whether it was his head or the coconut, I couldn’t be sure. But I had more sympathy for the latter as I stood there, pelted by rain, palms bending around me, naked as Tarzan before Jane sewed him a loincloth, grinning down crazily at an unconscious man with one ear and a wet off-center toupee.
I took the.45 out of his loose fingers and maybe I wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t somehow reached out and grabbed my leg, but I emptied the thing into his face, three bullets that turned his battered pug’s puss into a mask more grotesque than even the Incas ever imagined.
I stumbled away from him and fell to my knees, in the muck, gasping. I must have looked like some crazy native making a sacrifice to the gods. Winded, hurting, I hung my head, let the.45 fall to the wet ground, listened to the sky rumble, let the water purify me, or try to.
He didn’t say anything.
He was laughing; or maybe he was crying.
But when I looked up, the short one, his face cut and soiled and red-streaked, his suit soaked with as much blood as rain, a big goddamn shard of glass sticking out of one leg like a lightning bolt that got stuck there, was standing over me with the other.45 in one hand.
Somehow I knew it was loaded, now.
“Are you praying, you bastard?” he shouted over the rain. “You should be.”
He raised the.45 and I was looking into the black eye of its barrel about to dive to one side when the gunshot stopped me.
But it stopped him worse.
The shot hadn’t been from a.45-from a much smaller weapon, I would say-and the short wide lightning- scarred thug staggered before me like a tree about to fall. In his forehead, not quite exactly between his eyes, was a quarter-size black hole; a comma of red welled out and was washed away by the rain and now I dove to one side as he fell, heavily, throwing water from the sodden ground every which way.
Behind him, in the jagged doorway we’d made through the glass doors, was a tall, slender figure. From where I knelt I couldn’t make out his features, but he wore a black turtleneck shirt and black pants, like a commando.
Then the lightning showed me the harshly handsome angles of his face.
“For God’s sake, man,” Fleming said, “come in out of the rain.”
He came to me, skirting the corpse he’d made, helped me up, and took me around to the side door, to avoid the broken glass. Once we were inside-though the storm was coming in after us, through the broken doors and a bullet-shattered window-he wrapped me in a blanket and said, “Would you excuse me?”
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t quite ready to say anything.
He went into the bathroom and closed the door and I heard the sound of violent retching.
When he came back, touching his lips with a tissue, he seemed chagrined. “Sorry.”
“Didn’t you ever kill anybody before?”
“Actually,” he said, sitting next to me, “no.”
I told him he’d picked a good place to start.
“I had a report that those two arrived by clipper this afternoon,” Fleming said. “I’ve been looking for them. I thought they might be coming to call on you, so I dropped by. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Next time,” I said numbly, “do try to ring first.”
He withdrew his beat-up gold cigarette case and lighted himself up.
“Give me one of those,” I said.
He did.
We sat and smoked quietly and as we did, the storm began to abate. I asked him if he’d seen the boat they’d used; I figured there might be a third man, piloting the craft. Fleming said no. Was Daniel still in his shack near the dock? Yes. Within fifteen minutes, the rain was pattering, not pelting, and the wind was a whisper, not a howl.
“The worst is over,” he said.
