The Girl Hunters

'There seemed to be a connection through the jewels. Richie's cover was that of a sailor and smuggler. Your jewels were missing. Pat made that a common factor. I don't believe it.'

'Could Leo's position in government--well, as you intimated--'

'There is a friend of mine who says no. He has reason to know the facts. I'll stick with him.'

'Then Leo's death is no part of what you are looking for?'

'I don't think so. In a way I'm sorry. I wish I could help avenge him too. He was a great man.'

'Yes, he was.'

'I'll take you up on that swim.'

'The suits are in the bathhouse.'

'That should be fun,' I said.

In the dim light that came through the ivy-screened windows we turned our backs and took off our clothes. When you do that deliberately with a woman, it's hard to talk and you are conscious only of the strange warmth and the brief, fiery contact when skin meets skin and a crazy desire to turn around and watch or to grab and hold or do anything except what you said you'd do when the modest moment was in reality a joke--but you didn't quite want it to be a joke at all.

Then before we could turn it into something else and while we could still treat it as a joke, we had the bathing suits on and she grinned as she passed by me. I reached for her, stopped her, then turned because I saw something else that left me cold for little ticks of time.

Laura said, 'What is it, Mike?'

I picked the shotgun out of the corner of the room. The building had been laid up on an extension of the tennis court outside and the temporary floor was clay. Where the gun rested by the door water from the outside shower had seeped in and wet it down until it was a semi-firm substance, a blue putty you could mold in your hand.

She had put the shotgun down muzzle first and both barrels were plugged with clay and when I picked it up it was like somebody had taken a bite out of the blue glop with a cookie cutter two inches deep!

Before I opened it I asked her, 'Loaded?'

'Yes.'

I thumbed the lever and broke the gun. It fell open and I picked out the two twelve-gauge Double 0 shells, then slapped the barrels against my palm until the cores of clay emerged far enough for me to pull them out like the deadly plugs they were.

She saw the look on my face and frowned, not knowing what to say. So I said it instead. 'Who put the gun here?'

'I did.'

'I thought you knew how to handle it?' There was a rasp in my voice you could cut with a knife.

'Leo--showed me how to shoot it.'

'He didn't show you how to handle it, apparently.'

'Mike--'

'Listen, Laura, and you listen good. You play with guns and you damn well better know how to handle them. You went and stuck this baby's nose down in the muck and do you know what would happen if you ever tried to shoot it?'

Her eyes were frightened at what she saw in my face and she shook her head. 'Well, damn it, you listen then. Without even thinking you stuck this gun in heavy clay and plugged both barrels. It's loaded with high-grade sporting ammunition of the best quality and if you ever pulled the trigger you would have had one infinitesimal span of life between the big then and the big now because when you did the back blast in that gun would have wiped you right off the face of the earth.'

'Mike--'

'No--keep quiet and listen. It'll do you good. You won't make the mistake again. That barrel would unpeel like a tangerine and you'd get that whole charge right down your lovely throat and if ever you want to give a police medical examiner a job to gag a maggot, that's the way to do it. They'd have to go in and scrape your brains up with a silent butler and pick pieces of your skull out of the woodwork with needle-nosed pliers. I saw eyeballs stuck to a wall one time and if you want to really see a disgusting sight, try that. They're bigger than you would expect them to be and they leak fluid all the time they look at you trying to lift them off the boards and then you have no place to put them except in your hand and drop them in the bucket with the rest of the pieces. They float on top and keep watching you until you put on the lid.'

'Mike!'

'Damn it, shut up! Don't play guns stupidly around me! You did it, now listen!'

Both hands covered her mouth and she was almost ready to vomit.

'The worst of all is the neck because the head is gone and the neck spurts blood for a little bit while the heart doesn't know its vital nerve center is gone--and do you know how high the blood can squirt? No? Then let me tell you. It doesn't just ooze. It goes up under pressure for a couple of feet and covers everything in the area and you wouldn't believe just how much blood the body has in it until you see a person suddenly become headless and watch what happens. I've been there. I've had it happen. Don't let it happen to you!'

She let her coffee go on the other side of the door and I didn't give a damn because anybody that careless with a shotgun or any other kind of a gun needs it like that to make them remember. I wiped the barrels clean, reloaded the gun and put it down in place, butt first.

When I came out Laura said, 'Man, are you mean.'

'It's not a new saying.' I still wasn't over my mad. Her smile was a little cockeyed, but a smile nevertheless.

'Mike--I understand. Please?'

'Really?'

'Yes.'

'Then you watch it. I play guns too much. It's my business. I hate to see them abused.'

'Please, Mike?'

'Okay. I made my point.'

'Nobly, to say the least. I usually have a strong stomach.'

'Go have some coffee.'

'Oh, Mike.'

'So take a swim,' I told her and grinned. It was the way I felt and the grin was the best I could do. She took a run and a dive and hit the water, came up stroking for the other side, then draped her arms on the edge of the drain and waited for me.

I went in slowly, walking up to the edge, then I dove in and stayed on the bottom until I got to the other side. The water made her legs fuzzy, distorting them to Amazonian proportions, enlarging the cleft and swells and declavities of her belly, then I came up to where all was real and shoved myself to concrete surface and reached down for Laura.

She said, 'Better?' when I pulled her to the top.

I was looking past her absently. 'Yes. I just remembered something.'

'Not about the gun, Mike.'

'No, not about the gun.'

'Should I know?'

'It doesn't matter. I don't really know myself yet. It's just a point.'

'Your eyes look terribly funny.'

'I know.'

'Mike--'

'What?'

'Can I help?'