Strip

somebody got him, then Kapak could be next. He’s the one who had Rogoso’s money taking round trips. Kapak has a hundred reasons to lay low.”

Jimmy thought for a moment, then nodded. “All right. He has reasons to be careful. I didn’t know Rogoso was dead.”

“You must have been in the bathroom or something when we talked about it. Anyway, we’re here.”

Jerry and Voinovich put on their ski masks and checked the loads in their guns. Jerry produced a small hand- held device.

“Is that a stun gun?” Jimmy said. “A stun gun? Are you crazy?”

Jerry slid a switch with his thumb, a small light went on, and the device crackled in his hand and gave a hum, then switched to a higher frequency, then off. “Yes.”

“What’s it for?”

“Don’t worry. It’s just a precaution.”

“You zap a fat sixty-four-year-old with that and you’ll be thumping his chest to restart his heart.”

Voinovich was impatient. “Can you two talk about this later?”

“Yeah,” said Jerry. “Let’s go.”

Jimmy breathed audibly through clenched teeth as he followed.

They emerged from the bamboo grove and walked into the sunlight, up the winding path toward the guesthouse. Voinovich stopped. He whispered, “Hold it. Stop.”

The Gaffney brothers turned to look at him. He was motionless, his head cocked slightly to the side, his hands in front of him clutching his gun. “I heard something.”

“What?”

“Leaves rustling. Somewhere up there.” He gestured toward the guesthouse. “Like something moving into the underbrush.”

“You serious?”

“Of course he’s serious,” said Jerry. “Kapak doesn’t have a dog, right?”

There was a long moment of deep silence, when even the fluttering of the bamboo leaves was muted. In the middle of it there was a sound of metal sliding on metal. The three men turned toward the guesthouse.

There was the loud roar of a shotgun, and the dust of the path in front of Voinovich puffed upward in a cloud. Voinovich had been in firefights, and he knew enough to instantly calculate two values: the time it would take to find and kill the shooter, and the time it would take to get behind something. He dove, rolled, and was on his feet, running with his head down. He crashed into the grove between two tall bamboo stalks, his momentum carrying him through the narrow space and a few feet deeper, where the shooter could not see him.

The Gaffney brothers ran the other way, making a sprint for the guesthouse. The cover of a brick building seemed much better to them than bamboo. They reached the porch at the same time and hurled themselves against the wooden door, but it didn’t budge. Jimmy turned the handle as Jerry threw his shoulder against it again, and it flew open and swung into the wall as he sprawled on the living room floor. He got to his feet to join Jimmy in his rush to the windows on the far side of the house. As he ran, Jimmy had a moment when the extremities of his body felt icy. The window he was running for was already open.

It was too late to change course now. He reached the low window, sliding along the last three feet of hardwood floor on his knees and then stopping hard, already scanning through the window to see the shooter. He saw nobody. The tall pines on the far side of the yard had no foliage near the ground to hide anyone, and nothing about the low, leafy plants in the tropical garden seemed to hold any menace. He leaned outward and craned his neck.

Blam! It was a roar so loud that it seemed to be a part of a larger reality, like an explosive charge going off. He did not duck back so much as allow the surprise of it to propel him onto his back on the floor. He said quietly, “What the fuck.”

Jerry started firing his pistol out the other window, volleys of three shots each, an insistent staccato pop-pop-pop! Each time he paused, the three brass casings ejected to the right clattered on the hardwood floor.

“Where is he?” Jimmy cautiously peered out his window.

“Out there!” Jerry fired two more volleys, one to the right, and the next to the left.

“Did you even see him?”

“No, but he’s there.”

“Hold it. Stop firing.”

Jerry held his fire, ducked back in to release the magazine of his pistol and slip in a new one, then pull the slide back to let the first round into the chamber. “Why stop? The bastard’s shooting at us.”

“Think, for Christ’s sake. He must have been in here and we startled him, sneaking into the yard with ski masks over our heads. He doesn’t recognize us.”

“That was a shotgun. Know what you’ll look like if he hits you with double-ought?”

“We don’t want to kill him.”

“Did I mention he’s shooting at us?”

“I’m not talking about that. I mean he’s not worth anything to us dead. He can’t pay if he’s dead. Nobody will pay if he’s dead.”

Kapak had heard the gunfire coming from the back of his property. He stood in the small room off the kitchen staring at the security monitor. He had been there since it started, trying to make out the shooters and figure out how to avoid them. He could see there were at least three men wearing masks and windbreakers intended to hide their faces and their gear. They charged into the guesthouse, and then he lost sight of them.

He had not expected Rogoso’s friends to know enough to come after him this quickly, less than a full day after he’d killed Rogoso. He also wondered who was down there fighting them off with a shotgun. He hoped it wasn’t one of the gardeners, some innocent who had simply been cornered and found the gun in the cabinet. He supposed it was possible Spence had not left after he had dropped Kapak off. Maybe he’d just gone down to the guesthouse to watch the rear of the property—to watch Kapak’s back, as he had said. Spence was a real soldier.

Kapak was worried. After the second shotgun blast, he had heard a series of three-shot bursts, one after another, only one gun firing. Had they killed the defender? Blam! The shotgun. He was still alive.

Kapak squinted, trying to make out human shapes in the backyard foliage. Suddenly the guesthouse door flew open and two men dashed out, sprinting across the open lawn into the invisible dim spaces of the bamboo. The shotgun was silent, as though the defender felt he had done all he wanted by making them retreat. He apparently didn’t want any bodies in the yard. That would be like Spence, and he was grateful once again to the man. Killing one of the invaders would have created a new problem.

There were already enough problems. Spence had to plant the bloody relics of Joe Carver to prove he was dead and imply to the people in the club scene that it was Kapak’s people who had done it. There was also the continuing problem of the police. Lieutenant Slosser clearly knew he had killed Rogoso, and by now his detectives were talking to people who had been at the club last night, trying to break his alibi. They would also talk to Rogoso’s people to establish that he had reason to kill Rogoso. When they had enough, they would arrest him.

He hurried to the other end of the house, picked up the pistol from the nightstand by his bed, put it into the inner pouch of his briefcase, threw on a summer-weight jacket, and looked around for anything else he might need to bring with him. He unexpectedly knew several things that he hadn’t before. One was that he had never actually liked the big house, only the gardens that had attracted him to the property in the first place and the guesthouse that he had built. If he had seen clearly before, he would have put an office in the main house, stationed a couple of men there for protection, and lived in the back of the lot in the guesthouse.

Another thing that he now knew was that if today had happened to him when he was thirty, forty, or even fifty, it would have meant little to him. One place was the same as another. He had moved to one country and then another with a few briefer stops in between. Each move had involved a wrenching departure, a great deal of effort, a period of getting used to strangeness and language difficulties. But each, in the end, had left his life improved.