Not surprisingly, I had the beach to myself. I’d walked several hundred yards when I first noticed that I wasn’t alone anymore.
I felt that tickle in the back of my neck that I get when I’m being stared at. I quit watching the wave action and looked up. The man approaching me on the beach wore a black Gore-Tex coat, black running shoes, and blue jeans. Pepper-colored hair, six feet tall, big shoulders. He was maybe a hundred yards in front of me and seemed to be checking out the seagulls racing down the beach. I wondered where he’d come from. I hadn’t been watching the ocean that long, so he must have just stepped onto the beach from one of the houses. Like me, he was staying high up on the sand, avoiding the surges from the surf. If one of us didn’t turn around, we’d probably bump into each other in a minute or so.
As we moved closer to each other, I recognized his face from when I’d seen him in Lincoln City. He’d been driving the big Chevy Suburban, with Lavar Macone riding in the back seat.
He gave me a small smile like a rancher might give a cow he’s about to use a branding iron on. I felt a dizzying sense of unease, as if gravity had stopped working properly, or I was watching a movie of myself and the credits were about to roll. I was intensely aware of the roar of the surf slamming against the beach. The air felt thick and smelled strongly of salt water. I unzipped my coat as I walked, feeling the resistance of the zipper in my hand and then the rush of the cold air onto my skin.
Then the man stopped and pulled his hands out of his coat pockets, letting his arms hang loose at his sides. I kept walking. When I was about ten feet from him, I heard a clicking sound and saw a black blade several inches long materialize in his right fist. He held his left arm out towards me like a traffic cop might if he wanted someone to stop.
“Hold it right there,” he said.
I stopped. He had small eyes under the short pepper-colored hair. In the waning evening light his pupils had the appearance of dark marbles.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “You’re coming with me and my friends. Mister Marco wants to meet you.”
“Tough,” I said.
I saw the skin get tight around his eyes. “What Mister Marco wants, he gets,” he said.
“Not this time,” I said.
Then things started happening fast.
A high wave came, leaving the two of us standing knee-deep in icy water. I reached behind my back for the pistol I had tucked into the waistband of my jeans. I brought it around fast, pulling the safety off, and watched him drop the knife. I thought he’d duck, or run for his life, anything but what he did. He kicked a spray of saltwater into the air as he closed the distance between us, chopping at my wrist with the force of an axe and sending the gun into the water. I grimaced and threw a hook with my other hand at his face, catching him just below his eye. He staggered back, spun inside my reach, and used the leverage of my arm to do a judo throw that launched me onto my back in the water. I felt the wind go out of me with a rush as I hit the water and submerged, then rolled over and tried to get to my knees as the water went back out.
I felt the spine-wrenching force of him landing on my back with all his body weight, elbows down. I went face down on the beach with him on my back. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and pressed my face into the wet sand with all his body weight. I tried to jerk left, to jerk right, to get to my knees, but he was murderously strong and I could not break free. I did a push-up to get my mouth out of the sand so I could take a breath. When I did that, he put a forearm across my throat and locked it in place from behind with his other arm. I dropped onto the sand again and reached back, clawing behind me to try to gouge an eye, but he kept his face turned away. My efforts only elicited a grunt from him, followed by the pressure of his knee on my spine as he bent my back like an archer’s bow. The force he was applying to my windpipe was suffocating me.
I did another push-up and tried to roll him off of my back, but he wouldn’t let go, and we both fell on our sides. My visual field began to shrink like I was dropping down into a well. I couldn’t hear the surf any more, or smell the salt air, and I felt my consciousness fading. At least I went down fighting.
My left arm was laying on something hard. In desperation, I scrabbled for it with my right hand, thinking it might be a rock, or possibly a stick that I could use to pry his forearm from my windpipe. My right hand came up with the knife that he had dropped when I pulled my gun. I held the knife by the handle with the point down, and swung my arm back like a scythe with all the force I had left, catching him just below the hip bone with the tip of the blade. It felt like I’d struck bone. He let out a loud grunt but didn’t let go. I pulled back and slammed the point in a second time. This time the blade went in up to the hilt. He screamed in pain and let me go, rolling off my back and going into a crouch. The blade came free of his leg as he rolled away.
I was gasping for air, staggering to remain upright, spitting sand out of my mouth and wiping the sand from my eyes. I had the knife in my hand, ready to stab or slash if he came close again. He stood just out of reach, holding pressure with his right hand against the gash I’d cut on the inside of his thigh. We both breathed hard, each measuring the other. I could see blood flowing through his fingers onto his pants.
“I could have killed you easy if I’d wanted to,” he yelled over the sound of the surf. A hint of an accent. Boston? New York? “Now I’m going to take that knife from you and gut you with it.”
“Really?” I said. “You want it; I’ll give it to you.” My throat felt as raw as if I’d swallowed sandpaper. “Hold out your hand.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “Crazy son of a bitch.”
I did an exaggerated shoulder shrug and took a couple steps back, beginning a slow shuffle away from him and back down the beach towards the safe house. He limped behind me, holding one hand over the cut. In my half-suffocated state he was having no trouble keeping up, even with one of his bloody hands pressed on his thigh.
When he would try to close the distance between the two of us, I would swing the knife at him in a slashing backhand and he’d retreat a few paces, and then try again. I could tell he was trying to get a feeling for how fast I could react to his advances so he could predict the timing of my swing and grab my arm as it went past.
Surges of icy surf came up high on the beach as we walked, sucking at our shoes. The two of us were something to behold: me carrying a knife and covered with sand, him following behind with one leg dragging behind and his hand pressed against his crotch. As we made our way along the beach, I began to feel strong enough that I started jogging. He could keep pace with me, but I could tell he was in agony. His face was a mask of pain as he fought to keep up.
I yelled back at him. “If you don’t get that cut looked at, you’ll bleed to death.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he growled. “You’ll be dead before I am.”
I took a few fast strides, and as I looked over my shoulder to check on my attacker, a wave ten feet tall rolled up the beach and knocked me off my feet. I sucked in a huge lungful of air as I went down, gasping from the shock of the cold. I felt his hand grab hold of my coat as I went under, then experienced the breathtaking power of the undertow as the water went back out, sucking the two of us along with it. We began to tumble in one of the spinning barrels of water produced by the undertow as it collided with another incoming wave. I experienced a kind of hallucinatory sensory overload from the heart-stopping cold of the sea water, the roar of the water in my ears, the sand blasting at my skin, the accelerating end-over-end gymnastics tumble, and the blows from his arms and legs colliding with mine as if we’d climbed into a washing machine together. My coat and shirt were ripped from me, and then the killer and I were slammed together against the sandy bottom. He locked his arms around my waist as the undertow pulled us out into the Pacific Ocean. We accelerated and tumbled deeper and deeper, spinning and bouncing against the sand as the pressure built on our bodies and it became immensely quiet and completely black.
As we continued our descent I realized that he had decided to hold onto me at any cost, even if we both drowned. I’d lost the knife when the wave knocked me down, but I had to get him to let go somehow so I could try to push for the surface before I blacked out. In desperation, I reached down and jammed my thumbs into his eyes, feeling his eyeballs push in and hearing a muffled scream as he finally let go.
The pull of the undertow began to slow and weaken, and the next time my feet touched the sand, I pushed off as hard against it as I could, swimming frantically toward the direction I thought was up. I was close to losing consciousness when I finally broke the surface and took in a huge lungful of air. My lungs felt like they were on fire.
I was a hundred yards from shore and far down the beach from where I’d gone in. As I bobbed between the waves, I could see lights on in one of the beach houses, so I began to swim at an angle towards it. Numb from the cold, dizzy from being dragged out to sea and nearly drowned, I swam mechanically towards shore. My legs felt as if they were made of wood, and it took an act of supreme willpower to keep swimming and not give up. Knowing that Bonnie was by herself in the beach house kept me going. I closed the distance to the beach and then swam through the curling waves that broke a few dozen yards offshore, and then more waves came behind me and pushed me most of the way up the beach before receding. Totally spent, I lay on my back against the wet sand, gasping for air.
Chapter 33
Desperately cold, my teeth chattering, leg muscles numb and wooden with exhaustion, I began walking down the beach towards Eric’s house with the stiff-legged, shuffling gait of a zombie. My hands were shaking from the cold as if I had nerve damage. I finally came to the safe house back porch with fantasies of seeing Bonnie, soaking in a hot bath long enough to relieve the hypothermia, then escaping in the Ford.
It didn’t work out that way.
I looked through the windows at the back of the beach house and saw several men moving around inside. One was tall enough to be a circus freak, with a huge square jaw and big red headphones covering his ears. He wore a blue plaid shirt over faded jeans and was spraying down the dining room table with some kind of cleaner. The other was Lavar Macone, the one I’d burned with his cowboy hat. Lavar wore coveralls under a denim coat and had a black felt cowboy hat tipped back on his head. For the first time I saw the stripe of the rubbery pink scar tissue around his head. Lavar looked out through the window towards the beach like he was waiting for someone to return, lifted a shotgun across his shoulders like he was going pheasant hunting, and moved away from the window. No sign of Bonnie.
I shuffled around the side of the house, and as I came toward the front, I heard the garage door start to go up. I peered around the corner and saw a big, bronze-colored Cadillac parked on the grass. They’d fixed the flat tire on the Impala SS and pulled it out into the driveway where it idled with its headlights on, a pair of lazy smoke trails rising from the dual exhaust. A white Ford Crown Victoria, the same car I’d seen in Lincoln City, was parked on the far side of the Cadillac. I heard the sound of an engine start in the garage, and then a blue Chevy Suburban with dark-tinted windows rolled out of the garage and stopped in the driveway. The Impala SS began to roll, and the big Suburban followed the Impala down the country road that led back to the highway. I heard the garage door start to go back down, and I ran around the corner of the house and dodged under the garage door as it closed.
The Ford XL was still there. The small bulb attached to the garage door opener was illuminated, lighting the car and the garage interior.
I heard the front door slam and knew I was running out of time to prevent Bonnie’s departure. In desperation I picked up the hedgehog-shaped boot scraper off of the garage floor near the doorway and let myself into the house. I didn’t see Lavar Macone anywhere, but the giant I’d seen from the beach was in the living room with his back to me. He still had his headphones on, and he was moving to the beat of the music as he used a spray bottle to clean fingerprints off of the kitchen countertop. Bonnie and I had prepared our meal there only an hour before. Something about seeing him erasing the evidence of our existence made me explode.
I ran across the living room in fast strides, holding the boot scraper over my head. He must have felt the vibrations of my feet hitting the floor, or maybe he saw my reflection in the mirror over the countertop as I leapt at him. Either way, he spun towards me with a shocked expression that only lasted as long as it took me to bring the boot scraper down on his head with all the force I had left in my body. When I connected with his skull there was a sound like a log being hit with a baseball bat. My momentum carried the two of us into the side of the dining room table, knocking it off its pedestal onto its side. He staggered under the blow but managed to remain upright. He tried to bring one huge arm up to grab at me, but he was weakened by the blow to his head and moved in slow motion. I slapped his paw away with my free hand, stepped inside his reach, and then swung the shoe scraper down with the kind of force people use at a state fair when they’re trying to win a prize. He went down on the dislodged table top like a tossed rag doll and the wood shattered under his weight.
He didn’t get up again.
Chapter 34
I searched the house hoping that I’d catch Lavar Macone with his back turned. Everyone else had already left, and the only evidence left behind of a crime was the giant who lay sprawled across the smashed dining room table. I could hear music coming out of his dislodged headphones. It sounded like Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller.’
My body felt like it was shutting down from hypothermia and the aftermath of the adrenaline. I pulled a bottle of whiskey from the shelf behind the bar in the living room and carried it with me into the shower. I stepped under the spray, still wearing my pants and running shoes. I took pulls off of the bottle, letting the hot needles of water wash the salt water from my clothes and drill into my flesh until my skin reddened. When my teeth finally stopped chattering, I took my clothes off, toweled off, and went through the house a second time, checking the closets and looking under beds.
There was an assortment of clothes in one of the bedroom closets that looked like they’d been left behind by previous occupants. A blue dress blazer with brass buttons. A grey water-repellant woman’s coat. Several dress shirts and hooded sweatshirts. The largest of the dress shirts and hooded sweatshirts were close enough to my size that I put them on.
I almost cried when I found Bonnie’s rolling suitcase under the bed in the master bedroom. The suitcase wasn’t fancy. It was made of plastic with a textured cover that looked like polished aluminum, but it was all she’d brought with her from El Paso. Her purse was inside the suitcase, and I opened up the purse and went through it. Two hundred and sixty dollars. Driver’s license. A debit card. An old college ID card from University of Texas at El Paso. Evidence of a life interrupted. There were several pairs of jeans, several pairs of underwear, and a lacy brassiere, all neatly folded. I closed the suitcase, picked it up, and carried it into the kitchen. Maybe I’d get the chance to give it back to Bonnie someday. If I couldn’t, I’d die trying.
I tossed my pants and shoes, still soaked from the shower, into the clothes dryer. I set the temperature to high and sipped on the bottle of whiskey while my clothes dried. I had no idea where they’d taken Bonnie; just that she was gone and that I’d failed to keep her safe.
The giant was where I’d left him.
When I tried to turn his body to get the wallet out of his pants, he stirred, moaning with pain. He was unbelievably heavy, and I was grunting with effort by the time I got him rolled onto his face. There were twenty five one hundred dollar bills in his wallet. Two of the bills had the same chalk crosses on them that I’d found on the bills I’d taken from Bullard’s house. I slid his wallet into my back pocket, then worked his belt off and tied his hands behind his back with it. I tied his ankles together with the electrical cord from a tabletop lamp. Then I left him face down in the debris of the smashed tabl
etop.
I moved the Ford XL out into the driveway and pulled the giant’s Cadillac into the garage.
When I came back into the house he’d regained consciousness and rolled himself face up. His hair, face, and eyes were covered with blood from where I’d clocked him with the shoe scraper.
“Hey,” he said. “I think I’m blind. You really hurt me.” His speech was slurred.
“One of your friends tried to kill me this evening. It seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Would you call a doctor for me?”