Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (34 page)

Later, since we were after all in an unlocked room in the political “hotel” of our hosts, Father O’Leary and a fully clothed Amira sat on the quilts in the cool blue reflection of the rain coming down. A pitcher of water poured into her basin had allowed us to wash up and she mentioned that this current rain was welcome.

“Rainwater’s important here,” she said. “The ground water on this island has an awful, brackish taste.”

“I thought it rained every time you turn around, in the tropics.”

“We don’t get much in the summer, but winter monsoon season is pretty fierce. Lots of frequent, short showers.”

I wondered if she realized she spoke of Saipan almost as her home? And hadn’t it been, for almost three years?

“This is shaping up like a typhoon,” she said, looking toward the window. The shadows on the walls were darker, moving more quickly, and the wind sounded angry. The direction of the rain seemed to have shifted, coming down straighter, hitting the tin roof of the one-story house next door in hard pellets, unrelenting liquid machine gun fire.

She asked me questions about home, pleased that Paul Mantz had remarried (“That Terry is a terrific gal”); I gave her more details on her husband’s remarriage, which only seemed to wryly amuse her, now. She had no idea her disappearance had been the center of such worldwide attention and seemed rather flattered, even touched. Bitterly, though, she commented that the multimillion-dollar naval search must have largely been an excuse to pry in these waters.

She also spoke of her life in Saipan, which was very solitary. Other than Chief Suzuki, Jesus Sablan, and a few officials, like the
shichokan,
she knew of no one in Garapan who spoke fluent English, and—despite her ability to traverse the downtown—she had made few friends.

“The Chamorro family next door,” she said, pointing toward the window, and the rat-a-tat-tat tin-roof rainfall, “has been kind.” She laughed softly. “I got to know them on my trips to the privy…it’s in back of their house. They have a little girl, Matilda, maybe twelve, a sweet thing. She knows some English, and I tried to help her with her homework, now and then. I gave her a ring with a pearl as a keepsake…. Her parents are nice, too, they give me fresh fruit, pineapples, mangoes, which is something I can’t find at the Japanese market. Food’s awful—everything’s out of a can or a jar.”

“I noticed,” I said with a smile.

The room turned white from lightning, and the thunderclap was like cannon fire.

“Are you sure this rain won’t be a problem?” she asked. “For us leaving tonight?”

“No, it’s helpful,” I lied. “Listen…it’s getting close to time. I’m going down and check on the chumps in the lobby…. You better look around this room and see if there’s anything you want to take with you.”

Her laugh sounded like a cough. “I don’t think I’ll be looking back on this room with much nostalgia.”

“Well, look over your personal items, things you brought with you…wrap up a little bundle, if you have to, but travel light.”

She smirked. “Don’t worry.”

“I’ll go down and distract the fellas…. Wait maybe a minute after I leave, then go down to my room and slip inside.”

She nodded.

I was almost out the door when she clutched my arm. I leaned over and kissed her. “We’re gonna be apart for two, maybe three minutes,” I said. “Think you can bear up?”

She shook her head, no; she was smiling but her eyes were moist. “I’m afraid.”

“Good. That’s healthy. Only the dead are fearless.”

“Like Fred.”

“Like Fred,” I said, and touched her face, and stepped into the hallway.

It was empty. My hunch was the entire floor was vacant, except for Amy. The only other person I’d seen who seemed to be staying here was the desk clerk or the manager or whoever he was, who had the first room off the little lobby. I moved down the stairs, and through another empty hallway.

In the lobby, the check-in desk was unoccupied, and the ceiling fan whirred sluggishly over two Chamorro assistant coppers in their threadbare white suits. I knew them both: fatso Ramon, of the cantaloupe head and blankly stupid countenance, was seated in the rattan chair where Jesus had been previously plopped; and across from him was the short, burly officer who Suzuki had brought in to sub for Jesus. They were playing cards, of course, with what seemed to be the same greasy deck. Billy clubs and matchsticks again littered the rattan coffee table.

“Where’s Jesus?” I asked Ramon.

“Paint town red,” Ramon grinned. It wasn’t as nasty as Jesus’s grin but it was nasty enough.

“Oh, he’s still out with the chief?”

Ramon nodded, fat fingers holding the smeary cards close to his face, eyes almost crossing as he studied his hand.

Then I asked the burly character, who had a lumpy sweet-potato nose and pockmarks (though the latter weren’t nearly in Jesus Sablan’s league), if he knew how to play Chicago. His grasp of English was obviously less than that of Ramon, who having played a few hands with me this afternoon, frowned at my apparent interest in joining them.

“No!” Ramon said. “No play. Go hell.”

This rebuff was fine with me. I didn’t really want to play cards with these wild boars; I was just keeping them busy long enough for Amy to slip down the stairs and into my room.

Which, a few seconds later, was exactly where I found her, wearing her weathered wrinkled flying jacket, pacing and holding her stomach; my room seemed darker than hers, perhaps because my window onto the house next door did not overlook its rooftop.

“I feel sick,” she said. “Sick to my stomach, like before going onstage to give a stupid lecture….”

I was digging the nine-millimeter out of my travel bag. “Do you get butterflies before you take off in a plane?”

“Never.”

I checked the chamber; the bolt action made a nasty echoey click. “Well, this is more like takin’ off on a flight than giving a lecture. So tell your stomach to take it easy.”

She sucked in air, nodded.

Now, if only my belly would take that same good advice.

I slipped the extra clip into my suitcoat pocket. I wasn’t taking anything with me but the clothes on my person, the gun in my hand and Amy. That leather flight jacket was apparently the only keepsake she was taking along. Thunder rumbled and cracked, sounding fake, like a radio sound effects guy shaking a thin sheet of steel.

She swept into my arms and I held her tight, and her eyes widened as she looked at my right hand with the automatic held nose upward. “Is there going to be violence?”

“Only if that’s what it takes. Pacifists get off at this stop…. Okay?”

She swallowed. “Okay.”

“If there is…violence…you have to stay calm. If you ran into trouble up in the air, you could stay calm, right?”

“Usually.”

“Well, I need that world-famous nerves-of-steel pilot at my side, right now. Okay? Is she here?”

“She’s here.”

“Now.” And I held her away from me and gave her a goofy little smile. “Sooner or later in the life of a man having an affair with a married woman, the inevitable occurs.”

She couldn’t help it; she smiled back at me. “Which is?”

“Nate Heller goes out the window.”

And I opened the window—no bars on this prison—and went out first, into the downpour, a splattering, insistent rain that was surprising in its power, my feet sinking into grassy, muddy ground several inches. The window was up off the ground a ways and I held my arms for her to slip down into, as if we were eloping, and then she was in my arms and she blinked and blinked as water drummed her face and she grinned reflexively, saying “Oh my goodness!”

And, as if she were my bride just ushered over the threshold, I eased her onto the sodden ground, where her slippered feet sank in almost to the ankle.

“This is going to be slow going!” I said, having to work to be heard over the driving rain and grumbling sky.

We were between the hotel and the house next door—there wasn’t much space, not much more than a hallway’s worth. So I got in front of her, leading her by the hand; my nine-millimeter was stuck in my waistband. We hadn’t taken more than two soggy steps when the voice behind us cried out. “Hey!”

I looked back, past Amy, and saw him: Ramon, coming out of the outdoor toilet, buckling his pants with one hand and coming at us with the raised billy club in the other. His chubby body charged through the curtain of rain as if it were nothing more than moisture, his sandaled feet making rhino craters in the muddy earth, his eyes wide and dark and brightly animal, like a frightened raccoon’s, only a raccoon would have had sense enough to flee and here Ramon was barreling right toward me, moving faster than a fat man had any right to move, and I pulled Amy back behind me, closer to the street, and thrust myself forward and just as Ramon entered the tunnel between hotel and house, my nine-millimeter slug entered the melon of his head, somewhere in his forehead, lifting the top of his skull in fragments, revealing in a spray of red that Ramon did indeed have a brain, before he tumbled backward, careening off the house next door, then splatting against the hotel, where he slid down its cement surface and sank into the mud like an animal carcass on its way to becoming a fossil.

Amy screamed and I rudely covered her mouth with my hand until her wide eyes and nodding told me she wouldn’t scream anymore and she was trembling and crying as I stood there with a fucking monsoon dripping down my head, saying, “Nobody heard that gunshot, not in this shit…but I gotta go in and deal with the other one!”

“Why?!”

“Because Ramon here can’t take a dump forever. The other one’s gonna go checking on him, and I can’t have that!”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“Not if he’s smart.”

And what were the odds of that?

So I left her there, in the passageway between hotel and house, rain pummeling her as she covered her mouth, her back turned to the horror of what had become of Ramon, and I moved out onto the street and inside the hotel where the burly Chamorro looked around at me, and I swung the nine-millimeter barrel across the side of his skull in a fashion that would not only knock out most any man, but probably fucking kill him.

Only this son of a bitch shook it off, and went for the billy club on the table.

I put a bullet in his ear that wound up going through his reaching hand, as well, though I doubt he felt it. He tumbled onto the rattan table, breaking it in a crunch of shattering straw.

Now he knew how to play Chicago.

Just down the hall, out of the first hotel room door, the Chamorro desk clerk stuck out his mustached face. His eyes were huge.

“He didn’t understand that real cops have guns,” I told him. I went over and reached across the check-in counter and yanked his phone out of the wall. “Do I have to kill you or tie you up or anything?”

He shook his head, no, crossed himself, and ducked back into his room.

Then I ran out into the rain, the nine-millimeter back in my waistband, and Amy came flying out from between the house and the hotel. I slipped my arm around her waist and we ran down the boardwalk. No one was around; the unpaved street next to us was a swamp no vehicle could have navigated. From across the way, in a seedy little bar, came the sound of a gramophone playing a Dorsey Brothers record, “Lost in a Fog,” and Chamorro kids were dancing, boys and girls holding each other close, swaying to the record’s rhythm, ignoring the staccato percussion of the downpour.

When we ran out of boardwalk, the grassy ground provided a terrible soggy glue, but we moved along, stumbling, never quite falling, slowed though not quite caught in this just-poured cement. Through the sheeting rain we glimpsed the concrete cellblocks of the prison, impervious to the pounding storm, then ducked out of the way as a tin roof, flung recklessly by the wind, went pitching across our path, carving a resting place in the face of a wood-frame warehouse. Exchanging startled looks, and grabbing gulps of air, we moved on, pushing past our old friend the sugar king in his park as palm trees bowed down to him.

Then, along the waterfront, we had boardwalk under our mud-coated feet again, and the two-story buildings around us lessened the squall’s impact, though we were heading into the wind, and it took effort just to walk, our clothes so drenched they were heavy, our hair soaked flat to our scalps. A block away yawned the expanse of the Garapan harbor’s concrete dock. We were early, maybe five, maybe ten minutes; would the storm have delayed Johnson? Would it have defeated him entirely, and had I blasted my way out of one dead end and into another?

And with these questions barely posed, bad luck rendered their answers moot.

Because just as we were passing through the
hana machi
section of the waterfront, where men who were men drank
awamori
and had their manly needs tended to by faded flowers. Chief Mikio Suzuki and Jesus Sablan, drunk as skunks, came stumbling out of the Nangetsu, after an evening of revelry signifying the chief’s gratitude for his top
jungkicho
’s earlier display of loyalty.

Only drunks—particularly drunks who were outfitted in new, fresh clothes (even the Chamorro wore fresh white linens)—would have exited in the midst of this tempest, their finery immediately getting saturated.

But these were dangerous drunks, who looking across the liquefied goo of the unpaved waterfront street, recognized us, Amira and Father O’Leary.

And at first Chief Suzuki smiled.

So I smiled and waved and nodded.

But then Chief Suzuki frowned, even in his inebriated state smelling something fishy, not that difficult to do in this part of town, and he shrieked in Japanese at Lord Jesus, who also frowned, and they ran toward us.

We kept moving, too, toward the dock. We were on the boardwalk and the Chief and Jesus were trying to run across a sucking mucky morass. I drew my gun.

“Nathan!” she cried, and I just pulled her along.

“Amira!”
the chief yelled.
“Leary!”

I looked back at them and they were making progress but we were almost there, almost to where the cement apron of the waterfront led to the jetty itself.