Cape Disappointment (46 page)

Hoagland grinned at me, his teeth limned with blood that had run down his face and into his mouth. “You're dead, fucker,” he said. He turned toward the man in the distance. “Shoot him. Keep shooting. Kill both these motherfuckers.”

“Run, Kathy.”

“Not on your life.”

“Then get behind me.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Make his target smaller. Do it. Help me out here.” She stepped behind me, while I put both hands into the air as a gesture of peace. As angry and driven and frightened as I was, the last thing I wanted to do was to kill a man. Or even to shoot at him. The figure in the distance walked toward us, pistol braced in a two-handed law enforcement shooting posture everybody knew from the movies. He fired a third time.

“What are we going to do?” Kathy asked.

“I don't know.”

He fired again. I heard the bullet in the air, closer this time. I'm not sure why I didn't raise the pistol I'd confiscated from Hoagland. Perhaps, given his first attempts, I didn't believe the shooter could hit us at that range. Or perhaps I was paralyzed with indecision. He was walking toward us, closing fast, and soon would be within range of his skills. Most people, even good shots, were not very accurate at eighty yards. Even seventy or sixty yards was long for most pistol shooters, but he was down to fifty now. An expert could hit a man at fifty yards every time, though I doubted this shooter could.

“Is that who I think it is?” Kathy asked.

“I think so.”

“Jesus. What's he doing? He's …”

“Out of his mind?”

“He must be.”

Even the worst shooter could get lucky, and I was painfully aware that the next shot might kill or cripple one of us. For my part, even wielding a short-barreled revolver, I knew I had retained the great bulk of my former shooting skills.

“Shoot!” Hoagland screamed. “Kill these fuckers!”

The figure in the distance yelled something, but with my still-compromised hearing, it took me a few seconds to figure out what. He said, “You promised he wouldn't have a gun.”

“He's afraid of guns. Just shoot him. Shoot them both like we talked about.” The man in the distance continued to walk toward me. When he'd gotten inside of forty yards, he stopped, raised his 9 mm, and sighted. I lifted my .38 and slowly squeezed the trigger. I aimed at and hit his left leg.

The bullet spun him around, and as he whirled in a semicircle, he fired off rounds almost like a machine gun, the pistol swinging at the end of his wildly swinging arm, bullets spraying all over the place. As he began to fall and reached out to stop himself, the last round from his gun somehow hit him in the torso. He flopped onto his back and lay motionless, legs splayed, pistol on the ground beside him. It took a moment to mentally process the bizarre scene we'd just witnessed. Below us on the scree, Hoagland stood, mouth agape, waiting for his partner to rise back up and kill me, but the fallen man did not move.

When it became clear that our gunfight had come to a standstill, Hoagland barreled up the hillside like a huffing stallion. In one fist he carried a large rock I hadn't seen him pick up. When he got close, he swung it at my skull. Kathy had already stepped back away from me. I ducked and pushed him away. “You lucky bastard,” he growled, rushing me a second time.

The hate in him was so palpable you could almost see it rising off his red face in waves. I stood waiting while he interrupted his second charge in order to catch his breath. When he felt sufficiently recovered, he charged. You had to give him credit. He was a man with a rock trying to overpower a man with a gun, who'd just made a forty-yard
pistol shot. Then it occurred to me that he must have thought my shot was an accident. As he rushed me, I stepped to one side and clubbed him across the temple with the .38. His reaction was so sudden and comical I thought for a fraction of a second he was making a joke. He stood straight up, eyes rolling back in his skull, and before I could catch him, he fell onto his side and began rolling down the hill. It didn't seem possible that physics wouldn't arrest his fall, but each time I thought he was going to come to a stop he twitched or crumpled and continued rolling, and at one point he even broke into a cartwheel of sorts. He skidded and slid the full two hundred feet down the steep slope, then hesitated on the lip before disappearing. Although I couldn't see all of it, I knew he'd dropped the remaining fifty vertical feet into the ocean.

Kathy and I stared at each other for a second, the shock and horror evident on our faces. The fall, we both knew, was not anywhere near survivable. Taking a deep breath, I walked up the pathway toward the man I'd shot. When I got to him he was alive, his dark brown eyes open to the dimming sky. His right hand was groping for something, clawing at the gravel. I assumed Kalpesh Gupta was trying to get hold of his gun so he could finish killing me.

Kalpesh was in pain, that was clear enough. The wound to his thigh was bleeding profusely and I knelt, removed his belt, and cinched it around his leg, pushing a handkerchief under the belt as a dressing. The bullet had gone into his side just above the belt line. I pulled his shirt up and hoped it wasn't too serious. The glazed look in his eyes told me different, that he'd probably hit one or more vital organs and was bleeding internally and rapidly going into shock. “Did you know it was us?” Kathy repeated.

Kalpesh stared past my shoulder at Kathy and tried to speak twice before he could force the words out of his parched throat. “Just tying up loose ends. Or maybe it was you tying up loose ends.” He chuckled at the irony. Though it was cool outside, he was perspiring, his face and hair wet, his shirt soaked with perspiration and, now, blood. I tried to stanch the bleeding from his side.

“We've got to call for help,” Kathy said.

“Don't be a fool,” Kalpesh said. “I'll be dead in a minute. You let
anybody official know where you are and what happened here, you'll both be dead, just like me.”

“You're not going to die,” Kathy said. “We'll call somebody.”

“Out here? Help's gotta be half an hour away. You listen to me. Nobody's going to believe any of it. You two want to live, hide the bodies. Trust me on this.”

“Why did you come with him?”

“Don't be dense. You get in the way of a steamroller, you get squashed. I always liked you, Kathy. I didn't want it to be this way. Not Deborah, either. I almost couldn't go through with that. I came so close to letting her go.”

He tried to swing his eyes back from Kathy but he got about halfway through the motion when all cognition left his face. His eyes went blank. His breathing ceased.

“Oh, God,” said Kathy. “Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

“I can't bear this.”

“We were lucky. I shouldn't have waited so long.”

“How did he shoot himself like that?”

“Adrenaline. The question now is, what are we going to do? We have a couple of choices. We could leave him here and call the authorities. Let them investigate things as they lie. Hope they believe our story. Or we could exit stage left and cross our fingers that this doesn't get traced to us, knowing that if it does, because we left the scene, we will be presumed guilty.”

“How many people do you think are looking for us right now?”

“I don't know. Maybe just these two. If it's more, and we turn ourselves in … they'll try to kill us. I doubt they'll try like these two did. There won't be any talking. They'll just do it.”

“What's your idea, Thomas?”

“If I was alone, I might push him into the ocean behind Hoagland and get rid of their car.”

“That would be illegal. Covering up a shooting.”

“Illegal or dead. I figure those are our choices.”

“We'd be circumventing the law.”

“Or we'd be dead.”

“But we'd be circumventing the law.”

“You're the law-and-order person. I'm the bad boy. Tell you what. I'm going to defer to your call on this. You decide.”

“You're being mean.”

“If we do this, it's a secret we'll carry for the rest of our lives and that's going to be as hard for you as it will be for me. I don't want to be the one to put that on you. Your call.”

WHEN I DRAGGED KALPESH
down to the bluff, removed his identification, cellphone, and keys, and rolled him into the surf fifty feet below in the same spot where Hoagland had gone over, Kathy's tears weren't faked and neither was her ghostlike complexion. She was weeping for him, but she was weeping for us, too. What we'd become. His worries had ended. So had Hoagland's. Ours were just beginning. Even though we'd made the decision, I had to think about it for several minutes more before I rolled the corpse off the bluff. Did we want to live the rest of our lives with this godawful secret hanging over us? As I pondered the options and cast about for others, I looked out to sea. Hoagland's body had already drifted several hundred yards out and appeared to be headed toward Japan, probably following the same path the unclaimed bodies from the Sheffield wreck had taken. There was no way to be certain, but it was unlikely either body would be retrieved.

I tried to imagine convincing the authorities that, unprovoked, Timothy Hoagland and Kalpesh Gupta had attacked us. It bothered me that I didn't know for certain how closely Kalpesh had worked with Hoagland. I still didn't know for certain if either had taken part in bringing down Sheffield's plane, but I strongly suspected both had. The big question was, if we got caught now, would anybody believe our story? Kalpesh's gun would show evidence of having been fired, and
one of the two bullets in his body would have come from it, and if they looked hard enough they would find shell casings in the grass, showing that he'd done a lot of shooting, but it was still possible somebody would conjecture I'd shot him and then fired his gun to make it look like a gunfight. There was only one living witness, and she was on my side and everybody knew it. There would be even more suspicion over the fact that I'd been with my supposedly dead wife. Once we were implicated in Kalpesh's death, nobody would believe our reasons for not bringing Kathy forward. Nobody was going to believe much of anything we had to say. The world believed that Hoagland had been dead for five days. Another thought came to me. Once I got arrested for killing Kalpesh, they might reopen the Driscoll case with the idea of charging me with her death. Wouldn't that be ironic?

It was with all these regrets and not a few misgivings that I dumped Kalpesh fifty feet into the surf. A few minutes later as we stood in the grass trying to grasp the enormity of what we'd done, he bobbed into view, face up, and we watched his body begin the slow journey out to sea behind Hoagland's. I had the two guns in my pockets, along with an extra clip for the 9 mm. We still weren't sure there wasn't somebody else coming for us, but even so, Kathy and I stood on the bluff until darkness had thoroughly cloaked our crime. We were both in the daze that comes after you do something very wrong and realize you're going to have to live with it. We weren't watching the sunset as it changed colors; we were both silently tracing the path of the bodies as they worked their way out to sea.

It was dark when we located Hoagland's vehicle in the parking lot— a large four-door American car, government issue with government plates. I put on gloves, found the key on the fob that had been in Kalpesh's pocket, and drove it while Kathy took my Ford. It was pitch-dark when we abandoned Hoagland's car at a picnic area near a beach-access road not far from our motel. After taking extensive notes on Kalpesh's calls in and calls out, I walked out to the beach, turned off both phones I'd found on Kalpesh, and sent them into the waves sealed in a plastic bag I'd knotted at the mouth. There was a hole in the bag and I guessed it would sink two or three miles out.

At one in the morning, just before the tide was at its lowest, Kathy drove me back to Hoagland's government car. Neither of us had slept.

The storm clouds were starting to billow, but the tide was as far out as I'd ever seen it. I lowered all the windows and drove out onto the beach. I didn't use headlights for fear an insomniac, illicit lovers, or a crabbing vessel might spot me. Not far away was a small stream that fed into the ocean, and now, with the tide out, the flats beside the stream would extend for a good two hundred yards beyond the high-tide mark. It was an area where the beach was like quicksand and where many a car had been sunk forever. I sped into the water, knowing that after the car bogged down, it would keep sinking. Losing cars on this beach was a running joke among the locals.

I managed to get the vehicle a hundred and fifty yards past the tide line before it stalled and I crawled out through the open window and swam ashore against a riptide. The water was cold enough to numb my extremities, and I was shivering uncontrollably as I jogged up the beach to where Kathy waited in the Ford, the heater running full blast. Swimming had been a bad idea. All of it had been a bad idea.

Back at the motel I took a long shower and climbed into bed, but I was still cold. “I can't believe we did that,” Kathy said.

“We have a choice?”

“Half my clients think they didn't have a choice. That's what makes me feel so sick about all this. I feel like one of my clients.”