Gagliano,Anthony - Straits of Fortune.wps (24 page)

voice. Vivian brushed her eyes with the back of her wrist and walked over to where her father stood. He put his arm around her shoulders, and together they turned and walked toward the pier. They had gone only a few yards when Vivian broke away from her father and ran back to me. She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me hard on the lips. Williams looked on impassively. "I love you," she said. "You know that, don't you?" "Sure," I said. "Go on, now. Give me a call when you can. I'll be fine. Williams and I might even go for a beer or two. Isn't that right, Williams?" Vivian turned to look at him. "You bet," he said, but this time he didn't smile. His blue eyes were as hard as diamond drill bits. Vivian turned back to me. She reached up and ran her index finger over the scar on my cheek. It was a familiar gesture. I remembered the first time she'd done it--back when I first told her about the shooting up in New York. I had always taken it as her way of telling me she understood my remorse, why I'd never had it removed, and why I never would. I told her back then that there were some scars worth keeping. I looked down toward the end of the pier. Her father was just a shadow, almost invisible against the backdrop of the boat. From that distance I could just barely make out the tall, slender silhouettes of a row of deep-sea fishing rods lined up along the stern. "So long, kid," I said, trying to smile. Vivian gave me one last desperate look, then turned and ran toward the boat. In a few seconds, she, too, was a shadow. A moment later, with a muted roar of its engine, the cruiser made a wide turn and headed out to sea. I watched the boat become small against the night sky. Williams didn't bother to look; he was too busy watching me. 209

"Let's go get that beer," I said. "I don't know about you, but I'm getting pretty thirsty." "Yeah, that's a good idea," he said. He made a brief ges- ture with his gun toward the north. "Let's you and me take a walk up to those dunes over there." "Why not shoot me here?" I asked. He smiled. "Who said I was going to shoot you? Now, walk." The dunes were about fifty yards away. The stalks of oat grass that covered them were waving like the hair of mer- maids in the water. The sand was packed hard. Williams stayed behind me as we walked. "Stop and turn around," he said. I turned in time to catch his fist with my face. I fell back- ward onto the sand and skidded a few feet. I lay there and did a bit more stargazing before rolling onto my stomach. Judging from the blood filling my mouth, I gathered that my nose was broken. "Get up," Williams said from behind me. "We're just get- ting started." I sat up gradually. For a moment there were two Wil- liamses, identically dressed, each one as big and as ugly as his twin. I stared at them until they merged. It was then I no- ticed that he wasn't holding the gun anymore, and it came to me all at once, along with the pain in my face, what he had in mind. He was going to kill me with his bare hands. "Get up," he repeated. "I'm giving you a chance. You win, you leave. You lose, you die." I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand; it came away as red as a prizefight in the final round. "I've got a better idea," I said. "Suppose you just leave." Williams didn't answer me; he stood there glaring down at where I sat as though he were looking at a body already dead. Slowly, I got to my feet. Even on my best day, I knew I 210

couldn't have taken him, and it wasn't just the steroids either. He had been trained by the best, and he was also crazy. I, on the other hand, was beaten up, half drugged, and badly dehydrated. Still, being pummeled to death was better than being shot like a wounded animal--better, but a lot more painful. I straightened up and faced him. The blood from my nose ran down my chin. The salty sweetness made me angry-- angry, but not stupid. I took a step forward and pretended to stagger, and at that precise moment Williams charged at me from a distance of eight feet. As he reached for me with his right hand, I spun to my left like a drunken matador, brushing his arm away with my left arm as though it were the branch of a tree. I almost fell, but as he went by me, I kicked him in the back of the knee. It wasn't a hard kick, not by a long shot, but it made him stumble and lose his balance. I guess he got it back pretty fast, but it didn't matter, because by the time he recovered, I was already running at full speed down the beach. I waited for the sound of a gunshot, but all I heard was Williams coming hard up behind me. His fingers grazed the back of my shoulder but didn't hold, although I knew if I so much as stumbled, it would all be over. If the sand hadn't been as compressed as it was, he would've had me. People don't realize how fast a man built like that can run for short distances. The same muscle fibers that allow a weight lifter to hoist a quarter ton over his head can power him for thirty or forty yards at a speed almost equal to that of a sprinter a hundred pounds lighter. I could hear Williams coming, closing fast and breathing hard. I felt his fingers again graze my shoulders, and at that moment I cut to the right and onto the soft, wet sand closest to the surf. I didn't have to glance back to know where he was; I could hear him coming at me from the left. 211

He was falling behind, but he was still close, too close. One misstep and he'd be on me. You hit top speed at thirty yards, and after that it's just a question of who slows down first. The lactic acid begins to outstrip the body's ability to clear it from the bloodstream, and the muscles lose their efficiency. They begin to tire, to cramp up, and from that point it's a basic question of chemistry. There was one other fact I was bank- ing on: The stronger and more powerful a man is, the more he sacrifices in terms of endurance. For Williams and me it had come down to the equation between life and death. He kept coming. It had to be the Morphitrex. Not even steroids could have allowed a man of Williams's size and age to run so fast for so long. But I had nature's own private stock of juice powering me forward. It's called adrenaline, and in moments of extreme excitement it's the best stuff in the world. The little glands that ride the kidneys were work- ing overtime producing it, and I felt my stride evening out and my chest expanding, preparing for the inevitable switch of energy systems that would allow for the use of oxygen as a fuel source. That's the system that marathoners use. It's very efficient. You can run just about two hours before the sugar in the muscles gets used up and you hit the wall. The problem with that is by then you're no longer sprinting, and I could feel myself slowing down. A hundred yards with the juggernaut still coming, but not as fast. Even better, I could no longer hear his breathing. I checked ahead for a smooth stretch of sand, then glanced quickly behind me. The gap between me and Williams was now sixty or seventy yards. He was still running, but he was kicking up a lot of sand and having trouble keeping a straight course. He ran with his head down, like a drunk looking for a place to collapse. I ran for another twenty yards, then slowed a bit until my breathing evened out. I needed to save something for the end. 212

I stopped and waited for him. When he saw me stand- ing there, he redoubled his efforts. I picked up a chunk of coral and threw it at him. His head jerked back, but his body surged forward. He was almost cooked. He was mean, and he was crazy, and he had a great deal of willpower, but the laws of exhaustion are nonnegotiable. He was already into oxygen debt, and his body, despite its strength, couldn't pay it off quickly enough. I let him get within twenty yards, then took off running again. I slowed down just enough to keep his rabid hopes of killing me alive. Whenever I was satisfied that he was still coming, I trotted away from him. Again I looked back. It was well that I did so, because he had closed to within twenty yards of me. He'd put every- thing into one last surge, but he was finished, used up. As I watched, he fell forward onto his knees like a man kneeling in prayer. I stopped and called to him. He looked up and struggled to his feet, stumbled forward, then fell to his knees again. I turned and faced him. He was sixty yards behind me now, a shadow of a ruin rising up out of the sand. Say what you will of Williams, but he had a lot of Bushido in his bullet head. I ran at him, full speed, or what I had left of it. The world on either side of me blurred into a mass of incoherent light, like a palette of watercolors smeared in a rainstorm. I couldn't feel my feet on the sand, but I was moving fast. My mouth was full of blood, my blood, and it made me mad. Williams lifted his head, but it was too late, because I was already in the air, my knees tucked into my ribs and then the jackknife straightening of the legs as I thrust out my heels. There was no way you could have planned it, but Williams turned his chin to one side just as I struck him. His neck made a sickening sound, like the mast of a ship snapping in two. He spun half around and toppled backward. I landed hard on my hands and belly, facing away from him, the air 213

knocked out of me. I must have hit a nerve when I landed, because my left arm was numb clean up to the shoulder. I got to my feet as quickly as I could, pushing up with my one good hand, and walked over to where Williams lay. I noticed the revolver lying in the sand at his feet. He must have had it in an ankle holster. It had come loose when he fell. You tell me why he hadn't tried to shoot me with it. The .38 didn't have much range, and it would have been a tough shot in the dark with both of us running, but he might have tried, especially in the beginning when he was still close enough to have hit me. But that wasn't Williams. He had chosen to be the lion right through to the end, and that was maybe why I was alive and he was almost dead. I scooped up the gun and checked the clip. Its gold shells winked at me in the weak light. Williams was still breathing. I stood over him with the gun pointed at his head. He looked up, but not at me. His blue eyes were peering into the vast depths of the stars and seeing nothing. There was blood all around his mouth and nose. His massive chest lifted once, twice, then dropped and stayed down. It sounds cold to say it, but under the circum- stances it seemed to me like a fairly natural death, a grim fact that tells you something about the kind of territory my life had entered. I had a fresh gun, there was a dead man lying at my feet, and all I can tell you now is that it didn't shock me. I didn't feel any kind of satisfaction. I didn't feel anything at all. I sat on the sand next to Williams's body for five min- utes with the revolver still pointing at him until I was sure he wasn't faking it. Then, finally, I checked for a pulse at the carotid artery in his tree trunk of a neck. He was dead, all right. I went through his pockets, found his wallet, and buried it in the dunes under a patch of sea grass. What I needed now besides food and rest was time, and the longer 214

it took the cops to identify the body, the better it would be for me. There was nothing to do about Williams's body except to get away from it, so I started walking. I was just about played out, but I needed to leave the vicinity as soon as pos- sible. Come the morning, someone taking a stroll or jogging along the beach would spot him and call the cops. They'd bring Williams to the morgue, but without identification it would be a few days before they could identify him. Prob- ably they would have to take fingerprints. Williams didn't have a criminal record, as far as I knew, but his prints would lead the authorities to his military files. Eventually they would tie him to the Colonel, but not--I hoped--to me. I went down to the edge of the ocean and did what I could to wash the blood from my face. I had no doubt that I looked like death on a hot plate, and it would not be a good thing if someone were to remember the sight of a man with a bloody face emerging from the beach near where a dead man was found the following day. Still, a nosebleed is hard to stop, especially when you're walking, so I had no choice but to stay on the beach until I looked a little better. I walked south for a mile or so, my energy winking and blinking inside me like a fluorescent bulb about to flicker out. I was way too beat to go very much farther, but I pushed myself for another mile or so until I reached a place behind the dunes that held a small picnic area, complete with a rusty barbecue stand and half a dozen weather-worn wooden tables. I found a dark spot and stretched out on my back under a tree with the intention of resting for a few minutes while giving my nose a chance to stop bleeding. That was the plan anyway, but I didn't stay awake long enough to review it. I woke up eight hours later with the sun in my eyes and the Sahara in my mouth, but at least my nose wasn't bleeding 215

anymore. Just to make sure, I walked down to the shore and washed my face again. I touched my nose with a tentative finger. It felt a little flatter than usual, and it hurt badly, but I didn't think it was broken. I looked down the beach and saw an old man walking toward me, sweeping a metal detector in front of him as he came, his head down like a man looking for his car keys in the sand. I took off my shirt and waited for him to pass, but he didn't pay me any attention. All his hopes were buried in the sand. From the heat and the height of the sun, I estimated it to be around seven or eight o'clock. Surely someone must have spotted Williams's body by now, and that meant it was time to go. The question was, where? It occurred to me that I had absolutely nowhere to go except home. It was the only place that made any sense, even if the cops were looking for me. It didn't matter; I was too tired to care. I walked up to where the street flanked the beach and checked for some signage to figure out where I was, which turned out to be a bit north of a little town called Dania Beach. I walked into a diner and ordered ham, eggs, coffee, and a pitcher of water. In a booth at the end of the restau- rant, a pair of middle-aged cops were eating their break- fast and ignoring me. The waitress who served me treated me as though I looked perfectly normal and even called me "sweetheart" when she refilled my coffee cup. The food brought back some of my strength, though it hurt to eat, es- pecially when I tried gnawing through the slab of ham that came with the eggs. By the time I finished my third cup of coffee, I began to think I might actually make it home with- out collapsing. A half hour later I was on U.S. 1, walking south and feel- ing vaguely human and looking for a pay phone so that I could call a cab. Finally, at a gas station, I found one that actually worked, and ten minutes later I was sailing toward 216