Dead on the Island (23 page)

He was sloshing through it now, up to his
waist. The good thing was that it slowed him down.

I got to the edge and looked out at Ray. He
didn't look back. I stepped into the water.

It was cold. I was in only up over my
ankles, and the chill went right through to the bone. I went on
out. If Ray could do it, I could.

The water worked to my advantage as it got
deeper. It took some of the weight off my leg, and I was able to
move as fast as Ray. Of course, I was so cold that my teeth were
chattering. I was shaking too much to hit an elephant with a pistol
shot, much less a man. I kept on, trying as best I could to follow
Ray's path.

I was getting nearer, almost within range.
Then Ray disappeared, just sank right under.

I stopped. It was dark, and maybe he lost
his way. I stood, waiting for him to surface, the wind tugging at
me and almost freezing my sweatshirt to my body.

Suddenly Ray popped out of the water,
showering drops all around.

He scared the hell out of me. He was so
close that I could see him clearly. He'd been swimming toward me
under the water. He was smarter than I was, that was for sure.

He was firing the pistol wildly, however.
Blue flames spurted from the barrel.

I sank under the water. Never let it be said
that I'm a slow learner. The scrapes on my hands and face sizzled
when the salt water hit them.

I have no idea how long I was under. I
wasn't used to holding my breath, so it probably wasn't long. I
stayed down until my lungs were burning. I thought about Ray,
wondering if he thought he'd hit me. I knew he was reloading,
waiting for me to come up.

I eased a little way to my left, gripped the
pistol, and popped up. I held the pistol down to make sure the
water drained out of the barrel. The wind hit me like a bucket of
shaved ice.

Ray was nowhere in sight.

I looked all around, hoping to be able to
see bubbles on the surface of the water if he was releasing his
breath.

I didn't see anything except the slight chop
on the water caused by the wind.

There was a huge splash behind me. I started
turning. It was as if things were happening in slow motion. I got
half turned before the shooting started.

Over the sound of the pistol, I could hear
Ray's screaming. He wasn't screaming out words. It was just noise.
Rage, I suppose, or maybe the salt water was just hurting his
wound. Or it could be that he'd gone completely around the
bend.

I went under again.

In a way, Ray had the advantage on me. He
knew about how long I could stay under, so he could wait to go down
himself. My only chance was to out-maneuver him. I tried to decide
whether to try getting so far away that he couldn't possibly hit me
or simply to head for the shore. Either way, he might outguess me.
I opted for the shore.

The water was cold, but at least it seemed
warmer underneath it than in the wind above. I held my breath as
long as I could. I was just about to surface when I collided with
something.

It was Ray.

I tried to move away to get to the air, but
he was on me too quickly, flailing at me, trying to get a grip on
me so he could hold me under.

Somehow he got his left hand tangled in my
hair. He started trying to hit me with the pistol, but he couldn't
do much damage under the water. Then he tried raking my face with
the barrel. I felt the tip of the sight rip the skin of my jaw.

I was more worried about getting a breath
than about what he could do to me with the pistol. I struggled for
the surface, but he clubbed me on the temple. There wasn't much
force in the blow, but there was enough to keep me down.

I fought back by jabbing him in the stomach
with the Mauser. I shoved as hard as I could, concentrating all my
force on the small spot of the attack. It was so dark under the
water that I couldn't see a thing, so I had no real idea of exactly
where I was hitting him. I wasn't going to last much longer. I
would have pulled the trigger, but I was afraid to. I didn't know
what might happen. The barrel was full of water. There was water
outside, too, and maybe the forces would balance out, but I didn't
want to take the chance of having the pistol blow up in my
hand.

Ray loosened his grip on my hair as I jabbed
him for the third time. I flipped over and kicked backward as hard
as I could, then shot out of the water like an undersea missile. I
was gasping burning lungfuls of air and trying to get my footing,
hold onto the pistol, and spot Ray.

It took me a second or two to realize that I
wasn't going to be able to get my footing because there wasn't any
footing. We'd drifted over a hole. I tried to tread water and calm
down.

Ray was easing to the side about twenty feet
in front of me. I could barely see his head atop the dark water. I
moved in the same direction.

He got his footing first, and his shoulders
rose out of the chop. He fired twice. Both bullets thunked into the
water to my left, sounding almost as if they were hitting
sheetrock.

I was exhausted. My knee was throbbing and I
could almost feel it swelling. My scraped skin was frying on both
my face and hands. The cut on my jaw felt as if it had electricity
running through it. But I still didn't want to have to shoot
Ray.

He'd tried to kill Dino once and tried to
set him up a second time when the first attempt failed. He'd
certainly had both Shelton and Ferguson killed, though he hadn't
done it himself. He'd abused Sharon Matthews, even if he was
telling the truth about the kidnapping being her idea. He may have
killed either her or Evelyn. He'd tried to kill me, too, and he'd
had me beaten up.

But I didn't think any of that mattered
much.

To me he was still Ray, my friend, the black
kid I'd grown up with. Looking at it from his point of view, I
could see that he'd never really been my equal, not in the eyes of
a lot of other people. Dino and I had gotten most of the ink for
our athletic prowess, and maybe that was because we were white. And
Ray had fetched and carried for Dino for a long time, while Dino
seemed to expect no less. There was a depth of bitterness in Ray
from past years that I knew I would never understand.

So I didn't want to kill him.

I'd already killed two men that night, and I
wasn't sure I'd ever be able to accept having done so. I never
wanted another dead man on my conscience, especially not a dead
friend.

But when I got my footing, I fired the
pistol anyway.

I wasn't really aiming. I was shaking too
hard for that, and I was too exhausted for accuracy. It was all
chance, and it was clearly self-defense. Despite all my feelings
for Ray, he clearly had no qualms about disposing of me. Right at
that moment, I don't think anything would have pleased him
more.

"I hate your goddammed soul, Tru!" he
screamed as he fired for the third time.

The bullet went wild. I didn't even hear it
hit the water. He was taking aim again when I pulled the trigger of
the Mauser.

Ray seemed to rise out of the water. "Shit,"
he said, sounding more surprised than anything.

Then he sank under the surface.

"Ray!" I said. I pushed forward, trying to
get to him.

It took me a minute, but I reached the place
where he'd gone under. Stuffing the pistol in my pants, I dived
after him.

He was right there. I pulled him to the
surface and started for the shore. It wasn't far. I towed him with
my hand under his chin, and he floated in my wake, relaxed now, all
the hate gone out of him.

I got him out on the shore and tried to make
him comfortable. I knew that he must be freezing in the wind. "I'll
get help, Ray," I said. "It won't take long."

"Never mind . . . . that," Ray said. I was
surprised he could speak. There was a hole in his shirt, right in
the center of his chest. "I could never be a pro . . . could I?
Screwed up . . . again. I . . . I'm sorry, Tru, about . . .
everything."

I stood up from where I'd been kneeling in
the sand beside him. "Don't be sorry," I said. "We're all still
alive. I think."

"Not . . . all," he said. "I'm sorry about .
. . Jan."

There was no one on the seawall except
me.

I didn't know where the rat was. I'd gone
there to look for him, but he was nowhere around. Not that I blamed
him.

It was cold and gray, with a stinging rain
in the air being blown along by what was probably the season's last
really strong norther. The boulevard was wet and shiny in the
lights from the few cars that drove by.

I was carrying a blue cardboard box of Kraft
American cheese. I'd brought it for the rat. I don't know why I
thought I could find him. He was probably warm and dry in some hole
among the granite boulders, chewing on the remains of a hermit
crab.

I, on the other hand, was cold and wet and
getting wetter all the time.

Ray had died on the shore that night. The
last word he said was my sister's name. I don't suppose I'll ever
know for sure what he meant by it. I hope he meant that he was
sorry I'd never found her, but that might not be what he meant at
all. It may be that he was out to punish both me and Dino for
whatever imagined slights he'd conjured up and that he knew very
well what had happened to Jan. It may be that he'd made it
happen.

But I'll go on hoping that he didn't and
that someday I'll find her or that eventually I'll know the truth
about what happened, even if it's a hard truth.

One thing was for sure: Ray was never going
to tell. I tried CPR, slapping, screaming, and beating him on the
face. He just lay there in the dark and wind.

I finally left him there and hobbled back to
the house. Dino had things pretty well under control there, thanks
mostly to Evelyn.

Dino managed to get Hobbes to drop the gun,
but that was about all he was up to. Hobbes got on top of Dino,
digging his thumbs into the re-opened wound, when Evelyn realized
what was going on, left Sharon, found the pistol, and clobbered
Hobbes in the back of the head with it.

She didn't mess around. Hobbes was in the
hospital for three days with a severely cracked skull before he
finally came around enough to tell the cops his version of what had
happened.

For the rest of us, those three days were
spent in varying degrees of comfort. Dino, being who he was, got to
stay in the hospital in a much nicer room than the one Hobbes was
in. Evelyn and Sharon, who had been only creased by Ray's shot at
her, got to go home, thanks to Dino's influence.

I got to go to jail.

After all, I was the one who admitted that
I'd killed a man, and it didn't take the police long to match the
bullets from my pistol with the ones they'd dug out of one of guys
in the warehouse, the one I'd shot in the chest.

Gerald Barnes didn't like me much. It didn't
take him long to work up a really good case of moral fervor and
outraged indignation. I let him work on it, and I told him as much
of the truth as I could. It was up to somebody else to tell him the
rest.

Sharon told most of her story straight,
except for the part about the kidnapping being her idea. Ray had
told her about her past and lured her to Dino's isolated house.
Terry had helped Ray with that part. Ray had gotten to him,
promised him a big part of the ransom money, which of course he
never collected.

Because Sharon was distraught, and young,
her story was pretty convincing. Dino and Evelyn backed her up, and
so did I, when I found out what I needed to say.

Hobbes, when he came out of his swoon,
didn't contradict her. He really didn't know what was happening at
any point. Ray pointed him in a particular direction, told him what
to do, and he did it. His story was, of course, that Ray had
personally killed Shelton and Ferguson, Ferguson because he got
greedy, and Shelton because Ray had no intention of paying him any
of the proceeds from the kidnapping and because a dead Shelton told
no tales.

Barnes gave me hell, not that I blamed him
much.

"You sorry son of a bitch," he said. "You
lied to me that day when you found Shelton's body. Collection
agency, my ass!" He wasn't very big, but he could get mad with the
best of them. His face was very red. "I'd like to tie you to a
nylon rope and go trolling for sharks."

I was sitting on a cot in a jail cell at the
time, which gave him a superior position. Still, I felt as if I had
to say something. "You think if I'd told you the real reason I was
looking for Shelton you could have done any better?"

He put his hands on his hips and looked at
me. "Maybe," he said.

"Just maybe?"

"Just maybe. But
maybe
your friend
Ray would be alive now.
Maybe
your friend Dino wouldn't be
in the hospital with bullet holes in him.
Maybe
you wouldn't
have killed three men."

I didn't like to think about that last part
any more than I had to. And
maybe
he was right. But he could
have been wrong. If I hadn't mixed in, Sharon could have been dead,
and Dino, too. I could have been dead, for that matter.

I got the feeling, in fact, that Barnes
would have been happier if Ray had killed me instead of vice-versa,
but that was all right. He'd get over it. What was really bothering
him was that I'd solved his murder case, on which he'd made
absolutely no progress, and he liked to think that he could have
done just as well as I had if I'd given him all the information. He
might even have been right, but it didn't make much difference
now.

Evelyn came by to tell me that Sharon was
holding up pretty well, considering all that had happened to her.
They let us meet in the visitors' room.

"She knows how wrong she was," Evelyn said.
"And she blames herself for everything."