Skin Tight

13

Earlier that day, Tina and two of her girlfriends had appeared at the stilt house in a borrowed Bayliner Capri. They saw Mick Stranahan sleeping on the roof beneath the windmill, the Remington shotgun at his side.

Tina’s friends were alarmed. They voted to stay in the boat while Tina went up on the dock and approached the house.

“Ri chie wants me back,” she called to Stranahan.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What?”

“I said, Richie wants me back. I wanted you to be the first to know.”

“Why?” Stranahan said, his voice thick.

“So you could change my mind.”

Stranahan noticed that a seagull had crapped all over the shotgun while he was asleep. “Damn,” he said under his breath. He took a black bandanna from the pocket of his jeans and wiped the shotgun.

“Well?” came Tina’s voice from below. “You going to change my mind or not?”

“How?”

“S leep withme.”

“I already did,” Stranahan said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Go back to Richie,” Stranahan advised. “If he hits you again, file charges.”

“Why are you so afraid?”

Stranahan slid butt-first down the grainy slope of the roof, to a spot from which Tina was visible in her tiny tangerine thong swimsuit.

“We’ve been over this,” Stranahan said to her.

“But I don’t want to marry you,” she said. “I promise. Even if you ask me afterwards, I’ll say no-no matter how great it was. Besides, I’m not a waitress. You said all the others were waitresses.”

He groaned and said, “Tina, I’m sorry. It just won’t work.”

Now she looked angry. One of the other girls in the Bayliner turned on the radio and Tina snapped at her, told her to shut off the damn music. “How do you know it won’t work?” she said to Stranahan.

“I’mtoo old.”

“Bullshit.”

“And you’re too young.”

“Double bullshit.”

“Okay,” he said. “Then name the Beatles.”

“What?” Tina forced a caustic laugh. “Are you serious?”

“Dead serious,” Stranahan said, addressing her from the edge of the roof. “If you can name all the Beatles, I’ll make love to you right now.”

“I don’t believe this,” Tina said. “The fucking Beatles.”

Stranahan had done the math in his head: She was nineteen, which meant she had been born the same year the band broke up.

“Well, there’s Paul,” Tina said.

“Last name?”

“Come on!”

“Let’s hearit.”

“ McCartney, okay? I don’t believe this.”

Stranahan said, “Go on, you’re doing fine.”

“Rin go,” Tina said. “Ringo Starr. The drummer with the nose.”

“Good.”

“And then there’s the guy who died. Lennon.”

“First name?”

“I know his son is Julian.”

“His son doesn’t count.”

Tina said, “Yeah, well, you’re an asshole. It’s John. John Lennon.”

Stranahan nodded appreciatively. “Three down, one to go. You’re doing great.”

Tina folded her arms and tried to think of the last Beatle. Her lips were pursed in a most appealing way, but Stranahan stayed on the roof. “I’ll give you a hint,” he said to Tina. “Lead guitar.”

She looked up at him, triumph shining in her gray eyes. “Harrison,” she declared. “KeithHarrison!”

Muttering, Stranahan crabbed back up to his vantage beneath the legs of the windmill. Tina said some sharp things, all of which he deserved, and then got on the boat with her friends and headed back across the bay toward Dinner Key and, presumably, Richie.

Joey the shrimper spit over the transom and said, “Well, there’s your boy.”

Christina Marks frowned. Mick Stranahan lay naked in the shape of a T on the roof of the house. His tan legs were straight, and each arm was extended. He had a bandanna pulled down over his eyes to shield them from the white rays of the sun. Christina Marks thought he looked like the victim of a Turkish firing squad.

“He looks like Christ,” said Joey. “Don’t you think he looks like Christ? Christ without a beard, I mean.”

“Take me up to the house,” Christina said. “Do you have a horn on this thing?”

“Hell, he knows we’re here.”

“He’s sleeping.”

“No, ma’am,” Joey said. “You’re wrong.” But he sounded the horn anyway. Mick Stranahan didn’t stir.

Joey idled the shrimp boat closer. The tide was up plenty high, rushing sibilantly under the pilings of the house. Clutching a brown grocery bag, Christina stepped up on the dock and waved the shrimper away.

“Thanks very much.”

Joey said, “You be sure to tell him what we saw. About the big freak on the water scooter.”

She nodded.

“Tell him first thing,” Joey said. He pulled back on the throttle and the old diesel moaned into reverse. The engine farted an odious cloud of blue smoke that enveloped Christina Marks. She coughed all the way up the stairs.

When she got to the main deck, Stranahan was sitting on the edge of the roof, legs dangling.

“What’s in the bag?”

“Cold cuts, wine, cheese. I thought you might be hungry.”

“This how they do it in New York?”

The sack was heavy, but Christina didn’t put it down. She held it like a baby, with both arms, but not too tightly. She didn’t want him to think it was a chore. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

“The wine and cheese,” Stranahan said. “There’s a sense of ceremony about it. Maybe it’s necessary where you come from, butnot here.”

“Fuck you,” said Christina Marks. “I’m on expense account, hotshot.”

Stranahan smiled. “I forgot.” He hopped off the roof and landed like a cat. She followed him into the house and watched him slip into blue jean cutoffs, no underwear. She put the bag on the kitchen counter and he went to work, fixing lunch. From the refrigerator he got some pickles and a half pound of big winter shrimp, still in the shell.

As he opened the wine, he said, “Let’s get right to it: You’ve heard something,”

“Yes,” Christina said. “But first: You won’t believe what we just saw. A man with a machine gun, on one of those water-jet things.”

“Where?”

She motioned with her chin. “Not even a mile from here.”

“W hat didhelook like?”

Christina described him. Stranahan popped the cork.

“I guess we better eat fast,” he said. He was glad he’d brought the shotgun down from the roof after Tina and her friends had left, when he went to find a fresh bandanna. Subconsciously he glanced at the Remington, propped barrel-up in the corner of the same wall with the stuffed marlin head.

Christina peeled a shrimp, dipped it tail-first into a plastic thimble of cocktail sauce. “Are you going to tell me who he is, the man in the underwear?”

“I don’t know,” Stranahan said. “I honestly don’t. Now tell me what else.”

This would be the most difficult part. She said, “I went to see your friend Tim Gavigan at the hospital.”

“Oh.”

“I was there when he died.”

Stranahan cut himself three fat slices of cheddar. “Extreme unction,” he said. “Too bad you’re not a priest.”

“He wanted me to tell you something. Something he remembered about the Vicky Barletta case.”

With a mouthful of cheese, Stranahan said, “Tell me you didn’t take that asshole up to the VA. Flemm-you didn’t let him have a crack at Timmy in that condition, did you?”

“Of course not,” she said sharply. “Now listen: Tim Gavigan remembered that the plastic surgeon has a brother. George Graveline. He saw him working outside the clinic.”

“Doing what?” Stranahan asked.

“This is what Tim wanted me to tell you: The guy is a tree trimmer. He said you’d know what that means. He was going on about Hoffa and dead bodies.”

Stranahan laughed. “Yeah, he’s right. It’s perfect.”

Impatiently Christina said, “You want to fill me in?”

Stranahan chomped on a pickle. “You know what a wood chipper is? It’s like a king-sized sideways Cuisinart, except they use it to shred wood. Tree companies tow them around like a U-Haul. Throw the biggest branches down this steel chute and they come out sawdust and barbecue chips.”

“Now I get it,” Christina said.

“Something can pulverize a mahogany tree, think of what it could do to a human body.”

“I’d rather not.”

“There was a famous murder case in New Jersey, they had everything but the corpse. The corpse was ground up in a wood chipper so basically all they found was splinters of human bone-not enough for a good forensic I.D. Finally somebody found a molar, and the tooth had a gold filling. That’s how they made the case.”

Christina was still thinking about bone splinters.

“At any rate,” Stranahan said, “it’s a helluva good lead. Hurry now, finish up.” He wedged the cork into the half-empty wine bottle and started wrapping the leftover cold cuts and cheese in wax paper. Christina was reaching for one last shrimp when he snatched the dish away and put it in the refrigerator.

“Hey!”

“I said hurry.”

She noticed how deliberately he was moving, and it struck her that something was happening. “What is it, Mick?”

“You mean you don’t hear it?”

Christina said no.

“Just listen,” he said, and before she knew it the stilt house was shuttered, and the door closed, and the two of them were alone in the corner of the bedroom, sitting on the wooden floor. At first the only sound Christina Marks heard was the two of them breathing, and then came some scratching noises that Stranahan said were seagulls up on the roof. Finally, when she leaned her head against the plywood wall, she detected a faraway hum. The longer she listened, the more distinct it became.

The pitch of the motor was too weak to be an airplane and too high to be much of a boat.

“Jesus, it’s him,” she said with a tremble.

Stranahan acknowledged the fact with a frown.“You know,” he said, “this used to be a pretty good neighborhood.”

Chemo wondered about the Ingram, about the effects of salt spray on the firing mechanism. He didn’t know much about machine guns, but he suspected that it was best not to get them wet. The ride out to Stiltsville had been wetter than he’d planned.

He parked the jet ski beneath one of the other stilt houses to wait for the shrimp boat to leave Mick Stranahan’s place. He saw a good-looking woman in a white cottony top and tan safari shorts hop off the shrimp boat and go upstairs, so Chemo began to work her into the scenario. He didn’t know if she was a wife or a girlfriend or what, but it didn’t matter. She was there, and she had to die. End of story.

Chemo pried open a toolshed and found a rag for the Ingram. Carefully he wiped off the moisture and salt. The gun looked fine, but there was only one way to be sure. He took an aluminum mop handle from the shed and busted the padlock off the door of the house. Once, inside he quickly found a target: an old convertible sofa, its flowered fabric showing traces of mold and mildew. Chemo shut the door to trap the noise. Then he knelt in front of the sofa, put the Ingram to his shoulder and squeezed off three rounds. Dainty puffs of white fuzz and dust rose with the impact of each bullet. Chemo lowered the gun and carefully examined the.45 caliber holes in the cushions.

Now he was ready. He slung the gun strap over his shoulder and pulled his soggy Jockey shorts up snugly on his waist. He was about to go when he thought of something. Quickly he moved through the house, opening doors until he found a bathroom.

At the sink Chemo took off his sunglasses and put his face to the mirror. With a forefinger he tested the tiny pink patch of flesh that Dr. Rudy Graveline had dermabraded. The patch no longer stung; in fact, it seemed to be coming along nicely.

Chemo was extremely pleased, and ventured forth in bright spirits.

Someplace, maybe it was Reader’s Digest, he had read where salt water actually expedited the healing process.

“Don’t move,” Mick Stranahan whispered.

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Unless Itell you.”

From the hum of the engine, Christina Marks guessed that the jet ski was very close; no more than thirty yards.

Stranahan held the shotgun across his knees. She looked at his hands and noticed they were steady. Hers were shaking like an old drunk’s.

“Do you have a plan?” she asked.

“Basically, my plan is to stay alive.”

“Are you going to shoot him?”

Stranahan looked at her as if she were five years old. “Now what do you think? Of course I’m going to shoot him. I intend to blow the motherfucker’s head off, unless you’ve got some objection.”

“Just asking,” Christina said.

Chemo was thinking: Damn Japanese.

Whoever designed these jet skis must have been a frigging dwarf.

His back was killing nun; he had to hunch over like a washerwoman to reach the handlebars. Every time he hit a wave, the gun strap slipped off his bony shoulder. A couple times he thought for sure he’d lost the Ingram, or at least broken it. Damn Japanese.

As he approached Stranahan’s stilt house, Chemo started thinking something else. He had already factored the girl into the scenario, figured he’d shoot her first and get it over with. But then he realized he had another problem: Surely she had seen him ski past the shrimp boat, probably noticed the machine gun, probably told Stranahan.

Who had probably put it together.

So Chemo anticipated a fight. Screw the element of surprise; the damn jet scooter was as loud as a Harley. Stranahan could hear him coming two miles away.

But where was he?

Chemo circled the stilt house slowly, eventually riding the curl of his own wake. The windows were down, the door shut. No sign of life, except for a pair of ratty looking gulls on the roof.

A thin smile of understanding came to his lips. Of course-the man was waiting inside. A little ambush action.

Chemo coasted the jet ski up to the dock and stepped off lightly. He took the Ingram off his shoulder and held it in front of him as he went up the stairs, thinking: Where’s the logical place for Stranahan to be waiting? In a corner, of course.

He was pleased to find that the wooden deck went around Stranahan’s entire house. Walking cautiously on storklike legs, Chemo approached the southwest corner first. Calmly he fired one shot, waist level, through the wall. He repeated the same procedure at each of the other corners, then sat on the rail of the deck and waited. When nothing happened after three minutes, he walked up to the front door and fired twice more.

Then he went in.

Christina Marks was not aware that Stranahan had been hit until she felt something warm on her bare arm. She opened her mouth to scream but Stranahan covered it with his hand and motioned for her to be quiet. She saw that his eyes were watering from the pain of the bullet wound. He removed his hand from her mouth and pointed at his left shoulder. Christina nodded but didn’t look.

They heard three more gunshots, each hi a different part of the house. Then came a silence that lasted a few agonizing minutes. Finally Stranahan rose to his feet with the shotgun cradled in his right arm. The left side of his body was numb and wet with blood; in the twilight of the shuttered house, he looked two-tone.

From the floor Christina watched him move. He pressed his back to the wall and edged toward the front of the house. The next shots made Christina shut her eyes. When she opened them, she saw two perfect holes through the front door; twin sunbeams, sharp as lasers, perforated the shadows. Beneath the light shafts, Mick Stranahan lay prone on his belly, elbows braced on the wooden floor. He was aiming at the front door when Chemo opened it.

Stranahan’s shotgun was a Remington 1100, a semi-automatic twelve-gauge, an excellent bird gun that holds up to five shells. Later, when Stranahan measured the distance from the door to where he had lain, he would marvel at how any human being with two good eyes could miss a seven-foot target at a distance of only nineteen feet four inches. The feet that Stranahan was bleeding to death at the time was not, in his view, a mitigating excuse.

In truth, it was the shock of the intruder’s appearance that had caused Stranahan to hesitate-the sight of this gaunt, pellucid, frizzle-haired freak with a moonscape face that could stop a freight train.

So Stranahan had stared for a nanosecond when he should have squeezed the trigger. For someone who looked so sickly, Chemo moved deceptively fast. As he dove out of the doorway, the first blast from the Remington sprinkled its rain of birdshot into the bay.

“Shit,” Stranahan said, struggling to his feet. On his way toward the door he slipped on his own blood and went down again, his right cheek slamming hard on the floor; this, just as Chemo craned around the comer and fired a messy burst from the Ingram. Rolling in a sticky mess, Stranahan shot back.

Chemo slammed the door from the outside, plunging the house into darkness once more.

Stranahan heard the man running on the outside deck, following the apron around the house. Stranahan took aim through the walls. He imagined that the man was a rising quail, and he led accordingly. The first blast tore a softball-sized hole in the wall of the living room. The second punched out the shutter in the kitchen. The third and final shot was followed by a grunt and a splash outside.

“Christina!” Stranahan shouted. “Quick, help me up.”

But when she got there, biting back tears, crawling on bare knees, he had already passed out.

Chemo landed on his back in the water. He kicked his legs just to make sure he wasn’t paralyzed; other than a few splinters in his scalp, he seemed to be fine. He figured that the birdshot must have missed him, that the concussion so close to his head was what threw him off balance.

Instinctively he held the Ingram high out of the water with his right hand, and paddled furiously with his left. He knew he had to make it under cover of the house before Stranahan came out; otherwise he’d be a sitting duck. Chemo saw that the machine gun was dripping, so he figured it must have gotten dunked in the fall. Would it still fire? And how many rounds were left? He had lost count.

These were his concerns as he made for the pilings beneath the stilt house. Progress was maddeningly slow; by paddling with only one hand, Chemo tended to move himself in a frothy circle. In frustration he paddled more frenetically, a tactic that decreased the perimeter of his route but brought him no closer to safety. He expected at any second to see Stranahan burst onto the deck with the shotgun.

Beneath Chemo there appeared in the water a long gray-blue shadow, which hung there as if frozen in glass. It was Stranahan’s silent companion, Liza, awakened from its afternoon siesta by the wild commotion.

A barracuda this age is a creature of sublime instinct and flawless precision, an eating machine more calculating and efficient than any shark in the ocean. Over time the great barracuda had come to associate human activity with feeding; its impulses had been tuned by Stranahan’s evening pinfish ritual. As Chemo struggled in the shadows, the barracuda was on full alert, its cold eyes trained upward in anticipation. The blue-veined legs that kicked impotently at its head, the spastic thrashing-these posed no threat.

Something else had caught its attention: the familiar rhythmic glint of stunned prey on the water’s surface. The barracuda struck with primitive abandon, streaking up from the deep, slashing, then boring back toward the pilings.

There, beneath the house, the great fish flared its crimson gills in a darkening sulk. What it had mistaken for an easy meal of silver pinfish turned out to be no such thing, and the barracuda spit ignominiously through its fangs.

It was a testimony to sturdy Swiss craftsmanship that the Heuer diving watch was still ticking when it came to rest on the bottom. Its stainless silver and gold links glistened against Chemo’s pale severed hand, which reached up from the turtle grass like some lost piece of mannequin.