Rick Boyer - Billingsgate Shoal

"Poor Doctor Adams, and such a handsome devil too. Your wife's going to miss you-"

And it was at that point that the horror and indignity of the situation hit me with full force. Until then I was immersed in fear or pain, or both. But now, I heard the words with an indescribable mixture of hatred and outrage. Outrage at what would happen to Mary and the boys.

"Hold on. It's not wise, I think, to do this now."

It was John. He was standing next to me.

Then he began to move casually toward Laura. He moved in an awkward shuffle, but moved nonetheless. He had replaced the Walther in his coat. He approached Laura Kincaid, who had again picked up the Colt Armalite Commando. She cradled the short-version assault rifle in her arms rather clumsily now, tired from her exertion. Still there would be no arguing with the clip of high-velocity rounds she could send forth at the twitch of her finger.

"Nobody can hear it. I want him out."

John was moving toward her. He shambled, but moved with a certain ominous stealth and deliberation that she picked up.

"Hey, did you search him?" asked Schilling.

John hesitated half a second, then shook his head. It was the half-second wait that did him in. I think he remembered that I'd had a gun before, and if he answered no and they found one on me, it was all over for him.

"Forgot. I thought Hartzos searched him."

Schilling patted me down quickly and recovered the Buck folding hunter knife. It was long but trim; it was no wonder Hartzos hadn't seen a bulge in my hip pocket.

Laura Kincaid backed up two steps warily, eyeing John.

"Get back from him, Jim. Get back from both of them."

"But I've got the knife-"

"Get back! John's not the kind to forget to search somebody they've found upstairs. What about it? Better speak up."

"I have naw idea what you mean, mum-"

"Look. Jim and I have wondered about you for some time now. You disappear nights-"

"Just to go down the boozer, mum. Get a drop."

"Now look. This is the last haul; by noon we'll be out of the country. Either you'll be with the rest of us aboard the Coquette, or else you'll be joining the nosy doctor here, swinging around the bottom with a bad case of the crabs."

"Mrs. Kincaid, I dawn't-"

"Jim, get his gun. Now. You move an inch, John, and you're dead. Why didn't you search the doctor. Why?"

Schilling slid his huge arm into John's coat and retrieve the Walther with amazing quickness. There went our last? hope.

"I told you. I thought Hartzos would have gone over him."

I saw her raise the rifle up and aim it at my head. I shut my eyes tight and winced, but looked out through the slits, blurry and dim. Surrealistic. I was in a bad, bad dream.

Laura Kincaid was smart all right. She suspected John the instant she realized he hadn't given me a third-degree search, and now she made John show his hand, because he jumped for her gun, caught it by the barrel as if it were a striking rattler, and flung it out of her hands. But the big man grabbed him, spun him around, and mashed him hard under the jaw with a very big hard hand. With methodical coolness she retrieved the weapon. Schilling raised his arm above John and clipped him on the neck. The double whammy dropped him hard, and he joined me at the brink of the pit.

"Laura, I repeat: the place is being watched. They know I'm here. Whatever you do, they'll find out. Use your head."

I hoped like nothing else in the world she believed me. She stood silent for perhaps ten seconds. It seemed like an hour. Then she kept the gun on us while she called Schilling back with her. They whispered together, keeping us well covered. I heard the phrase "then go back to the boat" more than once. Then I heard three words of dread. I knew that John heard them too because I saw the brief, fleeting look of terror cross his face, then a look of-disappointment. Not further terror, or extreme sadness, just disappointment. Chagrin, as if having lost a good poker hand.

The three words were: Do it now.

I stared down at the black hole in the floor where the water sloshed. I saw two brief streaks of silver light reflection in a faint ripple, then they vanished. That was my life in there: that will-o'-the-wisp flicker of light for maybe a fiftieth of a second, then black again. I heard Laura Kincaid walking back to us. Slow measured steps. I turned and looked at her. At her eyes. They were the eyes of a pit bulldog. She stopped right behind John, perhaps a yard away. Without a word, she raised up the rifle until the muzzle pointed right at the back of his head. John didn't even turn around. He knelt on the floor, looking ahead of himself and down. His lips were moving, and he had that same disappointed look on his face. But it was gradually replaced by a look of intense concentration, and then of profound love. I heard him say, in a whisper so delicate it was barely audible, "Now take care of yerself, Billy. Take care of your mother-and may you be happy too, for all the days of your life-May Gad bless-"

I turned to look at the water again before I heard the shot. I didn't want to see John die.

The shot was like a pneumatic spring compressor. It was not the sound I was expecting. It went ptou! An obscene, single-syllable French word. I had my eyes closed by then, and heard a heavy slumping to the ground. I murmured a thought in my mind: And May God bless. Oh Christ… May

God bless.

When I opened my eyes after no second shot, was fired John was still kneeling. He was looking at the floor right beside him, dumbfounded. Laura Kincaid was on the floor. She was doing a horizontal waltz there. She was dying. I couldn't figure out why. I saw a flicker of movement out of the comer of my eye. Schilling was gone, rushed out the small doorway that ended in darkness. He'd killed her, perhaps to take the loot for himself. I looked back at the woman on the cement floor four feet away. Part of her throat was missing. It was pale white: fish-belly white. The white that no healthy skin ever gets.

And then the paper-white rift under her jaw grew dark. It oozed bright red. The whiteness was from the shock of the slug as it passed through her flesh, driving all the blood far away from it. But the, blood came back through the thousands of tiny blood vessels, and now poured forth faster and faster. There was no big spurting; no artery had been severed. But I soon heard a sound from her that will haunt me for the rest of my days. I'd heard it before, when I was a kid, on an Iowa farm. They had slit a hog's throat, and beat it with sticks to keep it running around the yard so its heart would pump all the blood out. And I heard screams coming through the blood. Underwater screams. Underblood screams.

Laura Kincaid, what was left of her, kicked and slapped herself around on the cement like a sea turtle at a Caribbean marketplace. She flapped and flipped, and made ugly noises. She was nowhere near dead and suffering terribly. The wound in her throat had cut her windpipe, and she was in enough pain so her jaw was clenched shut. She breathed through her wound, and screamed and cried through it too. A huge football-shaped mass of brownish-red froth rose up from it, bubbling like perked coffee.

It was so ill-fitting for the pretty slim lady I had met in the big elegant house. It was so-clumsy. So embarrassing. In a grotesque way it was as if she had just stumbled at a debutante ball, or thrown up on somebody's priceless Nahin rug.

"Oh pardon me," her soul seemed to be saying, 'I'm sooo sorry-you see, I cannot help it. I'm dying… and it hurts and there's nothing I can do."

She swung her head, now pale gray-blue, back and forth hard against the cement floor. Then she settled down and grabbed at herself all over with her hands, whimpering. She was doing a slow, sad side stroke into eternity.