Elmore Leonard - Cat Chaser

“How’d you do?”

“Well, the only thing I can figure out,” Mary said, “he puts on the front so no one will know what a real asshole he is.”

“So walk away,” Moran said. “What’s the problem?”

“I told you, I want him to understand why I’m leaving. I don’t want him to think it’s for any other reason than we shouldn’t have got married in the first place. We made a mistake and I want him to realize it.”

“What other reason is there? You don’t like him, that’s all.”

“There’s a good one,” Mary said. “I signed a prenuptial agreement. I didn’t want to but Andres insisted. In the agreement it says if the marriage ends in divorce, for any reason, I’m to be given a flat settlement of two million dollars.”

Moran said, “You didn’t want to sign it?”

“I felt like it was an inducement. I didn’t want to make a deal with him. I wanted to marry him. I might’ve been dumb, but I was sincere.”

“Well, it was his idea,” Moran said. “But if you’re worried about what he thinks-I mean you want to prove you’re still sincere, then don’t take the money.”

“Yeah, except that I like being rich.”

Moran studied her face, the fine bone structure, the delicate line of her nose, knowing the face would change and he would still want to look at it for a long time to come.

“You got a problem,” he said.

They were silent now. His gaze moved past her to the shrubs that bordered the south end of the hotel grounds. After several moments he said, “My first night here, I slept in a hole. Right over where that hedge is…”

THE AFTERNOON OFthe fourth day. The Chevrolet Impala moved in low gear through streets that were like alleys, past stone structures with wooden entranceways, tenements that dated only a hundred years-new housing in a town where the son of Christopher Columbus had lived in style. Mary stared at scarred walls. They could be in San Juan or Caracas. The heat pressed motionless in the narrow streets. She searched for something to hold her interest as Moran spoke to Bienvenido in English and pidgin present-tense Spanish. The oldest buildings of all, she realized, the ones that dated to the early sixteenth century, were the newest in appearance, clean, reconstructed among recent decay, with all the charm of Disney World.

When they left the car to walk, Moran would nod to people along the street and in doorways staring at them, staring longer at the blond-haired woman than at the bearded man.

Mary said, “You’re sure we’re all right.”

Moran’s gaze came down from the upper floors of a building to the narrow shops on the street level. “They look at you and it’s instant love. Blondes have some kind of magic.” His gaze lifted again. “Up by that corner window-those are bullet holes. My fire team came along this street… We shouldn’t have been anywhere near this area.”

“What’s a fire team?” She pictured firemen.

“A third of a squad. Two riflemen, an automatic rifleman and the fire-team leader. Thirteen men in a squad, forty-eight in a platoon. The platoon was Cat Chaser. After we lost our sergeant I was Cat Chaser Four-if anybody wanted to call up and say hi.”

“Mister!”

Moran turned to see the dark face close to him, teeth missing and brown-stained eyes smiling, the man holding up lottery tickets. Moran waved him away, moving past.

“You the Marine, uh?” the man said, stopping Moran again in his tracks. “I hear it on the radio, the marine looking for his girl. You the Marine, yes?”

“I was a Marine,” Moran said.

They were standing now, people gathering around. Mary saw the eager expression on the man’s face as he said, “This is the Marine!” Excited. “You looking for the girl Luci Palma. You find her?”

Mary watched Moran shake his head, with the same eager expression as the man’s. “You know her?”

“No, I don’t think so.” The man turned to the other people and began speaking in Spanish.

Moran took Mary’s arm. They continued up the old street past lingering people, piles of trash, children following them now, the children and the lottery-ticket man’s voice raised, telling everyone something in Spanish, with feeling, like he was telling a story.

“What’s he saying?”

“I ran an ad in the paper, looking for somebody,” Moran said. “Evidently one of the radio stations got hold of it.”

“Looking for somebody,” Mary said.

“Someone I met after I was taken prisoner. One of the snipers.”

“A girl?”

“She was about sixteen. Luci Palma.”

“That’s why you came here? To see her?”

“No, this is why I came. What we’re doing now. But I was curious.”

“I’ll bet you are.”

“She was a skinny little kid.”

“She won’t be now, though,” Mary said, “will she?” Have you seen her since then?”

“This is the first time I’ve been back,” Moran said. Coming to a corner he was looking at the upper stories again. Mary watched him turn to look off in the direction of the river. “There the grain elevators I told you about. See? Ten stories high. The Eighty-second sat up their with their cannons. Up on top.”

Mary stared at the cement cylinders standing about a mile away, on the opposite bank of the Ozama River. She felt Moran’s hand on her arm and they continued across the intersection. Behind them, Bienvenido’s Impala came to a stop. Moran was pointing now. “That’s the building. The one on the corner. Where I chased the sniper.”

“The girl?”

“No, it was a guy in a green striped shirt. Green and white.” Moran turned, looking at the side streets again, thoughtful. “They’d hide a gun in an upstairs room, take a shot at you, come out, walk up the street to an apartment where they had another gun stashed and let you have a few more rounds. You see how narrow the streets are, you have to look almost straight up. You feel exposed, looking up, trying to spot the window, the guy’s already someplace else, drawing a bead on you…” He turned slowly back to the building on the corner and stared, squinting in the sunlight. “I stuck my head out of that third-floor window, right there…”

It was the girl, Luci, who had brought him here, this far, and got him in a lot of trouble, though she was not the one he had chased. A sixteen-year-old girl playing with him, now and then taking shots at him. That was the trouble with the whole deal: After a while it was like a game and he would get excited and lose his concentration. He got chewed out for it more than once by the platoon sergeant who told him he was going to get fucking killed and go home in a bag.

A lot of it was boring and a lot of it was fun. More exciting than anything he had ever experienced before. Hugging a doorway under fire, then stepping out, seeing them running across the street down at an intersection and squeezing off rounds at them. Hearing the voices then laughing and calling you hijo de puta , son of a whore, that was the favorite; learning what it meant and yelling it back at them, though “motherfucker” remained the all-time any-situation favorite. (Ham and lima beans: ham and motherfuckers.) “Hey, motherfucker! Come on out of there! Where’s your balls!” Kids playing. Working a street and finding a cantina open, Christ, and stopping for a beer in the middle of a firefight. Or stopping to let the trucks go through with sacks of rice and powdered milk, the U.S. military feeding the people they were fighting. Did that make sense? None of it did. That’s why you might as well accept this deal as being pretty weird and have some fun. Though it wouldn’t be fun now.