Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

I enjoyed his snoring as I moved like a ghost past the door to the master stateroom. I opened the door to the head slowly. She was sitting on the floor. She snapped her head around and looked at me with a madwoman’s face, eyes and mouth wide and round, breath sucking to scream. But comprehension came just in time and I eased in and closed the door just as silently as I had opened it. She had found some greasy medication in the medicine locker and she had greased her bare ankle and foot and had been trying to work the chain off of it. She had gouged through the skin and her greasy ankle and the floor was speckled with blood.

I slid one jaw of the nippers under the ankle chain and applied pressure. The jaws bit through and the chain fell away, rattling on the deck. I put the nippers down and helped her up. She clung to me. I whispered to her and told her he was asleep and we were going to go aboard the Muñequita and release her tow line and drift away. She bobbed her head in violent agreement.

When we had crept to within two feet of the partly open door we had to pass, I suddenly knew what was wrong. I couldn’t hear him snoring. So I took her by the arm to try to make it a fast run, but the door swung open and there he was. I shoved her along the corridor and in the same violent effort I tried to jump him. But a big soft hot red hammer hit the meat of my left shoulder and that much impact at that close range spun me and drove me back through the open door of the guest stateroom. The spinning tangled my legs and I fell heavily, remembering as I went down an old lesson painfully learned long ago. When you are shot, you are dead. Bang, you’re dead! So be dead, because it might be the only chance you have left in the world.

I heard him come in to stand over me. “You damn fool!” he said. “You sorry pitiful damn fool.” And he put his toe against my hip and nudged me to see how slack I was. I swung both legs and swept his feet out from under him and clawed my way onto him, yelling at the same time to Jan to get off the boat, swim ashore, run like hell.

It was very busy work. My left arm wasn’t part of me, and he kept trying to work that revolver around to get it against me, and I kept trying to stay behind him and get the cuff chain around his throat. He managed to struggle up with me, which was a demonstration of an impressive amount of wiry strength, but I yanked him off balance and toppled back on the bed with him. It had taken only a very few seconds. I gave up the chain bit and got my right forearm across his throat, but he kept his chin tucked down well. I got the gun wrist with my left hand, but the left arm was getting worse by the moment, and slowly, slowly he was turning the muzzle to where he could be sure of putting the next slug in my head without even having to look back at me.

It was then that Janine came through the door screeching, and bearing on high, in both hands, the small red fire extinguisher she had apparently yanked out of the clips on the corridor wall. Screeching, face contorted, she ran directly at us, starting the great descending blow when she was at least three steps from the bed. He wrenched the gun wrist free and there was the great slamming sound of a shot in an enclosed place, and I saw her head wrench sideways as she struck her fearful blow, then a jostle of great weight made such a sickening pain in my shoulder and arm, the world shrank down to a little white thing and winked out.

I don’t know how long I was out. Thirty seconds, fifteen minutes. I came struggling up aware of great urgency, aware of being pinned under great weight. Freddy Hazzard seemed very heavy. I fingered his slack throat with my right hand and couldn’t find a thing. I wormed partway out from under him and saw one good reason for the weight. Janine lay spilled across us, supine, the small of her back across his loins, her dark head hanging back over the edge of the bed.

I squirmed out from under both of them and stood up. I did not want to feel any more dead throats. The left side of her head was toward me. Her hair was clotted heavily with blood. I stared at her and when I saw the rise and fall of her chest, I risked the finger on the throat, found a place going bump, bump, bump.

Then I looked at him. Nobody was going to be able to feel any pulse. He had a grooved head. Diagonal. From one temple across to the opposite eyebrow. A groove as wide as the fire extinguisher and maybe an inch deep. The eye bulged with a blank astonishment greater than any astonishment in the living world.

The faintness came over me and faded away slowly. I stood three stories tall and I would sway in the slightest breeze. Toy fellow made of broomstraws and flour paste. My left arm hung there, and I looked down and saw the blood dropping busily from my fingertips.

Things to do, McGee. Got to take care. Got to tidy ship. Grab the buckets and brooms, men. Clean sweep fore and aft. So start moving, because you don’t know how much time you have, and it might not be enough. I fingered Hazzard’s pockets and found the cuff key and managed to turn it with numb fingers and get my right wrist free. The metal had rubbed it raw.

I could not make myself hurry. I felt thoughtful. It was a kind of faraway game. Amusing and not very important. I might be able to do what might keep me from falling off the edge for good, and I might not. Interesting.

On my slow way to the head I ripped my shirt off. I turned my left side toward the mirror. The entrance hole was three inches below the top of the shoulder and on the outside of the upper arm, but deep enough so that I couldn’t tell if it had done bone damage. The slug had tumbled apparently, and torn one hell of a hole on the way out. I lifted my left arm with my right hand, braced the left palm against the wall and locked the elbow. I took my time putting the gauze pads on the wounds, winding it very neatly, tearing the surgical tape with my teeth.

“Nice,” I heard myself say in a voice that seemed to come from the next room. “Very neat.”

So I went floating blissfully to the galley. Shock. Loss of blood. Replace fluids. Use stimulants. There was a quart jar of orange juice in the icebox. I found an unopened fifth of Wild Turkey in the liquor locker. I put them on the booth table and eased into the seat and wondered what a good name would be. An Orange Turkey? A Wild Screwdriver? The white mist began moving in from the edges and I realized nobody was going to come along and serve me. I picked my left arm up by the wrist and put the arm on the table. It wiggled its fingers when I sent the message down the nerves. I drank a third of the quart of juice. I took four long swallows of the bourbon. Second third of the juice. Another deep drag on the liquor. Polish off the juice. Then enough bourbon to just begin to tickle the gag reflex.

Come on, white mist. Take another shot. Here is McGee.

But it had edged so far back I couldn’t see it anymore out of the corners of my eyes. I got up without thinking of my arm. It slid off the table and flapped me on the leg. And I thought about Janine, and she had a slug in her skull, and the bump, bump, bump would be over. I picked up my left arm and turned it and looked at my watch. How had it gotten to be three in the afternoon?

Go find out. You have to find out sometime. So go take a look at her.

The throat was still knocking away like a good little engine. I tugged at her and got her off Freddy and straightened her out on the bed. I did not want to move her too much. But I did not want to take the chance of her waking up all of a sudden and finding herself right there side by side with what had been Freddy.

I got an old tarp and put it on the floor beside the bed, on his side, reached beyond him and got hold of the bloody sheet and yanked it out from under her, and tugged on it until it rolled him off and he fell onto the tarp with a lanky thudding, face-down. I left the sheet on him and flipped the ends and side of the tarp over him. I turned on the bright reading light and fingered her crusted hair apart and found where the bullet had grooved her skull in an area an inch and a half long and the same distance above her left ear. There didn’t seem to be anything you could pull together or sew together. It had punched out a strip of scalp meat, hair and all, and had clotted over and stopped bleeding. I soaked gauze in antiseptic and patted the wound very delicately, then tied the pad in place with more gauze.