Double

McCone wasn’t moving. There was blood on her; I could see it glistening bright crimson in the hard white sunlight. Sounds came to me, like whispers at first, disjointed and indistinct. Then they got louder, and I realized Nyland was talking to her: “I didn’t want to do this. Don’t you understand? I didn’t want to do anything to you. It was the other one, that Sugarman bitch — she killed Elaine, she was evil. I had to kill her, didn’t I? For Elaine?” And all the while he kept aiming the automatic at Sharon’s unmoving head.

Better than twenty yards separated us — too far, too damned far. If I made a rush at him, he’d hear me coming and have all the time he’d need to turn and set himself, and blow me away too. I could try to catfoot it out there while he was still focused on McCone, but the risk would be the same...

Do something, for Christ’s sake!

Hurriedly I scanned the ground where I stood, then picked up a chunk of sandstone about the size of a baseball and stepped away from the shed with it. Nyland was still babbling to McCone, saying now, “I’ll bury you out here. Both of you. They’ll never find your bodies. What choice do I have? You see that I don’t have any choice, don’t you?”

Hit him in the head, I thought, knock his frigging head off — and I threw the rock with all the force I could muster.

It missed him by ten feet, but he heard it go by and spun around jerkily with the automatic swinging up in front of him. I was moving by then, and he saw me and yelled something and fired. I went down, hugged the ground alongside the shed, but the shot was wild, not even close. On hands and knees I scrambled around to the rear, came up and looked through one of the gaps. Nyland was running toward the shed. Even at a distance I could see the wildness in him, the look of a man out of control.

I stumbled around to the other side, dodged out far enough to let him see me again. He fired on the run, as I’d hoped he would, and that one missed badly too. Three shots at McCone, two at me; most automatics had six-bullet clips: one shot left. Maybe.

Back against the shed wall, I yelled at him, “Nyland! You’ll have to kill me too!”

No answer. But I heard him running; he was close to the shed now. I backpedaled fast, jumped over a jumble of rusted pulleys and cables, and ran in a crouch toward the loading dock. Over my shoulder I saw Nyland come into view alongside the shed, saw him slow when he spotted me and raise the gun. I threw myself sideways onto a patch of barren sand; the gun cracked as I landed bouncing and sliding and banged my chin and hand against more abandoned machinery. Another miss. Then I was scrambling around, coming up, and Nyland was a dozen yards away, still running with the gun out at arm’s length.

If I’d been wrong about the number of bullets in the automatic’s clip I would have been a dead man. But I wasn’t wrong. I heard the empty click of the hammer; heard it twice more. I was up on my feet by then, and I saw him hurl the gun away in frustration. But he was still moving, closing the gap between us — hands out in front of his body now, the fingers wiggling like fat white worms. Except for the way his eyes bulged, there was a kind of terrible blank calm about him.

We were both a couple of old military men, which meant we’d both had training in hand-to-hand self-defense, but for all I knew he had superior strength and skill. I wasn’t about to try slugging it out with him.

I could only think of one other thing to do. I started toward him, brandishing my fists like Muhammad Ali coming out of his corner at the bell, yelling, “I’ll smash your face in, Nyland!” Some ten feet separated us. I moved sideways a couple of steps, and he did the same thing, and now there were five feet between us — and I stumbled, grimaced, grunted as if in sudden pain, and clutched my chest and went down hard to my knees. It wasn’t much of an acting job, but he was half out of his head and not alert to tricks: it froze him for an instant, just long enough for me to catch up the short length of warped strap iron I’d been angling for and swing it sideways in the same motion, down low at his legs.

The piece of metal struck him beside the left knee with enough force to knock him off his feet. He cried out, came down hard on his shoulder, and started to roll over. I swung the strap iron again and this time it connected with the side of his head, made a dull crunching noise and came loose from my grip and flew away to one side. But that didn’t matter; I didn’t need it anymore. Nyland had quit moving and was lying on his back with a bloody gash across one temple, his eyes half open and part of the whites showing.

I crawled closer to him, felt his neck: he was still alive. Not that I gave a good goddamn about that at the moment. The way his eyes looked, I’d hit him hard enough to give him a concussion. He wasn’t going to be any more trouble.