Double

Wobbling a little, I got up on my feet and went to where he’d thrown the gun and picked it up on the move, put it into my pocket. The lowering sun was right in my eyes as I ran out past the shed to where McCone lay; the harsh glare of it half blinded me, so that I couldn’t see her clearly until I was just a few feet from her.

She was moving. Making little groaning noises and clawing at the sandy earth, trying to get up.

My knees went weak with relief; I sank down at her side. There wasn’t as much blood on her as I’d imagined from a distance, and I could make out the wound where she’d been shot. It wasn’t in a vital area. Her jeans and blouse were torn in a dozen other places, her skin was scratched, her face and arms were burned raw by the sun, and her lips were split and blood-caked. A feeling of tenderness moved through me; I took hold of her, to help her sit up.

Her body went rigid at my touch. She made an animal sound in her throat and tried to pull away. I said, “Sharon, it’s me, it’s Wolf,” and her head twisted and her eyes focused on me and she said, “Oh my God, Wolf,” in a cracked voice that had disbelief in it, as if she couldn’t quite assimilate the fact that I was actually beside her. She went limp. I hoisted her up onto her left side, held her clinging against me.

After a few seconds she said, “Nyland...”

“Don’t worry about him. He’s out of it now.”

She pulled back from me a little, wincing. “I think he shot me,” she said. “Part of my right side’s numb.”

“He shot you, all right. But it doesn’t look too bad.”

“Where did he—?” She felt herself, clenching her teeth against the pain, and a look of indignant horror spread over her face. “The dirty son of a bitch!” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“He shot me in the ass!”

I couldn’t help it — I burst out laughing. It was a release of tension more than anything else, and once I got started I couldn’t stop. McCone dug her nails into my arm — and then she started to laugh too, painfully but just as crazily.

It was a good thing nobody but Nyland was around. Hanging on to each other the way we were, yukking it up like a couple of deranged hyenas, we must have been some sight to behold.

43: McCone

I was lying on my parents’ living-room couch wearing a long green caftan — the only garment I had with me that was loose enough to be comfortable and still be what my mother deemed “suitable to be seen by a gentleman caller.” I had to rest on my left side because the bullet wound in my right hip hurt like hell, even though it was superficial. My face was gunked up with burn cream and there was red antiseptic smeared on my cuts and scratches. I must have been a sight.

Wolf didn’t seem to mind, however. He sat across from me in my father’s favorite armchair and smiled. “What’s that smell coming from the kitchen?” he asked.

“Crab cioppino. It’s being made in your honor.”

“That’s nice.”

“Well, it is, isn’t it?” The words came out grumpily, and Wolf looked surprised. I grinned to show I wasn’t annoyed with him — a painful smile because my mouth hurt every time I moved it.

I was annoyed with my mother. She’d already come in twice, foisting beers off on Wolf and fluttering and smiling. I knew what was going through her head. She was sizing him up as prospective-husband material, the way she’d been sizing up practically every man I’d so much as spoken to for years. And I was getting sick of it.

I certainly couldn’t feel any annoyance at Wolf, though. He’d saved my life and then had taken charge — getting me to the emergency hospital in Borrego Springs, dealing with the law both there and in San Diego, and when I’d flatly refused to spend the night in the hospital, he’d got me home with a minimum of hassle. When he’d arrived here today, half an hour ago, he’d brought the news that Henry Nyland had confessed to Karyn Sugarman’s murder.

The way Nyland told it, my visit to him at campaign headquarters had started him thinking that Elaine might have been murdered. And since he felt Jim Lauterbach’s file on Elaine was rightfully his property, he’d used his extensive contacts in city administration to obtain copies of both the file and the photographs of the house in the desert. Those photographs had immediately meant more to Nyland than they had to Wolf, because he’d met Karyn Sugarman a few times at Elaine’s house and knew what kind of car Sugarman drove — the Datsun that, in the photos, was parked among the others in front of Les Club.

On Monday night, Nyland had called Sugarman to ask about the house. Sugarman had denied knowing of it or ever having been there. This made Nyland all the more suspicious and he decided to check it out on Tuesday. He’d driven out to Borrego Springs in the morning and shown the photos to some of the residents. Because the old Matthews place was known to old-timers, one of them had readily identified it.