A Time of Predators

A tiny finger, almost of fear, touched the back of Julio’s neck; but then he leaped forward, slashing up and across and back with the half-clumsy technique of the street fighter who has seldom faced another man’s knife, and who has fought only with others as unskilled as he. Curt whipped his blade at the boy’s knuckles, to cut the tendons and disarm him. But the moonlight was almost extinguished by the fog, and he wasn’t sure where he had connected. Probably just a superficial cut.

Julio fetched up beside Champ, turning back toward Curt with an almost wooden expression on his face. “Hey, what...” he began.

“Look,” said Curt, “I can take you, kid, and I will. Stop...”

Julio took one step toward him and tell face-forward to the ground. Curt waited, milking sure it wasn’t a trick. Actually, it had to be a trick; the most he had done was slash, not stick. But Julio gave no hint of movement. Then the fitful moon emerged for a second, and Curt saw that Julio’s switchblade lay a yard from his curled fingers.

With a muttered exclamation. Curt went in, dropped to a knee, turned the boy over. Dark sightless eyes stared far beyond his — as Paula’s had at the dressing table, as the sentry’s had in his nightmares, as many men’s had during the war. He sighed wearily, and stood up. He wiped his blade on his sweater, and put it away.

He had missed the knuckles but bad gotten the wrist, where the radial artery is a bare quarter-inch below the skin. Julio had been unconscious in thirty seconds, dead in two minutes. But even as Curt felt the shock and revulsion at this senseless death, the thought came through his mind, unbidden: For an old sod, Halstead, you haven’t lost too much of the old speed, have you?

It was gone as soon as it had come, but it left behind it a taste in the mouth like vomit. He looked down at the two victims: the dead and the maimed. Madness. And two more to go? he thought furiously to himself. No. This was the end, the finish. Predators? If only he had arrived a few seconds earlier the night of Rockwell’s blinding, or had been there when they had come for Paula, none of this...

But perhaps, he realized, only on the long tortuous road he had traveled since her death had he learned that threat and force and fear could only be met by similar threat and force and fear. As Curtis Halstead, professor, he would have temporized, appeased, reasoned — and would have been destroyed. Perhaps only as Curtis Halstead whose roots reached back to the violence of the desert campaign was he able to...

He shook off the thoughts. It was over now, finished; leave the other two to Monty Worden’s ministrations, or to whatever private demons they might carry within them. If any. He removed his heavy sweater, laid it over Champ, and felt his pulse. Light and fast from shock, but steady. He might make it, if Curt could get help in time.

Only when he stood beside the VW in the fog, which now swirled thickly and made everything ghostly and dark and wet, did he realize he had lost his car keys. Now what? He didn’t know how to cross ignition wires to start a car, had no way of knowing where or when the keys had gone. Only one thing for it.

He started trudging slowly through the fog toward San Conrado, ten miles distant, his cracked ribs stabbing at every breath, shivering with the cold now that his sweater was gone. And with the fog, there was a good chance, he knew, that he would have to walk the entire distance.

Chapter 31

Sagging the ancient couch beneath his bulk, Heavy wondered how long Julio had been gone. Sure, the screams had stopped, but the silence was even more scary in its way. As long as there were screams, that meant somebody was alive out there. Alive. His moon face puckered; a great racking belch snored up from his belly. “Ah, Rick, how long you figure before Julio comes back?”

Rick slowly turned to look at the fat boy. His eyes were hooded, and his left leg, still outthrust in its pathetic pose of nonchalance, jerked as steadily as a heartbeat. His laugh was a caricature. “You know as well as I do that he’s dead, Heavy.”

Heavy shifted uneasily, belched again. He reached for a sandwich but the platter was empty. Julio dead? Or up on the Coast Highway right now, thumbing a ride? “All... I’m gonna make some sandwiches, Rick. You want one?”

Rick watched Heavy lever his bulk up off the couch; his lip curled. “Go ahead, stuff your belly. He ain’t get at us in here.”

Heavy waddled into the kitchen, by the Light of two candles busied himself over the bread board. What the hell gave with Rick? He’d thought Rick was going to shoot Julio, he really had. He mayonnaised bread thickly, opened a can of Spam, salivating slightly at the spiced aroma of the meat. If only it were light out, he could cannibalize the Triumph to get the wagon started. Or if he were up on the highway, even afoot, or swimming out of the cove to the next beach to the south...