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The marina smelled of the usual seaweed and dead fish, with a hint of garbage and charcoal lighter fluid, and they could hear a faint mix of music from a bar along the shore, maybe Jimmy Buffett. A woman laughed from outside the marina somewhere, a half scream, half laugh as though somebody had just dropped a squid down her blouse.
Baxter began giving Cartwright a hard time about refusing to admit she was with the Unspecified Agency, and Cartwright offered to shoot him if he kept giving her a hard time, and Baxter asked, “What is it with you two and guns? I’m thirty-four years old and I’ve gone my entire life without a gun and I’ve lived in some harsh places. I’ve never needed one. Never. Never even thought about it.”
Cartwright and Letty exchanged glances, and Letty nodded at Cartwright, who said, “In my part of Texas, everyone had guns. We needed them on the ranch. I learned how to shoot when I was five or six. Nobody in Texas is amazed when a woman is good with guns, but maybe they were a little amazed that I got so good, so quick. I shot my first deer when I was seven, with a .30-06. One shot. Never said a thing about the recoil; hardly felt it, I was so excited. But small girls have no power, and they feel it. You get to be ten or twelve, you can feel the ranch hands looking at your ass. So you get a gun in your hand and you know a guy’s looking at your ass and you let the gun kinda swing across his gut, and he’s like, ‘Hey, never point a gun at someone unless you plan to kill them.’ That’s like one of the Ten Commandments in Texas. And I say, ‘I never do,’ and the guy thinks about that and is like, ‘Whoa...’ ”
Baxter tipped his head back, looking at her, as though he were examining a bug. Then she said, “You know what that surge of power feels like? When you’re ten? It’s like an ocean breeze blowing through your soul.”
Baxter looked at Letty, who said, “My life has been saved by guns a half-dozen times. If it weren’t for guns, I’d never made it out of middle school. I’d be dead. I dunno, maybe I go looking for it—like my job now. I could have gotten a PhD, been an econ professor somewhere, never picked up a gun again, and probably would have been okay. That’s not what I did. I’ve shot more people than I’ve killed, but I’ve killed five. None of them were mistakes.”
Baxter said, “Jesus. When I was a kid, I thought I was being fucked over when I didn’t have a Pentium with a one-gig hard drive.”
Cartwright: “I don’t know what that means.”
As she said that, Sovern cried out, “Ah! Ah! Ah, goddamnit!”
They all stood up as Sovern stumbled into the cockpit of theGreen Flash, and Letty asked, “Are you okay?”
“No. Ah, motherfucker. I was trying to hurry and caught my little toe under the floor mat... I think I dislocated it.” He bent to look at his foot in the cockpit light. “It’s bruising, man, it’s already blue.”
“RICE,” Baxter said. “Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation.”
“What?” Sovern asked, annoyed. “If I’m getting out of here, how am I going to do that? Goddamnit, that hurts.” He stumbled to a seat on one side of the cockpit, and he asked, “Could somebody go down to the fridge and get me a blue ice? It’s in the freezer.”
Cartwright dropped into the cockpit, ducked down into the cabin, and emerged a moment later with a blue ice packet and said, “Lean back.”
He leaned back and she wrapped the blue ice around his smaller toes, then wrapped his foot in a dish towel to hold the ice in place. Cartwright asked, “You’ve got this OCD pretty bad, huh?”
“Yeah. Nothing I can do about it.”
To Letty and Baxter, Cartwright said, “You oughta see his refrigerator. Everything is lined up. Perfectly. The ketchup, the mustard, the olives, like little soldiers. Never seen anything like that.”
“I like things neat,” Sovern said. “Damnit, this toe, how does this shit happen?”
“Want me to kiss it and make it better?” Cartwright asked.
Sovern looked up: “Let me think about that.”
Letty: “Once you’re out on the water, how do we get in touch?”
“I’ll give you my phone number. I don’t always have my phone turned on, but I will for the next couple of days. Be careful withit—not a lot of people have my number. Don’t give it to the cops... I’m almost ready to go.”
“Not soon enough,” Baxter said, quietly. “Look.”
They all turnedtoward the motel. The lobby that led down to the marina had a glass door and two men were standing in the lobby light, looking down at them.
Letty said to Baxter, “The guy on the right.”
Baxter: “Yeah. He’s the other shooter. The one the FBI didn’t kill.”
Cartwright turned to Letty, grinned and said, “Showtime.” She turned to Sovern and asked, “Do you have any sort of louder music? White Stripes? Something with drums?”
Sovern said, looking at the men behind the glass, “That’s a little...” He paused, turned back to the boat and said, “I can stream ‘Seven Nation Army.’ ”
“That’ll work,” Cartwright said.
He dropped down into the cabin, limping on the bad toe and blue-ice wrap. They could hear him rattling the keys on a computer, and a moment later, after the opening bass riff, Megan Martha White began pounding on her drums.
Cartwright said, “Turn it up a little more,” and as Sovern did that, she turned toward Letty to cover her move, took her compact Ruger pistol out of a belt holster, dipped into a pocket, brought out a suppressor and began threading it onto the gun barrel.
