Back in the truck, I checked my watch. It was 10:35. I figured it would take Captain Morgo at least thirty minutes to track down the information I requested. There was time enough for me to go back to the cabin and check on Bug.
As I drove home, I wondered what had happened to all the St. Andrews alumni who had descended on the campus for homecoming weekend, wanting nothing more than being able to enjoy a football game in the crescent, meet some old friends in familiar haunts, and check out the old girlfriend from freshman year. Now they were probably holed up in their rooms, praying that the hurricane would finally let up so they could go back to their real lives.
Remembering the depth of the floodwater at the bottom of Campus Hill, I decided to drive home the long way around LaFeber Point. It coursed along the hills overlooking the west end of town and brought me back to the lake road about a half mile past the cabin.
Driving along the bluff, the only lights I could see came from the hospital, which like the college and the Groton Police Department, had its own backup generating system in case of a power failure. The rain was still coming hard. Several cars were abandoned along the lake road, the last less than fifty feet from my driveway.
Pulling in, I saw that another white spruce had toppled over. It was leaning precariously against one of the oaks that flanked my cabin, its long green branches almost covering the path to the back door. I parked well away from it.
In the shadowy gloom, I could see that the lake had risen to the level of the front porch. It was too dim too see exactly how far. I pushed aside several large spruce boughs to reach the cabin door.
I remembered having locked it when I left. Switching on the flashlight, I inserted my key, unlocked the dead bolt, and shoved it open. There was an inch of lake water on the cabin floor.
I stopped short. Instinctively, I knew that if Bug was able to walk, she would have been there in front of me. I threw the flashlight inside the open doorway and dove to the left.
As I hit the ground, my right side lit up on fire. The shot had come from the kitchen. Whoever had fired it was using a silencer. If I hadn’t thrown the flashlight away from me in the dark, the bullet would probably have taken me in the chest. Bent over, I scrabbled toward the far corner of the cabin.
I wondered if two men had been sent to do the job. No. If there had been more than one, the second killer would have been positioned outside and finished me right away.
I knelt in the wet grass and tried to assess how bad the wound was. I didn’t feel faint or dizzy. I could still move. The white heat in my right side was replaced by a steady throbbing ache.
Probing the warm wetness with my fingertips, I realized how lucky I had been. The bullet had passed through the fleshy area above my right hip, managing to miss both the pelvic bone and the lower rib cage before it tore through flesh and muscle and exited out my back.
Cold rain was running down the back of my neck, and it felt soothing somehow. An image of my uncle Bob hurtled into my brain. He was sitting near the fire in our hunting camp with a pint of Wild Turkey in his lap. Rain was hammering the roof of our tent.
“Never try to go hunting in the rain, son,” he had said. “You can’t hear a goddamn thing.”
I pulled out the .45 and cocked it. Staying close to the cabin wall, I crept around the back corner. Lake water was lapping against the stone foundation a few feet away. Floating at its edge was a foot-long square of cedar shake that the wind had ripped away from someone’s cottage. After retrieving it, I crawled back to the first of the two living room windows. I slowly raised my eyes to peer over the sill. It was dark inside the room.
Fitting the edge of the shingle into the base of the window frame, I shoved hard from below, and the windowpane groaned upward several inches. A moment later, two holes starred the glass, quickly followed by a third.
From the size of the holes, I knew it had to be a small-caliber gun, maybe a .25, no larger than a .32. I scrabbled quickly along the cabin wall to the smaller living room window next to the fireplace. The lake water was over my boots as I knelt below it and shoved upward again with the shingle.
With a sharp tinkle, two more holes appeared in one of the glass panes. I waited a couple seconds, thrust the muzzle of the Colt over the sill, and squeezed off two rounds into the room.
I didn’t expect to hit him, and I wasn’t trying to make him expend his ammunition. Unless he was an idiot, I had to assume he would have spare magazines, just as I did. But unlike me, he wasn’t bleeding, and I needed to stop him quickly.
I wanted him unsure of where I would come from next. Reversing direction, I staggered back to the first window I had forced open, extended the muzzle through the opening, and fired two more rounds.
It was now or never. I took off around the corner with long strides, lurching for the still open back door. Reaching it, I launched myself headfirst into the kitchen, coming up hard against the side of the refrigerator. Dropping to my belly, I pointed the .45 at the dark passageway to the living room.
The dark blur of him came tearing through the passageway a moment later. He was firing as he came, the bullets going Phut . . . phut . . . phut. One of them ricocheted off an iron skillet hanging on a peg over my head. I fired three times into the dark blur. It skidded across the kitchen floor, stopping when it hit the edge of the stove.
I kept a spare flashlight on one of the kitchen shelves. Standing up, I shined it across the room. The man’s arms were flung forward over his head. Although his back was to me, I knew who it was as soon as I saw the splint that had been used to bind his dislocated elbow.
A small automatic was still clutched in his right hand. I crawled over and took it away from him. It was a .25 Beretta with a three-inch silencer screwed into the barrel. The original James Bond gun. No stopping power, but good enough for an execution.
Sal Scalise was dead when I turned him over on his back. The water covering the kitchen floor around him slowly turned a tawny red. Two of my .45s had torn holes through his chest, and another had caught him in the stomach. In the beam of the flashlight, his open eyes stared up at the white plaster ceiling as if it held the secrets of the universe.
Looking down at his body, I saw that Bug had done her best for me. There was a long jagged tear in his left pant leg, probably from the greeting she had given him when he broke into the cabin. There were also deep bite marks in his right hand, and her fangs had torn off a long strip of flesh along his thumb.
It was his shooting hand, and he had been forced to wrap it in a bloody handkerchief that was still tied around his palm. It had to have affected his aim. Bug had probably saved my life again.
I stood up and went looking for her. She was out on the porch, lying on her side with the cold lake water lapping at her sodden white coat. I carried her back into the bedroom and placed her softly on the bed. She was still breathing.
Matted blood covered her left ear as well as the right side of her head. Her right eye was swollen shut, and her left foreleg was broken. Using the flashlight, I carefully examined the wounds. The first one over the left ear looked like it had come from a well-placed kick. At eighteen, she no longer had any mobility to avoid one.
The second was probably from the barrel of his gun as she was lying helpless at his feet. Her left eye gazed up at me bravely from her trembling jaw.
I went into the bathroom and found a large towel. Ripping off a strip lengthwise, I took off my waterproof jacket and raised the bloody edge of the denim shirt above the two seeping holes in my side. Squeezing an inch of antibiotic ointment into each of them, I wrapped the towel tightly around my midsection, overlapping it at the wounds. Holding the towel in place with my right hand, I went into the kitchen and found a roll of duct tape over the sink. I ran two lengths of it around my waist to hold the crude bandage in place. A million and one household uses.
Moistening the rest of the towel with tap water, I took it into the bedroom and lightly cleaned the wounds on Bug’s face, covering each of them with the same antibiotic ointment. She never whimpered.
In the bathroom medicine chest, I found some Percodan tablets along with a bottle of Ambien I had once been prescribed. I popped two of the Percodan and palmed another along with the Ambien for Bug. With her ruined teeth, there was no way to sugarcoat the pain medicine with a chunk of raw steak. Gently sliding the pills into her throat, I made sure she swallowed them.
I had no idea if she would survive. There was a lot at stake, and I didn’t think that taking her to a veterinarian at this point would make a difference. I hoped she would understand.
Her left eye was looking up at me with almost calm detachment, as if the danger had passed. I kissed her on her forehead and told her everything would be all right. My eyes blurred as I left.
I needed to search Sal’s body. Lying in the lake water, his skin was already getting cold. I went through the zippered windbreaker he was wearing and found a cell phone in the side pocket.
Sal wasn’t very smart. He had disabled the password requirement for his voice mailbox, and I went straight to it. He had saved Bobby Devane’s last message, along with nine others dating back almost a month.
I recognized the voice immediately. It was the same one I had listened to back at the campus security office when I left the message for Devane earlier. He slowly gave Sal my address, repeating it twice. Then I heard his voice say, “You know what you told me you wanted to do? Go ahead, Sally, but don’t fuck it up.”
I had a pretty good idea what Sal Scalise had told him from the Wonderland. He had said it to me three times before I ever left the motel room. Unfortunately for him, he had fucked it up. Putting my waterproof jacket back on, I headed out into the storm.