They’d begun to twitch.
DAY FOUR
The Bad
Sailor
20
ALL THE DEAD and maybe-dead were getting their coats. , They were in a kitchen and the coats were on hooks and Teddy’s father took his old pea coat and shrugged his arms into it and then helped Dolores with hers and he said to Teddy, “You know what I’d like for Christmas?”
“No, Dad.”
“Bagpipes.”
And Teddy understood that he meant golf clubs and a golf bag.
“Just like Ike,” he said.
“Exactly,” his father said and handed Chuck his topcoat. Chuck put it on. It was a nice coat. Prewar cashmere. Chuck’s scar was gone,.but he still had those delicate, borrowed hands, and he held them in front of Teddy and wiggled the fingers.
“Did you go with that woman doctor?” Teddy said.
Chuck shook his head. “I’m far too overeducated. I went to the track.”
“Win?”
“Lost big.”
“Sorry.”
Chuck said, “Kiss your wife good-bye. On the cheek.” Teddy leaned in past his mother and Tootie Vicelli smiling at him with a bloody mouth, and he kissed Dolores’s cheek and he said, “Baby, why you all wet?”
“I’m dry as a bone,” she said to Teddy’s father.
“If I was half my age,” Teddy’s father said, “I’d marry you, girl.” They were all soaking wet, even his mother, even Chuck. Their coats dripped all over the floor.
Chuck handed him three logs and said, “For the fire.”
“Thanks.” Teddy took the logs and then forgot where he’d put them.
Dolores scratched her stomach and said, “Fucking rabbits. What good are they?”
Laeddis and Rachel Solando walked into the room. They weren’t wearing coats. They weren’t wearing anything at all, and Laeddis passed a bottle of rye over Teddy’s mother’s head and then took Dolores in his arms and Teddy would have been jealous, but Rachel dropped to her knees in front of him and unzipped Teddy’s trousers and took him in her mouth, and Chuck and his father and Tootle Vicelli and his mother all gave him a wave as they took their leave and Laeddis and Dolores stumbled back together into the bedroom and Teddy could hear them in there on the bed, fumbling with their clothes, breathing hoarsely, and it all seemed kind of perfect, kind of wonderful, as he lifted Dolores off her knees and could hear Rachel and Laeddis in there fucking like mad, and he kissed his wife, and placed a hand over the hole in her belly, and she said, “Thank you,” and he slid into her from behind, pushing the logs off the kitchen counter, and the warden and his men helped themselves to the rye Laeddis had brought and the warden winked his approval of Teddy’s fucking technique and raised his glass to him and said to his men:
“That’s one well-hung white nigger. You see him, you shoot first. You hear me? You don’t give it a second thought. This man gets off the island, we are all summarily fucked, gentlemen.”
Teddy threw his coat off his chest and crawled to the edge of the cave.
The warden and his men were up on the ridge above him. The sun was up. Seagulls shrieked.
Teddy looked at his watch: 8 a.m.
“You do not take chances,” the warden said. “This man is combattrained, combat-tested, and combat-hardened. He has the Purple Heart and the Oak Leaf with Clusters. He killed two men in Sicily with his bare hands.”
That information was in his personnel file, Teddy knew. But how the fuck did they get his personnel file? , “He is adept with the knife and very adept at hand-to-hand combat. Do not get in close with this man. You get the chance, you put him down like a two-legged dog.”
Teddy found himself smiling in spite of his situation. How many other times had the warden’s men been subjected to two-legged-dog comparisons?
Three guards came down the side of the smaller cliff face on ropes and Teddy moved away from the ledge and watched them work their way down to the beach. A few minutes later, they climbed back up and Teddy heard one of them say, “He’s not down there, sir.” He listened for a while as they searched up near the promontory and the road and then they moved off and Teddy waited a full hour before he left the cave, waiting to hear if anyone was taking up the rear, and giving the search party enough time so that he wouldn’t bump into them.
It was twenty past nine by the time he reached the road and he followed it back toward the west, trying to maintain a fast pace but still listen for men moving either ahead or behind him.
Trey had been right in his weather prediction. It was hot as hell and Teddy removed his jacket and folded it over his arm. He loosened his tie enough to pull it over his head and placed it in his pocket. His mouth was as dry as rock salt, and his eyes itched from the sweat. He saw Chuck again in his dream, putting on his coat, and the image stabbed him deeper than the one of Laeddis fondling Dolores. Until Rachel and Laeddis had shown up, everyone in that dream was dead. Except for Chuck. But he’d taken his coat from the same set of hooks and followed them out the door. Teddy hated what that symbolized. If they’d gotten to Chuck on the promontory, they’d probably been dragging him away while Teddy climbed his way back out of the field. And whoever had sneaked up on him must have been very good at his job because Chuck hadn’t even gotten off a scream. How powerful did you have to be to make not one but two U.S. marshals vanish?
Supremely powerful.
And if the plan was for Teddy to be driven insane, then it couldn’t have been the same for Chuck. Nobody would believe two marshals had lost their minds in the same four-day span. So Chuck would have had to meet with an accident. In the hurricane probably. In fact, if they were really smart—and it seemed they were—then maybe Chuck’s death would be represented as the event that had tipped Teddy past the point of no return.
There was an undeniable symmetry to the idea.
But if Teddy didn’t make it off this island, the Field Office would never accept the story, no matter how logical, without sending other marshals out here to see for themselves.
And what would they find?
Teddy looked down at the tremors in his wrists and thumbs. They were getting worse. And his brain felt no fresher for a night’s sleep. He felt foggy, thick-tongued. If by the time the field office got men out here, the drugs had taken over, they’d probably find Teddy drooling into his bathrobe, defecating where he sat. And the Ashecliffe version of the truth would be validated.