From the Heart of Darkness (7 page)

Penske pulled up just beyond the arc of the gate. He said to Davidson, “Go hook it shut. We don't want any a' the cows to get loose.”

Davidson's eyes narrowed. “You opened it, you can shut it. Who the hell—”

“Look, bitch!” Penske said, his right hand curled by reflex into a fist, “You'll shake a leg or you'll—”

“Penske!” Kerr shouted, thrusting his torso over the seat and forcing the driver back without contact. “What do you think we are, exploiters ourselves who treat women like furniture? Want to try that with me too, is that what you think?”

“George, I…,” Penske began. He shook his head fiercely to hide the tears of frustration. Then he unlatched the door, almost falling out backwards in the process. He closed the gate. It was almost a minute before the short man got back into the van and drove on. There were three more gates in the long track between the highway and the pasture swale in which they finally halted. Penske opened and closed each gate himself without saying anything more.

In wet weather the swale drained into a creek more than three hundred yards from the van. The bank beyond the watercourse was steep but generally grassy. There was a bare patch in line with the axis of the swale. Bits of cardboard and metal there brightened the bullet-gouged bank. Other target material lay in riddled clumps at various distances along the way. There was some scattered cartridge brass, mostly .22 caliber—centerfire empties had been picked up for reloading.

“The boys around here use it a lot,” Penske said in satisfaction as he took cases out of the back of the van.

“The boys,” Davidson snorted. “The Klan's more like it.”

Penske looked at her without speaking or moving. He had just begun to load a magazine into a carbine. He looked back downrange after a moment.

Davidson swallowed, then bit at a knuckle. “I'll set some targets up,” she said.

“That'll take rigging,” Penske said without turning around. “You get the rest a' the guns loaded. Coster'n me'll rig the targets.”

“Sure,” she said, and she slid a box of miscellaneous empty containers over to the automatic rifleman.

Coster gripped the box with his left hand and his jutting hip bone. His other hand held the rifle at its balance. “All right,” he said, “where do you want them?”

“I doubt you'll have to fight off the field mice,” Kerr observed from the van. “You can leave the gun here and save the trouble of carrying it.”

“No trouble,” Coster said. He began walking down the swale.

Penske, carrying an armload of clothesline and plastic milk jugs, trotted along beside the rifleman. “You put a few a' those at one hundred and two hundred,” he said “Save a lot for the bank across the creek, though, 'cause that's where it's really gonna be at. We'll see if you can handle that thing'r not.”

The smaller man stopped some fifty yards from the van. He dropped his load and pointed. A fence post and a metal engineer stake stood on opposite rims of the swale. “I'm gonna rig a moving target,” he said. “You set up the bottles.”

Both men worked quickly. By the time Coster had returned to the line of the posts, the shorter man joined him unreeling clothesline behind him. “Aw right,” Penske said, wringing his hands with enthusiasm as they strode back to the firing line. “Aw right, now we just see how goddam good you are.”

Coster said nothing.

On a blanket beside the van, Davidson had laid out half a dozen varied long arms. Kerr was still in the vehicle, either in deference to Penske's request or from a disinclination to be anywhere else. Penske had forgotten his shirt downrange. Sweat streaks trembled along valleys separating ridges of chest muscle. He picked up what looked like an ordinary autoloading rifle and checked its magazine before cradling the weapon in his left arm.

“We let the lady shoot, hey?” Penske said to Coster with a high-lipped grin. “Then you'n me try it.”

The automatic rifleman shrugged.

Davidson passed Penske's reference with only a scowl. She picked up an M1 carbine and pointed it in the general direction of the nearest bottles. Her grip on the trim little weapon was fierce enough to whiten the skin across the tendons of her hands. She held the gunstock a good quarter inch from her shoulder. The first shot was loud and metallic, startling even to those who were prepared for it.

“You don't wanna let it scare you,” Penske said, reaching for the carbine.

“Go shove your head up your ass!” Davidson flared, snatching the weapon away with a clear willingness to empty it into the swarthy man. She whirled back to the targets and fired a long, savage volley as fast as she could jerk her trigger finger. When she paused, the muzzle had recoiled up to a 30° angle. None of the men spoke when she glared around fiercely. Squinting along the barrel, Davidson resumed fire more deliberately until the banana magazine was empty. Her brass spun off in flat arcs to the right. Once a puff of dirt halfway to the targets marked a shot. Davidson flung the carbine back onto the blanket and stalked into the van.

Penske started to say something but thought better of it. He grinned at Coster and raised his own rifle. Instead of a shot, there was a ripping five-round burst, the rifle emptying its own magazine as Penske held the trigger back. Dirt spouted around the bottles, though the last three shots had been slung skyward by the recoiling muzzle.

“Thought you had the only automatic rifle here, huh?” the short man crowed. “Converted this myself, same as the one a' the M1s and the .22 there. Not so special now, are you?”

“You only hit one bottle,” Coster said. His left hand curled around the grip on the rifle's forearm.

“Only one?” Penske cried in a fury. “A man's a lot bigger target'n a goddam bottle!”

Metal clicked as Coster's forefinger slid forward the safety catch in his rifle's trigger guard. Speech crumbled into the shattering muzzle blasts of the automatic rifle.

Coster ignored the nearest targets. The bottles at 200, then 300, yards disintegrated in pluming earth. The weapon fired in short bursts of two and three rounds, the muzzle recovering momentarily between blasts to snuffle another target. When the bolt locked back on an empty magazine, there was nothing but dust and glass shards at either aiming point.

Coster's fingers relaxed on the handgrips. He extracted the magazine and began thumbing cartridges into it from a box on the ground. He looked sidelong at Penske.

“We'll try the moving one, wise guy,” the shorter man said.

Behind them, Kerr had gotten out of the van. “What kind of gun is that?” he asked.

“M14E2,” Penske replied. “The squad automatic version of the standard M14. Has pistolgrips and a straight-line stock. Made goddam few of'em, too, before they switched from the fourteen to the sixteen.” He looked at Coster. “Hey, ain't that so?”

Coster shrugged and locked home his magazine. Heat waves danced from the tip of the barrel where metal was exposed to the air.

“Well, don't you even goddam know?” Penske demanded. “How'd you get that rifle, anyway?”

The rifleman looked at him. “You'd better hope you never learn,” he said. “Now, are we going to shoot guns or talk about them?”

“We'll shoot,” the smaller man said fiercely. “We'll goddam shoot.” He pointed to the gallon milk jug suspended beside the engineer stake. “One line's through the handle, the other's tied to it,” he said. “When I pull this one—” he gestured with the loop of wire-core clothesline in his left hand—“the jug runs to the other post. Don't sweat, I poured it full a' dirt so it'll show if you hit it.
If
you hit it.”

“Then pull,” Coster said and braced himself. His knuckles were as white as Davidson's had been. His head, hunched low, looked more like that of a man trying to hide than one aiming.

Penske chuckled. “Won't hit nothing but air if you're that scared a' your weapon,” he said. He tugged two-handed at the line bent around the fencepost. The jug spurted sideways and the first three bullets ripped it. Sandy loam sprayed from the torn plastic in all directions. The impacts spun the jug around its support line and the second burst caught it at the tip of its arc. Dirt flew again and both lines parted. The gun muzzle tracked the flying container, spiked it in the air, and then followed it down the swale, the bullets themselves kicking their target into a semblance of life.

Flying brass had driven Kerr back from where he stood to Coster's right. Now he massaged his left fist with his right palm, watching the rifleman reload methodically.

“That enough?” Coster asked. Kerr nodded.

Penske had silently begun to gather up the paraphernalia they had brought. Suddenly he stopped, staring at the empty cartridge box he held in his hand. “You reloaded from this,” he said, waving the box in Coster's face. “Last time.”

“So?” said the rifleman. “You want me to pay you for them?”

“You stupid bastard!” the shorted man blazed. “This was .30-'06 for my Remington there. It won't
fit
a goddam M14. You need .308!”

“Then I didn't use your ammunition after all,” Coster said, backing a step. “I brought my own in my kit, you know.” His foot tapped the AWOL bag gently.

“Let's see that goddam rifle,” said Penske, lunging forward, and the safety clicked off with the muzzle only six inches from the bridge of his nose.

“Don't,” said Coster very quietly.

Sullenly, the ex-soldier backed away. “Somebody gimme a hand with this crap,” he said, thrusting weapons back into their cases.

“We aren't rivals, you know,” Coster said without lowering the M14. “I wasn't Oswald's rival either. If you want a man dead and he dies, what else matters?”

“Just shut the hell up, will you?” Davidson burst out unexpectedly.

The three men looked around in surprise. Davidson's fists were clenched at waist height, her elbows splayed. After a moment Coster said, “All right.” He dropped the muzzle of his rifle and began handing guns back into the van.

*   *   *

A mercury vapor streetlight threw a line of saw teeth through the venetian blinds to the wall above the couch. Penske lay there, fully clothed, watching the whorls which his cigarette smoke etched across the pattern. The apartment was still.

Penske took a last drag on his cigarette. Its yellow-orange glow was momentarily brighter than the blue of the streetlight. He ground the butt out in the dish with the others and the crumpled pack from which they had come. Then Penske swung his feet over the side of the couch and stood, his right hand silently drawing his knife from its sheath in the same motion. He glided across the worn carpet to the door of Coster's room.

For a moment the swarthy man waited with his ear pressed against the panel. There was no sound within. The door did not have a working latch; its hinges were nearly silent. Penske pulled the door open just enough to slip through into the pitch-dark bedroom. His whole body followed the knife as if he were a serpent and the blade was his questing tongue.

There was a metallic click from the bed, tiny and lethal as a cobra.

“The light switch is on the right,” Coster said quietly. “Better flip it on. Carefully.”

Penske's hand found the switch. The room was narrow. The bed lay along its axis, the foot of it pointing to the door. The M14 pointed down that same axis. Coster's index finger was within the trigger guard. The safety catch had clicked as it slid forward. The shorter man stared at the muzzle brake of the automatic rifle. He remembered the way bullets had shredded the earth-filled jug that morning. Now his blood and tissue and splinters of his bones would spray the inside of the door panel.

“Put your knife away,” Coster said.

The shorter man only blinked.

“We're not here to kill you, Penske,” said the automatic rifleman. His voice was calm, almost wheedling. “Put your knife away and close my door behind you. It'll all look different tomorrow. Kawanishi will be dead, and you'll have as much of the credit for it as you want.”

Penske swallowed and began to back through the doorway. The gun muzzle waggled disapproval. “First the knife,” Coster said.

The shorter man hunched over, his eyes on the rifle except for quick dips down to the strait boot sheath. He jabbed the point into the flesh above his ankle the first time he tried. At last he succeeded.

“Fine,” said the rifleman. “You can go now.”

Penske's face contorted with rage. “You bastard, you gotta sleep sometime!” he said.

Coster smiled like a skull. “Do we?”

The swarthy man slammed the door, turned, and jumped back before he realized that the figure hulking on the arm of the couch was Kerr. “What're you doing up?” Penske demanded in a husky whisper.

Kerr shrugged. “Let's go out on the landing,” he said. “Dee's asleep.” But it was toward the rectangle of light around Coster's door that he nodded.

The second-floor apartment was served by an outside staircase. Its landing formed a small railed balcony, open to crisp air and the stars of early morning. Kerr waved Penske outside, then followed and swung the door closed behind them. The big man was barefoot, but he wore slacks and a shirt. The latter was unbloused to conceal his pistol.

Penske clenched his joined hands. “He can't shoot,” he said in a low voice. “Not worth a damn.”

“You could have fooled me, then,” said Kerr. “What I saw this morning was pretty convincing.”

“I tell you he's afraid of it!” Penske burst out. “The recoil, the noise even—he flinched every time Dee shot, and when he was shooting himself—I swear to
god
he kept his eyes shut!”

Kerr's fingers played at flaking paint from the bars of the railing. His complection was richened to a true black in the wash of the street light. “It looked like that to me, too,” he admitted, “but he hit everything he shot at. He couldn't have done that if—if you were right.”