Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [90]
I noticed the revolver lying in the sand at his feet. He must have had it in an ankle holster. It had come loose when he fell. You tell me why he hadn’t tried to shoot me with it. The .38 didn’t have much range, and it would have been a tough shot in the dark with both of us running, but he might have tried, especially in the beginning when he was still close enough to have hit me. But that wasn’t Williams. He had chosen to be the lion right through to the end, and that was maybe why I was alive and he was almost dead. I scooped up the gun and checked the clip. Its gold shells winked at me in the weak light.
Williams was still breathing. I stood over him with the gun pointed at his head. He looked up, but not at me. His blue eyes were peering into the vast depths of the stars and seeing nothing. There was blood all around his mouth and nose. His massive chest lifted once, twice, then dropped and stayed down. It sounds cold to say it, but under the circumstances it seemed to me like a fairly natural death, a grim fact that tells you something about the kind of territory my life had entered. I had a fresh gun, there was a dead man lying at my feet, and all I can tell you now is that it didn’t shock me. I didn’t feel any kind of satisfaction. I didn’t feel anything at all.
I sat on the sand next to Williams’s body for five minutes with the revolver still pointing at him until I was sure he wasn’t faking it. Then, finally, I checked for a pulse at the carotid artery in his tree trunk of a neck. He was dead, all right. I went through his pockets, found his wallet, and buried it in the dunes under a patch of sea grass. What I needed now besides food and rest was time, and the longer it took the cops to identify the body, the better it would be for me.
There was nothing to do about Williams’s body except to get away from it, so I started walking. I was just about played out, but I needed to leave the vicinity as soon as possible. Come the morning, someone taking a stroll or jogging along the beach would spot him and call the cops. They’d bring Williams to the morgue, but without identification it would be a few days before they could identify him. Probably they would have to take fingerprints. Williams didn’t have a criminal record, as far as I knew, but his prints would lead the authorities to his military files. Eventually they would tie him to the Colonel, but not—I hoped—to me.
I went down to the edge of the ocean and did what I could to wash the blood from my face. I had no doubt that I looked like death on a hot plate, and it would not be a good thing if someone were to remember the sight of a man with a bloody face emerging from the beach near where a dead man was found the following day. Still, a nosebleed is hard to stop, especially when you’re walking, so I had no choice but to stay on the beach until I looked a little better.
I walked south for a mile or so, my energy winking and blinking inside me like a fluorescent bulb about to flicker out. I was way too beat to go very much farther, but I pushed myself for another mile or so until I reached a place behind the dunes that held a small picnic area, complete with a rusty barbecue stand and half a dozen weather-worn wooden tables. I found a dark spot and stretched out on my back under a tree with the intention of resting for a few minutes while giving my nose a chance to stop bleeding. That was the plan anyway, but I didn’t stay awake long enough to review it.
I woke up eight hours later with the sun in my eyes and the Sahara in my mouth, but at least my nose wasn’t bleeding anymore. Just to make sure, I walked down to the shore and washed my face again. I touched my nose with a tentative finger. It felt a little flatter than usual, and it hurt badly, but I didn’t think it was broken. I looked down the beach and saw an old man walking toward me, sweeping